Citrus Moon

Citrus Moon has free tiles, backgrounds and other graphics. Unlike most of these collections, this site permits “commerical use of these patterns”:http://www.citrusmoon.net/about.html without payment and allows use of patterns if they have been colored or resized. The site also contains “tips”:http://www.citrusmoon.net/tips.html about how to make your own tiles.

In Filters that Fight Back,

In Filters that Fight Back, Paul Graham suggests

One intriguing idea is to literally fight back: to make filters disable spammers’ servers by automatically following all the links in each incoming email. We may be driven to this in order to achieve accurate filtering anyway. Why wait?

And the battle continues.

Web design postcards

This site with web design postcards suggests:

Elegant, flexible designs, easier maintenance and lower bandwidth costs. Don’t you wish you were here? Look through these postcards for coding, design and content tips for your own sites, and if one of the sites you visit regularly doesn’t measure up, why not show them you care by emailing them the URL of an applicable card?

(via Growing Leaves)

Synonyms in Google

There is a new Google operator which allows search by synonyms. As an example, search for “movable type ~help” and you’ll also get results containing “guide”, “tutorial”, and so on. Via Winged …

Google has a page with tips on how to refine your search which includes the new operator.

HTTrack Website Copier

HTTrack Website Copier is an open source website mirroring utility. I am using it to mirror my typepad site locally on my PC. With the weblog software I developed myself, I keep a local copy of my writings on my PC, and use my website host as the mirror. I dislike not having a local copy of anything that I write, and HTTrack allows me to create a local, browsable copy of my weblog.

One feature that I like about HTTrack is that it allows me to write a batch script to control the download, but also has a GUI front end available.