Envato is the parent company of many entities on the web, including Theme Forest and other such marketplaces, as well as the extensive and highly useful Tuts+ network of sites. They have their fingers in almost every facet of web development, including graphic design, website theme development, and coding. They used to have blogs associated with each of their 7 main marketplaces (Graphic River, 3D Ocean, Code Canyon, Flash Den, Audio Jungle, Theme Forest, and Video Hive), but they recently decided to combine everything into one blog called Envato Notes.

The posts are usually short and sweet and to the point. There’s not a lot of detailed content that development blogs like Smashing Magazine have. The posts are mostly about the Envato community, featuring authors’ workspace photos, interviews with Envato staff and successful authors, and my personal favorite, Friday Freebies, which usually contain a free set of files from each of the 7 marketplaces (and one commercial license for each of them!) I can’t tell you how many sets of icons and WordPress themes I’ve accumulated over the past several months.

Just take a look at their Freebies category to get an idea of the sort of content they give away. Probably the most detailed Envato Notes gets is when they do a case study, which usually highlights one of Envato’s own websites (they must have close to 40 all told). If you’re looking to get into the passive income retail web game, Envato Notes is a must have for your feed reader.

It’s not hard to tell that Webdesigner Depot is a blog about design. Just look at the header, it’s full of vibrant colors and swirls and pencils and birds. But what really gives it away as a design blog is the abundance of Apple products nested within said colors and swirls. I count five total: a Macbook Pro, three iMacs, and an iPhone. You can never have too much Mac though, right? Yes. Yes you can. That being said, WDD is a great blog with a prominent spot in my Google Reader. It’s one of those blogs that inspires me and overwhelms me at the same time. And one of the benefits of being an avid reader is receiving the exclusive free icon sets from time to time, like Reflection. Here is an excerpt from WDD’s about page:

Webdesigner Depot is an exciting new platform designed to explore different web and graphic design techniques, great examples and best practices.

We love design and are passionate about it in all its shapes and forms. Our vision is to make WDD a great showcase for this passion and feed a worldwide audience of savvy designers eager to learn more and share their knowledge with the design community.

Undoubtedly the most valuable things that WDD offers me are the roundups, specifically WordPress, such as 10 Places to Buy Professionally Designed WordPress Themes, and 300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert. This blog is of course geared more towards design than development, but the two are not mutually exclusive, and WDD touches on development from time to time. It’s probably an 80/20 ratio of design to development approximately. I’d recommend subscribing to WDD if you are at all interested in or currently part of the design industry. If you’re a Photoshop fan boy and you don’t read WDD, you’re not actually a Photoshop fan boy.

Today In Development: Blog In The Spotlight. Today’s blog is Function Web Design. With articles focusing on, you guessed it, web design, Function specializes in WordPress theme and plugin development. I particularly like Function because they definitely live by one of our core philosophies here at Outer Spice: Less is More. For instance, Function seems to post an article no more than a few times per month. As a result, each of their articles are well thought out and of very high quality. Their articles are relevant, insightful, and original. Today’s article really caught my eye since Socket version 1.1 was just released, featuring a revamped theme options page. The article is entitled WordPress Theme Options Overload? A Judgement Call and it brings up an interesting topic, once again, in the “less is more” category.

While this is one of Function’s shorter, less in-depth articles, it is very important because it asks this question at a very important time. Right now, theme developers are adding more and more options to their theme options pages, and too often it is only for bragging rights as to who has the largest number of options, even if a lot of them are redundant or useless. Socket contains one theme options page separated into 4 categories, and a total of around 50 options – all of which are necessary. We do not attempt to do anything that an existing plugin can already do, in order to avoid reinventing the wheel. That is exactly what this article is talking about. Check it out – it can really be applied to anything you do as a developer or designer. Content is king, meaning that design and functionality should always yield the the meat of your site: content. Having too many theme options can not only muck up your content, but more importantly scare away your potential clients due to over-complexity and over-complication.

Here is Function’s “mission statement” of sorts:

Designing a website that works… We Pride ourselves on giving you Great design & Functionality, providing a website that will impress on first looks, and continue to impress as you explore it. We make it as easy as possible for you to look after once we’ve finished. So if you’re after a website or blog design to freshen up you’re site we’re more than happy to help.

This is my second edition of T.I.D.B.I.T.S., and you’re probably still asking yourself what they are and why I do them. Here’s the deal: I don’t read very much. I’m probably in the lower 25% of all readers (and consequently the upper 25% of all TV watchers). So you can rest assured that what I do actually spend my valuable time reading is pretty dang good. Using that same logic, the amount you read is somewhat proportional to the quality of things you’ll read, and that explains why you’re reading our blog. Now we come to the reason for T.I.D.B.I.T.S. Since we’re not real good writers ourselves, the least we can do is point you in the direction of good writing and great resources for your development. Today’s tidbit is one of my personal favorites.

Smashing Magazine is a tremendous web design & development blog based out of the UK. I’ve been reading it for over a year and it has absolutely been the reason for my success and continued skill progression as a web developer. You can find anything from Photoshop tutorials to developing custom WordPress plug-ins. Smashing is very heavily WordPress and open-source based, and consequently you’ll often see posts showcasing free WordPress templates, fonts, and icon sets. The editors of Smashing have a keen eye for beautiful modern web design and spend their time scouring the web for superb websites to include in their showcases. There’s an average of about 2 posts per day – plenty of content but not enough to overwhelm you.

I bring this up now since they recently released a book and redesigned their website, creating a “Smashing Network” of other design blogs and featured posts from the cream of the crop around the web. I can’t tell you how many free icon sets, fonts, and themes I have acquired via Smashing – and most of them are licensed for free commercial use, which is MONEY for a web developer. I highly recommend this blog. If you are at all in the design or development industry, and somehow you have not heard of Smashing, check them out as soon as you can!

Let us apologize right up front for the acronym. There is something so appealing about using acronyms, even though most of the time they are inappropriate (see this article’s title (S.T.A.T.)) Anyway… we’re putting a blog in the spotlight today because we feel it is a great resource for fellow web & software developers, and we want you to know about it. Pay no attention to the banners promoting Outer Spice Web Company – we have no idea how they got there. This is a purely objective write-up.

Chomper Stomping is the blog of fellow software developer Christopher McCulloh. He has been developing professionally for seven years and has co-written and edited a number of development resources. His specialties include AJAX, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Flash game development, iPhone app development, Java, PHP, Python, and ActionScript. Quite a mouth-full, we know. Check out his about info:

E-Commerce developer at Finish Line Co-Author of HTML, XHTML and CSS All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies Graduated from IU with a Bachelors of Media Arts and Science and a Certificate in Applied Computer Science. Tech Editor for Building Facebook Applications for Dummies and Building Websites All-in-one for Dummies 2nd Edition. Creator and maintainer of the Status-bar Calculator Firefox Extension Three years professional experience in Java E-Commerce Development and four years professional experience with PHP for a combined total of seven years professional JavaScript/HTML/CSS experience

He’s got a couple of creative software projects he’s been working on, including his latest: ShoutMote. He mixes in good resources for development with a little bit of humor to create a blog that is worth having in your reader. If you are a software developer, Chomper Stomping is worth a look.

Stay tuned for future T.I.D.B.I.T.S.!