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Friday Focus #51

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We are now just one week out from the first anniversary of Friday Focus. It’s kind of weird to be sitting here thinking how quickly a year has really gone by…but I’ll get into all this reflection stuff next week. Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone. Next weekend is November.

Sites of the Week

DreamsDrive is the personal portfolio of Roy Ng. Small and compact is the best way to describe this baby. It could definitely qualify as one of the smallest portfolios as ever seen. What do you think?

DreamsDrive

Second this week is FutureFabric. Cool name, even cooler work. FutureFabric is the portfolio of Guy Moorhouse, who also works at Airside.

Future Fabric

Wrapping up this week is the portfolio of Marius Roosendaal. This site makes the list because of its two themed designs. Based on what time of day it is, it will either show a day (light colored) or night (dark colored) version of the site. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Marius Roosendall

Hot Spot: Jobberbase

Check out this cool piece of script I came across this week. Jobberbase is an open source Job board application that will give you the ability to run your own job board. I know there are already plenty of paid job boards out there, so why would I be encouraging you to start your own? Well, Jobberbase seems like a great solution for anyone who may be looking to add a job board to their own site specifically for their visitors and a specific category. If anyone has used or starts using this, let me know how it is.

Jobberbase

Digg Weekly

Design – 99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers
From the Digg description: I have used every one of these resources as a graphic designer and website developer and have hand picked all of these resources based on their usefulness and overall quality.

Programming – Protecting Your PHP/MySQL Applications from SQL Injection
From the Digg description: SQL injection is a serious concern for webmasters, as an experienced attacker can use this hacking technique to gain access to sensitive data and/or potentially cripple your database. Are you safe?

Friday Focus #50

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Time to celebrate the big 5-0! I guess that’s why today’s focus is rather late compared to the last few weeks (we were out celebrating all night). But anyways, here we go with edition fifty.

Sites of the Week

Kicking things off this wonderful 50th edition of the focus is Sikker, the Portfolio of Nicolás Calabrese. It is nice to see a portfolio displayed in a different way, and the dimming / highlighting of work really works well here on this simple, dark portfolio.

Sikker

Next up is IconSushi. IconSushi is new icon marketplace started by my buddy Prash (co-conspirator of Devlounge and owner of Mintpages), which he has been working on over the past few months. I had a chance a while back to check out the first icons from the first set, and they are looking very nice. The site is now up, but the service has not yet fully launched, but it will soon. Nothing like a little pre-launch hype.

Iconsushi

And wrapping things up this week is Newsweek. The site was recently redesigned and features a very nice clean feeling to it. A bold reader header gives way to the simplistic, organized fashion of the rest of the layout – but it is nice.

Newsweek

Digg Weekly

Design – Flash-Based Galleries for Your Images
More list madness from our buddies at Smashing Magazine (I have another list in store sometime this weekend that they have yet to do). A large list of flash-based galleries you can use for your portfolios or simply to show off your images.

Programming – Preventing Spam without captcha
From Digg Description: “I hate CAPTCHAs because it discourages lots of users(specially in impulsive mood) if they make a single mistake on first try. Here is how I tackle SPAM attacks on the comment form of my blog without using a CAPTCHA. You can use this technique for any kind of form on your website.”

Still on the market..

The hunt for a suitable new owner continues. It has a been a rough couple of weeks, with myself struggling to find the time to do anything but school work. I’m sure you are all tired of hearing that, and believe me, I’m tired of saying it. But, as the owner of the site, I feel it is important to have a personal connection with you [the readers], and I’d rather share news like this with you then keep you in the dark. Today I made a post on Mashable about the site situation. So if you see this, please don’t get all too worried.

Friday Focus #49

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Happy Friday everyone. Edition 49, just three weeks away from a year. Wow, are you as surprised as I am?

Sites of the Week

Week 49, and the first site this week is BillQ. BillQ is another billing / money management web application. Both the site and the application are very clean, but there are many of these around these days, and I’d actually have to have some money in order to actually try them out.

MyBillQ

9rules, the social network the content network, also finally released “Ali 2”. As the network I once belong to, I figured I’d share the news. And just for the hell of it, I thought I’d also love to point out how much more content is showcased in this new version. 4 “Most Popular Articles” (apparently based on views over the past 48 hours) and 5 “Most Popular Topics” (from 9rules notes).

9Rules Ali 2

And rounding out this weeks three is the Sundance Film Festival. A great festival to check out if you live in the area or just love independent movies. It’s hitting Park City, Utah (US) from January 17-27, 2008.

Sundance

Digg Weekly

Design – 9 Artists Who Will Blow Your Mind
[From Digg Description] Remember, the following jaw-dropping pictures are of paintings or sculptures. Even if you think photo realistic art is pointless (which I’m sure some people do) there’s no denying the skill and patience involved in these creations.

Programming – Nothing amazing again this week.

New Side Project

Just a little heads up. While I am still busy trying to find a buyer for Devlounge, I am also in the process of getting together things for a new small project of mine, one that won’t require any content adding of my own so I can just “set it and forget it”. I don’t want to give anything away (plus I don’t know exactly what I’m going to call it yet), but I will tell you that is it going to help a lot of you if you’ve ever been in my situation with trying to sell a site and having discovered that there aren’t really any places where you can say “my site is for sale” besides forums and Sitepoint’s Marketplace. This project is also doubling as my Senior Project for high school, so I have to do a lot of analyzing of marketing, prices, etc. We’ll see how things turn out.

Articles sitting on the burner, waiting for me to light the match

I have some articles I’ve been waiting to write, but it seems like as soon as I get home from school every day, before I know it it is time for me to go back to sleep and start the daily patterns of life all over again. I am going to work hard to get them out over the next few days. Please excuse all the excuses I have had over and over for the past few weeks for the lack of new content – I just need to get over my busyness and get some things published. Soon. Hopefully.

Friday Focus #48

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Edition 48. Yes, that’s f o r t y e i g h t.

Sites of the Week

Kicking things off is TEN (Teaching Excellence Network). Pretty nice for a network dedicated to teachers. Obviously their web department doesn’t need much work.

TEN - Teaching Excellence Network

Next we have a really minty design. This is the portfolio of Laco Janic, a graphic designer hailing from Slovakia. There is plenty of work in this portfolio, so don’t be surprised if it takes you a while to scroll through.

Janic Portfolio

Built by Buffalo, our final site of the week, has done some really slick looking work. Their newest site, Rememble, looks to be really cool. I hope on reviewing it sometime this weekend (in between SAT’s and a bunch of other things).

Built by Buffalo

Digg Weekly

Design – Super Slick Dusky Lighting Effect in Photoshop
This is a really cool effect, and a very long and detailed tutorial. By the comments on the site itself, lots of people are enjoying, so hopefully some of you will find it useful as well.

Programming – Microsoft to Release .NET Framework Source Code in v3.5
From the Digg description: Microsoft will begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, XML, and WPF. The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

Friday Focus #47

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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.

Groop

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

ShawnBlanc.net

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.

Hydra Studio

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.

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