In a move to stay ahead of rivals, Google has just started the process of spidering and indexing several US university libraries, as well as the New York city public library. The indexed content can then be used in combination with normal Internet content to answer searchers queries. This is fantastic news for pretty much all Google users as there are huge amounts of data that only currently exists in hard copy.

Franki

Web designers and graphic designers in general constantly need a stream of new ideas and creative input to keep their work fresh and lively. The good ones also learn to be highly efficient in their work because clients and a regular paycheck demand it.

I’m always on the lookout for little tools and tricks to make my life as a web designer easier. Below you’ll find a smattering of some that make my work go faster and creativity come more easily to me:

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The Inquirer has just done a review of the Mozilla Thunderbird E-mail client and they only have good things to say. That’s great to hear because that was pretty much my opinion after using it for the last year.

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The French are a strange lot, sometimes I think they are like us, and other times I’ve no idea how to define them. Today however, I’m liking the way they think. Microsoft is under fire in French courts for not keeping their end of the bargain with regards to OEM license agreements.

When buying a new PC, you are probably going to get forced to get a copy of Windows with it, and in the license agreement they say that if you don’t want the copy of Windows, you should return it for a refund (or words to that affect). Well several people have tried to get this “refund” with varying levels of success. In particular the amount of the refund should they decide to give you one may or may not match what you actually paid for it. In short, some French groups are saying “selling Windows OS with hardware violates a minimum of three laws intended to provide consumer protection.”

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While doing my daily rounds of all the tech news sites to look for anything new and interesting, I found a guy with several thousand Christmas lights all over his house that people can control via the Internet. What does he use to provide such a service? I hear you ask, Why Perl of course. (Mod_perl to be exact.) The site has a control panel during certain time periods (when his neighbours will let him no doubt) where you can take control over his Xmas lights and fiddle to your hearts content.

Over the last few years, languages like PHP and .Net languages have been growing very popular with the unwashed masses, but whenever I find something really cool, it seems to be written in Perl. Wise folks these guys. 🙂

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In an effort to block automated spam comments from our articles, we have adopted an image auth system. In short when commenting you will be presented with an image containing some random “case sensitive” text. In order to submit your comment, you must first type the text contained in the image into the text box below it.

We’ve been meaning to do this for about six months now as the amount of comment spam we were having to delete each week was getting ridiculous. We hope it doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

Franki

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to tweak CSS for design purposes. The more you can rely on CSS to drive layout, versus images, tables, etc. the faster your site is going to load and the more you’ll distinguish your site from others.

Mandarin Design is one such site that is pushing the CSS envelope. An exploration of their site reveals a whole shebang of excellent tips, tricks, design ideas and style guidelines. I haven’t come close to checking everything out, but here are a couple of notable articles:

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