Now this looks like a nice utility! The The Regex Coach will help you see the effect of a proposed regex (Regular Expression) match using a perl compatible engine. I am going to give this a try. What do you use for this purpose? Leave a comment on what you use.

I have always struggled with formulating regex expressions. I get them in theory, I usually understand when I look at one someone else wrote, but when I need to draft one it is always a bit of guess work and fiddling. This will make that fiddling much faster, and the interactive explainations provided may in fact help me better understand the outcomes so I will fiddle less and less. I can hope can’t I?

For those seeking to drop the outdated, you may wish to reference our page: HTMLfixIT list of Depreciated Tags; or visit codehelp for their list of Deprecated HTML tags and alternatives.

Excellent introductory css course called: CSS 101: Cascading Style Sheet Beginner’s Course. Ever notice that out of the millions of pages on the web you wind up at a handful over and over? This is one worth some time.

We sometimes lament the fact that we just don’t seem to have that “magic” that makes a site look good and clean. We often wonder is it an inate talent? Is it something that can be learned? How do you get better at it? This site explains a redesign: Maki. I wonder what I can learn from studying her thought process? Colors inspired by nature, the look simple and clean …

www.imagetweak.net is a nice little on-line utility you can use to change your images, reduce size, rotate, etc. It seemed to work very well in my tests. It was written by a friend of a prior student of mine, but I resisted any impulse to check out the html coding 🙂

I came across this nifty little DHTML Slide In Menu on another site and decided I liked it enough to track it down. It looked a lot better to me on the site where I found it. What I don’t like is how it acts/reacts when you scroll down as it bounces.

Some of the cooler looking sites sometimes use transparent layers/div’s to achieve the look. One method to get a transparent background is to use a png image with partial tranparency (see a discussion of that here). Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn’t much like png’s unless you go a bit to make them work.

You can also make Semi-Transparent Backgrounds with CSS and they are supported on FireBird/FireFox/Mozilla/Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Konquerer/Safari. I don’t currently run Opera, but I understand they are not currently permitting it.