Refresh Denver

Need some defaults, standards, and maybe a little shimmer applied to you work, then look no further. Below you’ll find some great links to some “kick-ass” resources. Enjoy and code well.

Start with a clean slate and use Eric Meyer’s “baseline” style sheet:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/

Or try Faruk Ates’s “initial” style sheet:
http://kurafire.net/lab/initial.css?v21

Next, slap IE into standard compliancy with this JavaScript library:
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

Also, this is great for making IE apply the hover state to anything (if you don’t use the IE JS library above):
http://www.xs4all.nl/~peterned/csshover.html

Need a little extra “zip” then learn and use the jquery library, it’s the one I recommend:
http://jquery.com/

Lastly, when you have the time, check out this style guide:
http://webstyleguide.com/

Let’s face it - we all need a break from the cube farm/dark basement/recliner from time to time.

Nowadays, there are plenty of great conferences, meetups, and other mixed social and educational events to tailor to any web professional.

For the big spectacles, I can personally endorse SXSW Interactive - held in Austin every March - as a premier event in both the professional and social aspects. Other large events such as @Media, Web Directions, Web Visions, and the “Future of …” series from Carson Systems present enticing panels, speakers, and happy hours as well.

Fortunately our friends at Digital Web Magazine have compiled a pretty comprehensive list of conferences. Check out the listing and tell us what you’ve enjoyed in the past and what you might be attending in the future.

Due to a low RSVP response, June’s event has been canceled. Hopefully more can join us at July’s event. See you then.

Well it’s almost that time again, our next meeting is scheduled to meet on Monday, June 18th (in other words the third Monday of every month) from 5:30PM to 7:30PM.

Looking forward to getting your feedback and seeing you again.

No matter whom you talk to, it seems that every professional has a different set of tools in their web industry toolbox. Sure there’s the more common tools such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver — but what I would like to know about is the “not so common,” as I’m sure others do to. So what great tools do you use and recommend, and in particular, what FREE and NOT-TO-EXPENSIVE tools do you use?

For example, if I’m on my Windows box, I find myself using Notepad++ a lot. This tool is great for just about any file type including plain text to javascript to html to xml to sql and more because it has a lot of great features. For example, it has syntax highlighting, line numbers, line collapse, the ability to expand through plugins, et cetera.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some others by category…

Design:

• Blender [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• Inkscape [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• NVU, for the none code-monkeys [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• Scribus [WIN/OSX/*NIX]
• HTML-Kit [WIN]

Productivity:

• OpenOffice.org [WIN/OSX/*NIX]

Utility:

• Putty [WIN]
• Cyberduck [OSX]
• Core FTP Lite [WIN]

So what’s your recommendation, what are your must haves?