Catch404 is a jQuery and CSS3 Modal Plugin for showing broken links and 404 errors without users even having to leave the page after they click the actual link. The plugin uses the power of AJAX to check the target clicked link in the background. If the URL is not broken nor generates a 404 error, then the page will load for the user. Otherwise, the visitor would be prompted through an Inline jQuery Modal Window that he is trying to access a non-workable URL address.

Let’s pretend that this is a broken link. Can you imagine that when your users click this link, instead of them being redirected to a 404 error on your site, a friendly modal message pops up on your current page saying that it’s not available?. In that same message box you can then give them a sense of direction so that they’re not lost – you could ask them to click on a contact link to report the link’s broken, offer an alternative mirror, recommend they do a site search for the file or just say that you’re experiencing hosting issues and the file will be back up soon.

Daniel Scocco, the owner of DailyBlogTips.com (a blog I personally enjoy reading) released a new project called “How to make a website – Free tutorial” that basically teaches you how to get a site up and running in a matter of hours. He covers how to choose the domain, how to get the hosting plan, how to install WordPress, how to choose a nice template and how to customize the website design.

HowtoMakeaWebsite.net offers a free 26 pages e-book titled “50 Mistakes to Avoid When Making Your Website.”. This is for beginners, but I am sure even the experienced web developer will pick some good points by reading it. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

16. Using The Wrong Font Color / Background
Apart from using a large font, you should also makesure that the font and background colors are producing a good contrast.
For example, it is very hard to read a yellow font on a white background. If possible stick with the basic color palletes: dark font on white background or white font on dark background.
17. Not Testing On Different Browsers
Different browsers interpret HTML code differently, so it is important to check how your website is loading at least on the major browsers (e.g., IE 8, IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera).
You can use a tool called BrowserShots.org for this purpose. It is free and easy to use.
18. Making Links Look Like Normal Text
Your visitors must must be able to identify what is clickable and what is not on your website.
The standard is to underline links. Alternatively you can change the color of the links.
19. Not Changing Color of Visited Links
It is also important to change the color of visited links. This is a common practice around the web, as it allows visitors to know what pages they have been to in the past.

Lightbox_me aims to be a simple solution to lightbox a DOM element without having all the fanciness of all the lightbox-related plug-ins out there. It’s an essential tool for the jQuery developer’s toolbox. Feed it a DOM element wrapped in a jQuery object and it will lightbox it for you, no muss no fuss.

Features include:

• Handles overlay resize when the window is resized
• Handles overlay size in cases where the document is smaller than the window
• Handles position: fixed in all browsers
• Position: fixed automatically swaps to position: absolute when the window size is smaller than the modal, so the user can scroll to see the contents
• Tiny footprint (just over 1000 bytes gzipped & compressed)
• Small DOM overhead (adds 1 DOM element for the overlay)
• Dynamic iFrame shim is created and destroyed for the IE 6 select box peek issue (tested and working on HTTPS pages)

After much procrastination, affiliate blogger Zac Johnson released Six Figure Affiliate Blogging (‘How you can be the next $100,000 blogger’), a 97 page free guide where you’re guided through the process of building a blog, creating a brand, and replicate the same process Zac’s using to generate over 6 figures a year with his blogs and affiliate marketing. Since he started his own blog a few years ago, it’s opened up a whole new world of revenue generation, branding and much more.

This book is a must have if you want to discover how to find a blog niche and use affiliate marketing to generate revenue from that blog.

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Jeff Star, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, has sent me a copy of Digging into WordPress v2 for review. He has written this book with co-author and master designer Chris Coyer of CSS-Tricks. The eleven chapter book, packed with 400+ pages of WordPress tutorials, techniques, tips and tricks was released after a year of production, design, planning and writing.

WordPress is currently the most popular publishing platform. It focuses on aesthetics, web standard and usability. It’s famous for its 5-minutes installation and comes with a complete user-contributed documentation. This is one of the reasons I like working with WordPress. Starting as just a blogging system, it has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more to the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination (and tech chops).

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Built by Alethia Inc., Open Standard Media (OSM) Player is an industry changing, all-in-one open source (GPLv3) media player that is written in jQuery to dynamically deliver any type of web media, including HTML5, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flash. The new Open Standard technology takes the place of the proprietary Adobe Flash Player, which has been used – for over 6 years – to deliver high quality media to audiences far and wide.

Features include:

• Dynamic HTML5 content delivery.
• Audio and Video support with the most popular media formats.
• Automatic Flash fallback for non-standard media.
• Easily themable using the incredible ThemeRoller system.
• Seamless Vimeo and YouTube integration.
• Playlist support
• Player to Player communication.
• Powered by jQuery.

OSM player is 100% open source and 100% free.

Front-End Web Developer Seamus Leahy has created Pure CSS Stack Menus and decided to take the same concept and created a jQuery UI widget for it. With the new jStackmenu, you can can take any element and turn its children into the items of a stack menu.

The effect is really cool and this script can help you reduce space on your web page. You can control when it opens and closes, the direction it opens, the size of the arc and even the time it takes to open. It even has events for those who really want to get clever.

The catch is that it does the arcing in browsers that support CSS transform (that’s an advantage for this browser because the JavaScript load is reduced). For browsers that do not support this property, the script degrades gracefully into a popup of the stack items in a line.

jQuery.popeye is an advanced image gallery script useful to save space when displaying a collection of images. It is designed as an alternative to often-seen jQuery Modal Window scripts. The JavaScript Image Lightbox employs a modal window to display the large images, thus disrupting the workflow of the users interacting with a web page.

This jQuery-powered Script takes a different approach: it allows for browsing all thumbnails as well as the large images in a single image space and respects the page flow, staying anchored and rooted in the web page at all times. This way it gives a less disruptive user experience than modal windows.

Imperial Porcelain is a free icon set consisting in 5 beautiful original icons in .PNG format (160×160px). This set, designed by Roman Khramov and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers, can be used in various settings including hotel and restaurants websites, e-commerce-sites or even on food-related blogs.

The set can be used in all your projects, for free without any restrictions. You can freely used in both personal and commercial projects including software, online services, templates and themes. However, it may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use.

Quoting Roman Khramov, the designer of these icons:

Icons were made in design of Russian imperial porcelain. We wished to perform this work with humour and in Russian traditions. The icon “partners” is especially distinguished. We tried to pay huge attention to difficult pictures and small details. The icons set is freely available for commercial and non-commercial use, without any restrictions. The set consists of 5 custom-made icons in the resolution 160×160 .png.