Graphite. Amazing. You should use it.

“Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. As a user, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite’s processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite’s specialized database …

Some key points:

• Track and measure everything and anything that can be measured
• Track all releases and when the release happened
• Make it easy to track new things, just by adding a new key string

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/12/08/track-every-release/

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15 …

Here are 2 libraries for showing dialog boxes with images and videos.

http://fancybox.net/

http://jacklmoore.com/colorbox/

Design tidbits from Paul Stamatiou:

• Add just enough effects to make it perceivable. ie. Don’t overdo it.
• “Whenever I see a website I like, or even just a particular element of a site, I take a screenshot and archive it”
• “Process of redesigning a product Get in the mindset …

Estimate the value of any website or blog:

http://www.worthofweb.com/

Too many articles that discuss interface design fail to include examples or comparisons. Here’s a great article in UX Magazine that doesn’t make that mistake - Visual Design and Usability Yellow Brick Road.

The article describes giving the user a visual path through the website by properly using whitespace …

I just found this cool website called Usability First that provides “valuable information about usability for anyone interested in the design of software or websites, from beginners to experts, in academia or in industry.”

An excerpt from their Cognitive Walkthroughs Section:

To determine the level of usability for a website …

Here are some awesome web charting libraries to make it easy to create nice-looking graphs and charts for your website:

• Google Charts - Free. Polished.
• JQPlot - jQuery plotting library
• Flot - jQuery plotting library
• Highcharts JS - A JavaScript charting library that looks polished. Free for non-commercial use, pay for commercial use.
• RaphaelJS …