Starglider Systems Blog

SpritePad is a pretty cool tool to make CSS sprites. You can literally make them in seconds. You just drag and drop the images into place, and the site generates a PNG you can download and the CSS to use each sprite. Very cool, and free so far.

Just wanted to mention DirtyMarkup - a nice, simple HTML/CSS/JS cleaner.  Just paste your code, choose your options and press Clean – and in a few seconds, you get a nicely formatted version of your messy code.

HTML5 Please is a pretty cool concept. Whenever your application requires an HTML 5 feature that the user’s browser doesn’t have, their API shows a nice screen with browsers that support that feature, including newer versions of the user’s browser. A nice way to get people to update when the new features would actually be useful.

This year, a whole batch of free online classes became available from Stanford professors. I’ve always been interested in AI, and so I took Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning . Both courses cover AI, but the first does more of a tour of the field, covering a lot of topics. The second is only about Machine Learning, [...]

This year I took Ben Hunt’s Pro Web Design Course. I learned a lot from it – and was able to raise my websites’ ranking for several keywords, and got some extra traffic too. The main reason I took the course was after reading Ben’s books Save the Pixel, Convert! and seeing his videos on [...]

The World Usability Day Bundle site is now available. It has a lot of usually expensive usability tools with a huge US$3800 discount (well, US$3950 if you use the link above – you get a US$150 extra discount). Of course, that is still US$1220, but for serious usability professionals this is pretty cheap. If you [...]

Optimizely is a very cool A/B Test service. I’ve spent some time using it on my site for simple tests, and I really liked how the basics work. Unlike other services (in particular Google Website Optimizer), Optimizely only has one simple line to be added to every page you want to test. You don’t have [...]

As I prepare to e-mail the newsletter to my users (yes, it has been quite a while…), I logged in on MailChimp – which I’m going to use instead of PHPList, which is nice and free but very limited – and I learned that since the last time I went there a whole lot of [...]

I’m looking into changing my e-mail newsletter from PHPList – which is pretty good for a free tool, but obviously lack features compared to pricy ESPs (e-mail service providers), and deliverability is of course smaller, as the ESPs spend a lot of time tuning theirs. I’m checking out several ESPs, such as Mailchimp and GetResponse. [...]