The 30 second Search Engine Optimization check is a nice article from Fizbang Web Design that will help you quickly analyze if your sites are optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Their neat approach focuses on content and performing your analysis with your monitor turned off!

As a happy Dreamhost customer, I am a regular visitor of their corporate blog. They recently posted a great article titled Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry that explores the nasties of web hosting review sites. They describe their experiences after being contacted by a prominant hosting review site. The reviews are supposed to unbiased, but it is clear that these review companies are a purely for profit organizations, that accept cash for top listings, then pass them off as honest reviews. It is an interesting read, and a good reason to take the reviews from these types of sites with a grain of salt.

From the creators of the fantastic Xyle Scope CSS debugging tool for OSX, comes a fantastic CSS 2.1 Reference. In my opinion this is the best reference available online. It’s very well organized and the interface is very snappy.

So you’ve been blogging for a few years now and are wondering if you could actually turn your blogging hobby into a full-time gig. How to Make Money From Your Blog is a great article that discusses just that topic. Even if you aren’t wanting to make money from your blog, there are still a lot of great suggestions on making your blog more ‘popular’.

If you’re looking to create a virtual digital darkroom, you should definately take a look at this collection of Photoshop CS2 Actions. All the actions are free and if you like them enough, send the creator a donation via PayPal. I recently used the Digital Velvia action to enhance a few pictures I took at a local park.

The WebServerXKit installer package :: Web Tools for Mac OS X by RBSoftware provides an easy way to install all the last versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Mac OS X.

The Dojo JavaScript Library offers a very niceRich Text Editing Box that can easily be incorporated into your web applications.

Crazy Egg is a nice web-based application that will help you improve the design of your web pages and web site. By inserting a small JavaScript snippet on your web pages, Crazy Egg will track where you’re users are clicking. This knowledge can be crucial to helping you design and place your navigation, content, and even revenue generating ads!

Yahoo! UI Library is now offering a collection of seven web page templates that generate Grids CSS. The templates offer the the ability to nest grids of one to four columns within the content area of those templates. This provides you with more than 100 page layouts with a single CSS file at just 1.82KB. The templates and CSS have A-Grade browser support and many other great options!

Richard Dooling has a nice tutorial that will have you running Python on Windows XP in 7 minutes. I’ve been using a bit of Python lately for automating some tasks on an older Windows Server. I could be using the old DOS Batch language, but instead decided to look at a fully featured, all purpose scripting language.