Gaston Garcia

Anil Dash writes about the future of the web. He calls it Pushbutton Web. A great read.

Hi Impact with Low Effort SEO (from a developer’s perspective). From the SEOMoz site.

Huge, huge, photos that you can zoom into. You can find some pretty stuff in there. Gigapixel Photography.

ActionScript 3 tutorials and videos with Doug Winnie.

A Slideshare presentation made by Alex King explaining Carrington Theme.

Start learning CSS3.

Just found out today that my good friend Casey Capshaw is working on a new project called Inspire Commerce. It’s a Merchant Service Provider service with a freaking twist… they give 10% of their profits to charity.

These guys are not only good at what they do and have amazing rates but they’re a B Corporation. That means that they’re clean, green and all about social improvements.

So if you need to process credit cards online, there are the friendliest and coolest people you can hook up with.

Make sure to grab Antoxic.org‘s feed to get a daily dose of beautiful imagery.

Do Little Things First is a fantastic post by Alex King on why getting small things done on web development projects is a good idea (great read).

How teenagers consume media

Worth. Taking care of clients. It’s worth it.

WordPress is a world of plugins. I come from developing sites in Expression Engine and therefore I’m used to hand coding a lot of stuff. But in WordPress plugins is the way to go. From embedding .swf movies to writing some custom inline JavaScript in a bog post —everything is done by plugins.

So this post will be where I collect the list of plugins I’m finding useful along the way. It will change and grow. I hope it’s useful for others too.

Contact Forms

Contact Form 7 is the best contact form plugin I’ve encountered in WordPress. It has literally tons of options ranging from validation, captchas, Ajax submit, multiple contact forms, etc.

Image compression and optimization

I’m a big fan of Smush.it, a free image optimization service provided by a couple of great guys from Yahoo. Now there’s WP-Smush.it. A plugin that optimizes your images as you upload them to your blog. This is a biggie. (thx www.danielgavilan.com for the tip)

Embedding Flash in blog posts and pages:

Kimili Flash Embed is the best plugin for embedding swf files in WordPress. The syntax for getting a movie embedded is very straightforward and easy to understand. It supports the passing of Flashvars and Parameters to your movie easily. You also get a shiny little Flash button in your visual editor to make things even easier.

Syntax highlighting for code examples:

WP-Syntax has support for tons of languages and simply works. Everyone uses it and so should you.

Font Replacement

WP-Cufon is the lastest and greatest. It’s based on the new technique for font replacement called Cufon which is an alternative to sIFR. It’s easy to install, automatically recognizes the fonts you generate and upload to your website and has a preferences page to get the little details all set up.

Inline Javascript

I know that writing inline Javascript is a crappy practice. But you might need it from time to time. This plugin won’t blow your mind, but hey, it’s worked for me when I’ve needed it. Volcano Inline JS.

Embedding YouTube Videos

Smart YouTube. This plugin rocks. It has options for embedding different quality versions of a video and has support for HQ. It allows you to set some default sizes for your blog posts and sidebar videos. Get it.

A great post on using the right browser for the job.

The post where Google announced the launching of their new Operating System has a brief description of what people want from their computers. It’s a good summary of the tough demands people have on machines today:

People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

This post at The Web Squeeze is a very good overview of the site optimization tips given by both Yahoo’s YSlow and the new competitor Google Page Speed.

Something about this version of Solsburry Hill by Peter Gabriel brings a good mood to me. It’s the relaxed and playful way in which they deal with the song and it’s subject.

Oh, and Tony Levin‘s big ass smile and mustache.