Here’s the weekly news round up culled from the stack of RSS feeds that I subscribe to.

Starting off is a great post from Just Creative Design that lists all of the WordPress plugins used by Jacob Cass. They range from spam filters (Akismet) to SEO tools (All in one SEO Pack). Many of these tools I already use in my WordPress installations for clients but there are a few that I will probably start installing for clients. I generally install Google Analytics for clients, though most never use it, but I will also probably start to use the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin for my own tracking and really it’s easy to install so having it for clients to reference is easy.

Second up is a post from NETTUTS on the ultimate ways to fight spam. It goes over many of the common ways that are used to fight spam. One, keyword black lists, are used here on this blog. I have a number of "off limits" words that if you try to leave a comment with it your comment will be rejected. The post ultimately recommends Akismet which was developed by the people that developed WordPress. I do have one small exception to this post’s information. It calls Akismet a new service but as far as I know the service has been around for quite a while. There have even been ways to port the service into phpBB bulletin boards for quite a while so I’m not actually sure what it new about it. Regardless Akismet saves you from a bunch of spam so if you don’t want spam install it.

Next we look at position:absolute, which I have mentioned a few times. This post discusses XHTML strict validation and is sure to get some people in quite a twist. This post can be summed up by saying that not everything needs to validate just make sure it is well written. I agree with the theme of this post. I do my best to code all of my sites to XHTML strict. I do allow for failing the validate if there is a good reason. As stated in the article, target=_blank is not a valid attribute in XTHML strict so you have to use a bit of JavaScript to make it work. I really try to stay away from javascript to make things work so am totally fine with using the target=_blank attribute if it is needed. Ultimately if there is a good reason for the failure then I am fine with it.

Finally a post from Smashing Magazine titled 7 Ingredients of Good Corporate Design. This post covers such topics as logo design, typography in design and colour in design, all with a bent to corporate branding. Good for designers of all experience levels to read through and brush up on corporate brand design.

That’s it for today.