So I’m going away for a couple of days and won’t be able to post and I came up with the idea of sort of listing my top 10.5 sites. Not necessarily the best on the web but the ones I use the most frequently and find the most useful. Perhaps you might find something you like.

10.5: BogeyWebDesign.com - not even rating a full number, but I’m always updating my site. I’d be surprised if the number of (non me) page views was over a dozen a week, but maybe you’ll find a template or idea you can steal.

10: Smedlock.com - I’m a geek, I admit it. I play Magic the Gathering. And this is one of the best sites to pick up cards on the net and I have never had any problems from them.

9: MySpace - I almost hate to put this one up here. I probably use Wordpress more, but I like the fact that you can share information easily with you friends. Not many of my friends have/read blogs or are into CSS and web design. But most of them have a MySpace.

8: Open Source Web Design - A huge, free collection of open source templates from beginners to experts. Stick to XHTML with CSS and you’ll find tons of great designs you can just plug your information to and have an amazing site. For free.

7: Web Developer’s Handbook - A huge collection of resources from Web 2.0 sites, to CSS and HTML tools and all the way down to color pallette generators and free stock photography. Awesome tool for designers.

6: CSSPlay - One of the best collections of CSS on the web. Anytime I need something neat, I look here first. The only problem is that anytime I think I’ve done something original, I usually find that he’s already done it.

5: MeyerWeb - The King of CSS. Enough said.

4: DilbertBlog - Scott Adams’ Dilbert is one of the funniest comic strips out there, especially if you’ve ever worked in a cubicle. The only thing funnier is Scott Adams himself.

3: CssZenGarden.com - The single greatest collection of CSS on the net in my opinion. If I had half the skill of some of the people that have designs on here I’d be all right. Hopefully, one day, I’ll make one and have it accepted.

2: Del.icio.us - This is my new obsession. I love the fact that I can store all my bookmarks in one place, categorize them easily and even share them with my friends. Awesome.
1: Digg.com - I am constantly checking this site for interesting stories, great deals or even some useful CSS and web design stuff. I have yet to post or get an account, but I may yet when I have more time.

Hopefully you found something interesting that you had not seen. I just realized most were design sites, but that has been my main focus the last year or so - so I guess that makes sense. I’m sure I’ll have a revision down the road. What is your top 10.5 sites?

Random Tidbit: Want to get to know me a little more? Of course you don’t. But I’m gonna toss my MySpace up here anyways. Logon and check out my weasel - my ferret Mugsy. She gets top billing because she’s cuter and works for Skittles.

Ok, maybe not the Holy Grail - Indiana Jones was not involved.  But still a neat template.  It’s a simple, fluid design.  In the source, which is what the search engines see, the order goes content, left navigation, right, header, and then footer.  So they get a good feel of your site as well as the links to go through it - if you use the left area for internal navigation.  It re-sizes up to 2 text increases with no failure in both IE and Mozilla - I have to start testing in Opera soon - and will fill the browser window in each - slight glitch in IE where sometimes right will drop down the pop back up for a second, I blame Microsoft.

Left and right will cover 20% of the available space and - for those of you bad at math - content the other 60%.  The header is 100px tall - I may update this to 10em to make more fluid later on - and the wrapper holding the 3 main divs has a 100px padding.  Changing both will expand the header and push the content down.  I also found a neat trick to position things at the bottom of the window.  I may also move the footer down to whichever is further down - the bottom of the browser window or the bottom of the content.  That may be tricky though and I wanted to get this out for now.  I should have a 2 column one out soon - if you wanted to convert this one simply delete the left or right, add the 20% to either or both of the ones left and change the margin-left if need be.

I also have not had time to add graphics to anything.  Between work - I work on a major companies family of job boards - and some recent job opportunities that have sprung up, I have been straight out.  I’m hoping to rectify this soon.

Random Tidbit: Two interesting space happenings.  One is Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system.  Pretty impressive that something that old is still going strong.  Also, after almost kicking Pluto out of the ‘family’ the tide has changed and they’re thinking of adding 3 new planets to the solar system - nothing as cool as Uranus though.  I’m almost willing to bet 10 bucks Google will buy one of them.  They buy everything else that’s new (2.0) - not that that’s a bad thing.

I posted an update to my site including 2 new open source templates.  One is setup for a small business, with space marked out for ads, your logo and some neat CSS buttons.  I won’t be adding graphics to this one since if it’s used as it’s intended, you would have your own company graphics.  I’m hoping to edit the XHTML some more to improve the SEO.  Right now the content comes after the links and the ads.  I definitely want to move the ads lower in the source (but keep the display the same).  I would probably keep the links where they are for now.

The second template is sort of a Web 2.0 inspired and could be good for a personal, portfolio or blog site.   This has the content right after the header in the source code - and the header should hold your site/company name and perhaps a slogan or SEO statement.  So the SEO is very strong.  I do want to add an image to this one at some point, probably in the background.

I have some nice templates that form 2 column and 3 column sites - with headers and footers - that are strong SEO-wise.  They have the content, then the links in the source code.  I should have more of those by the end of the week and hopefully will get around to getting them up on Open Source Web Design.

Both templates are valid CSS and XHTML 1.1.

Random Tidbit: Yankees are 3 games up on my Sox and I can’t even watch them.  Usually when I can’t watch them, we win.  I still say the wild card comes out of the central and the Sox take the East for the first time in how many years?

So lately I’ve been searching for a little inspiration and I’ve found two tools that when used together are very interesting.  One is Free Stock Photography.  They have tons of high resolution, royalty free images that are interesting as potential backgrounds.  Even just cutting a small portion of some of the landscapes and using them to create a pattern might be interesting.

The problem is when you find an image, figuring out what color scheme to use to best fit the images you have or get from the site.  Well, I found a nice Color Palette Generator that takes in a 600px or less image and gives you a matching palette.  Pretty neat.  I’m hoping to use this to generate some template sites very soon.

That’s all for now.  Been pretty busy at work and updating my site when I get home.  Hopefully I’ll have something to show soon.

Random Tidbit: If you haven’t checked out del.icio.us yet, do it.   Basically, it’s a social bookmarking site.  Meaning you can bookmark neat sites you find and share them with your network of friends.  In addition, it allows you to organize them with tags.  If you’re like me, and most designers, you have a large number of local bookmarks - at work, on your various computers - and no real cohesion.  This allows you to import them from your browser and save them all on there.  So you can have access to your entire bookmark collection and organize them very simply so that you can easily find what you are looking for.  I keep a great deal of mine private, but I’m going to start changing that as I go through mine in the next few weeks.  Feel free to check out my public ones - and send me a network invite if you want.  At the very least, use it.  It’ll save you a lot of time and it’s a cool site to boot.

Saw an interesting article talking about who was more clutch, Larry Legend or Big Papi? Some interesting points and maybe I’m a biased opinion, having just read Bird Watching, but I think not only is Larry Legend more clutch, but he’s also the greatest basketball player ever. Now, he says in his book that Michael is, but we all know Larry was the man. He put Boston on the map in the 80s, let the Big Three and brought us championships. Enough said. He was a fierce competitor and made everyone who played with him better. And his book was pretty good too.

I even thought about writing to him and asking him for an autograph for my dad. I think that would make his decade as some of my earliest memories are of me and him watching the Celtics and Lakers. Being young and foolish I saw him rooting for the Celtics and rooted for the Lakers to irk him (I’ve since smartened up). Unfortunately, just as I was really becoming interested in sports and realizing what we had in Boston was right around the time Larry called it a career. Anyways, I thought about it, but decided against it based upon his book - he mentions many times that he doesn’t like all the attention. Still, it would be cool to give my dad a picture of Larry Legend with the writing “To (insert my dad’s name here), from Larry Bird.”

Random Tidbit: Before you get irked that this is under CSS and Web Design I just wanted to mention I did get around to updating my site with my new style. I still haven’t figured out the graphics problem yet, and have been too disenfranchised to even try, but I think it looks halfway decent as is. It’ll look better when I polish it. Also, I put up 2 new (related) templates of sorts - click-able, CSS only US maps. There is a small version and a larger one - both images are transparent to let your background bleed through. If you do use it, let me know.