I'll be posting an update on why there's been a rather lengthy lag since my last post (almost a month!), but in the interim here's some interesting controls and tools that I've gleaned during my recent hops around the 'net for folks wanting to jazz up their sites.

 

 

I had a small chuckle when I came across this item and the following one below for charts because they made me think back to a rather errant project I was tasked with last year to develop a Windows Vista Gadget that was way overblown in terms of features - the two most time-consuming being a calendar and chart.

 

The DHTML Site has this collection of 10 calendars that you can source for your next web project, from the mundane to the uber cool.

 

 

 

Again, from the DHTML Site, here's a collection of 10 charts that can add some gloss to your site - they range from the simple to the MySQL + PHP variety.

 

 

 

One of the other features that my errant Vista Gadget required was tooltips.  For expediency, we used the standard OOTB web tool tips that you get for anchor tags (alt text).  BoxOvers would have been infinitely more cool.  There's really only one downside:  The code is released under GNU/GPL, so you effectively become a drone in Richard Stallman's Open Source Army by using it.

 

 

 

In June 2006 I was working on a "Web 2.0" site that to my knowledge has *still* to escape the confines of a private beta that revolves around creating a social network for tagging and sharing favourite places to hang out, eat, party, etc.  A large part of the early problems with the site revolved around having a layout that remained consistent in both IE and FireFox.

 

Our CSS guru had a hell of a time keeping things straight as she had to continually tweak the site CSS while checking it in IE then FireFox.

 

If we'd had a copy of CSSVista, we'd likely have shed about 1/3 of the time that was invested.  This util is a standalone app that sports CSS editing panes with two stacked browser panes that display your site in IE and FireFox.

 

 

Still in beta, so it's not 100% yet - but it's the first of its kind that I've seen!