treasure chest

Here are some tools I found this week that I thought you’d be interested in:

  1. When one is laying out a site for a client, and want to put in some sample text, the standard practice for professional designers is to put in “Lorem ipsum” text so that the reader “will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout.” I found lipsum.org- a site that will automatically generate this text for you according to your size specifications.
  2. Did you know there’s an advanced toolbar in the latest versions of WordPress? I didn’t… am I the last to know? Anyway, when you’re writing a post, hit Shift/Alt-V to toggle the toolbar. It contains several very useful items, such as a “remove formatting” button, and a text color button, among other things. (You can’t get to this toolbar when you’re editing a post under Manage Post- only when writing a post.)
  3. Via Alister Cameron’s post about his very cool blog redesign, I learned about Yahoo’s grid design tool. I haven’t gotten into it much, but apparently this thing will spit out cross-browser compatible CSS. The bit about the tool is at the bottom of Alister’s very detailed post.
  4. Also via the above-mentioned self-described “blogologist”, I became familiar with a new color-schemer tool by Adobe called Kuler. It’s fun to play with- you have to give it a try.
  5. Last but not least is a big list of tools for web designers at the People’s Toolbox. Tons of good stuff there.

I’m particularly interested in the Yahoo CSS tool – has anyone used it? What did you think?