Grab them while they’re hot. Free colorized vectors that you can use as templates or starting points for your own design work.

Here’s the direct download link: http://www.freepsd.com/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=37

This may be old news to some of you, but I had totally forgotten about my nifty Dropbox account.

The free account allows me to store 2GB’s worth of files on the web. The Dropbox desktop interface handles all the uploading and synchronizing and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The premise is simple:

Have you ever wished that you could access your files from anywhere? We made Dropbox because we were tired of e-mailing files to ourselves or carrying around a USB key.

Your Dropbox account can be accessed from multiple computers. Obviously, that means that you can have access to your project files at work, at home at a client’s site, etc.

Is it secure? According to the folks at Dropbox, “All files are transported over SSL and encrypted using AES-256 (banks use this too).”

All in all, the dozen or so people at Dropbox have done a great job at providing on-the-go file backup & access. What surprised me was to learn that at least three of the Dropbox team members are MIT drop-outs who thought that starting their own company would be more meaningful than finishing their degree (and at least two of the guys only had a year or less to go).

Thanks to LifeHacker for this tip.

LogoInstant is a design service that creates a new logo almost every day.

According to their web site, they create logos when they’re bored and share them freely with the rest of the world.

You can use all the logo design accessed from this website as inspirations, using it on your website or your project or even using them for your clients. You don’t have to spend big bucks anymore for designer, because this service is 100% free.

So basically, the logos are completely free for both personal and commercial use. Best of all, they come in a layered Adobe Photoshop source file (PSD) so you can edit the name or make more advanced changes.

So whether you want to use their service as inspiration or if you don’t mind having the same logo as several other companies, check out some of their logo designs.

Today, I was searching for some glass scratch remover and came across this little web site. The web site in and of itself is OK, but the implementation of the floating menu is marvelous. Here’s a screenshot of this floating menu in Firefox:

The idea is simple but surprisingly, only few web developers employ it: Provide always-available access to frequently used portions of the web site or the web page. That prevents the web design from getting cluttered with “BACK TO TOP” and/or duplicate link buttons.

And because I was in a good mood, I took a 15–second screencast as well, using the free software Jing from TechSmith.

Since we have to bail out the government and the already-rich (why couldn’t they just write off the 7 billion and make a deal with the IRS), we’re getting at least something for free: High-quality finance related icons.

Aside from being gorgeous and free, these icons also come in raster and vector formats. By the way, the icon set comes from the fine folks at Icon Eden, and if you’re interested in custom icons for your software, I’m sure they would appreciate a visit.

Tell’em I sent you.

For about two years, I’ve been subscribing to various online job search engines. You know, just to keep an eye out and see what’s in demand.

At any rate, every now and then, I see something awe-inspiring, similar to the following:

Say what? The perfect opportunity for the right candidate! Unlike the perfect opportunity for the wrong candidate. Or any other permutation, involving the words perfect opportunity and right candidate.

Then again, it’s a rough economy, and those twenty-something hot-shots from the recruiting firm are running out of ideas.

What are your favorite phrases from job ads?

Yes, they are gorgeous and free. The maker of this icon set allows you to use this set of 128 free icons “in any projects.” The icons have a consistent style, with just a tad of a glossy look. All you need to do in return for using them for free is to share the link.

That’s what I call awesome! Thanks guys.

Does not work. At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer 7 does (still) not expand XML-based character entities, such as ', <, > or ".

That may seem fairly obvious and perhaps even normal to the XML mavens out there, but I still keep forgetting from time to time that some web browsers may neither be able, willing nor ready to interpret those “friendly” charcter entities.

• Instead of using ' (apostrophe) in your XHTML markup, use: '
• Instead of using " (quotes) in your XHTML markup, use: "
• Instead of using > (greater than) in your XHTML markup, use: >
• Instead of using < (less than) in your XHTML markup, use: <

For situations in which you receive an RSS feed or other XML-based content, it would be best to replace the “friendly” character entities with escaped characters or the decimal character entities I’ve listed above.

In PHP, for example, you would do something like this:
$text = str_replace(’'’, ‘\”, $text);

In ASP, for example, you would do something like this:
text = replace(text, “'”, “'”)

Let me know if you have any additional insights into this subject. Thanks!

Any web developer who gathers information from actual human beings knows that there is always somebody who

• a) might be new to the whole Internet thing and doesn’t understand what they need to enter on web forms,
• b) likes entering weird stuff just because they can, or
• c) thinks they can exploit some kind of vulnerability on your web site by attempting to enter SQL or XSS injection code.

Obviously, the best and final defense (in my somewhat biased opinion) takes place on the back-end in your ASP, PHP, Java or .NET code.

However, the folks at JavaScript Coder and I believe that you can save a lot of time and trouble for about 90 percent of your end-users by helping them along with a little bit of front-end, client-side form validation.

Aside from jQuery (written by John Resig), the form validation script from JavaScript Coder is is probably the other JavaScript library I wish I had written myself. However, this script library does such a great job at validating form input, I simply keep re-using it from one project to the next.

They have excellent examples and documentation for this form validation script, and so I’ll restrain myself from repeating that. Let me just note that this script considers numerous real-world scenarios AND allows you to append your own custom validations (e.g., matching passwords).

In a nutshell, with this form validation script, you can check the following:

• required fields have a value (other than blank spaces)
• the maximum and minimum lengths of text input fields are enforced
• only specific types of characters are entered (alphabetic, numeric, alphanumeric, with & without spaces)
• the input matches your regular expression pattern
• at least one radio buttons is selected
• a specific OPTION from a SELECT element is not selected
• e-mail addresses are in the correct format

Considering the price of this JavaScript library ($0), this is an awesome bargain.

JR.com is currently selling refurbished Wacom graphics tablets for $39.99.

The Wacom UCTE440 Graphire 4×5 Graphics Tablet is a 4×5 inch graphics tablet that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and more. It also includes the Pressure Sensitive Pen & Cordless Mouse, is ideal for drawing & painting and comes in metallic blue.

The graphic pen with eraser has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity for natural brush control. Flip it over and it acts as an eraser in such software programs as MS Word and Photoshop. By the way, the tablet comes with free copies of Color Efex Pro 2 GE, Corel Painter Essentials 2, Evernote Plus and JustWrite Office 4.

According to Jr.com’s web site, This Wacom UCTE440 has been Factory-Refurbished to perform as if it were new. It comes with a 1-Year Warranty from Wacom.