• 13 Alerting Sites (as in “watchdog,” or “infobot” – not as in “scary,” or “alarming”
• 25 Start Pages to Get You Started
• Knowledge is Power – Here’s 200 sites that give you power.
• 50 Content Management Systems
• 100 Twitter Tools
• 36 TV Media Websites to watch anything you want
• 32 Time Tracking Tools for Freelancers and businesses.

OpenJason is also the proprietor of Daynger Interactive, a soup-to-nuts kind of web presence creation outfit which is either the most persuasive website I’ve seen in months or is using IP mind-control to make me write this.

(If there’s an OpenJason, shouldn’t there also be OpenArgonauts?)

• Randa’s 10 favorite free fonts
• The Ultimate Premium Theme (I’m not telling – and it’s a complicated answer, anyway)
• If you need some inspiration – check out Randa’s portfolio

RandaClay.com

The Death of The Boring Blog Post?

is as close to a “must-read” as is possible.

For my direct purposes – I started blogging to write about disaster preparedness and related issues at Popular Logistics - anything too much fun, or whimsical, would be, I think, in poor taste. Which is no excuse for bad design; and I’m certainly trying to make improvements.

But for content either mordant or whimsical, there’s no reason for every post in a blog to necessarily have the same layout. Donnelly’s essay is especially fun to read because of its own layout, which includes a  lot of examples.

Also – Smashing Magazine – which is the meta-uber power tool set, the Vampire Slayer site for anyone wanting to learn something new about web design (it’s often one of my first stops)

1. Wikipedia entry;  Scott McCloud.com.

Unequal Spacing - image by Jennifer Kyrnin

nice and shallow – and in doing so discovered Jennifer Kyrnin, who is the author of a number of excellent articles at About.com.

Here’s her list of The 10 Best Free Web Editors for Windows. And here are some others I found helpful. (I’ll admit that when I found her arguing persuasively that tables shouldn’t be used for anything except tabular data because they slow things down, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear).

1. Don’t Use Tables for Layout
2. Using Tables to Do Page Layout
3. Do You Really Need that Table?(1 – 3 were the triptych of bad news but good advice, I thought)
4. 95 SEO Tips and Tricks
5. SEO Step-by-Step
6. What is Search Engine Optimization?
7. SEO Made Simple (is by Heather Cross, another About.com writer, but it belongs with these other pieces)
8. SEO Checklist
9. Typography on the Web is About the Little Details
   
10. Use Real Text for Testing Page Layouts – when to use, and when not to use, Lorem Ipsum (See also my earlier post HTML-Ipsum – preformatted dummy copy, and also Jennifer Kyrnin’s Lorem ipsum dolor placeholder text – How to use Lorem ipsum text
11. Link Rot: Are You a Culprit?

I have one general reservation when I’m researching anything at About.com:  articles aren’t dated. And since things do change over time, there’s the risk that the quality of the site’s intelligence may have eroded. That said, Jennifer Kyrnin’s work stood out – and my sense is that most of it is – as of this writing – very useful.

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Check out his chives page, and you’ll see a  bunch of CSS tutorials published  in response to questions.

Like the Lone Ranger and Zorro, The CSS Guy is an anonymous hero (more like Spiderman, who has something to do with webs, after all, and whose name, like The  CSS Guy, is nine letters long).

But also – check out this excellent graphic:

Blogussion - using custom graphics to grab readers

That article – about their redesign is by Alex, who is also the proprietor of Asnio - a blog about entrepreneurship. A blog about entrepreneurship by a teenager – I anticipated that it would turn me off, a snarky forum about avarice and rationalizing disparities in wealth. Which tells you more about my biases than his Alex’s work. Which is outstanding.

Here’s Asnio’s Free Stuff page, which also includes a lot of useful material about Thesis Theme customization.

Alex is also the author of the Blogussion post 18 Resources to Help you Write Better Blog Titles, which I should probably read, and I think he’s responsible for some? all? of Blogussion’s images which open their posts. I don’t think they’re keyed to categories, but I think they’re mostly original work. Here are a few that I like; notice that the Twitter thumbnail¹   which works on its own as an image of the bird’s face, doesn’t really prepare you for the full-sized illustration – partly because the thumbnail has a nearly 45-degree orientation, but the full image – and the standing bird, are more or less at right angles to the frame.

Twitter "thumb"

My thought was that this made for a less expected – and therefore more satisfying visual payoff for the reader who follows the excerpt to the complete post.

Here’s the image accompanying the complete post:

a less predictable visual delivery for the readers who follow the excerpt link to the full article.

This article, by the way, is by Matt Cheuvront, who can also be found at Life Without Pants.

My favorite image on Blogussion, however, is this:

The domino theory meets Dr. Who?

This illustrates Alex’s post How to Properly Prepare a Guest Post in 5 Simple Steps. I’m not sure what this means, except that I think the implication is that a single guest post can bring down an entire blog. I’m hoping to get permission to use it on Popular Logistics as a way of illustrating network failures, particularly communications networks.

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1. Twitter “thumb” – full size, 66 x 66 pixels; link is to page on which except appears, five rows down, left column. As of this writing, the excerpt is on the front page of Blogussion; I’ll have to update links later in order to make this point.

Here’s one that I liked a lot,

[singlepic id=50 w=320 h=240 float=]

Gallery with more examples after the jump. If you want to see all 28, you’ll have to go to Elements of Design. Maybe we can find someone who’s written a tutorial on how to generate these practical and eye-catching elements.

[nggallery id=5]

via Elements of Design. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Smiley Cat Web Design Blog.

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Learning the World by Martin Kliehm

This post gives me a legitimate reason for showing you more of Mappery’s easily searchable cartographic treasures. Since the site is populated with user contributions, we thought it fair to bring to your attention Mappery’s heavy hitters. Meg comes in as the leader, with 963 maps posted.

Kuala Lumpur Transit Map - selected by Megan on Mappery.com

After the jump, more maps from Mappery.com. Picked at random for beauty and novelty.

Here’s a selected gallery of Megan’s contributions to Mappery:

[imagebrowser id=3]

Here’s a selected gallery of Brigid’s contributions to Mappery

[imagebrowser id=4]

Image located via Vladimir Prelovac's "Insights" plugin - search term "typography"

Alyssa Gregory, the autueur¹ of Small Business Idea Generator blog.has a post 7 Dummy Text Generators: Which Is Your Favorite? on Sitepoint. Five I’ve known and used; two were new.

As I’ve been tinkering with the design of my primary blog – Popular Logistics – I’ve started to identify the problems (let’s hope I’ve done it accurately):

• great variation in the length of posts (from one sentence to many pages);
• variation in author style (three and growing, the latest being the military historian Alan Cate, and the fourth to be announced shortly)
• heterogenous use of images and styling elements (e.g. pull-quotes)

So the use of dummy text in a sandbox – which as much as is possible approximates the posts in the blog you’re developing – is an important testing tool.

1. Pretentious, wasn’t it? But by me, not Ms.Gregory. Just another demonstration of Simon Elvery’s WP Footnotes plugin.