CommunityHappy New Year

Treehouse
writes on January 4, 2010

Welcome to the first post on Think Vitamin for 2010. I hope you all had a fun and relaxing holiday period and are easing yourselves slowly back into your normal daily routines.

For the first time in many years I decided to leave Google Reader closed over my two week break and instead relied on a once a day trawl through Twitter for my web design and development related news.

Judging by the amount of great articles published it’s clear that not everyone takes time out. Here in no particular order are some of the best articles I read over the last two weeks sourced from my favourited tweets list.

Design related

• Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement – A little old but still relevant look at the issue of replacing a text page element with an image (via @smashingmag)
• PrimerCSS – Create a starter stylesheet from your HTML outline (via @cowshedstudio)
• Making Your Design Pop – 8 quick wins to improve your current site design (via @smashingmag)
• 25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers – Beautiful and creative examples of displaying data visually (via @smashingmag)
• Advice for designers – D Keith Robinson offers up some great advice for web designers (via @dkr)

Business related

• Haystack is now Sortfolio – Jason Fried on having to rename their most recent application (via @37svn)
• Rework online – New promo site for 37signals upcoming new book (via @dhh)

Development related

• DjangoCon videos available – Videos from the 2009 DjangoCon (via @djangocon)

Content related

• Write articles the fast way – Great article from Christian Heilmann on creating content quickly (via @codepo8)
• Best and Worst SEO Practices – Checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing and Yahoo (via smashingmag)
• Mashable’s Social Media Guide for Journalists (via @mashable)
• Editorial Style Guides – Ideas and resources for creating editorial style guides for web sites (via @smashingmag)

Inspiration & opinion

• @chrispirillo on Twitter and negativity at conferences – Great video from Chris Pirillo discussing the use of Twitter at tech conferences (via @leweb)
• 10 iPhone Apps for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions (via @mashable)

What did you read over the holidays? Feel free to link up your best reads in the comments.