Don’t they? I’m on a bit of an AJAX kick the past week or so and happened across magnetic ajax demo. Unfortunately they’ve since had to decouple the database because of bandwidth usage but actually if there’s any interest I’ll get this running on metamusing just because it’s clever and au courant. It’s an AJAX app that models the magnetic fridge poetry that’s fairly popular, in case you’re not interested in clicking through.

A Skidmore student recently asked me how I learned what I know of web application development and we talked about learning by doing, dissecting other folk’s code and so on, and at the end of the discussion he asked if I could share some of the links I use. I started to pull together a list of the most useful sites, like a list apart and Westciv’s css tutorials, but as I was doing this Vitaly Friedman’s fantastic essential bookmarks for web designers and developers showed up in my feeds. I poked around and quickly concluded he had done a better job pulling together all the best resources on the subject than I could and sent that link along to the student. Now I’m passing it along to you all to enjoy.

Anyone interested in 3d modeling has no doubt heard of blender, which has been around for quite a while. Art of Illusion showed up in my RSS feeds last week and I checked it out – this is a decent, free, java-based 3d modeling and rendering tool. If you’re looking to experiment with 3d modeling and are overwhelmed with Blender’s interface you might find Art of Illusion will fit the bill. I could also see this used as a teaching tool where the budget doesn’t allow for a lab license for Maya or 3d studio max.

Do you Digg? Think community tech news aggregation with commentary and a karma system, then go check it out. What it lacks in thoughtful commentary it makes up in volume and verve. Worth adding to your rss feeds if you want a constant stream of tech news and links, and if you’re inclined you can participate and help shape the flow.

Ajax is all the rage these days. Check out Rico, another collection of ajax/javascript widgets. Some really great stuff to be found here. Check out the accordion demo, I could actually use that for a project I’m working on right now.

It’s funny. 5 years ago I was so disgusted with the state of javascript support in browsers that I started actively avoiding using it. Things have come around though. There are still issues but the tradeoff is how cool and useful the things you can do are, and the issues mainly have to do with IE and its crap standard compliance which should hopefully be fixed in IE 7.

Ever need a temporary ad-hoc mailing list? Check out conversate. The characteristics that make it more convenient than simply emailing a list of folks is that it generates a web archive of your discussion, it generates an RSS feed you can subscribe to or link folks to, you can open it to participants beyond the initial group easily, and it has a handy browser bookmarklet. It’s really more of a hybrid – depending on how you configure your preferences, this could be used as web-based discussion tool or you can conduct the conversation solely through your email client. At any rate it’s free and has a clean easy to use interface.

Holy cow is this ever good – Xylescope is similar to aardvark, the mouseover DOM inspector and the mozilla web developer’s extension, in that it allows you to explore the structure of an html document and the CSS that’s being applied to every element, including the best visualization of the parent-child relationship I’ve yet seen. The only caveats are that it costs money as compared to these other free tools (but only $15, it’s cheap), it can’t perform direct transformations in the way that aardvark and the web developer’s extension can, and you really need some serious screen real estate to take full advantage of it. Even so, anyone doing web development on the mac should check this out.

Fetch, the venerable ftp client, has recently been updated and now supports sftp. I’ve used Fetch off and on for at least 10 years. It may not have all the bells and whistles of newer products like transmit, and it costs money as compared to the free fugu or cyberduck, but it’s rock solid and a comfortably familiar interface if you’ve used it as long as I have. $25, osx only.

My hate of flash intro animations and useless UI widgets knows no bounds. I’ve got nothing against flash in principle, but gods do designers ever misuse it, and increasingly advertisers are using it, leading me to constantly re-jigger my adblock settings. I’ve been using flashblock to address this. Basically it intercepts any flash object and replaces it with a clickable link. If you need the flash, you can click on it and use it as the designer intended – if you don’t, you never have to see it.