As a developer, anything that can save you just a little bit of time is well worth its weight in gold. If you agree with that statement, you will love this. What we have for you is our selection of the best, the most useful and the most innovative tools and resources from 2011. That includes frameworks, boilerplates, apps, Javascript resources, CSS3 animations tools…and on…and on. So, no matter what, you are guaranteed to discover something completely new and really, [...]

Anything that can save time for a web developer is well worth its weight in gold. Whether you’re looking to cut loading time for your website or make light work of placing interactive elements into a design, these four tools could help speed things up: YUI Compressor With more web traffic than ever coming from smartphones, it’s crucial that web developers keep code lightweight. One excellent way to cut down on bandwidth-eating excess code is to use the YUI Compressor. [...]

Discussion Forums are a great way of ensuring active participation from your website’s visitors. Of late, many established blogs and websites have been running forums wherein their users can interact and discuss matters of relevance (and irrelevance, depends on the mood). When it comes to running a forum, the options are plenty – both free, and commercial. For WordPress users, arguably, the weapon of choice should be bbPress – as it offers seamless integration with WordPress (to the extent that [...]

There are many tools built to help with CSS, and improved ones are constantly being created. The fresh tools we have for you in this article will greatly improve your work-flow, whether that be by solving validation or debugging snags, or taking care of many of those tedious repetitive tasks that every project requires, or by simply offering solutions to many of those tasks that are time consuming (like sprites) and at times challenging (CSS3 animations). You’ll certainly appreciate this [...]

Media Temple is one of the more popular premium web hosting services out there. Media Temple is also pretty divisive – some swear by its quality, others claim it’s nothing but overpriced style-over-performance. Regardless, you can’t deny that it’s used by some big websites and bloggers like Gary Vaynerchuk, Sony, Starbucks, Toyota, Adobe, CSS-Tricks, and most recently, our site, Speckyboy Design Magazine. Up until recently we had been using Media Temples standard Grid-Service (gs), which is perfectly fine for most [...]

Gantry Framework is a WordPress theme framework that, unlike most of its modern counterparts, allows the user to construct a layout and color palette from within the WordPress admin backend itself. It’s powerful and flexible enough that power users can harness Gantry to achieve much greater things with much less effort than they might usually be in for, but the uninitiated can install Gantry and have a customizable layout configured in no time. In this tutorial, we’ll be taking you [...]

There is a chance that complex captchas are ruining your efforts to build a subscriber list, especially if you are using the free Feedburner RSS to Email service. After all, there are limits to how much a visitor is willing to go through to subscribe to your site and if they have to deal with captchas that are difficult to read, then they aren’t going to try too hard. In other words, by being to diligent in protecting your site [...]

CodeIgniter is a powerful framework that lets you create web apps very simply and elegantly. It’s an open source PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. Cool, that sounds great, so how do you get started using it? Well, this article features some essential CodeIgniter resources to help with your web app development: think of it as the CodeIgniter toolbox. Whether you need a [...]

Why reinvent the wheel? And by extension, why keep re-typing or copy/pasting commonly-used pieces of code over and over again? Copying and pasting pieces of code into text files and the like is disorganized and wastes your precious time. Instead, you can use code snippets to quickly call code you repeatedly use. There are applications that let you save, organize, and use your code snippets – for practically all of the major programming languages. And this article features 10 free [...]

When you come right down to it, the humble web browser is the most frequently used piece of software in the world. It’s used for everything, from checking your bank balance online to interacting on today’s social networks. However, you’ll find that most browsers are also immensely boring. They lack style and color – a monochromatic browsing experience is just not fun. Changing that experience for something a bit more personal is possible. Creating custom browser themes is perhaps the [...]

What is A/B testing? In short, it’s a controlled sample VS another controlled sample with a single variation, which is then shown to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times depending on how much traffic your website receives. A/B testing allows you to test changes in order to increase sales, decrease bounce rate, and a variety of other options depending on your needs. Although less accurate, A/B testing can even be done on websites with a small amount of traffic. [...]

Firefox is a widely-used browser – not just by users but web developers. Simply put, Firefox and its addons can make developing for the web easier and simpler. And with the release of Firefox 4, it got even easier. This article features 20 essential Firefox 4 addons for web developers. Before diving into the Firefox 4 addons, though, here’s a quick glimpse into some of the noteworthy new Firefox 4 features that benefit web developers: • Improved HTML5: Gecko now [...]

With jQuery now being used in over 40% of all web sites, the demand for up-to-date and feature-rich plugins has never been greater. Thankfully, the jQuery community has always met its popularity head on by offering a constant influx of new plugins that constantly push the boundaries of functionality ever-further. Yeah, we really do love jQuery :) We haven’t actually had a good look at jQuery plugins in quite a while, so today, we thought we would bring you up-to-date [...]