Sourcebench - the web developer’s workplace

Overwhelmed by the feedback to Darren's post I decided to invest some more resources in this project.

The feedback we got so far was really very constructive and I am amazed about the quality of the entries. They will indeed help to make this page better. So far we got 75 comments which give me a pretty good picture of mistakes and flaws of the current version. We are already planning a relaunch of this page in the near future.

The new version will be completely targeted in one direction - providing web developers with useful information and platform for exchanging information. The design will be optimized with a strong focus on usability rather then design. Content will be king and easy to find. Some customized modules will give this page a unique set of features, that standard blogs are missing out. The posts will be additionally categorized in experience groups, so we can serve all levels of expertise. The community spirit will be improved with better socializing options and open comments without subscription. Subscribers in addition will gain access to subscriber only features such as svn (subversion) access to submit and retrieve snippets and whole scripts from the Sourcebench snippet library. In the future each subscriber can get a subversion repository and a customizable subpage on this site.

As I can hardly focus on writing articles and at the same time focus on redesigning the site and providing all this improvements, we are now searching for some additional contributors for the projects. If you are interested in contributing to this project please refer to this job post and send us your application.

After putting a lot of effort into Sourcebench i was wondering the last days what we can do to attract more visitors to this site and how we can reach a bigger readership. I am a dedicated reader of Darren Rowse's Problogger blog and as this guy was able to make blogging a profession he seemed to be the right guy to ask for advice.

I wrote a short mail to Darren and asked him to give me a little clue of what i can do to lift my blog to the blogging Olymp. I was pleasantly surprised when i really got some feedback from him, offering me to make a post in his blog in order to forward this question to his readers.

I am aware of the fact that this means that we could also get negative feedback or even being torn to shreds, but i agreed to this offer without major concerns as whatever comes out of it, it can only be good for Sourcebench. No matter which feedback we gain, we will be able to use it to make this page a better place and gain experience and thoughts of a lot of different people.

We want Sourcebench to be a community page, so the best thing we can do to reach this goal is to ask the community what they want and expect from it.

As already the introduction to this case study got some positive feedback, we are really looking forward to the responsed and will be carefully watching the comments to Darren's request for comments on Problogger.

Hello everybody!

How are you feeling today? Good? Bad? So, so? Is it a good day for you now, right now? Well, no matter your answer, just know one thing - On October 15th the Blog Action day goes WILD!

It will be a day of hot hot dangerously hot discussions and debates about one single subject all over the world. As the title on the website says, "One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.". Beautiful isn't it? It sure is. Ok, enough with the chit-chat let's get to the point.

Blog Action Day will be, as I already mentioned, on October 15th and will be all about one thing - the Environment around us. The main object of this thing is to get everybody ( or as much people as they can actually ) to talk about the environment and to aim for a better, safer future. I say "Sign me IN!" as I love the environment and I like blogging, too. Also, the website features over 8000 registered blogs and websites, reaching an audience of nearly six million people. Thinking about it six million people is probably a lot less than some cities' population, but it is still a good number and it is growing especially if me and you can help it with whatever we can.

I mean come on its all about the environment - something we can not live whit out, you know. We here at SourceBench already burn with anticipation of the coming in just a few days event! Go, and place Get Involved!

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$ RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [L,R]

'register_globals', 'Short Tags' => 'short_open_tag', 'Display Errors' => 'display_errors', 'Magic Quotes GPC' => 'magic_quotes_gpc', 'Magic Quotes Runtime' => 'magic_quotes_runtime', 'Magic Quotes Sybase' => 'magic_quotes_sybase', ); $ve = phpversion(); $os = PHP_OS; $er = intval(error_reporting()); foreach ($flags as $n => $v) { $flags[$n] = (in_array(strtolower(ini_get($v)), $neg) ? 'Off' : 'On'); } $cli = (php_sapi_name() == 'cli'); $eol = "\n"; $gle = get_loaded_extensions(); $rows = array(); $le = ''; $wide = 4; $j = count($gle); $pad = $wide - $j % $wide; $len = max(array_map('strlen', $gle)); $func = create_function('$a', 'return str_pad($a, ' . intval($len) . ');'); $gle = array_map($func, $gle); for($i = 0; $i < $j; $i += $wide) { $le .= ' ' . implode(' ', array_slice($gle, $i, $wide)) . $eol; } $ec = array( 'E_STRICT' => 2048, 'E_ALL' => 2047, 'E_USER_NOTICE' => 1024, 'E_USER_WARNING' => 512, 'E_USER_ERROR' => 256, 'E_COMPILE_WARNING' => 128, 'E_COMPILE_ERROR' => 64, 'E_CORE_WARNING' => 32, 'E_CORE_ERROR' => 16, 'E_NOTICE' => 8, 'E_PARSE' => 4, 'E_WARNING' => 2, 'E_ERROR' => 1, ); $e = array(); $t = $er; foreach ($ec as $n => $v) { if (($t & $v) == $v) { $e[] = $n; $t ^= $v; } } if (ceil(count($ec) / 2) + 1 < count($e)) { $e2 = array(); foreach ($ec as $n => $v) { if (!in_array($n, $e) and $n != 'E_ALL') { $e2[] = $n; } } $er = $er . ' ((E_ALL | E_STRICT) ^ ' . implode(' ^ ', $e2) . '))'; } else { $er = $er . ' (' . implode(' | ', $e) . ')'; } if (!$cli) { echo '

', $eol;
}

echo 'PHP Version: ', $ve, $eol;
echo 'PHP OS: ', $os, $eol;
echo 'Error Reporting: ', $er, $eol;
foreach ($flags as $n => $v)
{
echo $n, ': ', $v, $eol;
}
echo 'Loaded Extensions:', $eol, $le, $eol;                                                                               
				

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) { $in = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE); while (list($k,$v) = each($in)) { foreach ($v as $key => $val) { if (!is_array($val)) { $in[$k][$key] = stripslashes($val); continue; } $in[] =& $in[$k][$key]; } } unset($in); }

We are proud to present the brand new version of our snippet library.

It still needs a lot of improvements but for now it is already a good replacement for the old snippets. The system is still running in beta mode but even now all subscribers are able to submit their code snippets to our system.

To submit a snippet you can either fill the online form or drag this Sourcebench bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar and you can easily mark text sections in your browser and post right to our system.

We know that this script is still only very basic and needs a lot of improvement but we already want to invite all subscribers who have useful chunks of code to submit them to our snippet library.

In the soon future this script will be extended with extra functions such as :

• Editing of your snippets
• Import of snippets from other systems
• Feeds for user submitted snippets
• API to access and manage snippets
• Plugins for various CMS systems including wordpress
• Creating SVN connection to enable checkin and checkout of snippets and full scripts via subversion

Here we are, yet again. Today we will be talking about, yes you guessed it - tutorials. Being a web designer sure gets harder and harder every single day. New websites pop-up on the net with every second and you never know who might have the same innovative idea as you just had yesterday and you are already working on it. Well, this really is not only annoying, but bad for some people's business.

So, let's get some things straight. What we are offering you right now are some nice websites that post and support CSS tutoring. To be absolutely honest with you, I want to make one thing clear - there are extremely few websites that concentrate their attention to css tutoring and such. Most of the websites turn their backs on stuff of that sort and concentrate on Photoshop or Flash, so what we got here are some websites made of people who like and develop css in their own fashion for people like you and me.

Isn't that just marvelous!

Depiction - http://www.depiction.net

Now this is a website that can offer some great tutorials not only for CSSm, but photoshop and such. Oh, but we already discussed this - we care about CSS right now, so forget the rest. The tutorials are growing slowly, but surely and I bet that soon there will be a lot of tutorial suggestions, post and much more comments than now. The website looks very serious and the tutorials may not be very advanced, but cover most of the things that are mostly needed in web designing - which is good for us right?

Up Up Media - http://upupmedia.com

Now this is a nice website which surprised me with their choice of name. I never thought that I could find something like quality tutorials on a website of that particular kind. No matter, still tutorials have a purpose and these here do it very well. Still, don't expect to stumble upon a large gathering of fabulous CSS tutorials - no as I said before few websites have what it takes to post a big major CSS tutorial section. Whatever, these guys here have put their heads together to make a few simple tutorials about the basic design moves involving css - static text, image link enhancements and the like.

Check it out so that you really understand and confirm what I am saying right now.

HV Designs - http://www.hv-designs.co.uk

There are few reasons that I decided to include this website in this list right here right now. One of it is the fact that they actually have a pretty first-glance-eye-catching-header design. The next one is that their tutorials - no matter how few they are - have a very nice and increasing in growth view rate. The last one - their last tutorial is about "Convert you original website into a working wordpress template." and I personally think that this deserves a few looks into it. This is not only hard, but time consuming and, for some, a brain damaging process. I have even seen companies doing this for big sums of money and it seems like their business is working fine.

So, bottom line is - why not give these guys here some serious credit.

I say "You got it!".

Sebastian Sulinski Design - http://www.sebastiansulinski.co.uk

A new web designer brave enough to post more than his profile on his personal website. Tutorials INCLUDED! Well it isn't that much of a deal, but it seems like the one responsible for this is the one who gains experience by the day and shares it with the rest of the world. He has some talent, it can be seen from his designs and websites, meaning that his tutorials - as few and simple they are right now - can grow like a plant in the garden of Eden. Alright, I know I kind of exaggerated, but still you know what I meant.

Nucleocide - http://www.nucleocide.net

And for desert we got something really not that special nor interesting. You might have ask something like "Why the hell is that thing here then?" .I understand you completely I would react the same way if I were you. But, I am not so I am sure you deserve some serious explanation? Ok, here it goes : This is the current website of a web designer Thomas Hunter. The thing that caught my attention is that this guy hates Dreamweaver and .Net. What he says about himself is : "Anything that you can do with Dreamweaver I can do with notepad.". The guy is a code maniac and he seems to be very found of it. About Nucleocide - it is a website/program that he develops for quite some time and the website features 4-5 different categories of tutorials and yes the best one is his CSS category that right now has barely anything in it. So, another reason not to include this website here - BZZZ! you are wrong. If you have a particular question about a tutorial or something completely out of the website - still CSS related - I am sure that he will respond with a solution to your demand.

As I said, code freak.

And here we are finally at the end.

I know that these are really just some few websites, but they deserve attention and repay with solutions.

Until, next time!

As i want to extend our snippet section we are working right now on an upcoming beta version of a small extension, that will allow users the posting of snippets directly to sourcebench.

Various pages such as Snipplr, Text Snippets, Big Bold or ProgrammingIsHard.com offer such services already but we are going to extend the feature set a bit once the public beta is sucessfully established.

Stay tuned - we keep you updated once the feature goes live.

In this article you will find info about some of the best flash tutorial websites on the net. Some of them are really well known in the flash community some of them are not, but that is not because they are bad, on the contrary - they are actually really useful and friendly.

Ok, let's start.

Our number one is:

Toxic Lab - http://www.toxiclab.org

Toxic Lab provides a lot material not only about flash and action script, but Photoshop, Css, java and more. But we are here for the FLASH part of the website and it is a really good part. You may not learn how to make a video game, a nice intro or anything of that kind - what you will learn to make on flash will be one of the following : A great lightning effect for pictures and website templates, all kinds of text effects, picture effects, different styles of navigation menus and buttons.

Basically, the website provides great tutorials which will help you enhance your website with glamorous and eye-catching effects, menus and more. The tutorials are not for total newbies that have started using flash sooner than they can handle it, but nevertheless, the explanation with each tutorial is very detailed and even the "Greenest" of flash designers will be able to use them.

Moving on...

Learn Flash - http://learnflash.com

Now this website is totally different form the rest. Why you might ask? Well, the answer is simple - the tutorials on this website are mostly supported by one man - a flash developer that is the company's very best at what he does. There is a newsletter that will tell you about every new tutorial from the category you have selected and you can pop at the website with a single click from your mailbox. They really are into the thing for their customers to stay tuned for the new stuff. Another good thing about Learn Flash . Com is that the tutorials no matter how complex they may be - they are explained in great detail so that users can augment and use the tutorial to make something different if they feel like it. Also a there is a great deal of video tutorials for the really new at flash people.

The downside of this is that they require - yeah you guessed it - money. For most of their tutorials they require a sign up fee in order for you to view the whole tutorial.

NEXT!

Flash Village - http://www.flashvillage.com

Now this baby right here has some serious stuff it can offer. Flash Village is a flash community that can offer flash developers and web designers some handy and damn useful tips and tricks. In my personal opinion the BEST thing these guys can offer the people of the net is their templates. They got some amazing flash website templates that are totally and exclusively free to download. The most beautiful thing is that when you download a template, in that same template there is a mini-tutorial-like-thing that helps you manage and change it at your desire. I mean how cool is that. THANK YOU FLASH VILLAGE PEOPLE!

Where were we? Oh, yeah...

Wipeout 44 - http://www.wipeout44.com

Now these guys surely know what they are doing. Not only do they provide free tips and tricks considering flash and some nice and nifty flash tutorials to enhance your web design, but they write HUGE articles on how a graphical design should be made - what you need to know, how the graphical design is progressing and what are the basic and professional way to do it. As much as I could investigate the website concentrates more on "educating" than showing just some flashing tutorials. A really good website for people who are seriously standing on their feet and are jumping in the vastness of flash making.

They also have a few links to other flash tutorial websites with a short reviews and such. They use the this as a topic to that part of their website : Sites That Help Build Mountains :). I say "Why the hell not? :) "

And our next contestant is?

Flash Game Design - http://www.flash-game-design.com

Now this here is something for the gaming community of flash making. Ok, right to the point - they offer tutorials, articles and links to some great resources. I read one of their articles for RPG game making and it was not only huge as space, but it offered a great meaningful content. Someone who is into making games and decided that flash is the tool for the job, will find extremely useful information on this website. Not only that, but their tutorials, not as flexible as some other, are about the exact things that games need. How to make something shoot or how to make something move with the press of the directional keys - action scripts for those things that are the "engine" of your future game.

The best thing is, when you read the articles and tutorials you get a feeling that they really care what is going to happen with your product. Isn't that sweet?

Last, but not least.

Luka Maras - http://www.lukamaras.com

No idea what the name means, but that is not important. First, the thing you should automatically put aside is the design of the website. How should I put this so that I do not offend anyone? Hmmm, the design ... bites? Whatever, the thing is that there are some really good and useful as an overall tutorials. Most of the tutorials are about specific symbols like buttons, logo, menu and such that will aid you in your website making. Some of them are spectacularly good and have a large number of visitors. The tutorials them selfs are nicely explained and the subject of the tutorial can be freely downloaded by anyone.

Well, this finishes this review of some really good flash tutorial websites.

Next, we will "see" each other when we review some other tutorial websites about something a bit different.

Stay tuned folks!