The Wayback Machine
Remember Peabody and his pet boy, Sherman, who used to time travel to historical events? I found a really cool site which allows users to look at web pages that are no longer online. There are literally billions of web pages, archived from 1996 to just a few months ago. Check out the historical archives of your old web site, or take a look to see how sites have evolved.
The best places to see how Internet design has changed are college sites. Check out your own alma mater and your school’s big rival. Found a good site that has undergone real changes? Drop me a line.
Public Domain Images
The Bureau of Land Management, under the Department of the Interior has a searchable database of images from all across the United States. Beautiful landscapes, wild mustangs running in the open, eagles flying high in the sky — all these images and more can be found at this site. There are a couple of caveats about the use of these images, but mostly the BLM asks that the images be credited. There are also links to other governmental photograph databases: Department of the Interior, US Fish and Wildlife, US Bureau of Reclamation, US Geological Survey, and National Park Service
Markup & Accessiblity Validation Tools (on one page)
I had a number of bookmarks to validate my pages, but then I found this page, which included:
- 206
- CSE HTML Validator
- W3C HTML/XHTML Validator by URL and file upload
- W3C CSS Validator
- Web Content Accessibility Validation
I tossed my old bookmarks and now just go to this site and validate there.
Spamblock Your Email Address (email mung)
If you have post your email address on a web page, you will probably find that spam robots harvest the address and the spam flood begins. MUNG means “Mash Until No Good.” To mung your email means to conceal or obfuscate from these spambots. Here are a few places to get mung help:
- Email Masker: create an image of your email address
- Email Obfuscation: changes your email address to a link with ascii characters (m a i l t o : h e, etc.)
- Advanced Email Link Generator with Anti-Spam Encoder
- Email Munger / Encoder: my favorite — gives you different options to choose from
Icons Icons Icons
If you are like me you have spent countless hours looking through various sites for that particular icon image. Here are a couple of links I use regularly:
- FavIcon Generator: generates a favicon.ico file to use on your website or web page
- Icon Archive: more icons than you could possibly ever use
The World is a Carousel of Colors
My favorite color help sites:
- Colors on the Web: A compendium of tools, theory and much, much more. Check it out
- Color Schemer: I use this a lot to go just a little paler or just a little darker from a color I am already using
- Color Code Converter: hex to RGB
- Hex CMYK RGB: not perfect but a pretty good reference
- Pantone Hex RGB: again, not perfect but . . .