Saturday Link Round-Up 4

Jun 28, 06:19 PM - and

I just don’t have the time to screencap all these sites today, so I’m afraid that this is a “screencapless” post. Everything is sorted into categories and there are excerpts from just about everything (with the exception of a few recipes :P) so you shouldn’t have any trouble decided which ones to click on. Enjoy!

Food

Holy Ravioli: Falling in Amore With a Sweet Treat From Philadelphia’s Termini Bros. Bakery – Picture, if you will, two of the greatest masterpieces of Italian cookery—the cannoli and the calzone.

Got it? Now, imagine that these two beauties get married and have a baby. An unholy, but wholly delicious, cheesy and carbohydratey baby.

Chicken Caesar Pitas – Enjoy a tender, flavorful chicken Caesar pita with homemade croutons.

Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Tomato Salad – If you don’t care for artichokes, try stuffing the chicken breasts with one of the following: olive tapenade; Feta and pine nuts; or roasted red peppers and Parmesan.

Grilled Potato and Onion Salad – Description N/A.

Cucumber Soup – Description N/A.

Sweet and Sour Pork – Pork is stir-fried with peppers, carrots, onions and pineapple in this version of the classic dish. Easy to make, and delicious.

Chocolate Kiss Peanut Butter Pie – This recipe has a wonderful combination of a chocolate and peanut butter. It’s simple and inexpensive. I make this pie for a restaurant owned by my mother, and we receive many compliments and even requests to purchase whole pies. You can also use chocolate pudding; the pie tastes like peanut butter cup candy. For a really spectacular presentation, garnish with whipped cream, peanuts, and chopped peanut butter cups,

Mayonnaise Cookies – A rich, crisp, sugar type cookie that is easy to make. The mayonnaise takes the place of the shortening and eggs. My son says it is possibly the world’s best cookie.

Grilled Smoky Cheddar Potatoes – Are you a potato lover? Try this cheesy grilled version.

Plum And Rosemary Sugar Tartelettes – Dodging the thunderstorms…that is all we have been doing this weekend. No, this is all we have been doing this past week and looking at the forecast, it looks like it will be our activity this week. Yeah!! Why does that make me happy? Free water ya’ll, free water!

Seven Ideas for Preparing Food at Home Cheaply with Minimal Space and Resources – My first living experience on my own was in a college dorm room, where I resided for two years. The cooking equipment there was minimal – I had a dorm fridge, a hot plate, a large pan, two plates, a few forks and spoons, and that was about it. I did whatever dishes I needed to do in the restroom sink on my dorm floor. My first apartment after that wasn’t much better – I shared what amounted to an efficiency with four other people. It was dirt cheap, but it also almost required you to eat out instead of eating inside, meaning that the money saved on cheap housing was somewhat taken away by the cost of eating out consistently.

15 Tips For Leftover & Surplus Food Items – Here are 15 Quick Tips for stretching out and using the last little bit of a food item instead of tossing the extra bit out. This is not only less wasteful–it saves cash!

How to line a springform pan – Springform pans are a unique type of bakeware. Round and high-sided, the pans do not have fixed sides. Instead, they have an adjustable ring that forms the sides of a cake or torte and fits onto a bottom plate with the aid of a spring or clamp. The advantage of this type of pan is that a delicate baked good can be removed from the pan very easily; unlike a solid-sided pan, the ring can simply be unclamped and lifted off, leaving your cake undamaged on the base, which can double as a serving plate.

Crystal Shrimp with Sweet and Sour Sauce – Toasted sesame seeds finish this stir-fried shrimp in a sweet and sour sauce with bell pepper, carrot and onions.

Bites from other Blogs – A few links to yummy things.

orzo with grilled shrimp, summer vegetables, and pesto vinaigrette – Serve this cold or at room temperature—perfect for a picnic or barbecue.

Butterhorn Garlic Knots – I don’t often post about breads unless it is a Daring Baker challenge or another event but Sunday is bread baking day at the house so B. did not find anything unusual in my baking behaviour that day execpt for running back and forth to the laptop and giggling and laughing every other minute.

Beginner Guide to Pantry Organizing – It’s the secret weapon of a well-organized kitchen: a working pantry. A planned reserve of foodstuffs and sundries used in the. home, a pantry saves time, money and stress in the kitchen.

links: food – More links to yummy things.

garlic-miso pork chops with orange bell pepper and arugula – Description N/A.

chicken breasts provençal – Travel editor William Sertl took a weeklong boot-camp course at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. For this classic French dish, students were taught how to sauté the chicken on one side—without touching it—until it’s golden, before turning it only once. The pan-sauce lesson that followed yielded a simple, elegant cloak for the very juicy chicken.

Cool Touch Oven Rack Guard – We all try to be as careful as possible when working in the kitchen. Hot pans, ovens, utensils and often boiling water are everywhere and can easily cause the occasional (or more than occasional) burn. Even if you have hands of stone, a burn is never fun and should be avoided at all costs. Potholders and dishtowels can help to protect your hands from most hot surfaces, but often the accidental burns are the ones that are most difficult to avoid.

Frosty Relief for a Hot Summer’s Day – You know what’s really fun on a hot, sweltering, summer’s day? Licking a blissfully chilly popsicle down to the smooth wooden stick, racing to finish it before it all melts down your chin.

Red Chile Marinated Grilled Chicken Recipe – This is some of the best chicken I’ve ever eaten – grilled, roasted, baked, whatever. Juicy, spicy, tender, lipsmackin’ good. Here’s the deal, there are two ways to make this recipe. One way entails making your own red chile sauce from scratch, using dried ancho and guajillo chiles that you can usually only find at a specialty Mexican market. Even our local Whole Foods doesn’t carry these dried chiles. The second method starts with a base of canned red chile sauce, which is a little easier to find in a regular supermarket, and saves quite a few steps.

Homemade Garlic Croutons – During the summer, I tend to eat a lot more salads than I do during other times of the year. Veggies are fresher and tastier (and, if I’m lucky, some are even home-grown) and it’s usually hot enough that I don’t feel like cooking hot foods – let alone like eating them. Cold salads are refreshing, as well as tasty, and they’re just ideal for hot weather in my book.

Mascarpone Raspberry Gratins – I always seem to have a story don’t I? Well, bloggers are like that…they like stories: to read, to tell, to share and to write about. Somehow there is always a story behind the desserts I make , sometimes it is a long drawn explanation and sometimes something that popped in my head while experiencing one of those stories. Today is no exception…these gratins almost did not happen. Glad they did in the end though because they were mighty good.

How to Make Fruit Leather – When you have your own fruit trees (or access to someone else’s) sometimes you can feel a bit buried in fruit, whatever happens to be dropping off the trees at that time. Summer becomes a mad dash of canning, jamming and freezing, trying to preserve the bounty to enjoy throughout the year. One thing you can do with excess fruit of the season is to make fruit leather, sort of the beef jerky of fruit. I used to love this stuff as a kid, made for a great snack and instant energy, and was easy to pack. Last fall I made fruit leather with the leftover grape mush from making grape juice, and this week it was fruit leather from our neighbor Pat’s apricots (Pat’s apricots are so ripe that when you go to pick one, two more fall off the branch). What follows is a general guideline to making fruit leather, no set recipe. So much of it depends on the specific fruit you are working with.

Firefox

See How Often You Visit Web Sites in Firefox 3 – One of Firefox 3’s newest (and most revealing) backend features is its built-in usage tracking—it keeps a running tally of how often you visit a web page over a period of time, which informs the Smart Location Bar’s suggestions and creates things like smart bookmark lists of “Most Visited” sites. Smarter features informed by your behavior are great, but checking out the raw data can offer a whole lot of insight into where and how you spend your time online.

Visualize blue https sites in Firefox 3 in a better way – Firefox 3 introduced a new coloring scheme and design for secure websites. You might remember that Firefox 2 displayed a yellow URL bar when the user was accessing a https site. This changed drastically in Firefox 3 which is now displaying blue, yellow and green colors in the favicon area on the left side of the URL.

Firefox KeyFixer Makes Home and End Keys Work Like Windows – Mac OS X only: Freeware application Firefox Keyfixer changes the default behavior for your Home and End keys in Firefox. By default, pressing Home or End moves your Firefox window rather than the cursor.

Functional Firefox User Styles – Now that you’ve been running Firefox 3 for almost a week, it’s time customize its interface to your liking with a few great user styles. Just like you can add user scripts (JavaScript) to web pages with the Greasemonkey extension, you can also add user styles (CSS) to Firefox’s interface with the Stylish extension.

CookiePie Logs into Multiple Gmail Accounts Simultaneously – Windows and Linux with Firefox: Free Firefox extension CookiePie manages Firefox’s cookies—small bits of text stored on your computer that tell a site you’re logged in, for example—in such a way that you can log into the same site multiple times.

Stumbleupon Toolbar with Export Function – The new Stumbleupon toolbar is now compatible with Firefox 3 and the developers have added an interesting function to the toolbar. Are you stumbling a lot of sites and use the Stumbleupon toolbar regularly ? You might be delighted to hear that you can know export the stumbled websites to your Firefox bookmarks.

How Can I Create a Keyboard Shortcut to Firefox’s Add-ons Window? – Dear Junkie,
You’re not alone in your quest for a quicker way to get to the Add-ons menu. There are a few ways you can access the Add-ons window from your keyboard, some of which are currently much easier than others to achieve. I’ll walk you through a few possible methods.

Put about:config in Your Firefox Sidebar – Reader Oshayr has been making all kinds of about:config tweaks to Firefox after reading our power user’s guide to Firefox 3 and top Firefox config tweaks, but he’s discovered that all that tweaking is a lot easier with the about:config window in your sidebar.

Snap Links for Firefox 3 – Snap Links was one of the most useful Firefox 2 add-ons in my opinion and it was one of the few add-ons that I missed dearly after switching to Firefox 3. The add-on could be installed with a little tweak of the install.rdf file that can be found in every Firefox add-on installation package but it turned out that this version, it was Snap Links 0.0.4, was causing some side effects like opening the right-click menu or disabling it for a certain time that made it unusable for me.

Easily Manage Firefox 3 Keyword Quick Searches – You already know how to set up Firefox quick searches by right-clicking in a web page’s search box—like on the Google home page—and choosing “Add a keyword for this search.” Now in Firefox 3, you can manage search engine keywords in Firefox’s built-in search box.

Import Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks and Tags to Firefox 3 – Web utility del.icio.us to Firefox merges your bookmarks from social bookmarking web site del.icio.us—tags and all—with your existing Firefox 3 bookmarks. Why might you want to do this? Because the new and improved bookmarking functionality in Firefox 3 supports tagging, but since previous versions of Firefox did not, you’ve already got tons of bookmarks with no tags.

Feedly Turns Google Reader into a Social Start Page – Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Create a start page with a wider view of your Google Reader feeds and social contacts with Feedly, a free Firefox extension. The add-on’s main service is spinning your Google Reader feeds into a more magazine-like spread, letting you browse over multiple categories, glimpse post pictures, and have all your read items sync back to Reader.

Bookmark Previews Creates Thumbnails of All Your Bookmarks – Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): Firefox extension Bookmark Previews creates thumbnail previews for all of your Firefox bookmarks. Once installed, you can browse your bookmarks in a straight thumbnail view or in an iTunes Cover Flow-esque album view.

Fix Choppy Scrolling in Firefox – One of my readers – Sammy – sent me an email just a few minutes ago that told me of a problem that several Firefox 3 users were having when scrolling websites with large fixed background images. The scrolling was choppy, example sites where this occurred can be found here, here and here. If you are one of the unfortunate with that issue you can fix it quite easily.

CMS and Blogging Systems

43 Phenomenal and Advanced Groundbreaking Wordpress Themes – Free to Download – Description N/A.

Textpattern CMS or Blog? – Textpatternians are as happy as sandboys because Textpattern’s flexibility is perfect for content management systems ranging from small blogs to large enterprises. There is evidence that non-users, however, either don’t know about Textpattern or have the impression it is neither a good CMS nor a good blog. This article suggests ways to make Textpattern more visible and reverse mistaken perceptions.

20 Free Corporate WordPress Themes – Your business’ blog doesn’t have to look boring or childish. If you’re going to use your blog as a tool to promote your business, you need it to have a clean, professional, corporate look. Here’s a round up of 20 of the best free corporate WordPress themes available. Preview them and if you find one of your taste, go ahead and download it.

Amaizing [sic] WordPress hacks part 1 – After a list of simple and really useful WordPress tricks i got amazing feedback which inspired me to write this one on amazingly cool WordPress hacks which are probably not often used but very inspiring and original and in my case showed me new possibilities of WordPress and a completely new way of use.

25 Outstanding WordPress Designs – If you’re contemplating on creating a theme for your newly-established WordPress installation or looking for design inspiration for an existing one, check out these 25 hand-picked, beautiful WordPress designs that showcase the creativity of its designer and the malleability of WordPress.

WordPress Tips and Ideas Learned From Implementation – Recently, I had to slice and implement a blog for the CEO of my company. I decided to go with WordPress because that is what I have become enamored with recently, when I created a job board using it. I used some features of WordPress that I had never used before, so I figured I would talk about them so that others could learn how to use them as well.

Plugin: Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin – Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin keeps your website downloads organised, and provide means to monitor the amount of downloads a file has, along with an easy method of linking to those files using special tags.

Building Viget.com In EE – In my last EE post, I covered some ExpressionEngine tricks we used for managing multiple sites, removing the /comments URL segment, and setting up a simple “Preview” function.

This time, we’re going to use URL segments to create some dynamic user profiles, sort a portfolio page, and make a flexible upcoming event list.

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

Tutorial ~ Zippered and Slip Pocket Tutorial – Zippered Pocket Tutorial One of the biggest phobias of sewing is the dreaded zipper. The truth is, with the proper tools, putting in a zipper is no problem. The most important tool is a zipper foot.

50 Free Apron Patterns & Tutorials – Here are another whopping 50 patterns and tutorials I’ve found online since then, including the couple vintage apron patterns published on Tipnut since that time so everything’s in one handy place for you.

How to cope with a toothache – Well, I know this has nothing to do with technology, but I thought I’d share some tips I’ve learned in the past 2 days. I didn’t have access to any dentists since I was away and I had very limited pain medication, which didn’t work anyway. So here are some tips totally unrelated to technology, but if some of you have toothaches right now, you’ll love gHacks for this!

Find out why text on a website is not properly displayed – Whenever I visit Chinese websites I stumble upon strange characters that do not resemble Chinese at all. When I visit the Chinese Google homepage for instance I see lots of blocks of hex code pairs but no Chinese characters at all. Since I’m probably not the only one with that problem I would like to explain how someone would find out why text on a website is not displayed properly and what he could do to change it.

How to close multiple windows in the taskbar at once – New folders are always opened in a new window on my system because I think it’s a comfortable way to work with folders and windows. I never liked the default way of opening a new folder in the same window. This spawns a lot of windows when I navigate to a folder like the Firefox profile folder and I would like to pass a tip on how I close multiple windows in the taskbar at once with no effort at all.

Five Ways To Keep Your Car Running At Peak Fuel Efficiency – Back in the good ol’ days of $2.50-per-gallon gasoline, you could ignore simple car maintenance. After all, what was it costing you? A buck here and a buck there? But when prices hit the $4 mark, things changed. Now, every cent counts, and you can save a surprising amount of scratch by performing a few simple maintenance tasks yourself.

The 3,000 Mile Oil Change Myth – According to a recent study by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, 73 percent of California drivers change their oil more frequently than required. This same scenario no doubt repeats itself across the country. Besides wasting money, this translates into unnecessary consumption of $100-a-barrel oil, much of it imported.

Clean Pen Marks Off Your Hands with a Teabag – Whether you’ve got ink blots on your hands from working too hard or snagging that cutie’s number at the concert last night, there’s a better way to scrub it off than plain old soap and water.

Predict Weather with the Clouds – DIY web site Instructables details how to predict the weather by glancing at the sky and—more specifically—the clouds.

Keep Your Elbows In to Reduce Camera Shake – Photographer Natalie Norton offers up six different tips on keeping your shot steady when you’re shooting indoors, at a slow shutter speed, with no flash, or other situations where shots often turn out blurry.

Remove a Stuck Ring with Dental Floss – It’s summertime, which means that hands swell and rings get stuck on them. If soap, cold water, and elevating your arm isn’t helping you get that stubborn ring off your finger, the wikiHow site suggests an interesting method: using dental floss.

Scanners Aren’t Just For Flat Objects – Even though your flatbed scanner is normally used for scanning (you guessed it) flat images, it doesn’t mean you can’t scan images that have more dimension (such as a watch, a ring, a yo-yo, you name it). The only problem is, scanning an image that lifts the lid adds lots of ambient light into your scan, introducing so many outside colors and reflections that it makes the scan all but unusable…

Top 10 Ways to Trick Yourself into Saving Money – Good money management is a mental exercise in self-regulation and focusing on the long-term goal, even when you’re sure you just can’t go on another day without buying that Kindle or MacBook.

Run Ceiling Fans Counter-Clockwise for Summer Savings – If you’re a renter with a ceiling fan in your pad, or you just never thought about which way the thing was turning, the Simple Dollar says you should check to make sure it’s running for optimum temperature control. While the weather’s warm, do this simple test:

How do you cut notches? – We’re having a bit of a debate in the forum on how you should cut notches. Obviously, we’re talking about multiple plies, not single or double layers.

Paste Text As An URL – With the rise of Instant Messengers and their web counterparts like Twitter came the problem that users who wanted to post text paragraphs had to divide them up because of the text size limitations of the clients. To be honest I’m not sure why there is such a limitation in first place but maybe I’m to old fashioned to grasp the use of such services anyway.

Quick Tips For Laundry – Here are a few tips for laundry that were previously published on Tipnut as Quick Tips that are being moved to this single page.

Coding

How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time – Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We’ve seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I’ve collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn’t always the culprit for your CSS woes.

CSS do’s and dont’s Part 2- Markup – If you truly get into web standards you’ll soon find out that the most important thing is – markup. A good, solid, well structured markup. HTML, XTHML, tags, attributes, structure… That’s what it’s all about actually. We tie in the terms CSS and web standards. Term CSS has become almost a synonym for standards. I often use the term “CSS designer” or “CSS this”, “CSS that” to quickly explain what methods and approach I am talking about. But the real truth is, CSS would mean NOTHING if your markup structure is wrong. Markup is the king.

Which Doctype is for me? – This is yet another thing that has been bothering me for quite some time now, that I just haven’t had the will power to address it. Well, I think it has pushed me over the edge. Why are people using Transitional DOCTYPES for new projects?

CSS Nesting Specifics – When CSS Misbehaves – There are plenty of CSS bugs one can write about. Some are worth tracking because they are annoying and have a huge impact on our every day work, others are interesting because they haven’t received too much attention yet. But most interesting are the ones that allow us to touch upon deeper, underlying problems. This article will focus on a CSS issue that will allow us to do just that.

Best Way To Clear Floats – One of the greatest challenges of a CSS developer would be dealing with floated elements that “spill” its contents outside the parent element. This is known as the float bug. Fortunately there are many techniques to address this issue. One method involves creating an additional blank element, which I find semantically wrong but it does get the problem fixed.

Prototype a Magazine-Style Home Page Template with the Blueprint CSS Framework – When Collis launched this site and asked readers for tutorial requests, a common one was for a “magazine themes” how-to for blog platforms. This tutorial focuses on the first part of the process: applying a CSS grid to the design to prototype a home page template.

An Argument Against Faux Absolute Positioning – A week or so ago, Netherlands-based Eric Sol published an article on A List Apart titled “Faux Absolute Positioning,” where he outlines a new system of element positioning that he has developed. Shortly afterwards, a reader wrote to me and asked my opinions on the technique. In the spirit of continuing the fantastic conversations we’ve been having on CSSnewbie recently, I thought I would respond publicly so that others might have the option of offering their opinions as well. But if you haven’t read Eric’s article yet, please do so before responding, so you have the full picture and not just my interpretation of things.

Design

Anivers — birth of a typeface – When I was asked by Smashing Magazine (SM) in 2007 if I could release a free font to celebrate their first anniversary I first thought that the release of Museo could very well be that font. However, it was nowhere near ready and, not wishing to rush things, I started to play around with some sharp elements I liked to see if something could grow out of it.

Top 10 Navigation Menus – The navigation menu is a fundamental part of a web design, no longer is it okay to simply have a load of hyperlinks linking to the different main pages of a website. It is now normal to see hover effects on menus and in this collection I am going to show you my favourite 10 I have seen over the past month. Enjoy!

A Guide On How Freelancers Can Compete Against Large Design Studios – Let’s face it, being a freelancer is just plain tough. In what other arena is one person responsible for answering the phones, balancing the books, paying the bills, designing the website, creating the graphics, and working with the customers throughout the entire process? Yet, despite our amazing ability to juggle all of these duties, we still face one large barrier. We don’t have that glowing brick building that somehow screams, “We are a successful company!” As a result, it can be difficult to “capture” large clients.

40+ Killer Typographic Posters, Photoshop Effects and Tutorials – We cannot escape typography; it’s everywhere on the web. In most modern designs it is used to not only present information but also be read by the users. Today we’re going to take a look at 40 stunning typographic posters, along with step-by-step Photoshop tutorials which can enrich your design skills and improve the quality of your works.

The Emergence of Gradient Grunge Design – Web 2.0 as a style is not dead, far from it. Styles don’t die. If anything they percolate and then fuse into other styles. They get absorbed by the forward movement of design trends. Web 2.0 styles are mixed with grunge designs in many websites and graphics today. This style is Gradient Grunge. Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics that make up this growing design trend today.

15 Great Tutorials on Grunge Design Styles! – Why download ready-made grunge designs and not spend some time to have a browse around and work on your very own creative design?

In this post you will find step by step great photoshop tutorials to create your own unique grunge design. You will also find resources on how to create your very own unique grunge brushes, for going really wild on your page design.

Repeating Seamless Background Image Tutorial – A trick often employed on webpages is to use a seamless background that can tile both vertically and horizontally. If your website gets alot of traffic and you don’t like paying for extra bandwidth costs you need to optimize your site for every single kilobyte. This generally translates to NOT using a giant JPG as a background. (unless you’re doing silly myspace layouts) This tutorial will explain how to make seamless backgrounds for your webpages.

36 Beautiful Business Card designs – This Article is the final part of one my Business card design inspiration series…

Get Some More Fonts – If you ever find yourself with a lack of design inspiration, you could always look at some beautiful typography, or get some new & beautiful fonts to experiment with. I should probably take my own advice in this case and get some more fonts, so I swear I will right after this! ;)

InDesign Project — Setting Up Master Pages and Styles – Last time I showed you how I set up my files with Grids, Guides and Baselines. Now let’s continue down the road of good file prep practices and look at the Master Pages and text styles. These are all very important steps! Don’t skip them for the sake of saving time at the beginning. You’ll regret it later when you have a messy file and you’ll probably be embarrassed to pass it on to another designer.

The 10 Commandments of Web Design – Since the Internet emerged as a major force, altering everything from the way people work to the way they date, it has been a roller-coaster ride that made the world giddy. Microsoft (MSFT), Netscape, et al. fought the browser wars, Web standards were championed, and the Web became community-minded and social, ushering in the reign of Facebook, Flickr (YHOO), and YouTube. From boom to bust and back again, with staggering amounts of money changing hands at every point, the online industry rides on with no end in sight.

7 Ways to Increase Your Creativity in Web Design – For all types of designers inspiration and creativity are vital to success. If you read many blogs in the web design community I’m sure you’re familiar with posts of inspirational designs and, of course, CSS galleries . We’re so used to seeing the 100+ CSS galleries that exist to the point that many designers tend to rely on them too heavily.

7 Elements to Make Your Blog Look Great – In What Makes a Design Good?, I talked about the technical aspects of a good design, like site and user goals, branding, and distinction.

I did not however answer the question of what makes a design look good. What makes one blog visually attractive, but makes another one ugly?

There is no mathematical solution, but there is an artsy one. A good looking design is a combination of a number of factors. If your blog succeeds in each of these areas, then the overall effect will be an appealing design.

12 Tools I Use Every Day as an Independent Web Designer – Every web designer has a list of favorite tools—a set of indispensable programs and resources that we couldn’t live a day without. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for us there is constantly a newer, better tool emerging for just about everything a web designer does daily. I thought it would be interesting and helpful to share my current list of die-without-it web design tools. Of course, by the time I actually post this article, the list will probably have changed; but that’s the nature of the industry.

Interesting Communities for Designers – Since Web 2.0 exploded back in 2005 many interesting communities started appearing on the web. Today websites are all about interaction. Sites like Digg, Flickr, StumbleUpon and many more really blew up over the past couple of years. Here are five amazing communities for designers you might have yet to discover continued with other worthy links.

24 Unforgettable Advertisments – Why should ads be boring? Check out this collection of unforgettable advertisements from around the world.

Best of the Week #19 – This week was very intense and we have one of the hugest selections of articles ever. To wrap up the week one of our posts, 20 Beautiful HDR Pictures – Part 3 hit the front-page at digg.com, what was fantastic, so enjoy our picks.

65 Resources for Grid-Based Design – Grid-based design is obviously a popular approach in modern web design. Ford designers that use grids, this post includes links to useful tools that can improve your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as some articles for advanced techniques. For those of you who are not as familiar with the details of grid-based design, there are plenty of articles and learning resources here.

Graphic Editors: Tutorials and Freebies

22 great Gimp Tutorials – It is very common to find fantastic Photoshop tutorials, just look at PSDTuts. However, finding high quality tutorials for the Gimp is much harder. In this collection I am going to show you 22 of the best Gimp tutorials I have come across. If you know of more then please do add them as comments.

75 Insane High Res Photoshop Brushes – Ah, the beautiful world of Photoshop brushes. With thousands of incredible sets floating around the web, and thousands more being made all the time, it can become quite a daunting task to find the perfect ones for your projects. Let me show you 75 insane high resolution Photoshop brushes that will be perfect for any project you may happen to be working on. Enjoy!

Photoshop: How To Make An Awesome Grungy Paper Texture From Scratch – Many of you might remember my Free High-Res Grungy Paper Textures I gave away a while back. I had a lot of requests for a tutorial on how I actually made those textures, so I here we are. Fire up good ‘ol Photoshop, have a scanner handy, and let’s dive in, shall we :)

6 Photoshop Tips and Tricks That You Probably Don’t Know About – Here are 6 Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks that you probably don’t know about (I bet you don’t know at least one). This post comes after hearing the reactions from some of my fellow students in class when they found out about some of the options available that they never knew about.

Let Photoshop Do Your Resolution Math – You don’t need a calculator to determine how much resolution you need for printing to a particular line screen—Photoshop will do all the math for you, right inside the Image Size dialog.

Ornate, Floral, Swirly and Curly Vector Roundup – The use of flourishes in design has been a popular trend for a while now, but is still going strong with intricate patterns and smooth flowing vines and leaves creeping into designs for both web and print. Here is a roundup of free ornamental, floral, swirly and curly graphics from across the web.

Portrait Retouching for Beginners – This tutorial shows a couple of simple techniques you can use to enhance your portraits. I will focus on retouching the skin, the eyes, and the teeth (whitening). To follow this tutorial, you must already know some Photoshop basics: working with layers, making simple selections, and using basic tools. If you wish to work on the same image, you can download it here.

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop – I’m fed up with Photoshop and its one billion rarely-used features.

How about a simple photo-editor that’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars. Fortunately, there’re tons of web-based photos editors popping up. Most are crap, but some are promising. Check out these free web-based Photoshop alternatives:

How To: Make The Viget Inspire Author Thumbnails – Since Viget Inspire blog launched, I’ve received a lot of questions about the little user thumbnails we made for the Viget designers. Is it just a Photoshop filter we slap on carelessly? Are they painstakingly drawn by hand and watercolored over a period of several hours? The answer is (unfortunately), neither as cool as hand-drawing or as easy as a filter, but we’ve got it down to a pretty streamlined process at this point.

25 Awesome Stock Texture and Photo Websites – Whether creating a grungy website or designing an event flyer, using the right textures and photos are key. Not only should the images be sharp and clear, but finding the right size (usually huge) is important as well. We take a look at some great stock texture and photo websites that provide these much needed tools at a price that fits everyone’s budget (FREE).

Acrylic Brushes – Great Hi resolution photoshop brushes by Jeff from theshoreways.com ! here is a higher resolution Preview .These are absolutely free for personal or commercial use. Be sure to check out his article on how he made theshoreways.com.

How to Use Smart Objects in Photoshop – Hilarious (in the dark humor way) Photoshop tutorial guy Donnie Hoyle is back with another installment of “You Suck at Photoshop“—this one showing you the ins and outs of Smart Objects.

Applications

AltTab Fingertips Brings the Window Switcher to Your Mouse – Windows only: Free, open-source application AltTab Fingertips switches between open windows from wherever your mouse cursor is located. To use it, just press the hotkey (F10 by default) to invoke the AltTab Fingertips menu, which displays every open window in a context menu right next to your mouse…

Detect Duplicates with Clone Spy – Clone Spy is a free portable application that can detect file duplicates in a number of ways and react automatically or after user input on the discovery of such files. Duplicates are detected by comparing file checksums, names, sizes and a combination of those parameters.

Find Album Art at AllCDCovers – Web-based album art library and search engine AllCDCovers just may have the missing art you’ve been looking to fill in your digital music collection.

Five Best Desktop Media Players – You’ve collected hundreds of thousands of megabytes (and maybe even gigabytes) of digital music and video in the past 10 years, and as your media library has grown, so has the necessity for finding the perfect desktop media player. Not only must the perfect player be capable of playing back your media, but it also needs to be able to help you search through and find any song or movie you’re looking for at a moment’s notice.

Total Organizer Manages Your Projects – Windows only: Total Organizer is a lightweight personal information manager with a surprising number of features for its diminutive size and memory footprint. Total Organizer has the basics covered: scheduling, to-do lists, notes, and contacts.

Organize your notes with Incollector – Do you have a bunch of little text files scattered across your desktop? You know the kind: notes you jotted while on the phone, IM transcripts, serial numbers, web addresses, that sort of thing. Pretty soon, they’re all piled on top of each other, and you can’t find anything in them.

Stick: add Screen Tabs to your desktop – Description: Stick is a free program that introduces tabs attached to the sides of your screen (called “Screen Tabs”) that can display notes, folder contents, web pages, RSS feeds, as well as mini apps such as a calendar or calculator.

Miscellaneous

Stephen Shubel – Kim has featured Stephen Shubel’s work before but I just had to revisit. This is his own space, a 1906 fisherman’s cottage. I love the gentleman traveller, bon vivant feel it has as well as the quirky touches. I love a room that doesn’t take itself too seriously but at the same time has all those little treasures you cherish close to hand. This is the sort of place that I’d love to spend time in to discover all the wonderful objects scattered about, their provenance, their stories.

Links of Interest – Description N/A.

Vanity sizing: generational edition pt.2 – Apparently, our attempt to inflate the egos of the public has reached new lows; we’re after babies now. My first generational edition was about geriatrics and whether pre WW2 women in Japan would describe today’s clothing sizes as “vanity sizing”. Today’s generational edition is about infant’s wear.

Men’s Q&A: 10 Staples of a Man’s Wardrobe – Q: Because of environmental issues, I try to consume less and re-use as much as I can; however, I find that I buy too much clothing, over half of which I barely wear. I know that it’s not entirely possible to have a 10-item-only wardrobe, but what 10 items do you think could make a complete wardrobe that would last forever (i.e. wear well and not go out of style)?

Paper Jewelry by Frucci Design – I’m continually amazed by the things that people are creating with paper, and this jewelry kind of blew my mind. Amazing, amazing creations from San Francisco based Frucci Design, including rings, bracelets, and necklaces that use paper as a main component…sometimes as the only component. Any of these beautiful pieces would be the perfect conversation starter and would pique the interest of everyone from jewelry mavens to M.I.T. grads.

Photos Bring Artwork to Life as Tableau Vivant – Inspired by an old parlor game in which players choose their favorite painting and recreate it using living models, photojournalist John Pendygraft and art director Suzette Moyer recreated paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida as studio photographs.

christina oh – this is one of those mornings i wish i knew how to knit. these knitted bicycles and swing sets by artist christina oh are so, so cool.

$50 and Up Underground House Book – My wife and I had some property, but not enough money to build a house without going into debt. We enjoyed staying in a cave B&B in France and love the Troglodyte dwellings in Trôo, France. After consulting several books, including one by Rob Roy, this book just made the most sense. The methods are so low tech, a bum could make himself a mansion

Top 30 Animated Movies – Even with the technology today (CGI effects) animated movies stay on the top of the favorite movies lists not only for kids but also for adults. Check out these 30 animated movies that have become one of the people’s favorites. Also see who are the people behind them, designing leaders, teams and companies responsible for their excellent design.

HOW TO – Hide an airplane factory – During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Tags: for-you, resources, saturday-link-roundup

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