Video For Everybody is a smartly created HTML code for embedding videos into websites using the HTML5 <video> element.

If HTML5 is not supported, it falls back to QuickTime & Flash as the last option automatically (actually, as the last option, it can display an image if the Flash is not supported).

It does not use any JavaScript or browser-sniffing & works in RSS readers, iPhone / iPad besides all the major browsers.

Video For Everybody requires the video to be encoded in 2 different formats:

• MP4 (Safari, Flash,  iPhone / iPad)
• OGG (Firefox 3.5+, Chrome, Opera 10.5+)

There is also a test page provided to see the compatibility it offers across browsers.

A good way to be more creative is interacting with other people who share the same interests.

Anyone can easily make full use of the communities which are available today to boost creativity. Also, interaction with others in the community, collaborating and getting feedback can become a motivating factor.

Author: Rony John

I am a 21 yr. old web developer and student living in Baltimore. I run Appsheriff which is a blog about latest and useful web applications for designers, developers and photographers.

Feel free to visit anytime and subscribe to keep in touch. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Once you are in one of these communities, you will be both criticized and supported which will improve your skills at the end.

Let's look at 10 great creative communities available which will help you to show-off your talent in design and art.

DeviantArt

deviantART is amongst the largest internet art community. It is a place where artists from every part of the world come together.

This is a perfect site for both professional and amateur artists since anyone can browse through countless works of other artists or sign-up and post their creations.

There are large number of free features including free thumbnailed art galleries, comment system, user page, journal, and more.

Behance Network

Behance Network is a platform for creative professionals to gather, collaborate on different projects and connect with companies/agencies who are looking for creative talents.

The major focus of the site is to assist creative persons/companies to boost their productivity and demonstrate themselves professionally. It has creative tools + a great search engine to navigate through the network and come across fresh talent and opportunities.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bgrepeat is a website that shares 100+ free repeating backgrounds to beautify your designs.

Most of the backgrounds are minimalistic & various colors of each are presented.

You can easily sort bakgrounds according to their popularity, view larger versions & download them (.JPG format).

Uniform is a jQuery plugin that enables you to control the look & feel of form elements (checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons & file upload inputs).

It is unobtrusive & works by hiding the original elements + replacing them with custom ones.

Uniform is very easy to use & can be set to convert every form element on the page or any specific ones.

The plugin has theming support & comes with a theme kit to quickly create unique forms.

You remember Uptime Robot, a free website uptime monitoring service that we launched few weeks ago.

While building it, we're looking for a free & easy way for adding SMS support to the application which would notify users when their websites were down (and back up).

There are great APIs around but they are paid & we experienced that the best way to do this is using the e-mail to SMS gateways of mobile providers.

But we needed a list of providers that had support for e-mail to SMS.

After digging, we found several lists, realized that every provider has a different format where some requires a prefix & other can require a suffix, digit requirements differ, etc.

At the end we merged lists, removed invalid entries, added new ones with the help of Uptime Robot users & created a flexible MySQL table that included this data.

Now, we're sharing it (as SQL & CSV formats) at the Uptime Robot website so you can easily add SMS support to your web applications & won't lose the time we already did.

P.S. Note that there may still be some invalid entries that we couldn't get a feedback yet. If you think there are, please share them in comments, we'll updating them & always be sharing the latest version of the data.

TinyEditor is a lightweight (8kb) JavaScript WYSIWYG editor that is free to use in both personal & commercial projects.

It is a standalone script (does not require any JS frameworks) & converts any given textarea to an editor

The can be easily customized by updating the parameters (like removing some of the controls). And it is possible to style it via CSS:

TinyEditor can be resized, a starting content can be defined, set to generate HTML or XHTML code & more..

Formwizard is a jQuery plugin which can instantly convert your standard forms into wizard-like interfaces.

Once it is applied, users will be able to fill the form step-by-step (which is nice for big forms) & it becomes possible to show different steps according to the input values.

It only requires a few markup updates like wrapping every step with elements that has id tags: "firstStep, "secondStep", etc & adding class tags: "step".

Formwizard also plays nice with the popular validation & form plugins that will help enabling client-side form validation & Ajaxed submissions.

Teambox is an open source platform that enables teams to collaborate on projects with a Twitter-like interface.

The application is built with Ruby on Rails and, besides the open source version, has a hosted version too.

Users can create an unlimited number of projects & tasks, assign them to their colleagues, share messages, files & much more.

Users can start a conversation instantly, create pages to store information & Teambox can integrate clients to the system to colaborate with them easily.

The application is multilingual, has support for mobile phones & offers a read-only API for integrations with 3rd party softwares.

52framework is a CSS framework which aims to provide an easy way to build websites using HTML5 & CSS3 while still supporting all modern browsers (including ie6).

It uses HTML5 tags like header, nav, section, article, footer or new input field types like url, email, etc. The framework also has a HTML5 compatible reset stylesheet.

52framework uses the new ::selection selector that enables you to customize the properties of selected text.

It can apply rounded corners for any block level element, text-shadow for text elements & more.

The framework also includes styles for creating grids: 16 column, 52 pixel based with 8 pixel gutter.

52framework is a user-contributed resource & you can easily send suggestions to improve it further.

gMap is a lightweight (2kb) jQuery plugin for easily integrating Google Maps into any website.

It can embed a map with a tiny function like:

$("#map").gMap();

and can be customized further with settings like:

• latitude/longitude
• default zoom level
• markers, their positions, info to display as a pop-up, custom marker images
• mapping controls on/off
• & more..