Font overload

Smashing Magazine is a blog that is full of great design information. It’s mostly web design - stuff like CSS and so on but they also cover more traditional design elements, such as these font collections:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/08/40-excellent-freefonts-for-professional-design/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/08/80-beautiful-fonts-typefaces-for-professional-design/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/20/60-brilliant-typefaces-for-corporate-design/

If you were a typeface, this would be porn.

Changing mySQL root user password

It’s a pain in the nuts if you forget your mySQL root password. Here’s an easy way to reset it:

1) Stop any running mySQL deamons

2) Open a text editor and create a new file with the follownig line in it:

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘root’@'localhost’ = PASSWORD(’<your new password>’);

3)  Run the mySQL deamon and use the –init-file flag to force mySQL to process the change password command:

mysqld_safe –init-file=<the file from step 2> &

You might need to sudo that mysqld_safe command.

Website Grader rates your website

WebsiteGrader from Hubspot is an online tool that ranks your website for online marketing effectiveness. It gives you hints about easy, mostly non-technical, things you can do to make sure your blog/site reaches the widest audience possible.

http://www.websitegrader.com/Default.aspx

This site ranks at 77% and needs some work! But I’m lazy…..

AjaxRain.com

AjaxRain.com has many, many web scripts that you can pick up and use. According to the title of the home page, they have 921 scripts and counting.

There’s stuff there for all your favourite frameworks including JQuery, Moo, Protoype, etc.

There’s a handy (and big) tag cloud on each page that makes it easy to search on keywords.

http://www.ajaxrain.com

Eye-catching photo album

dhteumeuleu.com have released a really nice interactive 3D image gallery.

http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/

I’m thinking it may be possible to modify this script to be used as a website logo. You cold grab the letters for the logo from Flickr and then display them using this script. Hovering around with the mouse would still spin the letters around. Clicking could either zoom them as it does already or could be links to other pages of your site.

90 free vector icons for web design

The Web Design Blog has a set of 90 vector icons available for download. This is a really nice set that should add a touch of professionalism to any webpage.

Get your free icons.

XDebug

XDebug is a debugging and profiling suite for PHP. I came across this after reading that the Wordpress guys are using it to optimise their 2.4 release.

The profiler is particularly interesting. It outputs stats that are compatible with KCacheGrind and WinCacheGrind.

Flexible Web Development

I’ve had the Flexible Web Development domain for a while now but I haven’t really pushed it at all.

I did write a SEO extension for the Geodesic suite of products a while back and that has sold quite well - the people that have bought it and used it on their Geodesic site have been pleased with the results and that’s been great. But other than that, I haven’t done much with Flexible.

So, to get the ball rolling I though I’d get a cheeky link in from this site!

Web Development for Small Businesses.

Writing code in Wordpress posts

Wordpress offers a <code> tag that you can wrap around any code segments in your post.


int steveMethod( int one, int two )
{
return a * b;
}

The snippet of Java above was surround with the <code> tag. Using the tag should allow you to make code snippets stand out from the rest of the text in the post.

The code tag does not tell Wordpress to format the text in any way - Wordpress will not strip or modify any HTML tags in a code segment so you will need to escape them yourself. I bet there’s a plugin somewhere to do that for you.

Magneto: Open source eCommerce

Magneto is a very nice looking open-source eCommerce package. Not only does it look very nice, it is also packed full of interesting and useful features, such as:

• Ship to multiple addresses
• Product comparison features for both store owner and customers
• Product tagging and a Tag Cloud (not self-respecting Web2.0 site would be without one!)
• Multi-tier pricing (create 2 offers 1 and similar offers)
• Store owner can create coupons valid for the whole site or for specific products and/or categories
• Comprehensive usage stats
• Ability to create static pages
• Users can be grouped by category and given permissions based on those
• Users can buy using multiple currencies
• Lots of other stuff……

Check out Magneto eCommerce.