With the rise of social news sites, finding new content aggregation methods are pretty simple. And with how quickly the web is growing today, it’s simple to find micro-niche sites for just about anything. DotNetKicks is one of my personal favorite sites – similar do DZone, but only for .NET and ASP programming links.

I’ve been visiting the site for a while and have been a part of the community for a few months. However a mass e-mail has been sent out to all the site’s users announcing a new update they’ve done to the design. I’ll agree with their statements – the design looks very, very good!

Read More…

Template Monster has really made a name for itself over the past couple of years. Growing into the leading provide for website templates, clearly the company’s CEO David Braun is doing something right. I’ve been a huge fan of Template Monster for years now and have written about their blog earlier this year.

However with 2010 kicking around, I was intrigued to hear about how Template Monster is doing and where they may be heading. I’ve got a great interview with David below, discussing future plans for TM and where the company will be growing into.

Read More…

There are plenty of social news and media outlets today used for sharing and promoting articles. Especially once we break down website’s into niches and focus on the web design and graphics tutorials portion, we’ve got plenty of sites. However there appears to be a new launch for a Drigg-powered social news site, WebDev5.

The site’s design is sturdy and everything runs very smooth on the site. Just by checking out how the XHTML/CSS and JavaScript work together you can tell it’s not based on the popular Pligg CMS, but of course Drigg is an alternative which runs very nicely for a Digg-clone site.

Read More…

A riveting documentary and informative series just started last night on History Channel. Simply entitled America: The Story of Us, it contains featured interviews and discussions with important political leaders from everywhere around the US. Luckily for those who missed it, History Channel has some clips streaming from their website.

It appears to be a multi-part documentary series, and History Channel has spared no expense at running up to date pictures and videos from the series on their website. The design is simple to navigate and it’s easy to find information on the play times and content during the series, which I’m already a huge fan of.

Read More…

For a long, long time have I been looking for a great Plugin for Gmail to help manage my contacts. I send a lot of e-mails to a lot of different people, and it’s difficult to sort through all of my mail and attachments without getting lost in the thousands upon thousands of messages. However with the new browser plug-in MailBrowser, it’s actually pretty simple.

Currently only supported on Firefox and Internet Explorer, the plugin seems to run perfectly and works on mostly all OS’ (Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OSX, haven’t tried any Linux distros). It makes managing mail, contacts, and attachments so much easier than before, and the side panel is easily collapsible for more space.

Read More…

A new chatroom client has been released on the market, and it runs so smooth I can’t believe it’s not being used elsewhere. Donut Chat is my latest find in the ways of community and boards, and the software runs perfectly. I’m a huge fan of chat rooms, they’re useful as support forums, sharing ideas with friends and business partners… really anything.

Donut Chat is a new piece of software, used both standalone on your own domain (*.donutchat.com) and also embed-able into web pages. This makes setting up your own Chatroom really simple, and you can choose where you want it hosted and how your community interacts.

Read More…

There have been quite a few videos in regards to the new Adobe Creative Suite 5, most specifically Photoshop and design software. There have been a lot of updates from the not-so-old CS4 set of Web and Graphic design software.

Adobe currently controls a large portion of the digital media market, and with their newest brand of software this will allow them to bump their skills up another level. This means developers working with Adobe Dreamweaver will have a much easier time, and Illustrator/Photoshop are both getting facelifts with countless new graphical features.

Read More…