Things that made me happy this morning (yes, it is back)

• Today’s Google Doodle is a playable guitar in honour of Les Paul (screencast)
• HTML Boilerplate makes it much easier to write those annoying HTML emails
• A collection of simple .htaccess snippets
• jVectorMap is a jQuery plugin to make simple map visualisations in SVG - for larger data sets there is GISCloud
• If you are a security company you shouldn’t leave your encryption keys in a readable folder (fixed now – screenshot)
• Great comics that never happened is an awesome series
• The Aloha Editor guys have a pretty mental CSS3 Cube Demo but awful browser detection on it
• Very cool behind the scene shots of classic films

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Apparently I am the third most influental GitHub user in London – more importantly, ex-colleages Steve Marshall and Yoan Blanc lead England and Switzerland!
• SimpleGeo has released two new Geo free APIs that give almost the same data density as Yahoo GeoPlanet
• A Star Wars alphabet of win
• Github have a really cool new tree interface using the HTML5 History API
• The new HTML5 interface of NYT looks quite nice
• Make your iPhone look like a nice snack
• Genius copy protection by Ubisoft Vuvuzelas Blare on Pirated Copies of Michael Jackson
• Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behaviour explains all the internals of Pac Man
• Getting to work with new web technologies is a cool introduction to the topic
• If Web Browsers Were Celebrities is a cute little infographic
• Minimalist Muppets are good fun
• Now there is a Opera Mobile emulator for desktop
• head.js lazy-loads scripts in order and has some CSS3 and HTML5 detection methods.
• A full-length Star Trek fan fiction movie in 3D renderings
• Did you know you can use Google Translate as a beatbox
• Flickr Hack Makes 3D Model of Any City in a Day
• TweetSentiments now has a new API.
• Good tutorial on Stack Overflow on starting with Git
• Social Steganography: Learning to Hide in Plain Sight is an interesting take on Facebook privacy
• A service to clean up your PSD files into organised folders
• Ars Technica’s explanation of how they build der iPad app with HTML5
• Carina Reindl hat eine deutsche version meines “images” Artikels fuer OWSC
• Eric Karjaluoto has some interesting tips on delivering presentations
• MIT Labs create hack to browse Chrome with body movements using a Kinect controller

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Dan Catt of the Guardian (and Flickr fame) has a great write-up on website redesigns and scaling issues with social elements.
• Ablenet provides us with SoundingBoard, an iPad/iPhone/iPad Touch app that allows you to create message boards with nine predefined messages connected to your own photos. Imagine Hawking’s communicator on a shoestring.
• Usabilitypost explain their confusion with endless scrolling Ajax loaders in the elusive footer
• ThinkUp is a great tool to archive and analyse your social media use (yes, Twitter and Facebook)
• Krishna Kumar collected some interesting Characteristics of great programmers
• Chris Shiflett has a simple introduction to using Twitter oAuth
• A list of words blacklisted by Google instant – yes, they all are naughty
• Why companies should insist on employees taking naps has some interesting insights into naps
• Another proof that unicorns solve anything!
• A great gallery of 3D illusion chalk paintings
• The Bespin bookmarklet turns any textarea into a code editor
• 100 Amiga games in 10 minutes and 60 DOS Games in 5 minutes
• A list of all the HTML5 Cross-Browser polyfills
• According to Cursebird I swear like an enthusiastic porn star – oh, well.

Things that made me happy this morning (a lot this time as I was offline for four days and had 670 unread Google Reader items)

• Badass JavaScript lists a few upcoming JavaScript competitions – I can predict a lot of pointless but impressive Canvas animations
• Apparently Digg has been censored for years by a group of conservatives. This is sad but it makes me happy that it has been discovered.
• Nathan Smith has some good JavaScript advice in JavaScript Inception
• Some amazingpixel art demakes of new computer games – guitar hero on C64 is my fave
• Microsoft Scriptjunkie released my second article on Progressive Enhancement
• Webcredible lists the top 10 CSS3 commands
• Rasmus Lerdorf talks about PHP performance at SF’s hacker Dojo
• Nettuts has a simple tutorial how to get users to authenticate with Twitter for your site
• Pixie is an online Pixel editor written in HTML5
• Hedger Wow has some nice tricks to create triangle arrows in CSS
• Paul Irish has High-Res Browser Icons for use in presentations
• If you’re going to Paris, check out these free Paris walks in PDF format – shame there is no audio
• Git from the bottom up is a detailed PDF guide to Git
• Songkick allows you to follow bands and locations and never miss a concert
• A five year time lapse of an ant colony in a scanner
• Keyonary is a keyboard shortcut finder
• Things I learnt from my Node.js experiment details some tricks to run Node.js smoothly
• The birds and Beedrils is a song with 151 pokemon names used for sexual innuendos – step aside Bloodhound Gang – the geeks are coming
• Zinnia is a lightweight blogging tool based on Django
• jsPerf is a collection of performance tests of different JavaScript constructs
• Bruce Lawson as written quite a good guide on optimising your web sites for mobile use
• Dirk.Net has a Quickstart tutorial for HTTParty with Rails and YQL
• You can now steer a real ball with your iPhone – kind of like real life marble madness
• Google now allows multiple account sign-in
• 8 management lessons I learnt at Apple is a good read for any company
• The American Museum of Natural History has quite an awesome mobile app – but the London one looks like Hogwarts and has a Blue Whale skeleton – so it still wins
• The iPhone’s gesture Pull to refresh is now available as a JavaScript library
• Six useful CSS3 tools lists them

Things that made me happy this morning

• The Aegis project released a few Creative Commons licensed personas with disabilities for UX testing
• Famous Sci-Fi quotes as infographics – missing “aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?”
• Google translate doesn’t support the Netherlands in the World Cup but the adult industry does – great viral by Bobbi Eden
• Fix bad rendering of resized images in IE with a specific vendor extension img { msinterpolation-mode: bicubic; }. There is also a Firefox setting for better image quality
• Another nice 4chan crack – Justin Bieber must tour North Korea
• A slightly scary CSS media queries and using available space is something I need to look at closer
• Webkit developer tools are about to get a debugger for websockets
• There is now a .NET port for Less if you want to have another layer of abstraction to CSS
• The yes, and… culture is a great idea taken from improv theatre to improve communication with collaborators


• Dustin Diaz had the cool idea of providing a cache shim for HTML5 storage
• Dynatrace have some best practices on JavaScript and Ajax performance
• Film the blanks are blanked out movie posters letting you guess which movie they are for
• Godblock is a filtering system for religious content
• Growing up female has a few disgusting examples of sexism in politics
• A most excellent Google Streetview sighting
• Rich Snippets and structured Markup from Google webmaster central has some good tips
• Extension.fm is a browser extension to add a iTunes like interface to any mp3 links
• The JavaScript RegEx syntax highlighter is handy but must have been a brainf*ck to code
• Graffiti analysis is pretty and very very clever
• Can a slider be an accessible Captcha alternative
• what the commit is a handy commit message generator – needs an API though.