The Big Word Project has been set up by Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, two Masters students from Northern Ireland, who are exploring what different words mean to different people. The project allows you to purchase a word from our list to represent your site. Your site will then represent this word in our list and when people click on it, they will be taken to your site. The project is aimed at changing definitions and creating a new tapestry of words, meaning altogether different things. Words cost $1 per letter. I bought “Gilbert” today so lets see how it goes.

StylizedWeb has written a great list of 10 hand picked CSS hacks that front end developers use every day to get around browser compatibility issues. Great resource.

GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. GWT-Ext is basically an interface allowing you to use GWT to create Ext web apps. Very nice.

Digsby is a a new all-in-one utility for managing multiple IM, e-mail, and social networking accounts. Digsby is a desktop client that lets you chat with contacts no matter which IM service they use. It also includes an e-mail notifier, and a pop up screen for keeping track of Facebook and MySpace updates. You can even add a Digsby chat window to your Facebook page so that anyone viewing your profile can send you instant messages which you can reply to using Digsby.When you first run Digsby, you’ll be prompted to add accounts for each service you want to use. Under IM, you can choose AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. For e-mail, you have a choice of Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, or any POP or IMAP e-mail service.

I thought I would try it out as Download Squad are handing out 5000 free invites to the private beta. Its really quite nice. Just what I was looking for.

Deziner Folio have created a nice page of 3D design inspiration. Well worth a look.

Decent, flexible WYSIWYG editing in the browser is still an inconsistent affair at best in terms of user experience, integration effort, and generated markup. In the meantime a crop of text formatting languages such as Markdown, Textile, BBCode and wiki markup have emerged as ways for users to enter rich content in a controlled enviornment.

Control.TextArea provides a toolbar for textareas where users are entering text in one of these markup languages. In addition to a toolbar it provides access to a cross browser text selection and manipulation API so that creating new functionality, or integration with your custom application features is vastly easier. Control.TextArea is made to work with prototype.js.