Attention AJAX programmers! Do you need a good “loading image” (or “throbber”)? Take a look at AjaxLoad.info, the only throbber-image generator I know of (as of this writing). You pick an image style, then enter some hex odes for the foreground and background colors. Hit the generate button, and if you like what you see, download the animated GIF. Simple, or what? Here are some examples:

Those are just a few examples of what AjaxLoad can do.

So, you’re not serious enough about blogging to host your own blog? You’d rather use a free blogging service? Are you sure? You can get a domain and hosting for only $3.99/month. No? Okay, then I guess we can get started.

Okay, here’s how this fill work. I’m going to compare Blogger, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.com. We’ll see what free blog provider is the best. Let’s start with LiveJournal. (more…)

You won’t get very far as a webmaster if you don’t know what a plaintext editor is (Notepad, for example), so I’m not going to waste time explaining. Let’s fast-forward to the good part.

Are you happy with your text editor? Which one do you use? Do you want to try some new ones?

I use Notepad (included with Windows), and EvolvEd (which is no longer available, unfortunately). I mainly use Notepad, but I use EvolvEd if I need line numbers, syntax coloring, or other extra stuff. Notepad is still my favorite text editor (I like It’s simplicity), though I’ve always wanted to try the Mac-only (I want a Mac!!) TextWrangler.

If you want to look around at more advanced text editors than Notepad, check out Wikipedia’s page on text editors.

So, you’ve got yourself a domain. Sure, it helps people get to your website, but what else can you use it for? Google’s got the answer. Do you hate your webhost’s webmail program? Do you like GMail? Well, now you can have your own copy of GMail (with 100 free email accounts)….but at your own domain. That’s right, you can have your own mini-GMail with email addresses resembling you@yourdomain.com. You get more than just email, but the email’s the best part. Forget your host’s SquirrelMail system, switch to Google Apps.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily manipulate HTML elements onscreen? Wouldn’t it be nice if AJAX requests could be sent with only one line of code? Take a look at Script.aculo.us.

What is Script.aculo.us? It’s a set of JavaScript files (based off the Prototype JavaScript library) that lets you do numerous cool and/or useful things with ease. Fading, sizing, and movement actions are only a couple lines of JavaScript away. Not to mention easier AJAX techniques.

Nearly every blog, or blog-like site, on the web offers several icons that allow you to submit their articles to Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and other “social bookmarking” sites. Have you wanted an easy way to add icons like that to your blog? Enter Socialinks v.2. Pick the social bookmarking services you want, enter some data, and you can download a bit of javascript code to paste into your blog template. There’s also an optional Wordpress plugin available on the site.

Just so you know, the “infos” fields are the places where you paste you’re blog’s template tags. For example, if you have a blogger blog, you’d paste <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> into the “url” field.

This site is a great way to add social bookmarking links to your site.

Now this is a good site. FreeWebmasterTips.com is pretty much composed of short one-page tips and tricks pages on a variety of subjects like making pages load quick, preloading graphics, hiding e-mail adresses from spambots, etc.

DevelopingWebs.net is an interesting site with HTML, CSS, and Photoshop tutorials (well, there’s more than just that). Some of the tutorials seem a little cheesy, but a lot of them are okay.

Whois.net is one of the easiest to use WhoIs sites I’ve found so far (and the easiest to remember). I like their “Get a Domain” form, which checks multiple TLDs at once, to aid you in findind a cool domain. They say they have “$10 domains” as well, but it doesn’t say if that’s per year or for two years. For domains, you want 1and1 ($6/year!)</a>.

SnapFiles has it’s freeware and shareware separated into separate of categories. Then there are categories below those to make navigation easier. I’ve gotten some really cool freeware off this site (including a great screengrab program). There’s even a huge webmaster category (with a dozen subcategories).