Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I use a tag in my delicious account to identify sites that I want to share. I forgot. Here is a bunch of websites from back in January and February.

Blog and web design advice and tools from Virtual Hosting

• No More Comment Spam! 46+ Free Tools and Resources to Stop Blog Spammers
• Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

Skelliwag’s blogging advice

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

Time to close some tabs. Here are all the good things found since the last round up.

I completely redesigned the front end of www.rasita.biz using panels and views. What do you think? Judith is now selling reptiles as well as her cooking eCourses.

Sarah Perez posted this on live mesh wallpapers. We got them!

Are you Mesh-obsessed? Well now you can show off your devotion to the new service by displaying the Mesh logo on your computer’s desktop. You can grab the zip file for yourself from here.

Sarah also has a Q&A session on Microsoft Office Web Applications.

Wow – what an amazing website. Not only is the content fascinating – well to me anyway – I love old world war 1 and 2 vintage airplanes – and these machines a beauties – but the website is also a work of art. (and they are Kiwis!)

The Vintage Aviator is an amazing website. The developers have spent countless hours putting this together. There is a full description of what they did to make this work on the Drupal website.

They list all the modules they use as well as the custom modules developed and other tweaks they had to do. The developer, dman also explains how they solved the CSS issues (including ignoring some of the IE6 issues).

This is a great site – congrats to all involved.

I finally got around to building a new banner for my website.

Spy Journal 1.0 didn't have a banner - except for orange and text.

Spy Journal 2.0 had customised banners for each of the personal, tech, excel and blog websites. Actually they were the same banner but some CSS allowed different colours to show as a margin on each banner.

So yesterday I used some photoshop skillz and put together the banner thats here now. Do you like it? Is it an improvement on previous ones? Let me know what you think.