10 Sites that every web developer should know
This is a simple post listing some sites that I use very regularly. It is not an exhaustive list, by any means, but it might contain some sites that you didn’t know about. If you like any or have any sites to add to the list, please leave a comment.
Whats My Agent String?
Ok, so this is a small plug for our small Agent String displaying site. Its sometimes irritating to try and grab the agent strings from the browsers you are trying to support, especially if a client has a strange agent string and you are trying to get them to tell you what it is. This just takes a step out of the process.
Browser Shots
This is a brilliant site to render your code in many different browsers and then you can see screen shots of how it looks. Its not overly helpful for debugging but if you are confident your code supports the latest browsers, you can double check here.
Xenocode
Xenocode is a cool web based virtualization hub. It allows you to run a variety of applications (including all major browsers) from your browser without needing to install anything (oh except their firefox plugin). Its a great service. Its a little hard to find but you can also download the executable files from their site also meaning you can run the virtual browsers locally without needing to be online (as I have).
Alltop
Alltop is an information resource of the current ‘hot topic’s’ online. It has a ‘tech’ category with hundreds of subcategories like ‘php’ and ‘web design’. You can also create your own account and have your own alltop custom page with news from areas that you think are relevant to you (which saves you having to browse around to find it). See my Alltop page here.
Nettuts
Nettuts is a blog for general web-relevant tutorials. From designing Wordpress themes, to building fancy UI features with JQuery. This site is a must-subscribe-to for any self respecting web worker.
Delicious – Programming
A great resource of the latest bookmarks on Delicious tagged with ‘programming’. You can also follow @delicious_prog on twitter for the best bookmarked sites tweeted to you. I am not sure if this is officially a Delicious service or not.
Clean CSS
Clean CSS is simply a site for cleaning up css. It has an options pane that allows you to make changes to the codes layout so that it fits with your existing coding conventions. If you have ever taken over a project with less-than-impressive coders, then this site will save you lots of time while making the project nicer to work on.
Smashing Magazine
While Smashing Magazine is primarily a design resource, they do have many good development posts that pop up from time to time. This blog is a fantastic way to keep yourself up to date with the latest in web design trends.
Devshed Forums
The Devshed forums are a great resource for all things tech. The users are friendly and due to their reputation system, it makes it fun to provide your help so you can gain reputation. Well worth looking at when you have that niggling problem that will just not go away.
Github
Github is a free (and paid) git repository host with a social networking angle. Public repositories are free but if you want to make them private then you have to pay. A lof of big projects are on github including rails, Blueprint, haml, YUI (Yahoo User Interface) and scriptaculous. If you have a need for a certain script, its worth searching on here, also if you have a simple script or a work in progress, github make it very easy to manage your code. See my Github profile here.
UPDATE: Sorry about the broken links folks, all fixed now.
UPDATE #2:
I have just used JSTidy and I have to say, its very VERY cool. If you have any compressed js that you need to return to a readable / editable format, this is just the tool for you.
