Last week’s gems this week

1. Like most people who have seen/use/use the validator buttons, you can’t but grimace at their, erm , well, ugliness. Here though are some tasteful buttons for xHTML and CSS compliance display. So much nicer than the W3c ones… Go get them
2. Part 2 of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN
3. Over the last couple of weeks I have contemplating the purchase of a laptop. But with so many different options out there and technology having moved on leaps and bounds since I last forked out some case for hardware. It’s time to do some serious research, and first up what’s the go with UXGA?? Well here is a primer for all those monitor/display related specs (ta Neil).
4. Here is a link to CSS tab based lists and how to implement them, but this chap also happens to have a whole heap of other related CSS info, well worth the browse.
5. One of the main reasons for developing web sites with web standards in mind is so that the pages can be accessible by multiple devices, not just browsers, but also PDAs. I have a Palm and I use AvantGo, so I thought I’d look up their resources, after all maybe one day I’ll find the time to create an AvantGo version my site:
   • Avant Go
   • Hotwired
6. This link has some useful tips and hints for designing your database for optimum performance. On that page I also found a link to a site that is dedicated to MS SQL server performance, which had some more useful resources.
7. Over at Hivelogic there is a nifty little way to force browsers to reload background images in style sheets. By default browsers seem to cache images defined in style sheets, but by pointing the url in the style sheet to a link similar to this background-image: url(http://example.com/rotate.php?id=e74b9c816a5303cf337dcfb63f7d86e1);. The browser is prompted to reload the image because a) it’s a link, but b) it’s a template that’s being called. Not only that though as you can see from this example it’s pointing to a PHP template so could even code it in such a manner that it rotates the background image. Have a read!!
8. I recently wrote a little item on favelets and here is a pretty cool one that reads the x and y co-ordinates of your mouse (and displays them on screen), as well as allowing you to draw a marquee and giving you the exact box dimensions.
9. Having recently completed and RDF come RSS feed generator for my CMS I could have benefited from this useful link. A real in depth tutorial for building RSS feeds.
10. Digital web is carrying a tutorial on designing logos, also pretty cool.
11. Some Cold Fusion resources: an extensive and detailed explanation of using UDFs (User Defined Functions) in CF 5.
12. Found this page, which contains a list of conferences on User Interface design, while I was reading up on how to get the most out of conferences.
13. Just finished reading the interview on Meet the Makers.com with Steve Champeon (the new leader of WaSP), and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Have a read. In this interview he also refereed to this site, Stating the Obvious, which at a glance seemed pretty good, as it’s on a topic that interests me. Focusing on thinking in a critical manner and also formalising these thoughts by writing them down.
14. How to read a W3c specification is a really good explanation on A List Apart about w3c specifications, their intended audience, how to read these and what you can take away from them.
15. And now a set of links I found while working on the Reach Conferencing project, accumulated over the last month or so, that have me helped understand, implement solutions and apply work arounds to a number of CSS problems: This has an interesting analysis of the current browsers and their implementation of CSS. This also makes for a slightly demoralising read, as it shows quite clearly all of the deficiencies still out there. A tool that translates CSS selectors into plain English.