4 Awesome Reference Libraries
Between Twitter, Facebook, and the copious amount of RSS feeds I follow there is a proverbial firehouse of amazing sites being traded around the web as you are reading this. Most of the sites are useful, but a few I find my self going back to again and again. Here is a quick shortlist of some of the best I’ve recently bookmarked.
1. 30 Seconds of CSS
A small curated list of common CSS problems and solutions. It’s not the biggest list out there, but I find myself googling how to make css triangles and gradients that it is super useful to have it on speed dial. The examples are short, sweet, and to the point.
2. You Might Not Need jQuery
I’ve been frequenting this fantastic site for years. Even as jQuery’s popularity has waned in recent years, developing in WordPress has a tendency to force it back into my life. A good many themes and plugins simply require it so it’s there whether I need it or not. This means it is all to easy to rely on it for even the simplest of functions. This gem of of a site is a great reference tool for those exact situations. If you just need to toggle a class here and there and don’t want to load in a full framework just to do it, try giving You Might Not Need jQuery a go.
3. Any API
Frankly this site is just plain fun to browse whether you need to hook up to an API or not. API’s are everywhere and it is crazy fascinating to me to find out who is offering what. From the big players like Google, Microsoft, and Twitter to sites you’d rarely think of, like xkcd, there is an API for almost any data you can imagine. I’d highly recommend keeping this link around for whenever you need a quick reference check.
4. Brand Colors
Brand colors can be a bit of a pain in the rear. It’s rare that I build a site that doesn’t include some link to twitter or, facebook or, etc, where I need to google up the hex code for this brand color or that one. Those are the easy ones. Trying to track down the exact code your more obscure companies can be near impossible. That is where Brand Colors comes in. A smart looking, easily searchable database of hundreds of brand colors that can be copied at the click of a button. Definitely bookmark this one!