Seriously, today was way too much of an information overload, and I really have to just get this out. I’m afraid of what might happen if I don’t, and I don’t want to find out.

Sooo……

Woosaah. I needed to take a breather.

Now, the list of links, which I was more or less bombarded by Bombay bombers. All I wanted to do was a search for at the time was a simple, online color picking tool that I could just bookmark, and have quick access to at my fingertips when I need to make a different shade or tint of a color setting I’m using, or whatever other reason. Just a simple search for something I knew had to exist but never saw was a mistake. I had no idea how many of these tools there would be, and what a wide variety of different, cool, and worth sharing at least, bunch of color picking tools. The first is exactly what I was looking for.

This is a basic colorpicker that is similar but better than the one used in Photoshop. Both RGB and HEX codes are used by it and you can store a set of up to 10 different colors if you want. Plain and simple, just the essentials. Out of all the different ones I found below, I just wanted a simple HEX / RGB color picker, and will take the added bonus of saving the colors.

You need MORE!!

Color picking tools. Save time and if you just need to grab a couple colors really quick for something, and work in real-time.

Pick Color RGB and Hex Codes

There were many more, by the way just no time to re-gather them all or I’ll be here all night. The color pickers above half of what I managed to collect in about 3-4 minutes, no intention to do that (link junky?). I honestly didn’t know what the hell was going on, or why I all of a sudden felt like I went from living in a black and white world, to feeling as though colors were bleeding from my eyes. Maybe I became possessed and since don’t have any clue what went on during that time, I must have blacked or gone into epileptic shock or something. It was just so beautiful you wouldn’t be able to imagine.

That’s when I hit my breaking point and had to stop with the colors. Which brings me to what I found previously. A entirely different thing that I was again overloaded after finding it, some how or another most likely on Twitter, I came across a CSS and JavaScript tool that claimed you could drag and drop fonts into the page for testing in real-time, and this I had to see obviously since that’s cool shit if it were real. This is how I found theCSSninja.com and from there it happened, yet again. A handful of posts on that site, in combination with some 25 other random tabs I had opening and closing at any given time, it was just a matter of minutes before I had far more information than I needed, again. I tried to stay focused on the things from thecssninja site as could since it was new to me, but I’m unable to focus when there’s so much info swirling like a tornado around me. So that is why in the list below I focus more on cssninja posts. Yes, I am crazy. I know you’ve already concluded that by this point.

Font Dragr – Drag and Drop Font Tester

This is a page that you can just select, drag and drop a typeface, or font into the page, so could test how it would look in that page in the section which you can also edit in place if you wanted. Stuff like that is cool in itself.

CSS – JavaScript – Text

There were others but I can’t remember what they were. That’s ok though, they will be found again, and by larger numbers. That I have no doubt will be true. While I’m on this topic, I might as well rant on about it some more, because it was one of those days that you just say, damn there’s just too much.

There are so many new things in web technology. Things that have extremely cool, easy to use, and feature-filled, and these things include the W3 recently released and/or updated technologies HTML5, CSS3, Canvas, SVG, along with the less recent but still new and extremely powerful jQuery1.4.2, and the somewhat even less recently updated jQueryUI 1.8, which is the cherry on top this list of all that is possible from any one of them.

I would say it is easy to understand why someone who works with these things daily, as I do, becoming extremely overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing number of resources for any or a combination of these technologies. Which is noticeably advancing into the future at the speed of light. Every next thing I see, is yet even more amazing, and never could conceive as a possibility just a mere 3 months ago.

This is by no means a bad thing, and I am extremely happy to be able to be apart of the growing community of developers and designers, BUT, I mean come ON, take a chill pill. I know that asking an entire online community to chill out and take a rest is delusional, and I would never want it to stop, I love it to much! It would be nice to have that kind of power though, huh?

Anyways, I guess what I should do, but have a very hard time doing, is to take a step back with Jeff Star, since it would seem to be a good, no, Necessary* thing to do. Duh, obviously. I know but actually doing it and knowing it is good to do, are entirely different things. Just ask me, I am the king of knowing all the things I should or shouldn’t do or be doing. Do I do them though? I can do what you do? Voodoo, coming through your area, – Fugees. Despite having ability to do what you do, or doing what I should/shouldn’t do, I 90% of the time, do NOT DO them. I just do things the hard way, the way NOT TO DO them. Don’t do what I do, in case you were planning to, I know you were.

One last thing, all of that stuff above, also makes it very difficult to get anything at all done, and I have: a plugin update to release, a theme to finalize, as well as 2 half completed posts over at New2WP.com, one which is a continuance of the W3C HTML5/CSS3 meetup post which is the post-meetup review and overview of what was covered at it. Coming soon!

Anyways, ok I feel much better now that I got some of this stress of the web today out. Thanks for listening, if anyone does actually read this.

Okay go play with those links I posted, no more blabla mouth from me. Good day to you all.

Lately I’ve been modifying the design of Tweeaks.com, which involves doing CSS, and I quickly noticed how much I forgot. To freshen my memory up, and to make my life easier so I don’t go insane trying to do things I think are right but apparently aren’t because they don’t work as they should, I searched for some CSS articles. I found some really great things, some of which I listed here. These are invaluable resources, which have helped me solve the CSS issues I’ve had the past few weeks now. So I had to share them with other people who might need to refreshen their CSS skills, and anyone else who might be interested to learn CSS.

Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started

Mastering CSS: Styling Design Elements

Mastering CSS: Advanced Techniques

With these three articles on Smashing Magazine, you should be able to learn enough to get by when making a website. There is so much more you can do with CSS. Lately, I have been using CSS in a lot of different ways because of some jQuery things I have been making. It is becoming the way to design websites today, and if you still use tables, like these, you are either a Coldfusion developer, or you are this guy. I personally prefer tableless design, over the use of tables just for the fact that the code is cleaner, more organized, and much more is possible when using div layers. I don’t care if it’s considered "cutting-edge web standards" that some people out there might call it. Plus I just really hate tables, which is why I am not a fan of Coldfusion, even though it is part of my job lol.

Hope you enjoyed this post. It has proven to be helpful to me, and I’m sure you will too.

Bonus!

Additional CSS Resources

• W3C Box Model
• HTML Dog: Beginner Tutorial
• HTML Dog: Intermediate Tutorial
• HTML Dog: Advanced Tutorial
• Cascading Style Sheet Level 2 Visual Cheat Sheet
• CSS-Tricks: All About Floats
• CSS Properties

Have you ever had a CSS issue, and went insane trying to fix it but was never able to?

They are also another way to improve search engine optimization and page ranking, by having several incoming links to your site from other notable websites. This is obviously very important for when people search for a keyword, the most relevant results that are returned are partly based on the PageRank of certain page. So the more links to your site from sites that aren’t considered spam, the better off you are all around.

However, I did not make this list for people interested in submitting their site to CSS Galleries, at least not entirely, because there are a very large number of these types of sites, and manually submitting yours to some or all them would take time, and you might want to consider your options here first before doing so. Outlaw Design Blog gives some insight to alternate ways to for getting your site listed on CSS Galeries.

Although the majority of these sites are listed as a “CSS Gallery” or “CSS Showcase” etc., many of them do display flash and html websites as well, as long as they are inspirational, well designed, and nice clean looking sites. So really the correct classification for sites like these should be “Web 2.0 Gallery” rather than “CSS Gallery”, but they are still referred to as the CSS Galleries.

So I have made a list of 50 CSS Galleries for your design inspiration, and by no means is this list every website gallery. There are many other sites like these, so if you run a CSS Gallery or know of one that should be listed here, please leave a comment with the link and I will add it up. I just chose these sites at random, and though I could have listed way more than 50, I would be writing this all night if I added more than this, and I am about to go out to a club to dance and be social. So enjoy!

1. FantastiCSS

2. TheWebBased

3. CSS Brigit

4. CSS Showcase

5. Design Bombs

6. RGB Land

7. CSS Deluxe

8. CSS Design Yorkshire

9. Mental Refugee

10. CSS Garden

11. Beautiful 2.0

12. CSS Illustrated

13. Best CSS Vault

14. Divine CSS

15. CSS Luxury

16. BestWebGallery

17. CSS Leak

18. CSS Fresh Blend

19. Website Gallery

20. The Best Designs

21. Unmatched Style

22. CSS 2.0

23. Pro CSS

24. CSS Style

25. We Love WordPress

26. CSS Orgy

27. Blog Design Heroes

28. CSS Burst

29. The Design Inspiration

30. 101 Best Websites

31. Fave Design

32. Blog Design Lap

33. For All To See

34. CSS Vote

35. CSS Line

36. CSSDsgn

37. Dzinemart

38. Styleboost

39. Type Inspire

40. CSS Creme

41. CSS Import

42. CSS Design

43. Dezinspiration

44. Colorgorize

45. Submit CSS

46. Creative and Link

47. CSS Cutie

48. The Fluffery

49. Design Fridge

50. CSS Fights

Other CSS gallery resources and collections:

• The Great Web Design Gallery Roundup – by CSS Tricks
• 50 Best Sites To Get Design Inspiration – Dzine Blog
• Ranking 80 of the Top CSS Galleries – Vandelay Design
• 101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic – Caroline Middlebrook
• Most Useful CSS Galleries Sorted by Google PR – Webdesign Gallery Week

This post is a spin-off of 2 other ones on Dzine Blog, and WebDesignerDepot which are similar to this.

Though, I have created a new list of even more websites with wonderful designs that are so inspiring, I decided I was going to re-design a totally original theme for this website. I have yet to start working on, but nevertheless! I will do it eventually. I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I intend to make an original design that maybe, I might see listed on one of these, “amazing website designs”, types of lists. Anyways, that’s another topic for another day, and until it happens I can dream, right?

So, here is my all new list of 35 Wonderful Website Designs That Inspire Creativity

1. Toriseye.Quodis.com

2. Inmeres.com

3. Mercpartnersny.com

4. Legworkstudio.com

5. Blackmoondev.com

6. Piksal.com

7. Creativemagasine.com

8. Camille.Boidron.me

9. Readyphotosite.com

10. Pvmgarage.com – Garage

11. Pvmgarage.com – Web Design Updates

12. Ma.tt – new design

13. Workatplay.com

14. lt.tl

15. Yodaa.com

16. XHTMLCSSexpert.com

17. Survival-Spot.com

18. Artcore-Illustrations.de

19. Marcodeliso.it

20. Kardoayoub.co.uk

21. Starcatcher.es

22. Thepickuptruck.com

23. Dselva.com

24. Corvusart.com

25. Carbonsugar.com

26. Duirwaigh.com

27. Colorburned.com

28. Spoongraphics.co.uk

29. Designbombs.com

30. Ormanclark.com

31. Rob-Sheridan.com/sketchblog

32. Carrerasconuturo.com

33. E-Schneider-Garten.de

34. Ayakaito.com

35. Madeinspace.com.au

36. All-For-Design.com

37. BrownBlogFilms.com

38. Digimurai.com

39. Alaskazip.com

40. MplusZ.com

The example in this article will render a simple horizontal menu with submenus that are displayed when you move the mouse over the menu.

Read full post here…