Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re interested in getting started with HTML5, you will probably appreciate the HTML5 cheat sheet posted by Smashing Magazine. Even though HTML5 won’t be completely supported until 2022 it looks like it’s already on it’s way to becoming popular. SmashingMagazine promised to update this cheat sheet as new changes are being published.

Full screen image slide shows can be a great design approach, if you have a site with many images and you need to show them one by one. You can install an image gallery but there is an easier way to do it – get the script from JavaScript Kit and install it. The script uses jQuery and PHP and can be installed on any site.

There are many ways to create an image gallery and almost all of them include programming. However, there is a way to create an image gallery in HTML5 and CSS3 and it is described in details by Lostcore.es. Follow the instructions in the tutorial and you will have a cool image gallery.

The ultimate resource for learning HTML5 is its specification. W3 is the authority behind the HTML5 specification. The HTML5 specification in the link is still not in its final version but this is the basis for HTML5, so dramatic changes are unlikely to happen in the final version.

If you want to have a colorful scrollbar on your site, check this resource from JavaScript Free Code. Copy and paste the code in your page and when you open the site, the scrollbars will be colorful. You can change the default colors to any color you like, so you can make your scrollbar match the colors of your site.

If you want to give your visitors the chance to adjust the size of the text on your pages, you need a text resizer. You can get a script at JavaScript Kit and use it for free in your designs. This script stores the choices a visitor makes in a a cookie, so when the visitor returns to your page, it will be displayed in the font size the visitor chose the last time. The script can be attached to any CSS class, so you can select to shrink/enlarge only particular sections of the page and not necessarily the whole page.

One of our readers sent a link to this batch of bad domains posted on IndependentSources and we thought you might like them – or not! It may not always be a big deal to have a bad domain, or it may even be good for marketing purposes, but looking at the list below will give you a good idea of what to avoid and what to look for when buying your next domain. So here goes – look closely at the URLs… these are all real websites:

whorepresents.com

penisland.net

therapistfinder.com

speedofart.com

gotahoe.com

Can’t find quite the right YouTube icon for your project? Now you’re out of excuses, because you’ll get a set of 272 free YouTube icons over at mysitemyway.com. You’ll get antique, orange, crinkled, pink, blue, buttons, metal, dirty, scratched, modern, metallic, round, square, gold, sandy, transparent, large small, etc.

You may have the best intentions with designing your new logo, but make sure you look at your logo from different angles and – better yet – have others take a look at it. They may see something that you don’t. For some of the worst logos, visit 123print.com.

If you’re looking for a free graphics manipulation software to download, try Gimp. It’s an excellent retouching program lets you fix perspective distortion caused by lens tilt and eliminate lens’ barrel distortion and vignetting; it offers a clone and healing tool for retouching photos as well as a perspective clone tool and a orthogonal clone tool. But it can also be used as a simple paint program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP also offers various input devices out of the box, like pressure and tilt sensitive tablets, but also a wide range of USB or MIDI controllers. The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows to extend GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Features are:

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export