External General Links
Page Navigation
This is a commented list of some of my favorite sites, and other sites and resources I've used/consulted during the development of my site. I also have an additional page of external Christian links and a non-commented page of all my links, for lighter reading. I'll occasionally update these pages with additional links I think might be of interest, and will verify them regularly. Please also visit my External Linking Policy for details regarding my external links site-wide.
Sites That Link To Me
- Alaska Jim's Music Charts
- Stumbling upon this site inspired me in part to start my own site. It hosts links to various people's personal music charts.
Social Networking Sites
- Imeem
- This is a community where visitors can discover new music, videos, and much more, as well as promote their own content, and network with others. However, in order to view or listen to any media, you must register on the site first. So far, I plan on primarily using the site to share a few Christian songs each week or so.
- Last.fm
- Have you ever wanted a Web site to keep track of, and chart your music listening habits? That's what this unique site does. That's not all, though. Over time, the site can match you up with new friends who have similar music tastes, as well as with new artists you might not have discovered on your own. You may also track others' listening habits, as well as the overall habits of the entire site. Finally, the site can develop a personal online radio station for you, based on the music you enjoy. It sure seems the perfect place for music junkies (like me :-) (smile), as well as the casual music fan.
- Ruckus
- Ruckus sure seems to be stirring quite a...ruckus, at least among college students. Okay, that was probably a lame joke, but there's hardly anything lame about the actual site. This is a site where college students and alumni can download legal music for free, as well as interact with their college peers. It is literally for college students and alumni only—you must have a valid .edu E-mail address in order to register on the site.
Site Credits
Here, I recognize books, software, Web development resources, scripts, and other Web sites, that have been helpful to my getting my site up and running.
Books
- The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, by Rachel Andrew
- From this well-written CSS resource is where I learned to create button links on my site with just CSS, and to create rounded corners with no images or additional HTML. The round corners are visible only in the Firefox, and other Mozilla-based, browsers, however.
- HTML and XML for Beginners, by Michael Morrison
- This book introduced me to basic XML and XSL, basically laying the foundation for my site's current backend design work.
- Learning XML, by Eric T. Ray
- This book helped me further my beginning knowledge about XML and XSL.
Software
- CookTop
- Interesting name, or so that's my opinion. This powerful tool for XML developers has mainly helped me discover errors in my XML/XSL, when Internet Explorer and Firefox would fail to show me them.
- Easy Thumbnails
- Ignite 2
- If you need to quickly resize multiple photos, Easy Thumbnails can do the job. And it's free! It's what I use to batch resize CD images I save from Amazon.com into thumbnails for use on my site. As for Ignite 2, it's the free graphics program I discovered first, that's useful for manipulating single images. It's what I've used to edit my site logos.
- EditPad
- This has been an indispensable tool for me during the development of my site, a worthy replacement to Notepad.
- Firefox
- HTML Validator For Firefox
- Web Developer Toolbar For Firefox
- Firefox is my web browser of choice, and one I actually enjoy coding my web pages for. Internet Explorer users, if you want a safer, more customizable, web-standards-compliant alternative, then I recommend Firefox (but if you must stick with Explorer, please consider upgrading to Version 7 if you haven't done so yet, as it's less of a nuisance for standards-minded web developers to code for, than the progressively buggier earlier versions). The HTML Validator and Web Developer Toolbar have been other indispensable tools for me in developing my site.
- GuiTidy
- HTMLTrim
- Both of these are excellent little utilities (which incorporate HTML Tidy), for cleaning/optimizing (X)HTML documents. However, in my experience, HTMLTrim would sometimes crash when dealing with documents first created with Microsoft Office Word. GuiTidy was able to handle them, though. However, my only complaint about GuiTidy is that it can only tidy one document at a time, whereas HTMLTrim can handle dozens of files at once, if need be.
- Xenu's Link Sleuth
- What I use to quickly verify my links, site-wide.
- Microsoft Office Word
- As a word processor, I certainly think Word does its job well. As an HTML editor, though, it leaves so much to be desired—for Web page creation/editing, you're better off using a dedicated text/HTML editor and/or Web page authoring tool. So, why do I mention Word? Well, I credit its deceptive ease of use as an HTML editor, with inspiring me in part to start my original web site in 2004. Also, I designed my logos in it for my current site.
- OpenOffice.org
- In a nutshell, this is Microsoft Office 2003, minus the "Microsoft" and minus the generally hefty price tag. OpenOffice.org is free open-source software that I've used for some of my backend work; specifically, I used OpenOffice Calc (the Microsoft Office Excel lookalike) to keep a basic database each year of charting songs. But as of September 2007, I'm now using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for that purpose. Nevertheless, I say that overall, OpenOffice.org is a worthy alternative to Microsoft Office. But if you can afford and are willing to pay for Office 2007, then I think you should do so, for at this time, it is technically superior to OpenOffice.org.
- Table Tools Firefox Add-on
- Table2Clipboard Firefox Add-on
- These are little Firefox Add-ons that aid me in record-keeping. To facilitate updating my database in Microsoft Excel, I use Table Tools while viewing my current Top 50 in Firefox, to sort the table by the "Rank Last Week" column, and then I use Table2Clipboard to copy the resulting "Rank This Week" column cells, directly from Firefox into my Excel database. Frankly, I don't if what I describe, makes sense, but as long as it makes sense to me and works for me, I guess that's what counts? ("Table2Clipboard" added June 27, 2008)
- WAMP Server
- WOS Portable
- Xampp
- Each of these 3 links are for a free software package that enables you to configure your computer as a server. That's useful if you're a web developer who wants to develop and test a complex web site locally instead of having to upload it to a host site first. It's also useful if you want to host a web site from your computer. I used XAMPP at first, but then moved to WOS Portable, as it's smaller overall in file size. It's also supposed to let you switch quickly between PHP4 and PHP5, but, PHP5 wouldn't work for me on my Windows XP Professional laptop, so I moved on to WAMP instead, and that's what I work with currently.
- XSLToys
- A powerful little toy I've used for quick transformations of XML files on my computer. However, I never got it to work in Windows Vista.
Web Development Resources
- Adding Elements To The DOM
- This page helped me learn just enough about JavaScript to be able to modify to my taste, scripts I borrowed.
- A List Apart
- An excellent resource for Web designers, with articles covering (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, and more.
- Dev Shed Forums
- This is an extensive online community, geared not only to web developers, but to anyone that has even the slightest bit of experience in the technology world. With sub forums covering a wide variety of topics such as various programming languages, web design/hosting and site management, databases, system administration, operating systems, and computer hardware, there's bound to be an answer to any question/concern you might have. And if not, you could always post and receive help; it's what I did when I stumbled upon a problem in setting up my weekly charts in XML/XSL. I'm member "OnFire4God1229" on the site.
- Float Layouts
- The concept of CSS floating, well...floated over my head at first. Okay, maybe that's a lame pun. But anyway, there's no joke about how this blog post brought the floating concept down to earth for me, enough so that I could incorporate it in a few places on my site, such as my archived charts list on each year's intro page. I originally found this link through another resource, Dynamic Site Solutions.
- HTML Dog
- At some point, I found useful CSS tips on this worthy (X)HTML/CSS resource. More importantly, though, it's where I retrieved the base code for the drop-down navigation menus on my site. Its dropdown menu section is called Sons of Suckerfish.
- Making Visited Links Radical
- You may notice check marks on links you've visited. I got the idea to style the links with checks, from this blog post.
- Tabless
- Pronounced "table-less", this is where I learned how to do "mouseover" events without having to use JavaScript.
- TopXML
- This is an overall decent site covering topics on and related to eXtensible Markup Language. Some may find it more useful than others; whenever I stop by here, I generally have ended up having to turn to additional sites for more information, because I didn't find enough of it here. However, one of their tutorials helped me greatly, when I was assembling my Lyrics section, the one for XSLT Grouping.
- W3 Schools
- I love this site—to me, it's an indispensable resource on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, XML, XSL, and much more. I know all those acronyms might confuse some of you :-) (smile), but if you're interested in learning about what they stand for, and what they are, then this is a good place to visit. Unlike places that heavily use technical jargon, I feel most content on this site is readily understandable to anyone with even minimal computer experience.
Scripts
- Clear Links, by Jonathan Snook
- Position Breadcrumbs, by Justin Whitford
- You Are Here, by Steve Clason
- The above 3 links each contain the original source for part of the JavaScript navigational aid I use. Link 2 has the source for the bread crumb navigation that appears on the page bottom when JavaScript is enabled. Link 3 has the source for the part that styles the list items containing links to the page you're currently on, and Link 1 has the source for the code that clears the links to the current page. I want to make an honorable mention of another breadcrumb script that I used at first while building my site, Dynamic Javascript Breadcrumb Navigation, by Adam DuVander. It does its job very well, but it is not XHTML compatible, due to its use of the write() method. I was planning on making my site fully XHTML (with even the use of the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, but then decided against it, for it's not worth the trouble, especially since Internet Explorer doesn't properly support it yet and would require a tremendous workaround.
- Unobtrusive Table Sort Script (revisited), by Brian McAllister
- This links to the blog post with the source for the JavaScript I employ in the regular versions of my Top 50 and all songs stats tables.
Other Sites
- SongMeanings
- I've found myself using this Web site much more often now during the last several weeks; it has become a regular destination for me now. It's a community-based lyrics Web site, where visitors can join and submit new lyrics, and definitely post comments on songs' meanings. That makes the site a great tool to use to read other people's perspectives on songs (it's not a definitive resource, especially since songs tend to have multiple possible meanings). I love the site, but occasionally, I look up artists and find that they don't have any lyrics available on the site. Also, in my experience, the site sometimes takes a long time to load, even on a broadband Internet connection. (Added May 27, 2008)
- SpaceSocket
- Through Free Web Hosts, I discovered this new hosting provider. It's where I have my site hosted now, and as a satisfied member, I feel compelled to share my experience. I'm a former member on Yahoo! Geocities, and SpaceSocket's generous amount of features astounded me, especially given their price, free! All that's required is a little forum posting. Not even ads are required; I put mine on my home page because I wanted to. Of course, if you want even more features, there are upgraded plans that require more forum posting. If you're interested in running your own web site, I recommend looking into SpaceSocket, or if not appropriate for you, then you may be able to find what you need through the Free Web Hosts page.
- Time 4 God
- In the Miscellaneous section of this site is where I found the Cross image I use in my logo.