Great free web design tutorials

Teach yourself what you need to know, for free, with these online lessons. They start at the beginning and take you where you want to go.

FotoFlexer

Edit photos online and save them to your favorite locations. If you don't have your own photo editor this is for you.

Good, cheap, software classes online

Here's a good place to get some training on lots of software and online topics. For $25 you can have a month of access to the entire 30,000+ library of online tutorials, or you can buy them one at a time on CD, and so on. For less money than one college course costs, you can have a full year of access to their courses. Become the Flash expert you want to be, learn 3d software, get some solid HTML training, and get yourself a better, more fun job. Education costs a little but pays back a lot more.

FontStruct

Create, share, hide, modify, and download TrueType fonts -- using this Web-based lettering tool.

New Web development course - Free

The best thing about this is that it's put out by Opera so it's committed to the standards. If your site is built on standards, it just works for everyone. It's been a long time since some good courseware appeared, and this is new, so check it out.

ZON

"Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

"By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

"The nice part about Zon is it is all browser based. No client applications are required, so you can log in and play from school, work or home. Zon is a persistant environment, so when you log off, the world still keeps going.

"As you progress through the game, your character graduates from the tourist class, to a resident of Zon and then finally a citizen, where you can own businesses and create new content for the world. "

[The website is coy about pricing, but it seems to be free for a while anyway. It's in beta still. A university project of some kind. - Susan]

Fotolog continues to delete writers' sites

I think I've said this before, but it is only getting worse, so I'll say it again: Fotolog seems to have a special hatred for graffiti artists, because it routinely closes their sites without warning (and we hope that's the worst thing they do). I suggest all you folks with fotologs go to Flickr instead.

Wherever you do it, make sure you keep copies of your photos, because most companies can't be trusted to keep them safe, and it's a hassle to download them one at a time too.

Web cookies: what, how, where - and why you should delete them

All cookies are not evil, but bad people can hijack your good cookies, and bad websites can track you across the web.

Interactive graffiti wall

Hamburg, Germany: Daim, Tasek, Daddy Cool, Desur, and Seak have again found something new to do -- this time with Quick Read (QR) codes and "mobile tagging."

QR codes can be snapped by your phone camera, interpreted by software, and then translated into words or websites, or whatever they mean. Plus they look cool.

You can make your own, print them onto stickers and join the fun wherever you are as well.


This one says http://graffiti.org

Online art sales - busiest sites

Monthly traffic in the online art market.

Online photo editing tool - Splashup

Universal Apology Form

Nicely done and customizable!

Tool for finding words of a certain length or with letters you like

List all words by word length, browse all words in the list, explore all combinations of letters, find words with all letters different, or with letter pairs and double letters.

Great for Scrabble too, plus built-in dictionary.

Google Sketchup (free 3D drawing program) has a get-started book now

New book, some how-to videos online too.

Play Defcon free this weekend - till 6pm GMT Monday

Win-OSX-Linux online multi-player (or single player) strategy game

PC world said: "Through 6 p.m. GMT on Monday, August 27, Defcon is free for all to play; gamers are not required to enter key codes to have access to the full game.

Defcon is a throwback to the Cold War. Your job, as a general hidden in a deep underground bunker, is to totally destroy the other side - inflicting massive civilian casualties and disarming your opponent using a thermonuclear arsenal, trying to protect your own forces and people as best you can.

If the game sounds disturbing, it is -- its tagline is "Everybody Dies," and Introversion and Ambrosia don't shy away from showing you the dark side -- and the reality -- of global nuclear conflict."

59MB download
If you decide you like annihilating the world, it's $25 for a license after Monday.

[While you're at that website, you may notice that Ambrosia software also makes Snapz Pro, which is a tempting screen capture utility for OS X, but I like SnapNDrag and iShowu better and they cost a lot less. The Firefox extension PageSaver does a great job of capturing long web pages in one shot too.]

Fotolog is kicking a lot of writers out

I've noticed a lot of forcibly closed Fotolog accounts lately. One writer had a (tasteful) painting of a nude, but it doesn't seem to be all about T&A. If you have a Fotolog you might want to gather up your material and move to a more friendly service before they get around to you.

Google Guide

This is a nice free tutorial that will help you find more of what you're looking for online. It has a downloadable "cheat sheet" also.

How to type all those special characters on a Mac

Accents, symbols, everything. Download the PDF file(s) and you'll always have it on your Mac when you need it, for email, word processing, general lettering and typesetting work.

I used to use PopChar for this but it's US$30 now and I don't need special characters that often these days. PopChar is very fast though, so if you want to use lots of special characters it might pay for itself in time savings.

For making special characters in HTML you'll need an entity list instead.

See which US presidential candidate(s) agree with you

This excellent web tool lets you pick the issues that matter to you and then shows how closely the presidential candidates align with your views ... or not.

I know it's still early in the election process, but the time to fight for your underdog is right now before he gets eliminated or pushed out of the debates. It's also very easy to see which party in general has your burning issues at heart, in case your favorite candidate does disappear before election.

Give it a shot, you might be surprised.

iPhone FTW on Googlefight

Well the iphone is certainly winning the hot-air wars. Go Apple. The next version will be even more fun, and so will the next. And pretty soon most other phones will be tolerable to use too. Now if we could just replace all the mobile phone reps with helpful people and get competitive phone plans that don't suck, we'd be ready to go.

But it's an exciting time to be alive here at the dawn of the information age ... and we are there.

Flickr Graffiti Geotagging

As promised.

From the article:

"For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, "graffiti," and "New York City" at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for "Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti," for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous "Neck Face" tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."

www.flickr.com/map

It's a bit fiddly so far. Search at the bottom, then click on the dots on the map to zoom in until they are at a meaninful level of detail. Or you can watch the slide show anytime.

Some cameras do the GPS/geotagging automatically (it's embedded in the information in the image files), so if you upload your photos to flickr, you might blow up your spot, or someone else's.

Be very careful what you upload anywhere if your camera has GPS.

I'm hoping Graphic Converter (Macintosh only) will have editing access to the GPS stuff as it already does to the camera info, however. If you have a clue about a Windows tool for removing image metadata, please send it to yo@graffiti.org and I'll add that here too.

Colour Lovers - Color Palettes

US wants free image hosting sites to give up records whenever

As usual, they are waving the child porn flag, but you know they will go after writers with this too, if they can get the power. Of course, most companies already track who uses their services (with IP numbers) so the only really safe thing to do is to use a proxy server or another anonymous account not related to your home or credit card, etc.

Thanks to 12-oz for posting about this.

Of course, this applies to sites like flickr, image shack, and fotolog, etc etc, not sites like Art Crimes, since nobody directly uploads images themselves here. We also don't keep logs of user activity.

Learn more about proxies and anonymous internet use here (constantly updated proxy list): proxy.org

Please write to your congresscritters about this and other Bush regime violations of privacy and civil liberties, and to support those who fight the good fight such as EPIC and EFF and ACLU.

Make Internet TV

Useful tutorial on do it yourself internet video equipment and processes.

via BoingBoing.net

Visuwords: online graphical dictionary

djdamico pointed out this very cool word tool. It's more like a thesaurus actually, because it shows the relationships between words and ideas. MCs and slammers will love this.

Give it a try with epitaph and epithet

Hex Color finder

This is so helpful when you're making web pages.

It would be nice if the colors were clickable to change the background, but they aren't, so do this:
Find a hex color number (left column) that you like and hack the page address to end with that number instead of 000000. That way you can pick a background color for your page and see which other colors work well on it.

Paint picker anyone?

free internet phone calls with Gizmo

Check it out. Mac and PC with Linux version on the way. Free software phone and you can call other Gizmo users for free. the only way for it to cost you money is if you call a land line or a mobile phone.

CSS Layouts for your web pages

Good source of good clean CSS layouts for web pages.

Color and graphic design software

Color Consultant Pro for Mac OS (9 and X) is a $30 piece of software that makes color palettes: colors that go together. The same site has Art Directors Toolkit 3 which does things like calculate the width of columns and gutters for print layouts, convert between measuring scales, calculate RGB and CMYK color values and more things that professional graphic designers and artists need.

Urban Dictionary