A hilarious chart explains the Time Breakdown of Modern Web Designers. Have you been there yourself? I have!

[link via Dustin Diaz]

Thomas Silkjær has created a WordPress plugin that will createLanding Pages for your Blog. I never really understood landing pages before I read his article, but if you follow his example you should immediately understand them, and at the same time, see the value in using them. I am already begining to think about how I will use this in my client websites!

Validaty is a Firefox extenstion from Henrik Gemal that provides one-click HTML validation from your toolbar. If validation succeeds, the toolbar button turns green, if bad, it turns red and gives you the option to view the validation report.

I just finished listening to Jason Fried of 37 Signals speak at the SXSW Keynote today.  If you’re an aspiring web entrepreneur you should definately listen to what he has to say.  If you aren’t fortunate enough to hear him speak in person, you can now download his latest e-book titled - Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application that has some really neat ideas on how to build a web app and the bennefits of starting small.

Alexander Kirk offers 10 Realistic Steps to a Faster Web Site!  This is a rather technical look at speeding up web sites and goes far beyond the old reduce your page size by using web standards and semantic markup (even those are part of any solution), but instead deals with network latency, rendering issues, cache control and using reverse proxies.

P.J. Onori has created an interesting and clever set of web icons that can be changed to any color simply by setting the CSS background-color property of the img tag that points to the icon.

Over the last few years there have been many studies on the popularity of authoring techniques such as what HTML ids and classes are most common. The most recent study was done by Google. Their study on Web Authoring Statistics is quite interesting and shows many statistics for authoring behaviour in the following groups…

• Pages
• Elements
• Classes
• HTTP headers
• Page headers
• Metadata
• The body element
• Text elements
• Table elements
• Link relationships
• The a element
• The img element
• Scripting
• Editors

If you made a New Year’s resolution to redesign your blog, you may want to start with  Rachel Cunliffe’s list of current Blog Design Trends.

Another advent calendar worth reading is 24 ways. Again a post every day from December 1 to December 24 except this calendar post totally awesome general web development tutorials.

When Matt Brett read that IE was going to standardize the RSS icon to be the same as the one in Firefox, he got pretty excited and created vector-based versions of the new feed icon. They can be downloaded in Illustrator (ai) and Photoshop (psd) formats.