Winner of PaperbackSwap’s Twitter Background Contest

I found out last night that I had won PaperbackSwap‘s Twitter background contest. I had submitted a few different designs, but one of them seemed to be a favorite since it won both the People’s Choice award and the PBS Team Choice award! I really could not have done it without my darling Brooke Mello‘s help though, she urged me on after I was going to give up and had me design the background with the packaging motif. PaperbackSwap was really generous with the prizes, so I will definately have plenty to read this summer, and for a couple of years to come. Please check out PaperbackSwap’s Twitter page where the winning backgrounds will be rotated, and here’s the contest results announcement from their blog. If you are not already a member of the used-book-trading website PaperbackSwap.com I highly recommend checking them out. If you more into DVDs or CDs they also have the sister sites SwapaDVD.com and SwapaCD.com.

Blog Included in Abduzeedo’s 50 Awesome Blog Designs List

Thanks to Paulo from Abduzeedo for adding my blog to their list of 50 Awesome Blog Designs – Part 1. I have been a frequent reader of the Brazilian design site (don’t worry it’s in English) so it is nice little surpise to be included.

My apologies to everybody for not posting in a long while. I will start blogging more again, I promise, and now that I have started using jQuery I might have something interesting to write about. If you are interested in receiving updates to this blog, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Taking Website Screenshots Using Screengrab!

I used to take screenshots of websites with Print Screen and then in Photoshop crop the part that I wanted to keep, but I always figured that there had to be a better way. So after I installed Firefox 3 I went looking for good extensions and I came upon Screengrab! created by Andy Mutton. This excellent Firefox extension lets you take a screenshot of a selected portion of the page, what is visible on the screen, or the whole page scrolled down all the way to the bottom. This last option is fantastic when you need a screenshot of the entire page, which might be several screenfuls all the way to the footer, and there is no cutting and pasting involved. The extension automatically removes all of the browser chrome from the image so you will not see the navigation bar and tabs at the top or the scrollbar to the right. You have the option of either saving the screenshots as PNG or JPG images, or copy the image to the Clipboard so that you can paste it in your favorite image editing application.

Blog Included in Six Revisions’ Top 25 List

Jacob Gube from Six Revisions recently wrote an article called 25 Outstanding WordPress Designs that featured 25 handpicked WordPress blog designs. I was honored that my blog was picked and included in this great company; two of my personal favorites from this list are ISO50 (check out the beautiful prints) and coda.coza. If you are not familiar with Six Revisions you should really give it a read. It is one of a handful of web development/design sites that I frequently visit to find out about new techniques and to be inspired. Here are a couple of great articles to get you started: 30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples and 9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension.

CSS Galleries Galore

At first thought it might seem like a strange concept to name galleries that showcase exceptional website designs after a computer style sheet language, but once you understand how CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) revolutionized website design it makes perfect sense. CSS has simplified the creation of great and consistent-looking websites by separating the content from the way it is presented. CSS galleries are awesome sources for inspiration when creating a new website or blog, and if you make it a habit to follow the featured websites in the CSS galleries you can easily spot new trends, and maybe even tell what the next big thing is.