Accessible drop down menu.

UDM is a fully-featured and accessible DHTML menu, that provides useable content to all browsers - including screenreaders, search-engines, text-only browsers and any web enabled device such as PDAs, iPhones ®, and Blackberrys ®.

Accessible Website Menu: Ultimate Drop Down Menu 4.5 - List-based Semantic DHTML Menu

Screen Capture with ScreenHunter

I'm currently building a You-Tube styles video application. A sub-task of this is to create thumbnail images of all the videos in the player, and this is turning out to be quite a labourious print-screen-athon. I was having to print screen, past into a new Fireworks doc, crop the image to the size I wanted, export and save x 70 odd times. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Having seen the graphic deisgner in our office using a screen capture tool on his Mac the other day, I've gone about the task of finding something similar for Windows and after a quick Google search Ive discovered the following nifty free little tool called 'Screen Hunter'. Does everything I need and saves loads of time, mouse clicks and my sanity! Press F6 to start the capture tool, click and drag the rectangle to capture the area of the screen you want and your in! You can save to JPG or GIF and to a folder you specify on your PC.

Free Screen Capture - ScreenHunter

Free Flash Video Player (FLV) Player

If like you me, you are involved in Video Streaming production, the viewing of videos encoded in the Flash FLV format isnt a straightforward as you would have thought. You can't just double click the FLV to preview it, you need an external player, and this Free FLV Player is just the ticket!

It also displays important video properties of the stream such as the encoding video and audio bitrate's.

Free FLV Player

Create a Collapsible DIV with Javascript and CSS

This isn't a tool or application as such, but it's such a handy little trick for a web designer to use I thought I'd post it here. This is an excellent article that shows you how to show/hide DIVs on a web page by using some clever and simple JavaScript.

Although you are show and hiding content, it will not have a nagative impact on your SEO as Google with still index all the pages content using this method.

Harry Maugans » How to Create a Collapsible DIV with Javascript and CSS

See where I implemented it for for Kleeneze on their web site. Upon the user clicking a link, I showed and hid different client testimonials on a page.

Test your web design in different browsers - Browsershots

I recently stumpled across this excellent resource for checking your your web pages in different browsers and OS's. Crucially if you dont have a Mac, it supports this, in addition to Linux and Windows. I have seen a similar service called BrowserCam in the past but you had to pay lots of cash for their service, wont be using them again, "cash-back!".

Test your web design in different browsers - Browsershots

Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools

A good artcile I found on how to remove yours, and others, web pages from the Google Index.

Google Releases Improved Content Removal Tools

Free CSS Validation Service

I have sometimes been pulling my hair out as why a certain page element isn't displaying as it should and quite often this can be down to an easily typed and difficult to spot syntax error in your CSS file. When I come across such unexplainable problems I regularly validate my CSS just to make sure - it's also good practice to do so regardless!

Validate your site CSS file(s) with the following free validation service from the goodfellah's at the W3C. You can validate it against different versions of the CSS standard, the medium for which the sylesheet is to be embedded to and various different warning reports, so blaze away on the link below! You can even place a CSS valid button on your site and everything when you are valid - which is nice.

The W3C CSS Validation Service

PS - This site is CSS valid, naturally!

Magic DVD Ripper

Pretty good and cheap DVD ripper for download. I use this program as the first port of call when preparing video content on DVD for streaming on the web i.e I use it to rip a DVD to AVI format which then can be used to convert to Flash Streaming FLV or Windows Media Streaming ASF format.

"Thats MAGIC"!

Magic DVD Ripper - rip DVD to hard drive or blank DVD

Google Sitemap Generator @ xml-sitemaps.com

A spiffing online Google XML sitemap generator tool. Also, create HTML sitemaps for your t'internet site and CSV sitemaps for Yahoo. Pretty sweet. If you dont know what a Sitemap is read the below, mmmkay.

"By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly."

XML-SITEMAPS.COM

Search Engine Robot Simulator

A cool online tool that will simulate how a Search Engine bot will index your web page and display the results to you.

Search Engine Robot Simulator - XML Sitemaps

Encoding Best Practices for Prerecorded Flash Video

Quick tips for setting encoding parameters for Flash Video from Adobe.

Adobe - Developer Center : Encoding Best Practices for Prerecorded Flash Video