Looking for inspiration?

Thanks to the many bloggers out there exposing the work of countless designers and coders, you can now get a good dose of inspiration to save you from a mundane Monday, solve a technical problem or get the latest tech and design news...

Here is a list of some of my favourite sites, in no particular order:

The FWA
Abduzeedo
Smashing Magazine
Web Design File
Ants Magazine
FaveUp
Best Web Gallery
Design Flavr
Speckboy
Webdesign Inspiration
Design Is Kinky

For random snippets of design related goodness visit The Cool Hunter. If you really have a lot of time up your sleeve, get lost in time with Mood Stream.

Cool free fonts for designers!

Thanks to Ants Magazine, here is a list of 50 free fonts to download. Warning, these are for designers... :-)

Want an alternative to Google Analytics?

Check out Piwik! http://piwik.org/
See a comparison for these tools at Clazh.com

(Thanks to Weblenium for the Piwik tip!)

Are you complying with Anti Spam laws?

According to the Australian Government, Department of Broadband Communications and Digital Economy, the "The Spam Act 2003 prohibits the sending of spam, which is identified as a commercial electronic message sent without the consent of the addressee via email, short message service (SMS), multimedia message service (MMS) or instant messaging. The requirements under the Spam Act apply to all commercial electronic messages, including both bulk and individual messages."

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has enforcement responsibility for the Spam Act. However, there is more to this law than just not sending without consent.

The three main things to remember are:

1. Consent - make sure you have consent to contact the recipient and can prove you have obtained it.
2. Identify - include accurate information to identify yourself or your organisation as the authorised sender of the message
3. Unsubscribe - make sure your messages have a functional unsubscribe facility, so that recipients can unsubscribe (also known as "Opt Out") at any time.

If you are broadcasting or engaging a 3rd party to do this for you, make sure you are familiar with all the Spam Act requirements.

Some organisations are exempt, such as charities, educational institutions and the government of course!

Read more on the Spam Act and Code of Practice here

IE8 out now...

IE8 is out of BETA and being pushed on the Microsoft website.

So does your website display OK in IE8? It's time to find out! You may need to throw a META tag into your website so it renders as IE7 until you fix any issues... "X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" Personally, I prefer Firefox.

View the tour of Microsoft IE8

You Tube down the tube?

It seems not even Google can escape the impact of bandwidth costs. Despite revenue going up 20% over last year and being responsible for 41% of all domestic video streams, the costs to serve all this data is a whopping $711 million dollars per year!!! And you thought your hosting was expensive.

What will this mean? More paid content on You Tube, that's what! Lots of family friendly videos from ABC and Disney...

Read full article here.

Friday Cool Stuff - Chrome Experiments

Make your browser talk... :-)
See more chromeexperiments here!