Weekly Web Roundup - #2
Continuing my new series of link collections, I’ve found some fantastic stuff for you all to look at this week. 
HTML Playground is an online reference guide for XHTML and CSS, including a complete list of tags with descriptions, attributes, and example code. There’s even a visual representation of what the code does. It’s like having several weighty reference books rolled into one web page!
There’s many web sites offering free bitmap images, but vector art usually costs money - and free vector collections are not usually of an adequate quality to be used in professional projects. But Vecteezy is an index of free vector artwork, produced by some great designers. It’s updated regularly too!
Aardvark is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to view the elements that make up a web page, and the source code for each of those elements. It works in a similar way to the commonly-used Web Developer add-on - but handles things in a much slicker way!
There are lots of online tools to test your website - but it can be a chore to work through them all one at a time! Jonas John has made it much simpler now though, with his Test Everything site - which allows you to test CSS markup, W3C validation, SEO scores and the like from a single interface!
I’ve always found the subject of aging a fascinating subject, but the Golberg family in Buenos Aires have taken things a step further - and published a collection of photos on the web that illustrates the quirks of aging beautifully! On June 17th each year the whole family gets their photo taken - which allows everybody else to see a perfect photographic chronology.
Collections of web design tutorials are in plentiful supply, but they’re typically aimed an an American audience - not that there’s anything wrong with that! 
If you’re a Brit like me though, you could do a lot worse than to check out the collection of tutorials at Tutorialtastic.
How often have you published a new post, only to realise that you forgot an obvious problem - like forgetting to enter a title or a silly spelling mistake? I’ve only been blogging properly for a few months, and I’m already guilty of both of those (at least), which is why I found an article by Shankar Ganesh to be a useful reminder of the things to do before you hit the Publish button.
After reading Randa’s Ultimate Guide to Free Web Site Analytics this morning, I was amused to find that Mashable have just done a similar write-up too - only their one focuses on all solutions, not just free ones. Worth a read if you’re a statsaholic!
Adjusting photographs you’ve taken to get the color right can be a tedious process, but with the magic of Adobe Photoshop CS (or CS2 or CS3) it can be made much easier - with some impressive results. Check out this guide on how to apply the colourings of the old masters to your photos.
To finish off this roundup we have a bit of SCANDAL! I got tipped off about a blog post that talks about what it’s like to work for Google and Microsoft. The post was written anonymously, after the contents of it had been in the Microsoft internal mail system for some time. It makes interesting reading if you wonder what it’s like to work for one of the biggest companies in the world!
Enjoy my little selection of links - and let me know if you liked any of them, or if you know of a site that you think should be featured here!
Thanks to Harshit, Ian, Zep, Randa, LaurenMarie, Robby, Vivien, David, Tomo, Paul B, Asgeir, Diego, Jose, Aaron, LEMONed, Jo, Lisa, Dirk, Tess, J David, Damien, Stevie, Jem and Tolumi for their recent comments - cheers! 
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I’ve been meaning to check out that vector art resource for a while now, although would’ve probably forgotten had it not been for this reminder.
Cheers, Paul
My pleasure! If you get a chance then maybe you could contribute to the collection? It’s how it expands, and it’s great promotion for the artist too! I plan to submit a couple of things myself - just as soon as my current workload eases a little!
Hey! Thanks for mentioning my article. Glad you liked it
You’re welcome Shankar - it made very interesting reading!
Thanks for plugging tutorialtastic ;D
I liked the firefox plugin Web-Developer, but this new Aardvark seems a whole lot better!!
I’ll also check out Tutorialtastic - as you said, most tutorials are aimed at the US, makes a change to have one thats different!!
No problem Jem! Good sites need to be plugged more often, otherwise everyone forgets about them in the onslaught of crap ones!
Aardvark’s pretty cool. It doesn’t do *everything* that Web Developer does, but it certainly excels at highlighting a page’s building blocks!
Wow, that photo collection is fascinating! I like Randa’s one of her son, too. I’m going to do that with my kids (if I remember!).
Thanks for sharing that Vecteezy site. I took a look at their Brusheezy collection, too. Definitely bookmarking those! Always good to have resources like that.
Whoa! I love that tutorial about the match color feature in Photoshop. I never even knew that existed. I’m going to have to try that. Cool!
I like the Firebug extension for Firefox, too. It sounds like it does a lot of the same things Aardvark does.
I said I was going to make a chronological gallery when our first was born - but I didn’t get around to it! Mind you, we’ve shot more than 8000 photos of the three of them combined over a six year period - so we’re not doing too badly!
The colour match tutorial is great! I used the method earlier today, to correct a badly shot photo of a bar interior for a client - it worked wonderfully!
Firebug! That was the one I couldn’t remember - but Tara uses it too right? Yeah - they’re all very similar, but the bonus with Aardvark is that it doesn’t eat any screen space!
Yes, Firebug is the one Tara recommended. Aardvark doesn’t use up any screen space? Well, I will need to try that one then! That is a disadvantage with Firebug.
Thanks for the mention Paul! I loved that Goldberg family link, as I’m into things like that, as Lauren mentioned. Thanks for the link to the free vectors, as I am always looking for stuff like that.
Hi Paul,
The Aardvark plugin is excellent. I’m amazed at how much stuff is available for Firefox. My browser is eventually going to turn into one huge toolbar.
LOL! If you’d like to accelerate that process then you could always use Flock!
I just had a look at Flock and you’re right, I’m almost there with my browser!