Here’s the rundown:

• Twitter
• GuildWars.com News
• Flickr
• NCSoft Jobs page
• Press Releases

I certainly wasn’t looking forward to building parsers for the multiple different feed types that entails, but YQL came along and saved the day again. I only had to do simple things manually like make sure that Twitter links & @username replies were properly wrappped in <a> tags. To keep from bashing on YQL every time the page is loaded it stores the transformed results of the updates for an hour in a local APC cache. This provided the best of both worlds and made caching super-easy.

The site itself was built using YUI grids, YUI 3b1, and DD_belatedPNG to solve transparent PNG issues in IE6. It’s also using my favorite new PHP framework, Nice Dog. It’s a nano framework (about 100 lines) that is more of a VC than MVC. For a site like Arena.net it’s perfect as there’s no need for models. I could’ve plugged in an ORM to make it the full stack but when getting all your data is as simple as

apc_fetch($key);

the need to build a “proper” MVC site kinda isn’t there any longer.

So then I started on it, I had grand plans. There were even icons that I was going to grab from… somewhere. That part of it was rather poorly planned. After doing the basic layout I spent about an hour trying to find the right icons. Eventually I threw up my hands and just dropped the whole idea.

Here’s what I’d planned for it to look like:

Notice my awesome hand-drawn icons…

Today I was feeling more up for a challenge though. I did some reading and decided to use YQL thanks to Chris Heilmann’s screencast illustrating how he used it to pull multiple sources of data together. After deciding to just ditch the icons I picked a few colors for the top-level sections instead, and here’s what I came up with.

I like it well enough. Still wish I could’ve found icons I was happy with.

Pictures!

You know what time it is!

I make no claims that this list is authoritative, in fact I’d love feedback pointing out really smart people I missed. I read a lot of feeds but none are more dear to me than the ones contained with my “development” folder. Adding new items to it is a joy each and every time.

• Usability/Design

  • 456 Berea Street, full text

    Roger Johansson does a great job of covering usability issues on the web.

  • 90 Percent of Everything: Usability Blog

    Harry Brignull and Andy Baker cover usability design both on the web and in client apps.

  • flow|state

    Usability fascinates me, and this is one of the best usability blogs I’ve ever seen. Updates are infrequent, but always incredibly insightful.

  • Looks Good Works Well

    Bill Scott left Yahoo! for Netflix but we won’t hold it against him. His UI design comments are fantastic.

  • Theresaneil’s Weblog

    Another really fantastic UI blog. I wish there were a lot more done this well.

• Web Development

  • A List Apart

    Great writers and a ton of content makes this a great resource. Doesn’t update that often, but always great content.

  • Bite Size Standards

    Tiny little nuggets of web knowledge, updates infrequently but with useful info.

  • Ajaxian

    Ajaxian’s great about updating with the newest and greatest javascript libraries and techniques.

  • Bartelme Design – Journal

    Small Design firm based out of Austria that posts nice wallpapers and some decent articles every now and then.

  • CSS Help Pile

    Monster collection of CSS tips and tricks, always a nice reference to have around.

  • CSS, JavaScript and XHTML Explained

    Browser quirks, CSS techniques, all sorts of stuff. Updated rarely.

  • DOM Scripting Task Force

    Unofficial group dedicated to promoting good Javascript, I can get behind that goal.

  • Douglas Crockford’s The Department of Style

    Crockford discovered JSON and writes great articles about Javascript best practices. Also see javascript.crockford.com and JSLint.com.

  • Dustin Diaz

    A Googler (we won’t hold it against him) yet he still loves YUI (yay!). Produces a lot of really interesting code snippets.

  • Fiftyfoureleven.com

    Mike Papageorge runs this general web developer resource/weblog. Good stuff though getting a little stale.

  • Firebug – Web Development Evolved

    Firebug development blog, updates almost never but good to have a subscription to in case it does.

  • Foo Hack

    Isaac Schlueter is a fellow Yahoo! and writes some fantastic pieces about web development.

  • Garrett Dimon

    Garrett Dimon’s weblog is wonderfully minimal, yet still provides really great insights into the development process.

  • HedgerWow`s Blog

    I worked with Hedger last summer, he’s a true mad scientist in the world of web developers. Seriously, I have no idea how he comes up with most of this but it’s insane and amazing.

  • If..Else Log

    Only occasionally development related, but still a good read.

  • JoeHewitt.com

    Joe created Firebug, so you know he’s pretty damn smart. Too bad his site appears to be unloved these days. Staying subscribed just in case!

  • John Resig

    Author of JQuery and an all-around Javascript genius, I love reading about John’s continuing adventures.

  • Johnnie Manzari

    Interesting observations about the web, definitely worth checking out.

  • Julien Lecomte’s Blog

    Julien’s the author of the YUI compressor and consistenly posts things you should be reading.

  • Matt Snider JavaScript Resource

    Matt Snider does a great job of breaking down JS and investigating all the 8 bajillion frameworks floating around these days.

  • Nate Koechley’s Blog

    One of the main YUI guys, Nate’s super smart and consistently posts interesting stuff. Not always web dev related, but always worth checking out.

  • Particletree RSS Digest

    Great articles, wish they’d start updating again a bit more regularly.

  • Pete Freitag’s Homepage

    Pete’s a Cold Fusion guy but still posts things that apply to web dev in general.

  • Ryan on WordPress

    I like WordPress an awful lot, so keeping tabs on its development is a good idea.

  • Schillmania: DHTML and other client-side experiments

    Scott Schiller is a web dev genius. I have no idea how he’s so good at what he does, I wish I did. He’s at Flickr now, before that he worked on the really impressive new Y! Photos that was canned.

  • Simon Willison’s Weblog Entries

    Django co-creator, Simon also writes a lot about OpenID.

  • SitePoint.com

    Lots of good articles to be found here.

  • snook.ca

    Lots of PHP talk, it’s good stuff.

  • Solution Watch

    Features new websites that do things well. Good for keeping up with the current state of web dev.

  • Vitamin Master Feed

    Vitamin is kind of like A List Apart, another big group of contributors writing amazing articles.

  • WordPress Development Blog

    Keeping tabs on WP development, even if I don’t have my hands into the guts as much as I used to.

• General Development

  • Coding Horror

    Jeff Atwood’s posts are always well thought out and engaging, I love his blog.

  • Joel on Software

    Joel Spolsky writes about software development from a very pratical place, having done quite a lot of it himself.

  • Programmer’s Notepad

    Programmer’s Notepad rocks my world. I use it every day and love it to pieces. Keeping up with releases via a feed is tops.

  • Rasmus’ Toys Page

    Rasmus is really, really smart. Not surprising, given that he wrote a bunch of PHP (the language itself, not just PHP code). He’s another Yahoo! as well.

  • StickBlog

    Lots of good development tips to be found, as well as general programming talk.

  • untidy blog » PN

    Programmer’s Notepad author’s personal blog. The feed is just for the PN category, because that’s the programming related stuff!

And just in case you made it to the end of that huge list, here’s a link to everything I read on a not-at-all daily basis. It’s a little ridiculous. My Feeds.

For those that don’t know this is an attempt to make the Classfinder tool at Western Washington University not only easier to use but also cleaner and faster with more emphasis on getting out of the way. To that end it has a few features that the original Classfinder doesn’t have, including a freeform search box that will guess what you searched for and dynamic scratchsheet handling. You can add classes instantly without having to go to a seperate page. No screenshots for now.

It’s not the prettiest thing out there but it’s very functional and tries to take better advantage of screen real-estate than the previous Classfinder. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out overall.