Buy, Sell CMS Extensions & Templates

Not too popular yet but CMS Market looks like a very useful marketplace for all those extensions, plugins and templates that we seem to never have enough of. There you will be able to buy a Facebook connect integration or a content versioning component for Joomla, templates for WordPress and etc. Looks like there are not very many scripts you can buy just yet but it is growing and has lots of potential for us web designers.

So go dig up some extensions that you’ve built from your past jobs and post them up on CMSmarket.com. I’m gonna go see what I can post up there.

Source: http://www.cmsmarket.com

Awesome Tools: Textorizer

I keep finding cool tools online and they are not really anything I can or know much to write about but would want to have filed somewhere so I can come back to later, so I will start a new category called Awesome Tools where I will stash these cool tools that I find.

The first one will be Textorizer. You enter a logo or any image URL and then enter your text into a field and hit Textorize and you will see an image from your URL drawn with the text you entered. It’s pretty cool.

Source: http://textorizer.whatfettle.com/

Is DIGG Dead?

Seems to me that DIGG is not what it used to be anymore. It has became a high-rollers club and not as it was intended – a social news engine. No more can a story have a chance to raise from upcoming news to reach the front page.

If you take a look at the upcoming news you will see that very rarely does any story that is submitted gets more than 3 diggs. To get a story up in the ranks on DIGG, now you have to be a part of a team of many “friends” that will DIGG your story when you ask. Does this remind you of SPAM? I know that the stories that are getting Dugg are great stories but the rest of the world that does not have Internet Marketing in their mind when submitting, have no chance.

This is how it seems to me. Tell me what your take on this is.

Collection of 50 Amazing Lighting Effects Examples

Collection of 50 amazing lighting effects examples at Vandelay Design Blog, go here to see it: Design Inspiration: Lighting Effects.

3 Practical Ways To Efficient CSS

Most probably already know this but it doesn’t hurt to remind and have it down on “paper”. When writing CSS code and as you adjust things to make it all look good in the browser your CSS file becomes huge with extra lines of unneeded code that can be purged to make the size of the file smaller. All though this is not a complete list, this is practical and easy to remember steps that really make a difference. What I am talking about is Shorthand, Default Values and Multiple Declaration.

Shorthand

There are several elements that you can apply shorthand to font, border, background, padding & margin.

font

 Instead of declaring:

font-family:   Arial;
font-size:        12px;
line-height:   18px;
color:              #333;

You can say all that in one sentence:

font: 12px/18px #333 Arial;

border

 Instead of declaring:

border-color:    #ccc;
border-width:    1px;
border-style:      solid;

You can say all that in one sentence:

border: 1px solid #ccc;

background

 Instead of declaring:

background-color:         #fff;
background-image:        url(images/bg.gif);
background-position:    top;
background-repeat:        no-repeat;

You can say all that in one sentence:

background: #fff url(images/bg.gif) top no-repeat;

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