25 Firefox Extensions to Make You More Productive

16/Feb/2008

From the very excellent Blog LifeDev:

Firefox is my weapon of choice when it comes to browsing the web. It’s fast, free, and gives the user the best feature ever: Choice.

The beauty of the Firefox extension is that it allows you to add a specific feature or function, fully customizing your browsing experience. For someone wanting to make the most of their online time, this is a huge opportunity. There are limitless ways to tailor your browsing with Firefox extensions. Here are 25 of my favorite extensions that help save time while online.

get them here. Read More...

100 Ways to Use Your iPod to Learn and Study Better

16/Feb/2008

From the site:
If you think that iPods are used just for listening to music, you obviously haven't been keeping up with the latest technology

The Apple-developed music player now features all kinds of accessories to help you study better, and now other companies are in a rush to get their designs in sync with the iPod. Pre-teens, college kids and even adults are taking advantage of the educational benefits an iPod affords them.

From downloadable podcasts to just-for-iPod study guides and applications, learning on the go has never been easier. To find out about the many different ways you can transform your iPod into a learning device, check out the list here. Read More...

60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers

16/Feb/2008

Wow. A lot of free online classes with deep and detailed information. Oh, and it's all free. it's here. Read More...

old book illustration database

22/Jan/2008

A nice compilation of old book illustrations, free to use. your can see it here. Read More...

125 Code Snippets for web designers

29/Sep/2007

Make powerful online forms easily with Wufoo

29/Sep/2007

Wufoo makes great use of ajax to create a very nice user experience on the admin side of things. You can place your finished form in either an embedded iframe (as I have in this post) or on a dedicated web page. You can receive new responses by email or RSS, response data can be filtered and displayed in a variety of ways in the reports section and there is easy control over the look and feel of the forms your users interact with. There are more functions available than I’ll go into here, but the system is still very easy to use.

Free accounts include let you create 3 forms with 10 fields, 100 submissions and 10 reports. Premium accounts bump up these numbers, allow respondents to upload files and be redirected to a URL of your choosing after the form is completed. Four service levels are available at between $9 and $199 per month. Wufoo also supports all UTFF characters, so forms can be multilingual. Read More...

Google Pirate

29/Sep/2007

Use power of Google to scour every corner of the internet for exactly what you need. Don’t know complicated search strings? No worries, Google Pirate makes it simple. Pick a category and enter a basic search term, then check out the results. Click the pic for more. Read More...

Mango - free online language courses

21/Sep/2007

Mango is a set of Flash based language lessons. It has a simple interface and the lessons are well done. Check it out. Read More...

Round-up of several Online Photo Editors

31/Aug/2007

Photos are everywhere on the web. From sharing with friends, to editing, printing, buying, selling, searching, remixing and free hosting, we’ve lined up a plethora of resources for photo fiends.

Mapufacture - create your own maps

31/Aug/2007

Oakland Crime Spotting Map

31/Aug/2007

A nice Google Map Hack that shows weekly Oakland Crime Statistics. They should add a feature so you can add your crime while it's in progress. Read More...

Unofficial SEO Blog

24/Jul/2007

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization"... it's the book of tricks that can get your site listed higher or closer to first position in a search engine, which means more people will see your product or ideas. There is some good free advice here. click the pic for more.
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Lampshade buying guide

24/Jul/2007

There is a lampshade buyers guide at Lamps USA that has some good information. It points out the different types of shades, base designs and how to measure correctly for a lampshade. Many lamp shops are more intent on selling a new lamp as opposed to a replacement shade. Lamps USA offers a good selection of replacement shades available for purchase at reasonable prices. Read More...

Lifehacker roundup of useful government websites

17/Jul/2007

Overlooked and difficult to find, there are hundreds of thousands of U.S. government web sites that can help you accomplish a variety of tasks.

At the right federal .gov destination you can locate historical documents, keep tabs on Congressional happenings, view presidential paperwork, and a whole lot more. Click the pic for the most useful U.S. government web sites out there. (via LifeHacker) Read More...

Stock Photography and Royalty Free Images from Alamy

14/Jul/2007

The website has millions of images from thousands of photographers, picture agencies and national collections. Our customers include newspapers, magazines, book publishers, advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments.

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Circle Up

11/May/2007

A free web service, which lets users pose questions and gather needed information from groups of any size and get back a single, organized response that can be used and shared among all members of the group. Think Evite mashed up for organizing. click the logo to see more. Read More...

How to String a Guitar so it doesn't fall out of tune

11/May/2007

Photoshop Smoke Tutorial

28/Apr/2007

Nice simple step by step guide for creating "smoke" effect in Photoshop Read More...

Video Tutorial: RSS in Plain English

28/Apr/2007

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start. Read More...

Nikon's Universcale web application

01/Apr/2007

It puts the entire universe into proportion, from the smallest particle to the largest measurements of space.

From the femtometer to the light year, Universcale spans 40 magnitudes of measurement into a single cosmic web app. It's really amazing when you zoom all the way out into stars and galaxies and realize that every time you go a magnitude higher, everything you saw before, from the flea to Mount Everest, is contained in this tiny little grid in the lower-left side of the screen. Of course, the Carl Sagan-should-be-narrating-this planetarium music helps.

If you have a few minutes and want to feel really, really small (or really, really large, or really, really disoriented), check out Universcale. It will eat up your afternoon and enlighten you as to the true size and scope of the cosmos. Not bad for a Flash app.

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Colortoy - anothercool color picker

20/Mar/2007

simple and useful tool to help you pick colors that work together.
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Google Image Ripper

13/Mar/2007

If you ever use Google Image Search and are annoyed by the thumbnails view that makes you click and hunt for the original image... this solves a problem by ripping the originals to a page without any fuss. Click the link above to see my Kashi Cereal search.
Read More...

Colorjack Sphere

13/Mar/2007

Color Sphere helps you design your website, redecorate your home, or choose your outfit in the morning. It can even simulates various forms of color blindness! Sphere uses color theory in order to provide you with visually appealing colors. There is a widget for OS X. click the pic to check it out.
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80,000 sound and video recordings of animals now available to public online

03/Feb/2007

For decades, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has shared the remarkable sounds of birds and other animals with the public through audio guides featuring recordings hand-picked from the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds' vast collection. Now anyone can explore the archive's holdings on his or her own. For the first time, more than 65,000 sound clips and some 18,000 video clips of birds and other animals are accessible for no charge at the Macaulay Library's Web site. Read More...

A great set of financial advice tips

01/Feb/2007

A lot of this might be common sense, but it delivers structure and a plan to follow for anyone who feels financially "lost". click the pic for the whole article. Read More...

Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough ideas for 2007

01/Feb/2007

There is some great stuff here including a nice article on "Living with Continuous Partial Attention" and another called "The Accidental Influentials" which argues that social contagion is the effect of individuals and the right conditions. "The principal requirement for what we call “global cascades”—the widespread propagation of influence through networks—is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom adopts, say, a look or a brand after being exposed to a single adopting neighbor."

snip: Our annual survey of emerging ideas considers how nanotechnology will affect commerce, what role hope plays in leadership, and why, in an age that practically enshrines accountability, we need to beware of “accountabalism.”

click the pic for a full list of ideas Read More...

BooBox - adding affiliate commerce to blogs easily

21/Jan/2007

Brazil-based booBox is preparing to launch a set of tools for bloggers and other website owners that will help them sell items they are writing about. Since sites will be using their own affilate codes, booBox won’t be able to directly take a cut of transactions. It isn’t clear if they are launching this for free, or charging for the service. Pending their position on that, as well as details on how difficult this will be to integrate with websites, I’m giving this an early thumbs up. This may be quick acquisition bait for Amazon or eBay. Read More...

popurls - a great start page

21/Jan/2007

this is sort of a custom rss feed layout of some of the better feeds on the net. updated dynamically, I always find cool stuff here. Great if you are bored, curious or looking for a new bit of information. Read More...

Yelp - an opinion site written by people just like you (sort of)

14/Jan/2007

I've been meaning to add this for some time... I always find useful opinions and thoughts on Yelp. It's like Craigslist but it's more honest and covers food, shopping and more. check it out. Read More...

Listango - share your favorite stuff with others online

14/Jan/2007

Like I've said before, I love a good list. Well there are a lot of them here.

snip: "Listango is a new web site that lets people create, tag and share lists on any topic imaginable. Create lists of your favorite books, movies and music. Keep track of your goals. Create online to-do lists. Give travel tips and recommendations. There are no rules. Go wherever your imagination takes you."

Good place to go if you're willing to rely on the wisdom of crowds to help you pick what movie to rent next or what book you should be reading. Read More...

FlavorPill

07/Jan/2007

Music, art, fashion and other carefully selected event highlights in five cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Chicago. Type in your email address to get the weekly newsletter for the urban mecca of your choice, and you'll always know just what to do with your free time. Read More...

Complete Review - online book reviews

07/Jan/2007

This well-organized, easy-to-search compendium of book reviews—last we checked, there were 1,430 titles covered—includes editor's picks and bestseller lists by year. The site links to (and vets) dozens of literary weblogs, from Bookninja to Mobylives to its own Literary Saloon. The Review Index lets you search for books by author or title, genre or nationality; you can read the site's own review or click to read reviews published elsewhere. Read More...

Rent Me a Vacation

07/Jan/2007

Nice site that aggregates vacation rentals into a decent search engine with a pretty good interface. check it out. Read More...

Peekvid - a massive collection of video links

01/Jan/2007

this is an excellent aggregation of video links to full episodes of current tv shows, movies and more... almost everything is hosted elsewhere, so the links seem to stay up and current. wow. Read More...

Shefinds - "best of" products picked out by other women

25/Dec/2006

I like sites that aggregate consumer opinions to solve problems... in this case, what are some of the "best of" products recommended by other women. Not a huge site, but it has potential. Read More...

Bug Me Not

03/Dec/2006

annoyed that you have to "join" the New York Times to read an article? bypass the process by using bugmenot!

click the pic for more. Read More...

5 excellent FREE online education resources

03/Dec/2006

Nice round-up from 52 reviews about free education resources online, including the OpenCourseWare from MIT and Stanford on iTunes. good stuff. Read More...

How to read a tire sidewall code

03/Dec/2006

This is something I just can't make my brain remember. Now I don't have to. Click the pic for more. Read More...

Animations teach knot tying

03/Dec/2006

Somebody unfortunately named Grog has put together a great site with knot tying animations. Far superior to looking at a drawing. Good job Grog! click the pic for more. Read More...

2 Prong - Anonymous email for website registration

03/Dec/2006

You want to sign up for something on the net but don't want the spam associated with signing up? Use 2prong... you instantly get an anonymous email address to a 48 hour domain. brilliant! Read More...

CSS Play - tips, layouts and more for web designers

03/Dec/2006

A great resource with lots of practical advice and experimental layouts to play with. Read More...

Aging Hipsters - A Guide for Aging Boomers

26/Nov/2006

Jan Reisen, who along with her partner Peter Kooiker runs the Web site aginghipsters.com, said she plans to join AARP at some point to take advantage of financial benefits like discounts on insurance, rental cars and hotels. But as for recommending albums, “If I want to know about cool music, I’ll ask my 22-year-old.” Covering issues on the Boomer Generation including original Boomer content, bulletin boards, user comments, Sixties and Seventies music, Baby Boomer culture, health and coverage of issues for "Aging Hipsters." Read More...

Flickr Leech - browse Flickr faster

12/Nov/2006

It seems like the "web 2.0" sites that are making the most waves these days are the ones that have the foresight and openness to release an API and allow users to mash up their content. Google Maps is a good example of this. Although Flickr doesn't really need any help from users to bring it to the forefront of people's minds, they've still released an API. That API lets people do interesting things with their data, and one of those interesting things is Flickr Leech.
Flickr Leech allows you to choose between Interestingness (by date), By Username, By User ID, Favorites, By Photoset, Group Pool, and Search, and returns a massive set of thumbnails to allow you to very quickly browse your results. Clicking on any thumbnail opens that image's Flickr page in a new background tab or window, allowing you to continue browsing, then view all of the images you selected once they've already loaded. Slick. Probably my favorite part of Flickr Leech is the snarky messages you get on each search - fun stuff. Read More...

Color Palette Generator

02/Nov/2006

Here's an ingenious way to create a palette of colors that work well together for your next design project - Color Palette Generator. Simply supply the site with an image that contains colors you enjoy, and it will select a set of colors from the image that are complimentary to one another, and match the image's colors. As stated on the site, this can be useful for design projects that rely on a central image, but I can imagine it could also be a good way to choose colors for offline endeavors as well. Maybe you can match your wall color to a color from your favorite painting or rug.

click the pick to visit the site. Read More...

Photofront: Slick Flash photo gallery

01/Nov/2006

Looking for a cooler way to display your photos? Check out Photofront. Photofront bills itself as "a better frontend for your photos," and it's pretty slick. It integrates with your Flickr account and has a surprising array of features and options. You can choose from among several layouts and transition styles, including a neat "photo drop" effect, and there's an optional "adaptive background" feature that will change the background around each photo to match the photo itself. You can also control the display of titles, descriptions, EXIF data, and so on, and Photofront supports direct linking to individual photos. Photofront is a free hosted service, but if you pay a one-time $10 fee you can get rid of the Photofront logo plus a few more features and the ability to host it on your own web site. Read More...

The Information Architecture Institute

18/Oct/2006

Our Mission

The Information Architecture Institute (formerly The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture “AIfIA”) serves to advance the design of shared information environments. We support a global community infrastructure that connects people, ideas, content, and tools. Through research, education, advocacy and community service, we promote excellence within our field and build bridges to related disciplines and organizations.

Operated by a dedicated, multi-national group of people volunteering our own resources, we aspire to build bridges to related disciplines and organizations. We invite you to join us in advancing the state of information architecture through research, education, advocacy and community service.
Read More...