Links
The following are a few places I'd just like to share and/or find handy.
Usability and Accessibility
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Whilst often poorly worded in a legalese that's hard to digest, this is THE go-to guide for how to make sure your website is usable to as many users as possible. A number of places in the world -- like the United Kingdom -- will actually fine you for failing to follow these guidelines depending on the nature of your site. As such if you are going to call yourself a professional, it is in your best interest to know it!
Nielsen Norman Group
One of the FEW places left that actually bothers testing on actual users, instead of just wildly pulling claims out of their arse like most "designers" and alleged experts in the field. Their entire articles section is filled with examples of places where things considered hot and trendy generally just piss all over the usability of websites or other media. If you are creating anything that will involve user interaction, it is in your best interest to spend a few minutes EVERY day to read any new articles, and back-read whatever you can spare the time to!
Naturally their calling into question trendy flashy stuff is why most of the ignorant fools running around calling themselves "designers" rail against the mere mention of NNGroup. It puts to lie all of their ignorant "gee ain't it neat" flashy BS, and generally means the skillsets of these graphic artists under the delusion they know what design is simply does not apply to making a good user experience.
Web Development
Digital Point Forums
While some of the members can be a bit "mercenary" in certain sections, this web development forum is one of the few places you can speak your mind freely without worries about some namby pamby wuss getting their painties in a wad and running to the moderators with "wah, wah, wah, he said something negative". Unlike some other sites with "point" in the name!
Mozilla Developer Network
While not always presenting the best in code examples, this is still one of the best references online for HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Certainly a far cry better than some of the scam artist web-rot out there like W3Schools.
Web Design Group - HTML 4 Reference
While one of the oldest references online, it remains one of the best in terms of taking the specification and turning it into plain digestible ENGLISH, instead of vague legalese. While it only talks about HTML 4 that's fine -- you should have a full command of HTML 4 Strict before you even THINK about 5 anyways. Besides if you learn to use 4 Strict properly and understand it's intent, you'll quickly come to question just what benefits 5 actually brings to the table.
Specific Articles
Lame Excuses for Not Being a Web Professional
Whilst written "way back" in 2007 this extremely insightful article is as true today as it was then. People come up with endless excuses for why they are taking the lazy, sleazy, or just plain ignorant aproach to development. This article outlines the most common of these excuses -- in particular the hypocrisy shown by most people who repeat them endlessly.
In general the articles over at 456 Berea Street are worth taking the time to go through.
Six ways to write more comprehensible code
Written from the point of view of writing C code, I consider this one to be worth a read by anyone writing code regardless of the language. Clear verbose names for variables and functions mated to sane commenting practices can be the difference between incomprehensible gibberish, and easy to maintain codebases. Simply put, some people seem determined to make their code as hard to work with as possible through needlessly and pointlessly cryptic names on elements, mated to comments that they wouldn't even need if they just used meaningful names on things!
Some of my other sites
Deathshadow's Madness
My personal page for other computing/language projects. Pascal, Assembler, and software for vintage systems are all to be found here.
EWIUSB.COM
A page I put together to document the EWI USB. What's a EWI you ask? "Electronic Wind Instrument" -- a breath pressure and touch sensor device that acts as a MIDI controller allowing woodwind players to control synthesizers.
