Speeding up websites has a huge effect on the success of the website as it directly effects the user experience and search engine rankings.

Browser Diet is a very nice guide that lists the steps needed to be taken for a better front-end performance.

It is created by a team of experts that work on large projects and presents the “best practices” under categories like HTML ,CSS, JS, server, images and more.

Also, the guide is not only listing these practices but also sharing “how to implement them” in detail.

Simply, a must-bookmark (and it is open source).

Candy is an open source chat application that is built with JavaScript and makes use of Jabber (XMPP) for real-time communication.

It has support for multiple rooms, users can be active in any number of rooms, chat publicly or privately and perform all of these in a good-looking, tabbed interface.

The application notifies users when new messages arrive, users can be blocked and the admin has the right to kick/ban.

Candy is themable and highly customizable (a powerful JavaScript API exists for that) with the provided event hooks + plugin support.

CSS3 provides us lots of styling options to create good-looking form elements.

Fancy Input, a jQuery plugin, doesn’t focus on the styling part but makes the fields attractive (and fun-to-use) by adding CSS3-powered effects.

The plugin hides the input field, places a span element containing the character pressed and applies CSS3 transitions to each element (letter).

There are multiple built-in effects and it works with both input + textarea fields.

The dynamic column grid layouts are so popular not only because it is used by Pinterest but also because it is a great way of displaying content with different sizes.

Wookmark, a Pinterest alternative, has released a jQuery plugin for creating such layouts, that work well on each browser, instantly.

The plugin has very few options to set: the container element, offset (vertical/horizontal distance) and width of the items, that’s all.

Once initialized, it gets the size of the window and auto-arranges the grid (yes, it is responsive).

There are many creative uses of symbol fonts and Stately is definitely one of them.

The font is for creating US maps where states are glyphs within the font. Each state is positioned and sized relative to the the rest of the states so that they play well with each other.

It is possible to style each state with only CSS, scale them to any size or manipulate with JavaScript.

As a wish, how great would it be if there was a world map version : ).

Maplace.js is a jQuery plugin that simplifies integrating Google Maps into websites.

It works with the latest Google Maps API (v3) and has methods for adding markers + custom content and drawing paths, polygons or routes.

There are options for defining the zoom level or controls to be displayed (zoom, map/satellite..).

The plugin allows customizing almost everything from the icons used to texts and colors.

It has callbacks on each action and comes with a very well documentation.

CanvasQuery is a JavaScript library that eases working with HTML5 canvas and adds lots of new methods to it.

The library provides a jQuery-like syntax and methods added are mostly for image manipulation (like masks, blur, crop or fill mask).

It also brings blend modes, new shapes, text wrapping and much more.

CanvasQuery can be used with or without jQuery, has methods for color conversion and can be extended with plugins.

SVG.js is a JavaScript library for working (manipulating and animating) with SVG without any complexity.

The library is standalone, very lightweight in size (5kb gzipped) and has lots of features.

There are built-in methods for creating shapes (rectangle, circle, polygon, etc.) or defining images.

They can all be animated with size, position, color or any other properties and be interacted with standard JavaScript events.

It has support for grouping elements for mass manipulations, filling them is possible and a unified API simplifies working with the library.

SVG.js is extendable with plugins and there are already various plugins (like dragging or easing).

jui_datagrid is a jQuery plugin, making use of jQuery UI, that comes with lots of features for presenting and managing data.

It has built-in pagination, sorting, editing, deleting and advanced searching.

The datagrid can be used with any scripting language (a PHP class comes with the download package) and its look can be totally customized (Themeroller-friendly).

A “preferences” option enables users to choose which columns and features to show/hide.

And, a powerful API exists for controlling/integrating the datagrid however wanted.

Custom scrollbars that look the same on all browsers are everywhere (for ex: almost all Google apps).

Perfect Scrollbar is a lightweight (~14kb) jQuery plugin for creating them without any hassle.

It doesn’t ruin the default layout or require/apply any CSS changes. The plugin works with containers of any size and re-arranges the positions if a container-resize happens.

Also, the design of the scrollbar can be customized completely with CSS and it supports jquery-mousewheel plugin in case you want to make use of it.