Here with are with another month drawing to a close. We are just 5 weeks away from the first year anniversary of Friday Focus, so feel free to start putting together your gifts for us now. I’m not sure what exactly the 52nd week of Friday Focus will actually hold, but hopefully I can get a whole bunch of things to stuff the focus with when the time comes. In another quick announcement, I apologize for not getting out the WordPress 2.3 sum up article out right away like I had promised. The week became a lot more busier than I expected it to be. Things are coming, just be patient.

Enough talk, let’s kick off the weekend with a new Friday Focus.

Sites of the Week

Leading off is Groop, a really simplistic, clean design that utilizes flash. They’ve done some really cool work, including stuff for Live Earth, so check them out.

Next is ShawnBlanc.net, a good example of a dark design that is simplistic, uncluttered, and eye catching.

And finally we have the updated version of Hydra Studio. They’ve done some really clean work, including designs for the bands The Almost, Underoath, and Mae among others.

Digg Weekly

Design – 100 (Legal) Sources for Free Stock Images
From the digg description: Staying legal as a designer or webmaster means you’ll have to either create your own images or buy them from stock sites. Fortunately, there are a number of sources for free images, and we’ve collected them here. So read on for 100 sources where you can find free stock images: and don’t worry — they’re all legal!

Programming – 7 Reasons I Switched Back to PHP
Everyone thinks that Rails is the future of coding. It is already in use on tons of web applications, but this article just may make you reconsider.

Another weekend is upon us. This was a fairly busy week in terms of site changes around here, most of which have been received fairly well. Now that school is beginning to calm down and settle back into the usual “pattern” I can expect to be in until June, I should hopefully be able to get writing again over the weekend or at the beginning part of next week. Watch for it, because it is about damn time I write something other than these focuses!

Anyways, enjoy the weekend everyone!

Sites of the Week

This week was rather scare, and there wasn’t too much of anything that really caught my eye this week. One site that I did stumble upon and found pretty nice was Cabedge. Cabedge is a Nashville based web design and development studio. Besides offering design and development help, they also offer hosting to any of their clients.

Design Float / Digg Weekly

Design – 30 Secret Photoshop Shortcuts
A collection of Photoshop shortcuts aimed at boosting your productivity. From WebDesignerWall.

Programming – Creating Google Custom Search Engines
A custom search engine (CSE) tells Google which sites to search and which to avoid when dealing with a search query. This makes it much easier to get specific, guided answers to questions about a specific subject area. If you create a CSE you can use your expertise in a subject to control where Google looks for information about that topic.