This is one of a few sites that I just love for inspirational web design. Almost any really great site I see these days has the “Site of the day” award tag hanging off it. Check it out for some amazing designs and great interactive design inspiration.

The goal of reset stylesheets are to get rid of browser’s style sheet inconsistencies with things like default line heights, margins and font sizes, etc. There are many open source and public domain reset.css sheets online that you can easily find and download for free. I prefer to use the meyerweb reset style. You can go to the site directly or just use the link below and download it here.

You can use this as a base, but I’d recommend that you tweak a few things for your own projects. Add your preferred colors for the page, links, etc. Hope this makes your coding life easier. Enjoy!

One of the blog writers for W3C’s site has posted an interview with Manrique Lopez de la Fuente who is an advocate of Web technologies in the company he works for, Andago. I love what Manrique has to say here about how he has been using Web technologies as part of his deployment of mobile applications. Read the full article here:

You have probably seen a ton of blog posts recently about CSS3 and HTML5. How will we ever keep up with everything? Here are a few tools that you may want to check out to make things a bit easier.
Sass is an extension of CSS3, and is also a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than basic CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets. Now it’s just finding the time to learn it! The good news is if you know basic CSS and nesting techniques from HTML, you should be able to understand the how and why behind it. I personally love that they’ve gotten rid of some brackets – as when my students are learning they tend to forget an end bracket here and there which really plays havoc on their style sheet! ;} If you can check it out it will save you hours on writing code, and your style sheet will be so much cleaner.

If you’ve read my previous post on Ruby, you’ll need Ruby installed to run this. The good news is if you’re on OSX you’ve already got it.

There are a number of new programs that I’ve been reading up on lately. One of the programming languages I’ve been curious about learning is Ruby. Most OSX should by default already have Ruby installed.

I have found a good installation guide here for OS users. Just download the program with the link on the image below and follow their step by step instructions. Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an a clean syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. You will need Ruby running to install SASS which I’m covering in the next post to make your life with CSS easier.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed Ruby – a quickstart guide to using Ruby is on this site below.

Wow. What a Dude! Check out this message Jeff has on his main page – it made me crack up for sure. I love Jeff Bridges, and am a bit of a crazy movie buff to say the least but this website is a piece of work even for the “Dude”. Check out some of the photography! I especially love some of the photos from the making of Iron Man. I’ve done some set design work for the film Automoto, but I can’t imagine working on set production with a doll head this big staring at me!

In this video, you’ll get a brief introduction to web accessibility standards, laws and regulations in different countries, and learn about the organizations that set accessibility standards (such as the w3c). You’ll also find out why accessibility is important to not only disabled people but also your pocket!

You can also find more free and useful videos on the thinkvitamin.com site here. They have email subscriptions as well which are very useful with keeping up to date with what’s new with web!

Another good video to checkout if you’re into making any web apps with forms is below. It goes through best practices with markup for accessibility standards. Again there are more videos free to view on their site if you’d like more information. These tutorials are set at a great steady pace for beginners and really covers what you need and cuts out any extra unnecessary jargon.

My good friend and one of my mentors (in design and art but also in life), Neil Lee, or Neilio as his twitter followers know him as, runs this site. One of the few people I have never, and will never regret following online. Always a source of inspiration and education for me. I’ll never stop learning from him… So many great videos and little trinkets on this site! Enjoy!

Quite a few articles and tutorials on this site for jQuery. Filter by your level – beginner or advanced!

The “slide out and drawer” effect is a popular one with my students to show / hide content instead of endlessly scrolling pages. For each post here you can view the demo, read the article or just go straight to the source code. The Automatic Infinite Carousel is also a great read.

I’ve had a few questions recently about validating code. This W3C page is probably your best bet for validating. The nice thing about this is you don’t have to have your site live, on a domain or URl or server to validate this. As most of my student’s projects are built and tested locally, this is a handy tool because you can upload a file from your computer instead of having to put it online to test.