IconFinder, Cyclo.ps, and Smush.it

I have three new web tools to feature this week, all working with images.

Our first one is IconFinder, an icon search engine. They have a collection of over 120,000 icons to search from and offer .PNG and .ICO as the download options. Great little tool to add some positive user experience to your website.

The second tool is Cyclo.ps which is an image search engine, but it aggregates search results from BigStockPhoto, Cutcaster, Flickr, Fotolia, Photos.com, Shutterstock, stock.xchng, and stockvault.

The last website I have to feature is Smush.it, hosted on Yahoo! Developer Network. Smush.it is a lossless optimization tool, meaning it will reduce your image file size without jeopardizing your image's quality. This comes especially handy when you need to optimize your websites speed.

Online Storage

"Online storage? To store back-ups and other archives?" No, no, no. Not that kind of online storage. I'm talking about the kind that runs as a remote access drive, in real-time, allowing you to access your files from anywhere. In this post I'll talk about the benefits you could enjoy by switching to online storage and we'll look at a couple companies that offer this kind of service.

I recently started looking for online storage solutions to host my music library, have it stream to my iPhone over the 3G network and eliminate the need for me to sync with iTunes libraries which can be a real pain and cause a big mess.So I tried using DropBox (which also has an iPhone app).

DropBox installs itself as a folder, but all of it's content is accessible through the DropBox website and to who ever you decide to share a folder with. The free accounts offer 2GB of disk space, with an additional 250MB for every friend referral. If that's not enough space they also offer a 50GB and a 100GB plan which run at $9.99 and $19.99/month respectively.

I had issues with streaming music to my iPhone through DropBox and I wasn't exactly ready to put that much money into online storage so I kept looking.

Another online storage solution I found is ZumoDrive, which mounts itself as a remote drive.

ZumoDrive's free plan only has 1GB of space but they offer 10GB all the way to 500GB starting at $2.99/month. ZumoDrive also has an app for the iPhone so I signed up for a 25GB plan.

ZumoDrive works the same as DropBox by allowing you to share folders and also by having an interface for you to see your files through their website.

But I recently stumbled upon Online Storage Solutions which offers a much more interesting price. Their website says that they support file sharing and give you unlimited storage for $19.99/year. The service supports WebDav folders, FTP, transfer over SSL, backup with rSync, unlimited drive mount and claims to have a 99.9% uptime. What a deal!

Check out all the specs:

The only downside is they don't have an iPhone app for the service, which would require you to get ezShare lite (free) or ezShare Pro for $6.99 from the iTunes App Store. EzShare supports WebDav folder connections and can stream files to your iPhone, with the added capabilities to connect to Google Docs, FTP servers, Amazon S3, MobileMe, iDisk, Box.net and a couple others...

I think I'll be signing up with Online Storage Solutions soon. Having all of your files online means you don't need to worry about backups and they can be accessed from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. Combine that with a 16GB flash memory netbook and hello cloud surfing.

3 CSS tools that will save you time and optimize your code.

In this post I'll show you 3 CSS tools that will save you time and optimize your code when finishing up a project.

The first one of this list is blueprintcss which resets the CSS to allow cross-browser formatting and also provides a template of tags to speed up coding time.

W3C CSS Validator's name speaks for itself, it checks your code for errors and gives you tips on how to consolidate your code.

The last one is CleanCSS which gets rid of any unnecessary markup or spacing, converts to shorthand and compresses your code.

With these tools at hand you should end up with and optimized and compliant CSS file which will be more readable for browsers and will speed up loading time.