Brusheezy, Vecteezy and Fresheezy. Like their proud parents say, "Stupid Names"... But cool free resources. We featured one of those (Brusheezy) in our yesterday's article on free Photoshop brushes. Why not take a tour and learn to know the two other brothers? Vecteezy is an index of free vector graphics, while Fresheezy (as the name doesn't say) does the same for Wordpress themes.

» Brusheezy, Vecteezy and Fresheezy

So you've decided to become a programmer. That's a great decision, but let us ask you a little question: do you know where to start? Maybe this article should be a good starting point.

Read more...

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

Packt Publishing is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

What happens when you mix both? You get a free eBook titled "Building Websites with Joomla!".

This eBook is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Joomla!. If you've never used Joomla!, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Joomla! based web site fast. You don't have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions using this book and Joomla! The eBook is available online from the link below.

» Building Websites with Joomla!

One of the most powerful features in Photoshop is the brush tool. Thanks to its numerous settings, it can create an infinity of shapes, effects or textures. The sites we're featuring today offer free brushes for your favourite graphic toolbox. As usual, don't forget the read the licencing terms before you download and use what you'll find on these sites.

» Designfruit provides many amazing brushes for Photoshop and png files for other editing softwares.

» Brusheezy is a place where artists can download the best free Photoshop brushes and patterns on the internet. This site is updated every day with new material.

» Adam Woodhouse released many sets of quality brushes including Web 2.0 Style Brushes with different shapes, and many dynamically generating gradients, Grunge Brushes and Retro Brushes.

» BittBox provides a lot of free and original source files of photoshop brushes.

» Hawksmont Universe offers over 30 sets of Photoshop brushes.

» PSBrushes offers more than 500 free high-quality Photoshop brushes, conveniently sorted in themes.

» R0man.de's set of free Photoshop brushes, hosted on DeviantArt.

» EasyElements free Photoshop brushes.

» GetBrushes.com is a free Photoshop brushes directory, featuring carefully handpicked collection from the net, all free to download and use.

» Photoshop Support provides plenty of high-resolution brushes.

Web design isn't 100% about design, we know that. It's a complex mix that requires several ingredients to be effective. In every webdesigner, there should be a graphic expert, a useability guru and a marketing specialist. That's a lot of things to combine.

In their neverending quest for excellence, our friends from Smashing Magazine wrote two extremely interesting articles over the basic principles of effective web design. These articles do not discuss implementation, code or design per se, but rather focus on the theory, the principles, the heuristics and the approaches for an effective web design.

Keep in mind that there's no magical receipt; creating a website with an high value requires a lot of work. You won't become the next "big man" after you've read those articles. But you'll better understand some key concepts like avoiding to squander users' patience, make use of effective writing, using fluid and minimalistic designs, and adressing the user's needs and expectations — certainly the most important one, and also the least implemented one...

» Article #1: 10 Principles of Effective Web Design
» Article #2: 5 More Principles of Effective Web Design

Are you into AJAX? What a silly question, of course you are! Who isn't, those days? AJAX is everywhere, and it fuels the so-called "web 2.0". So even if you're not into it, you have to deal with it. That's the story.

Now the wonderful thing about AJAX is that, since everybody does it, there are tons and tons of scripts, modules, libraries, snippets and frameworks available. And the place to start looking for those is certainly AjaxRain.

AjaxRain is a repository of over 1000 AJAX, Javascript and HTML examples and demos ready for download. The AjaxRain guy call themselves the secret behind your inspiration!. As we all know, inspiration isn’t usually generated all within our singularly creative being, infact, sometimes (not to say, quite often) we just are downright "inspired" by another person’s work, a little copy and paste never hurt anyone, right?

AjaxRain's website is crisp and simple. You can browse through the demos and examples, search, use the tag cloud and mark the ones you like as favorites so you can review those later. Registration is required to benefit all the features of the site, but hey, it's free. You can also suggest new stuff to add to the repository, so it's a living thing, maintained and bred by a whole community.

» AjaxRain

If you're like us, you certainly have to work on international projects, or projects involving foreign languages and character sets. Handling many of these can be quite a nightmare, if you don't have the right tools.

Benjamin Kalytta has released a nifty little free utility called Character Set Converter, and it does — perfectly — what's it's supposed to do: convert character sets. Many of them.

Character Set Converter will, as the name suggests, modify the character set in the text document of your choice. This can be a web page (.(x)htm(l), .php, .asp, .xml, .jsp, ...) or a more generic document (.txt, .csv, .ini, .bat, .c, .java, .sql, ...). If can also change the XML header or the META CHARSET tag if they're found, and it also lets you specify the document encoding (DOS, MAC or UNIX) which is useful if you share files between the three environments. Finally, the app can also be invoked from the command line, which is perfect for batch processing.

Character Set Converter supports the following sets: ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-11, ISO-8859-12, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, Windows-874, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, DOS-437, DOS-737, DOS-775, DOS-850, DOS-852, DOS-855, DOS-857, DOS-860, DOS-861, DOS-862, DOS-863, DOS-864, DOS-865, DOS-866, DOS-869, DOS-874, MSMAC-CYRILLIC, MSMAC-GREEK, MSMAC-ICELAND, MSMAC-LATIN2, MSMAC-ROMAN, MSMAC-TURKISH, Apple-CENTEURO, Apple-Roman, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE.

» Download Character Set Convert (for Windows only)
» Browse through the other apps of the author

We got selected to be featured in CSS Nature's showcase. CSS Nature is maintained by the guys from Studio 7 Designs, a well-known brand and identity development agency.

You can see our page and vote for us here. Thanks in advance!

When you look at the general tendencies in web design those days, it appears that Flash-powered websites have lost points, as more and more web developers use technologies like (X)HTML, AJAX, Javascript and CSS to propose clean, feature-rich and effective websites to the world.

However, there's still one field where Flash has its word to say: media handling. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen (yet) a 100% javascript framework capable of properly handling audio and video files. So let's face it: we need Flash to handle media files, even if we don't like it (well, at least I don't like it, mainly because it makes SEO optimization a real nightmare, but that's another story).

Dewplayer is a very small (4Kb) Flash-powered MP3 player, which is also very easy to implement on your pages: download the .swf, upload it on your server, specify the location of the MP3 file or the playlist to read, and you're done.

Dewplayer comes in 3 flavours; each version differs from the others in the number of controls that are provided to the user.

• the mini version offers play, stop and seek
• the normal version adds the pause function
• the multi version adds previous and next buttons

Below, you can see GIF animations showing respectivelyt the normal and the multi versions:

Dewplayer is developped by the french company Alsacréations, and its dedicated page features an online wizard that will generate the code you need to get the player working.

So it's tiny, it's nice and it's working. What to ask more ? Oh, yes: it's free, and released under the Creative Commons licence.

» Dewplayer (documentation, download and code wizard)

This morning, I was setting up a couple of new websites on my development server. The way I do this is very simple: since I use IIS7 on my development box, I change the default binding and map each new website to its new port — easy, quick and clean.

But today I encountered a small glitch: after I mapped port 87, I couldn't manage to access it from Firefox, no matter what I tried. Mozilla's browser wouldn't simply open the pages, and constantly kept to return the same error message:

After a bit of googling around the topic, I found out that Firefox blocks specific ports by default. And also, that it's possible to unblock those ports by changing some settings in the preferences. Unfortunately, you'll have to dig into the depths of your hard disk, since you can't tweak those specific settings from the about:config panel.

In order to unblock the ports you need to access, you should go to your Firefox installation folder, and from there move to <your-ff-folder>/defaults/pref. Look for a file named user.js, or just create a new text file with that name if it doesn't exist already. Then add the following line:

pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "<ports>");

where you replace <ports> with the list of all ports you want to unlock, for example:

pref("network.security.ports.banned.override", "42,87,6000");

Save the file, restart your browser, and you're done. You can read more about port blocking (and un-blocking) in Firefox in the link below.

» Mozilla Port Blocking