Today I came across a great little site that lets you get the links to the latest versions of the most popular javascript libraries quickly and easily.

You find your library on the page and click the ‘Copy’ button. Then all the code you need to include the library in your page is copied to your clipboard.

I really like simple, easy to use sites like this that do one thing and do it well rather than trying to do too much.

The Google Font API allows you to use any font from their font directory or you can use the font loader to load other fonts which they co-developed with TypeKit.

Using the Google Font API

There’s no point in re-inventing the wheel so I’ll just link to a great article and video guide by Jeffrey Way over at Nettuts. You can have a look at his article here.

Other Info

The great thing about the Google Fonts API is the fact that you can still use CSS3 effects on your text if you want to. As for page performance, obviously the initial download may slow your page down slightly but they do try to cache everything to minimise and extra loading times, just make sure you don’t try and load too many fonts!

Lately I’ve been messing around learning ASP.NET MVC which has been interesting, but I haven’t had time for much else. Luckily I’ve done a lot of PHP and classic ASP programming so the c# syntax wasn’t too new and I love CodeIgniter so the MVC part wasn’t scary either.

Now I’m working on trying to set up a database access layer in Visual Studio to connect to a Sybase database we have on the development server at work which isn’t so straight forward. Maybe I should start using Twitter so I can just tweet when I get stuck with things like this.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on one of my clients sites and updating my portfolio site to make it look a bit better. I was thinking of re-doing this site so it’s a bit more simple but I’m worried about damaging my rankings in the search engines. I’ll have to give it some thought.

In the future I’m going to try and add more tutorial posts and less roundup posts because I think there’s waayyy too many of those on the internet now, my RSS reader is packed full of them.

Finally, I ordered the Smashing Magazine book (not an affiliate link) last week (a bit late, I know) but I’ll maybe get some photos and or a review up when it comes and I’ve had a chance to look at it.

Edit: Ok, I’ve decided I’m going to try using Twitter again, this time properly…hopefully! http://twitter.com/jmz360

I’ve been learning loads about CodeIgniter and Doctrine when I’ve had time aswell and I’d really like to write a few blog posts on that when I’m not as busy but it looks like I’m going to have loads of work on for the next month or two at least.

Hopefully when I get back to having time to post here I’ll come back with loads of great ideas for articles.

Freelance Radio

Like all of the other Envato sites, Freelance Switch is pretty awesome and the official Freelance Switch podcast, Freelance Radio doesn’t let down either. They have talked about everything from working on the road to social networking.

I’ve only just started listening to this podcast but I liked it so much, I downloaded every single episode from iTunes and I’m listening to them in order.

Freelance Advisor

This is another podcast based around freelancing. I do like this podcast a lot as it’s one of the only UK based ones I have found which means a lot of the stuff in terms of accountancy etc is more relevant to me.

The podcast is founded by the same people that make the Crunch accounting system, however I haven’t found it to be too promotional.

Tweak

Tweak is a podcast aimed at creative entrepreneurs that is created by Josh Iwata. In his podcast he goes through important things such as choosing a pricing level, how to manage a project and how his design phase works.

You can watch the video below and read more information on it on the official google blog.

The new theme is up, I’ve updated the about me page and the new contact form on the contact page will be up tonight.

I looked at my feedburner stats and amazingly there are still people subscribed! I just want to say thanks to those people for not deleting my feed while I’ve been lazy and haven’t updated the site. I’ll be doing my very best to keep the site updated regularly from now on.

If there are any tutorials or articles you would like me to write, please let me know in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. I know there are a few people that have asked for horizontal and vertical drop down menus so I’ll have a look at writing those in the near future.

Because of work and commitments and freelance jobs I’ve had to pretty much put all of my projects on hold.

PikFolio (which was almost ready to launch) has had to be put to one side for now as I just don’t have the time to work on it. I’m hoping that in the future, I’ll have some time to streamline the whole app to make it a bit less complicated and feature rich. Then I can launch it and add new features as I go so that the whole thing doesn’t get so overwhelming.

I’m almost finished my first premium WordPress theme, which I’m hoping to sell on ThemeForest. I literally need to do some screenshots and prepare the files for download and I’m done. Hopefully that will be submitted and approved this week, although since it’s my first one I’ve got no idea how long they take to approve or even if it will be approved. I’ll get a preview up here when it’s done (if it’s not against their TOS) and a link to the ThemeForest site where you can buy it. If all goes well with this one, I have 2 or 3 other blog templates to code and add.

Finally, I’m learning to use CodeIgniter because I think it will speed up the time I take to develop larger PHP projects. I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far so some time in the future I’ll have some apps made with that to show off.