Google searches mail-order catalogs. JC Whitney, the online version of the magnificent old paper catalog for automobile parts. Edmund Scientific. The Estes model rockets catalog, present-day, and the Estes catalog from 1973. Campmor and REI.
A FAQ on linking databases to Openoffice.org, another FAQ with answers about specific databases, and links to external resources addressing these issues, all at dba.openoffice.org. OpenOffice, ODBC, and MySQL HowTo (PDF). Using Microsoft Access databases in OpenOffice.org. Rick Morris asks “are there any good reasons to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL?” and answers “yes.” Buy Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael J. Hernandez. MySQL Gotchas and Why Not MySQL? Yet another PostgreSQL vs. MySQL review. How to relate tables and databases with MySQL using phpMyAdmin. phpMyEdit — a phpMyAdmin alternative? The MySQL Manual.
Jukka Korpela on footnotes and endnotes in webpages. You can use OpenOffice.org, which records linked notes in its HTML-editing mode just fine. Don’t forget to count the words in footnotes.
The Text Encoding Initiative: “TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standard that helps libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars represent all kinds of literary and linguistic texts for online research and teaching, using an encoding scheme that is maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent.” Jeffrey Veen on accessible design, with links to examples. Position Is Everything: a CSS site with an emphasis on designing around browser quirks (good links, too). CSS column layouts compatible with Netscape 4.x (and more here, too). How to use CSS to make line spacing consistent when using superscript and subscript characters. Design Detector pulls an extreme CSS stunt.
Coppermine is a package of PHP scripts that lets you serve galleries of images from a server. Coppermine has a FAQ, an online manual, and a forum full of help, as well as an online demo. There’s also a stylesheet guide that helps with changing Coppermine themes.
Sitepoint.com web design forums, including PHP and server discussions. A PHP tutorial at php.net. How web servers work. How domain name servers work. Apache documentation. Using Apache with Windows. “PHP, MySQL, and Images” (William Samplonius). “Binary Data + MySQL + PHP: How to Store Images Directly in the Sql Database” (Florian Dittmer) (but lots of people say this is a bad idea). Webmonkey PHP resources (oldish). Anybrowser.org. Webstandards.org. Anitra Pavka’s accessibility weblog (nicely designed by other measures, too!). Bugmenot: password sharing service. Mailinator: One-use e-mail addresses.
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams. “The Social Life of Paper” by Malcolm Gladwell. Read Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe one word at a time. Herman Krieger’s Churches ad Hoc: A Divine Comedy. The world produced half a million Libraries of Congress of print, film, and magnetically or optically stored data in 2002 (double the output in 1999), according to “How Much Information? 2003,” a report by researchers at UC-Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems.
“The Semantic Web” — Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila in Scientific American, May 2001. Some cogent skepticism about semantic markup. “XHTML 2.0 Considered Harmful” thread at lists.w3c.org. HTML table art. HTML preprocessors: The Dolt and PPWizard. The University of Minnesota-Duluth’s web design reference page, including lots of PHP links.
DBDesigner4. MySQL Control Center. phpMyAdmin (seems widely used). DbVisualizer (cross-platform, cross-database). The book on MySQL: Paul DuBois’s MySQL Cookbook.
Considerations (beyond the obvious) for choosing when to use id and class attributes, and Mark Newhouse’s Environmental Style essay. Also Tantek Çelik on using only “a touch of class.” Barry Pearson on the history of tables in HTML and deficiencies in CSS positioning. Links to about a thousand websites that get along without layout tables. David Dorward presents an IE hack to enable centering of block elements with CSS. Tableless layout links at allmyfaqs.com. A CSS positioning and box model tutorial at brainjar.com. Styling forms with CSS. Will the browser apply the rule? — A nice chart at centricle.com.
