Just thought I’d share with you my favourite font finding resource - Abstract Fonts. This website currently contains over 12,000 free fonts - that’s a lot of free fonts! You can browse them in various ways; randomly, by how new they are, by how popular they are, or by my favourite method, which is by category. This way you can find just the type of font you are looking for, be it graffiti, floral, calligraphy, retro or whatever else.

Hope you find it useful - I do!

I’ve just revamped one of the first websites I ever built. Domparison is a domain name price comparison website - it does exactly what it says on the tin (who remembers Ronseal?!), comparing prices for domain registration, renewal and transfers on various extensions.

One of the problems I originally had with the site was that some of the registrars list prices in USD (dollars), whereas others list prices in GBP (pounds). Originally, I listed the USD prices and GBP prices as they were and simply indicated what currency each price was. When I first made the website database-driven, around a year ago, I started listing all prices in USD. This meant that, in addition to having to periodically update all prices, I also had to frequently obtain the latest exchange rates and calculate the GBP prices in USD in order to update them. This was clearly quite a chore.

What I have done this time is written a PHP script that scrapes the latest exchange rates from Reuters. Using a cron job, this script automatically executes periodically on my server, fetching the latest exchange rates and automatically converting all the GBP prices in the database into USD.

The site has also had a bit of a face lift - I felt the previous design was a little cumbersome in the  look and feel department, so I have ditched the blue-based colour scheme and gone for a light grey one.

Next on my agenda is to create a mailing list so that users can be informed every time a mass price update takes place. I’m currently thinking I may go the whole hog and allow users to create accounts - then I could allow users to rate and review each registrar. If you have any other suggestions, let me know!

Hopefully my fellow domainers will find Domparison useful - and hopefully they will like the improvements I’ve made!

Just thought I would post a useful link I found today. My fellow web designers will appreciate this

While trying to find a nice shade of gold for a stylesheet, I decided to see if Google had any suggestions. One of the sites I found was this one:

http://cloford.com/resources/colours/500col.htm

It basically lists over 500 different colours and shades by name, along with Hex and RGB values for use in web/graphic design. The fact they are listed by name means you can do a CTRL+F to search for specific shades, such as “olive”, “cobalt”, etc.

Not the most powerful of tools but certainly a useful one that I’ve bookmarked for future reference!