No doubt, if anyone is paying attention, they may have noticed a few subtle changes to the structure of this site’s home page. Particularly in the extra column usually rendered on the right side of the page. Some may have even noticed a tiny little change in the main navigation that would be easy to overlook. These changes represent a gateway to the additions to Stopdesign which I’ve slowly been adding behind the scenes.
So much information is available today. But it’s not always easy to find the good information. Sites, books, weblogs, journals, articles, tutorials, interviews, news stories, blog entries, demos, organizations, mailing lists, specifications, reference charts, and so much more. I wanted to make sure I recorded the pieces which directly impact my world as a designer. The pieces which inspire, inform, and enrich my knowledge and life.
As I’ve been assembling this collection of information over the past few months, I’ve received increasing amounts of email asking which resources I use, and where I learned what I know. Readers wanting to know how to solve certain problems, or learn more about web design and the use of CSS for advanced layout. As I took the time to respond to as many inquiries as possible, I realized I was writing (and copying and pasting) a lot of the same information over and over again in the replies.
I always thought my old Articles section was lacking in the amount of complementary external information it could have provided. So I decided to make my collection of Links, Sites, and Books a public one, create a list of references I’ve used, and group it all under a new section for Stopdesign appropriately dubbed See Also. It combines the Articles I’ve written to date with lots of other great resources I would recommend to anyone who practices, toys around with, or is looking to start learning the discipline of web design.
The ideas behind See Also borrow from the sites I visit on a regular basis. The section is a work-in-progress, never intended to be complete, exhaustive, or considered finished. It is by no means revolutionary. But hopefully, it will help direct visitors seeking more information to the wealth of growing resources available all over the Web.
Posted at 2:12pm in Site
15 comments (Comments closed)
Hooray for referral logs, I caught ‘See Also’ earlier today.
I’ve noticed the volume of e-mail asking me the same questions is starting to add up. Thanks for showing me the way out Doug, I am so stealing this idea. I’d ask how you rigged MT, but I’d imagine I can figure that out on my own given yours and Matt Haughey’s past articles on the subject.
(the Zen Garden link is going to Dug Falby’s ALA article, by the way)
Ack! It’s fixed Dave. That’s what I get for creating the References page by hand to save on time. (Notice Gruber’s SmartyPants plugin has not yet educated the text on that page — a sure sign of manual content creation, or forgetting to include the smarty_pants attribute in those tags.) This is the only page of the new section not yet produced by MT. But it will eventually be stored in MT too.
This is a great resource. Thank you!
Now maybe I’ll be able to figure out that footer at the bottom no matter what problem. :D
Doug, thanks for the new resources. Your site has been a great place for me to jump off from to visit other designers and this just takes that process a step further.
My big question is this. I have studied your design work and that of others and learned quite a bit about CSS, XHTML, MT, etc. I created my own website but have some very minor CSS issues. Is there a venue where I can show folks my site and my CSS and have them help troubleshoot these issues? I have posted to the forums on CSSCreator.com but I was wondering if you knew of another place like this one. Although the responses have been very helpful there, they were long-in-coming. Is there a more popular forum that you know of?
Thanks in advance
Thank you kind Sir!
And ditto Patricia’s remark re: Footers. :)
Dave (#4): Is there a venue where I can show folks my site and my CSS and have them help troubleshoot these issues?
Depending on how far along you feel you are with learning CSS, there are two mailing lists which fit the bill. css-foundations for those still trying to get grasp on the basics, and css-discuss if you’re past the basics and running into walls on layout issues and the like.
Css-discuss, in particular, is often very helpful for posting problems with a site and asking for some advice. If you haven’t, just be sure to read the css-discuss policies before posting, and keep it related to CSS. Not every request gets a response, but I’d say at least 90% of them do. With a couple thousand subscribers (I believe that was Eric’s last report), you’re bound to get some generous soul to help you out. From my experience, css-discuss averages anywhere from about 20 messages on a slow day, up to 100 or more on a very active day.
FYI, these two lists are also listed in the References section under “Discussion Lists”.
Great implementation of a great idea. I’ve tossed around several like minded ideas before and have yet to have the time to really sit down and think about it. I like what you’ve done, and until I get my own system worked out, I’ll just visit SEEalso and use yours. Thanks doug - your a peach! ;)
Thank you extremely very much ((-: This is what I’ve been hoping for since I first discovered your amazing site.
Eternal sunshine on you kind Sir
“No doubt, if anyone is paying attention, they may have noticed a few subtle changes to the structure of this site’s home page.” *bows* :)
Great. Terrific. Lovely sidelog.
MT setup with details coming when? ;)
Doug,
It’s great to see your IA developing and I’m thankful that you’re doing it in the public domain. I learn a great deal from watching stopdesign evolve, which is helping me to architect the many years of jumbled URIs haphazzardly crammed into my bookmarks.html file and other places.
Many thanks!
t.
This is a really great idea. Easy to come up with, hard to implement properly. Seems like a good start. I can see myself coming back to it again and again. The perfect place to point someone interested in web design.
I like the books section. Not enough emphasis is put on good hard copy these days. It’s still the easiest medium to learn from (for me anyway), and it’s hard to find reliable information about what’s worth reading.
Thanks for the fantastic resources! I absolutely love the new section. If anyone has thought of everything, it’s definitely you.
Oh cool! The phrase “gift of sharing” comes to mind. Thanks for supporting the web and others indirectly and most definitely now .. directly. Good on ya!
You nailed this one. I’ve been following your blog for awhile, and have learned alot from your writings. But at least half of the time I’m using your site to link out, and learn more.
If there is an idea of what a successful technical blog can be, your on the edge, helping to define that idea even more: a personal story, adherence to a well defined scope, up to date and relevant content, community involvement, and now, categorized resources.
I’m not a designer, but an IT manager, working with designers and coders to develop and maintain sites. Your site, and the resources there, have been the subject of many team meetings and discussions. The language that we use, just the terminology and the way we talk about things, is so important in a team effort; and having a place where things are brought together with the level of clarity you bring counts, man. It really does.
Thanks!
Off-topic slightly, but I’ve gotta ask - you’re using SmartyPants, and your comments pages validate. Somewhere along the way, you must be reversing the process for those quoting passages by converting the literal ’ into ’, and I’m wondering what you had to do to pull that off. Regex?
I’m up to everything validating but my comments; this, I believe, is the last step.
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