My Junk Drawer of Tips & Tricks

You know what a junk drawer looks like. I bet you even have one (or two).

Well, this post is about as random as that junk drawer. It’s an assortment of tips and tricks I’ve recently found helpful. Most of these may be junk to you, but maybe you’ll find one gem you can use. 🙂

p.s. All resources below are free.

Random Resources

Style Tiles

Are you a web designer? Before you ever get to the point of showing a client comps, start with Style Tiles, an awesome Photoshop template to help you nail down the mood of a site before you set to designing.

http://styletil.es/

Typespiration

Looking for ideas on Google font combinations or color palette’s? Check out Rafal Tomal‘s community collection of web font combinations with ready-to-use CSS codes, color schemes and web-safe font families.

http://typespiration.com/

Facebook Developer Debug for Open Graph

Ever had the wrong featured image showing up with your shared links on Facebook? It’s usually an open graph issue. While this is not guaranteed to fix your problem, it’s definitely worth a try (as my mom says, “Can’t hurt. Might help!”).

You can force Facebook to flush its cache, by entering your site URL here:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Once you’ve entered your site URL, click on “Fetch new scrape information” to refresh Facebook’s cache.

Google Analytics URL Builder

This is a handy tool you can use to generate custom campaign parameters for your advertising URLs. Assuming you’re already using Google Analytics, this will help you see which clicks were generated from a custom campaign link.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Mobilegeddon! AghhhH!! Want to see your site through Google’s beady robot eyes? Run your URL through this test and see if your site gets the “mobile-friendly” designation with Google search results.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Twitter History/Research

If you want to deep dive into Twitter history (starting waaay back in 2006) you can do it via Twitter’s public API or pay for a more user-friendly experience like BrandMentions.

https://brandmentions.com/blog/twitter-historical-data/

BrandColors

I wasn’t kidding about random tips here. The BrandColors website shows you the HEX values of the logos for the world’s biggest brands. What are you going to do with that information? I have no idea, but here’s the link, just in case:

http://brandcolors.net/

FontAwesome CSS Values

Want to use FontAwesome icons via CSS instead of HTML? Here’s a cheat sheet of those CSS values along with an example of how to use them:

http://astronautweb.co/snippet/font-awesome

Download YouTube Videos

Okay, this is so fun it’ll knock your socks clean off. Just add pwn in front of youtube in the address bar of any YouTube video and you’ll get lots of options for downloading the audio or video.

Hat tip to Alain Schlesser for this one!

Tota11y

For those of you looking to make the web a more accessible place, Tota11y helps you visualize how a site will work with assistive technologies.

http://khan.github.io/tota11y/

Unminify

Got hold of some minified code that you’d like to expand out so you can actually read it? Meet Unminify. It’s a free tool that works with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

http://unminify.com/

The Best WordPress Plugins Ever Created Since the Dawn of Time

This is a killer list of great WordPress plugins written by Rob Neu, I guy I trust hands down when it comes to vetting the quality of a plugin. So, if you’ve ever hunted a list of recommended plugins for WordPress, most definitely bookmark this one:

http://www.wpsitecare.com/best-wordpress-plugins/

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