Best blogs and sites to increase web skills

There are so many great sites and blogs out there that have content and tutorials on learning things, there is little need for buying internet books at Borders or Barnes & Nobles.

I don’t think I would ever write a tutorial on how to to do something unless I couldn’t find it anywhere (which is almost NEVER the case). My tutorials would consist of saying what I am doing, referencing articles, books, or videos, and then saying additional problems I had after looking over the resource. Anything else just seems to be wasting time.

I read quite a bit from books, but most of the information I need can be found on the internet or blogs. Having a lull at work or some downtime at home is a great opportunity to improve and hone my skills.

Here is a list of the top resources I use to increase my productivity. The fastest and easiest resources are blogs, so I will start off with a list of my favorite blogs I follow.

Blogs

• Occam’s Razor - Web Analytics Google Analytics Evangelist
• Lies, Damn Lies - Online Marketing
• Six Revisions - Web design
• Smashing Magazine - Web design
• Web Design from Scratch - Web design
• The Flash Blog - Adobe Evangelist that has good tutorials on Flash/Flex

I subscribe to all of these using Google Reader. I also have Shrook for Mac at work, but I like Google’s interface and features better. Each blog/site all probably average about 1-2 posts per week. Some weeks the articles aren’t that interesting, while other weeks they are priceless.

Other Resources

• Digg.com
• Lynda.com
• Borders bookstore
• local library
• Web Designer Magazine (subscription)
• ImagineFX Magazine (subscription)

Blogs and most sites don’t always tell you everything. I usually go to Digg for any kind of technology news that is getting much press. Just recently I found out Internet Explorer 8 RC1 came out and would have no idea otherwise.  Libraries and bookstores are good to pick up reference books and light programming reading.

While it looks like I do nothing but read blogs and surfing, I can really do most of it with small open windows of time at work. It doesn’t really take that much time to stay on top of it - as long as you do a little each week. The local library was good for a while, but I haven’t really been getting much stuff there recently since it tends to be on the old side (you can only read so much of IIS5 or PHP4).

The Magazine subscriptions I have are mostly for fun. They are both from the UK, as there is nothing like them here in the states. They are a little more pricy than most magazines, but they really make my free time a little more exciting.

Next post

The past couple of weeks I have been working on a small website, so I haven’t had too much free time to really hammer out anything else. I have been reading and practicing my 3d modeling skills quite a bit, so I will probably go over what I have donr and explain some  of the problems I encountered (ahh…so many shortcuts in Blender). Also, maybe  give  good references and direction for how I built up my skills and workflow throughout the process.

Getting these blog posts indexed by Google is being a problem as well. It might have to do something with caching the pages since they are built in PHP. Google doesn’t like compiling them when the search bot come banging on the door.