xavodim

I have been using SiteMeter on both my blogs basically from the beginning. While a web counter may be important to some webmasters, site statistics should be important to anyone who has any type of web site. I started using SiteMeter because it was easy and free, and it just so happened to be the first stat counter I tried. I’ve liked it, and it’s very easy to set up. You simply sign up for an account, and insert the javascript code into your blog template in a spot that will be generated on every page of your blog (or every page you want to track). SiteMeter has a few options for the graphic that gets inserted with the counter, everything from a simple square logo, to a small button with Sitemeter’s name and a count of visitors to your site. But here is a list of a few pros and cons of Sitemeter:

Here is a very interesting article outling the design process, titled “A Design Process Revealed” by Stéphane Deschamps. The author outlines the process in these phases:

I’ve been using the ‘SimpleTags‘ Wordpress plug-in to imped Technorati Tags directly into each post. This has been very useful, but I’ve always wished it could be a bit easier than typing <tag></tag> around each keyword I’d like to tag. Well, now there is an easier way that integrates directly with the Wordpress post writing page.

I found this searching for ‘development‘ tags on Technorati, and it looks very promising. It’s a very simple interface to generate PHP objects quickly and with integrated CRUD methods. Which is an obvious headstart in developing PHP applications. I made a sample object for a table that would hold the post information for a simple content management system.

1. Hard to Find 800 Numbers - Ever been absolutely frustrated at the difficulty in finding a toll-free number to a company for customer service or sales? Well, look no further.

Although I’d probably prefer to use Technorati’s API to see who’s linking to my posts, I’ve found a very useful tool available via IceRocket. It’s called ‘Link Tracker‘ and has two versions available install on your blog.

Nick Mullen at SitePoint has an article, “Cool Web Design Effects Tutorials”, covering the elements of design and what they mean for web design in general. Here are the elements he lists:

I’ve used this repository of true type fonts for a number of little graphic design projects, including the font work on this banner as well as this one. Both banners were created using Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 and Macromedia Fireworks 8. Not the highest quality work, but again, I am not a real graphic designer, yet. Dafont.com has a large selection of true type fonts to choose from.