refresherate.com

I remember when background patterns were everywhere on the web. Was sometime around 2004 or so. Thankfully, the trend moved on. But sometimes a paisley pattern is just what you need for a winning design. I stumbled upon ava7 Patterns and was quite impressed. They have over 980 patterns thus far and a beautiful interface for for finding the right color and pattern shape for your web site. Patterns can also be sorted by top rated, most downloaded and most commented, so you know which patterns have been over-implemented.

It’s always a good idea to compress JavaScript and CSS files in order to have them load faster.  However, it’s a compressed file is nearly impossible to edit if you need to make changes down the road. Enter Minify. Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

Here are a couple posts from Smashing Magazine regarding user interface design. A definitely must read for web designer and anyone working to design modern web application:

• 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques
• 12 Useful Techniques For Good User Interface Design

It’s great to see the new whitehouse.gov web site embracing web standards. This is a trend I noticed with Obama. He hires the best people for the job and makes no exceptions when it comes to web design. His campaign web site was made with web standards, whereas the other top candidates sites looked pretty clunky behind the scenes. Web leadership starts at the top, and well, you can’t get much higher than the POTUS.

The new whitehouse.gov web site is validate xhtml. It takes advantage of jQuery for some smooth user-interface effects. It even has Atom 1.o feeds. I haven’t had a chance to look it over completely, but at first glance I am very impressed. Very nicely done, Mr. President.

Amy Hoy, et. al. have put together a very nice quick guide on getting up to speed with credit card processing based upon their experience with the subject when launching Freckle Time Tracking. It’s a wee bit Rails-centric, but overrall it got plenty of info whether or not your using ActiveMerchant or not.

Running with the cheatsheet theme, if you are running OS X or any is with a command line, I highly recommend installing the command line cheatsheets from errtheblog.com. They are great when you just need a quick syntax check on how to run a certain MySQL command or work with a particular library.

Here’s a shoutout to the blogging engine I am using for this web site (as of 1/2009, since I might change to something else). The GraphicRating.com blog has a sweet little write-up on some of the elements of WordPress. Check it out.