Sometimes you just need a quick decent graphic for a logo, page or menu - time is short, and you really can’t face battleing photoshop or fireworks for half an hour to make a button background. What do you do? Use one of the great free online generators now available!

We have listed six of the ones we find most useful below:

1: Web 2.0 badges
Really cool way to make superb quality web 2.0 style badges for your site in seconds - our example below took no time at all! Nice choice of badge styles, and various fonts to choose from as well, make this a winner!


2: Logo generator
There are quite a few logo generators online now, but we like this one for its simplicity and the decent logo it produces. A few different fonts to choose from, and you can also select background/font colour, where or if the reflection appears and whether or not to display one of a variety of amusing badges such as ‘beta’. See our example below:

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With such emphasis rightly placed on using CSS to control the layout, design and typography of websites it is little surprise to find a wealth of online tools to help experts and newbies alike produce their sheets quicker and easier. We have selected six notably useful tools for your enjoyment, listed below:

1: Listamatic
Great resource for styled lists, a good array available as examples with css as well as a useful browser compatibility chart covering pretty much every popular browser you users are likely to be viewing with.

2: Yet another multi-column layout (YAML)
Really nice ajaxified online layout builder - design, build and edit complete web page layout on one screen, add elements and tags then generate code! Enables you to construct a completed page layout in minutes, very straight forward to use. One to bookmark!

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None of us has a perfect photographic memory, and with the vast amount of different languages, protocols, standards and techniques currently in use in web development, it doesn’t get any easier! That’s where cheat sheets come in…
Cheat sheets are great, providing a quick and simply laid out reference on popular techniques within a given subject area. Generally in handy A4 format, you can print them out, laminate and keep them close at hand for the day you need to look something up. A hundred times quicker than using either documentation or help files!

For your convenience, we have compiled a list of six web development cheat sheets below, that we find particularly useful - so visit, print them off and keep near your PC :)

1: mySql cheat sheet

2: php cheat sheet

3: javascript cheat sheet

4: html character codes

5: css cheat sheet with examples

6: html cheat sheet

*Worthy of mention: most of the above list are actually produced by one site - ilovejackdaniels - they really are the cheat sheet kings! Their css sheet is also well worth downloading.

Not in any particular order, thought we’d share a list of six slightly freaky music videos which although pretty damn cool are a little on the freaky/scary side…kind of horizon-expanding though, so sit back and enjoy!

Warning: none are that graphic but it may be best not to watch if you are either a kid or of a sensitive nature… well, we did warn you ;)
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Ok just a little light relief ’six things’ today as its sunday :)

Everyone knows about flickr, stacks of great photos you can browse through covering any subject area you can think of, always a great resource for inspiration.

Anyway, to brighten everyones day, I’ve spent a while trawling their site (that was some hard work) and come up with a fresh, highly useful list of six top babes I found, (not in any particular order).
Enjoy! :)
(And if anyone on the list wants to get in touch, please, feel free!)

1: Tarryn Taylor

Taken from the ‘Tarryn10′ album by Aysha. One of a truly stunning set of pictures!

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There is a plethora of really great looking wordpress templates out there for free download, but many can be over-complex and over-graphical in layout and design. Less is more, right? We also find that using a clean theme as a basis for your blog makes customisation much easier and faster.

Sharesix have complied a list of six really cool fresh, clean themes for your wordpress blog - have a look today, give your blog a birthday!

1: Simplicity Bright

Really elegant two column theme, as the name suggests, ’simplicity’! Also available in a black background version.

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Although a vast amount of information on all subjects is freely available around the internet, we still love leafing through a good book now and again. Sometimes you just don’t want to stare at a screen the whole time either :) Books are a great reference tool that you can pick up, delve into and put down again until next time. And also a great way of keeping your skills honed.

We’ve put together a list of our favourite web-development related books, below. All can be highly recommended and are deserving of a place on your bookshelf:

1: Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

2: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

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Loads of people use wordpress. We do. Along with about 800 million other blog owners. One of the nicest things about wordpress is, of course the plugins you can download and install to add great functionality to your blog.

We have got together a list of six of the most useful plugins you can get below:

1: Adsense_deluxe
Most of us have to find a few bucks to cover things like hosting, and the way for most is google’s adsense contextual ad program. Using adsense deluxe you can automate the whole procedure, even holding a variety of ad sizes ‘on tap’ ready for use in your posts or anywhere esle on your site. Highly configurable, and can also be used with yahoo ads as well.

2: Akismet
Anyone who either publishes a blog, or reads them will have come across so called ‘comment spam’ - annoying, generic bot-produced bulk comments linking to all sorts of heaving nasties. A blog with any decent amount of traffic will get a lot of these messages, either taking a lot of time to manually inspect and allow or covering the post page like a rash if allowed without approval. Akismet takes the workload off your shoulders by filtering dodgy looking comments, and actually learns whats good and bad, making itextremely accurate at spotting spam. Amust have!

3: Sociable
There’s just a seemingly never-ending list of social news/bookmarking sites these days, way too many to even try and keep up with at any rate. Fear not, as there is a nice quick easy way to let your readers bookmark your pages if you use wordpress - the sociable plugin. The plugin lets you configure which social bookmark services you wish to offer, from a large array of pre-installed choices, even down to display order. Its great, you can see it in use at the foot of this post.

4: Ultimate tag warrior
Allows you to add tags to individual posts for the benefit of readers and search engine optimisation. Tag your posts as you write them and display your tag cloud as a whole in the sidebar. Neat.

5: Flickr rss
Nice clean and simple way of displaying a bunch of pictures from flickr on your blog. Easy to install and work with, configurable to show either your own gallery (or any other spcific user), or a random set of images based on tags you supply. Being used in our sidebar :)

6: Image manager
The one area wordpress lacks a little in, is image management. Its a bit of a pain to host the images yourself, type in full url’s etc etc…and its just not the done thing to hotlink. The ImageManager provides an interface for browsing and uploading image files on/to your server. The editor even allows for some basic image manipulations such as, cropping, rotation, flip, and scaling. We just installed this ourselves!

Welcome to the opening of sharesix.com :)

The intention is to share six really cool things each day - regardless of subject area, but with a probable bias towards web-related stuff, like fonts, sites, platforms, scripts…but also to encompass art, photography, design, beauty, products…you name it really,chances are wewill give you six of the best at some stage.

So check back each day, subscribe to the rss feed and sit back and relax :)