PHP Magazine

PHP Magazine is an online magazine in the form of a blog. There are posts that range many different categories, mainly PHP, but others from within their network of sites. There is information from software and book reviews to articles and tutorials.

Ajax Magazine

Ajax Magazine is another online magazine in the form of a blog from the publishers of PHP Magazine. The Ajax version focuses mainly on Ajax technologies and offers news, articles, and reviews to name a few.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is one of the best sites on the web (also an online magazine in the form of a blog). They have amazing "round-ups" and posts bringing together the best sites, services, and resources on the web. They focus a lot on web 2.0 technologies and provide great content for both designers and developers.

Design Mag

Design Mag offers news, articles, galleries, interviews and more. The website is in the form of a blog and is updated very frequently. They have great resources and devote a section to freelance information. This is often a common thread between webmasters/designers/developers. They are the home of the 200+ Resources for Freelance Web Designers article.

Website Magazine

Website Magazine offers their magazine both in print and online. However, the only way you can see the online version is if you subscribe to the print version. The good news: it's free! The website has forums, articles, and blogs full of content. The magazine contains a lot of useful information in typical article format, usually offering one focus article with many other shorter articles throughout.

Digital Web Magazine

Digital Web Magazine offers news, articles, reviews, interviews, and tutorials. News is updated daily and main articles are updated on a weekly basis and are well worth the wait. The content is very useful and very thorough. They also report on upcoming events around the world.

SD Times

SD Times reports on content related to programmers and developers. In both a print version and online, SD Times has over 60,000 subscribers. They report on recent news and stories, write columns and opinions, as well as providing a job board and resource center. This publication reads more as a newspaper than a magazine.

Dr. Dobb's Journal

Dr. Dobb's Journal is another publication both in print and online. They offer information from a variety of different programming and development topics. Some topics include databases, open source, security, web development, and specific programming languages like C/C++ and Java. They also have a resource center and a blog full of information as well.

Developer.* Magazine

Developer.* offers articles, blogs, and book reviews for all things development and programming. There articles are broken down by categories ranging from software design and quality to legal issues and techniques. The articles are well written, the information is great, and the information is very thorough.

.Net Magazine

.Net Magazine is both in print and online. They offer articles to help developer, discover, and design. They also have podcasts and forums filled with content. They cover topics ranging from flash to CSS to Facebook.

Firefox offers a lot of advantages over other browsers, namely Internet Explorer. One of the greatest advantages it offers, is the ability to install add-ons. There are plenty of great plugins available for developers to use to help them make better websites and make them easier to navigate. There are extensions that cover SQL, regular expressions, debugging, security issues, FTP, and more. Here is a list of 20 great Firefox extensions for developers.

• Firebug - This extension provides debugging capabilities while viewing a web page. There is live debugging on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It is recommended to turn off this extension while not debugging, due to a speed lag in browsing.
• FireFTP - This extension is a full featured FTP client that integrates into Firefox. It is free and includes features like drag & drop, encryption, search, directory comparisons, and directory syncing, just to name a few.
• FireShot - This extension takes screenshots of web pages. It allows you to save the image, copy it to the clipboard, and edit the screenshot. You can also choose to capture only the visible area or the whole page. This is a very useful extension for bloggers who often review web pages.
• Screengrab - This extension is another extension that allows you to take screenshots of web pages. The features include saving the image or copying to the clipboard. It also supports capturing the visible area, the entire page, a selection, or a frame.
• Greasemonkey - This is one of the coolest extensions available. It allows you to customize how web pages behave using JavaScript. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scripts available to download, and you can create your own. This is an easy way to improve on web pages that you didn't create, as well as the ones that you did.
• Web Developer - This extension adds a toolbar that has a large selection of webmaster tools and resources. It includes the ability to view the source and the CSS easily by loading them into a new tab within the current window. It allows for one-click validation of HTML, CSS, Feeds, and more. Other features include information and manipulation of images, forms, and cookies.
• YSlow - YSlow is an extension developed by Yahoo! to help understand why a web page is slow. There are report cards generated that detail why the web page is performing poorly based on Yahoo's rules for a high performing website.
• HTML Validator - This extension integrates HTML validation directly into Firefox. The validation is based on Tidy and gives detailed output of the errors that are found. Icons are visible in the status bar that give general counts for errors and warnings.
• JavaScript Debugger - This extension provides feedback for JavaScript errors. This is very useful when needing to determine what has gone wrong. It provides a lot of detailed information to help you troubleshoot and fix the problem.
• Dummy Lipsum - This extension provides on-the-fly creation of Lorem Ipsum dummy text to use as a placeholder. Lorem Ipsum text has become the universal default text used as a placeholder in web pages, and this extension provides a fast and easy solution. You need a minimum of 5 words, but you can create many paragraphs worth of text if needed. This is a very useful time saver.
• SQL Inject Me - This extension is a security tool for checking the vulnerability of your forms. It submits your forms with typical SQL injection values and the shows the database errors that occur.
• XSS Me - This extension is very similar to the SQL Inject Me extension. It is a security tool that tests the vulnerability or your site to XSS, or cross-site scripting, attacks.
• ColorZilla - This extension provides an eyedropper and color picker for web pages. You can easily determine what color is being displayed on the page and then create custom color palettes from it.
• Regular Expressions Tester - This extension provides testing capabilities to your regular expressions. You can plug the expressions in here and determine if they are correct and will do what you wanted them to do. It includes a save feature that allows you to keep previously tested regular expressions readily available.
• XML Developer Toolbar - This extension is very similar to the Web Developer extension. It tracks a large range of items pertaining to XML. It allows for validation, generation, and manipulation of XML schemas, DTD's, and XSL's.
• Load Time Analyzer - This extension was developed by Google and is used to track and report on how long it takes a web page to load. The output is very easy to read in graph form. You can customize what events you would like to measure.
• Server Switcher - This extension is very handy for switching between your development server and your live hosting server. It allows you to switch between each in one click, or keyboard shortcut, and is completely customizable to your servers.
• Window Resizer - This extension allows you to switch between different resolutions and screen sizes for testing your layout. This is great for designing themes, because of the obvious need to accommodate as many resolutions as possible.
• SQLite Manager - This extension is used to manage SQLite databases on your computer. You can browse, search, edit, add, and delete using this tool. You can also run SQL queries against the database. This is a very nice tool if you use SQLite.
• MeasureIt - This is a very simple, yet very useful extension. It is basically a ruler that allows you to find out how much space something is taking up on the page. This is good for developing themes and working on the layout of your web page. It can save you a lot of time, since you won't need to guess and try different pixel dimensions.

What other extensions do you use to help you when developing websites? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook just recently celebrated their one year anniversary for the release of their developer platform. The API was released on May 28, 2007 and has exploded with user applications since then. The application directory has tens of thousands of applications, some with over 1.5 million daily users. For those of you, like me, who may not have jumped on the bandwagon right away, here are some great tutorials and information to get you started now.

• Facebook Developer Documentation - This is the main Facebook Developer website. It has all kinds of information from a wiki, to tutorials, to getting started guides.
• Facebook PHP Tutorial - This is a great tutorial for beginners. It goes through the very basics of what is needed to begin developing with the Facebook APIs and PHP. It Includes a basic application example.
• Developing with the Facebook Platform and PHP - This is another great tutorial for PHP developers, this time from Sitepoint. It covers the basics and gets a little more in-depth, covering topics like the News Feed and the User Profile Box.
• How to Develop a Hit Facebook App: 29 Essential Tools and Tutorials - This is not a tutorial, but a site that links to 29 useful websites that provide more information to help you in your journey to create the next best Facebook App.
• An Introduction to FBML - This link provides a nice overview to FBML (Facebook Markup Language). It is fairly basic, but an easy read. Definitely recommended when in need of a quick understanding.
• Facebook Developer Tutorials - A good listing of many tutorials covering many different topics. There is a lot of good information here. It is definitely worth checking out.
• How to use the Facebook API - This is a very basic overview of the API. It offers some good information, but is very short and to the point.
• Getting Started with the Facebook Platform API (Screencast) - There are 3 screencasts here that cover the basics of setting up an application through Facebook and writing the code once the application has been set up through the Facebook developer application.
• How To Set Up A Facebook Feed Reader Application For Your Blog - HowtoForge gives a nicely written tutorial on how to create an RSS feed reader application. This is a great tutorial and a great idea. This is a good way to spread the word about your blog in a fairly easily.
• Facebook Development Kit - Here is a development kit released by Microsoft, that includes control and samples for both Visual Basic and Visual C#. The site includes some nice walkthrough videos as well.

What other resources have you used to learn your way through the Facebook API's? Let us know in the comments.

Who doesn't like a helpful cheat sheet to have around? They save so much time and really help you learn what you are working with in an easy to understand format. I have gathered a list of the cheat sheets I have found to be the most helpful. There are cheat sheets from PHP to CSS to RegEx, and I have listed over 40 different cheat sheets to help!

• Design
  • HTML (1) (2) (3)
  • CSS (1) (2) (3)
  • XML (1) (2) (3)
  • RGB Hex Color (1)
  • DOCTYPE (1)

• Programming
  • PHP (1) (2) (3)
  • ASP (1) (2)
  • JavaScript (1) (2)
  • Ruby On Rails (1) (2) (3) (4)
  • Perl/CGI (1) (2)
  • Ajax (1) (2) (3)

• Database
  • MySQL (1) (2)
  • PostgreSQL (1) (2)
  • SQL Server (1)
  • Oracle (1) (2)

• Other
  • Regular Expressions (1) (2) (3)
  • mod_rewrite (1)
  • htaccess (1)
  • RSS (1)
  • WordPress (1)
  • CHMOD (1)
  • Vi (1)
  • Social Bookmark Links (1)
  • SEO (1)

For even more resources check out this blog post on the Virtual Hosting Blog.

Update

Hey everyone. DZone also has some great cheat sheets. They have one of the best layouts available. They have topics ranging from ajax to Eclipse. You can check them out here.

What cheat sheets did I miss? Leave any missing cheat sheets you found helpful in the comments.