To start the new year off on a fresh start, I have finally redesigned DMM. I was pretty happy with the last design, but felt it was time to renew the look. The new design is a bit more “blog-like” but my main goal was to widen the content area so that I can present screencasts in the content are more easily. Screencasting is regular feature that I hope to post regularly this year. I also have some ideas for the left sidebar that you should see appear within the next week or so. I am also going to bring back the rotating banner image (a popular item in the design before the last).

I hastily updated the site before Christmas with the hopes of cleaning it up over the holidays. Well we got pretty busy and the time to clean it up didn’t happen. So I know that the overall design is still not quite done. I need to spend a bit more time on validatation (a necessary evil) and there are some issues with the footer on IE6 that need to be fixed.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to become active in the open source community. Seeing as Wordpress my most used open source application, it seems only logical that I participate in their community. So starting now, this blog is being powered by the WP2.1 nightly builds. I know that running a production site on unstable code is a little risky, but I’m brave and prepared to submit great bug reports. I actually haven’t found any problems yet, but that’s not to say I won’t come across any in the near future. On the topic of WP2.1, I am really enjoying the new features added to the admin backend. Features like post auto-saving and the reorganization of comment management, make this blogging tool a pleasure to use!

Maybe a bit late to put these gifts under the Christmas tree, but if you’re like me and buy yourself a Christmas present every year, you should check out this list of 77 Design Gifts Under $77. My favorite on this list is FlipClips. Upload a short video clip, and they send you back a small flip book that you flip through to see your video.

Oh - and what am I buying myself this year? An Asus R2H UMPC!

Mapstraction is a javascript library that hides differences between mapping APIs. It provides a common set of JavaScipt functions that lets you switch seamlessly between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s javascript mapping APIs.

Tag this one as cool - Data Generator is a simple web-based tool that lets you create large volumes of random, custom data for use in testing software. You can have your data formatted in HTML tables, CSV or SQL statements. They also offer a free desktop application that will generate larger sets of data. Check it out next time your in need of sample data.

Adobe has just launched the Adobe - Flex Cookbook Beta site. The site contains a list of problems, solutions and explanations that will help you in your daily Flex development. I really wish this site was available a few months ago when I first started working with Flex 2.0. Upon first glance though, I can immediately see the value that this site will have for those beginning their Flex adventures! If you contribute a solution to the cookbook, you may a chance to have your solution published by O’Reilly.

A couple of weeks ago, two web based services launched that allow any web designer to add a commenting and rating system to any page they create. Both of these systems can be incorporated into your pages by adding a very simple snippet of JavaScript code to your page.

• Star It! is a star rating system that allows visitors to rate your content using a 5 star system.
• JS Kit if a fully featured threaded comment system.

Of course the upside of these tools are that they are simple to use. The downside is that your data is stored in somebody else’s database so you need to have some trust that these services will be around for a while.

Half way through December and it’s time to start thinking about what your New Years resolutions might be. If one of them ends up being starting a blog, you might want to check out this article titled - 25 Steps to Launching Your Blog and Making $100+ A Month in 30 Days. Although it is probably unrealistic that you will ever make $100 a month with a new blog, the article is focused mainly on how to start a blog and it is only the last three tips that speak specifically to generating revenue.

DOM Tool is a cleaver web-based tool that gives you a text area to enter structured HTML, then creates the appropriate JavaScript to create the same HTML content using the DOM. I could have used this a few months ago while I was working on a DOM-based project.

Sponsored review:

Do you know the difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO? Why are the title element and image alt attributes important to help increase your search engine traffic? Need help understanding search engine marketing acronyms like SEO, SEM, SERP and PPC?

Search Engine Marketing Glossary is a site that is chalked full of extremely useful terms and definitions relating to the search engine optimization industry. This type of information can be useful to help you learn about techniques employed by search engine optimizers (SEO) and can be a great resource if you are thinking about employing a SEO firm to help your websites visibility on Google or other search engines. Even if SEO is not your main interest, you can still get succinct definitions about terms that relate to web development/design in general.

Each term is well defined and full of links to other sites that help explain the content using full length articles giving you a broader perspective on the search engine optimization. It will even help you gain a better understanding of the search industry in general.

Another interesting feature about this glossary is that it is published under a Creative Commons license that allows you to reuse and edit the content as you see fit. This could be valuable if you are selling search engine visibility services to your clients.

S3 Firefox Organizer is a Firefox extension that will let you transfer files to and from your Amazon S3 account. The UI is pretty simple and works quite well. My only beef with is that the extension does a poor job of representing folders on your S3 account. Otherwise, the extension works as promised. For those of you not familiar with the Amazon S3 service, it is a great and cheap way to store/backup your data offsite.