How to Make, Create, Design... Stuff

Always on the look-out for new projects, I found this web site, Instructables, that promises step-by-step instructions on how to make... well, just about anything. From Food to pets, to art, to the offbeat, ideas about. Users submit their own "how to" instructions, photos and all. Get inspired--in a cast? paint it into a funky high-top sneaker, like this one. Teach yourself how to divide, throw a punch, enroll your kid in school in San Fran, or teach your dog tricks.

Tutorialized Tutorials

Tutorialized is packed full of good old fashioned, F1 help. Learn how to make hair in Illustrator, or how to get started in Adobe Premiere. There are technical and business tutorials there too, but I'm mostly interested in the free online graphic design education I can give myself. Maybe you simply want to learn more about making animated banners in Flash. Whatever the reason, if you can see past the many blinking ads, this handy web site is your one-stop shopping for freebie online learning.

Browser Usage - Web Statistics & Trends

In my pursuit to update my internet knowledge, I thought it would be important to check out some web stats... but where? And how accurate would those stats be? Would they be up-to-date? I found what I was looking for on the W3Schools web site. Not only am I able to brush up on my coding, but the web site provides a monthly breakdown on web statistics and trends, dating back for the past six years. There's also info about OS Platform statistics. Oh, and being part of W3, it's free.

XML-Sitemaps for Web Page Ranking

Moving right along... The photo in the last fascinating post about the dinosaur discovery looks more like something my dog makes, that I must pick up and dispose of. Time now for a little web technology...

My page ranking had slipped a point, and I am looking for help. The best remedy, I've found, is to actually post every day, but if you've ever tried writing 70-100 words to write, EVERY day, you know it's not that easy.

I realized I needed to submit an XML sitemap for the robots to better crawl my site. I'm a so-so at coding, so for that reason, I sought out an XML sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com. Just plug in the code, and away it goes, generating an XML map to all your pages. Download the new file, then upload it into your site's root folder, and submit it to Google's Webmaster Tools... Voilà! (I'll let you know how my page ranking turns out).

Test JavaScript in IE, on Multiple Platforms

Need to test your JavaScript in Internet Explorer on various platforms? DebugBar has an alpha release of IETester. It's still in the alpha stages of testing, but maybe we're on to a good thing here.

Color Scheme Tool

Are you one of those people who just doesn't have a natural eye for color? If so, check out this color tool, which provides you with "Color Wheel", "Color Harmonies", and "Suggested Colors". It's ColorSchemer Studio, and you can try the freebie online version of the tool, right here. The paid version (about $50) also includes a "Color Blindness Simulator" and "Convert to nearest WebSafe or WebSmart color". More color tools to come.