The more time I spend on the web the more gems I stumble upon. But I did not find this gem on StumbleUpon.com. This time I was venturing into a new (for me) service to reach out a little more and enhance my online identity with Gravatar. What Gravatar does is provide you with a globally recognizable avatar. For those who may not know, an avatar is representation of yourself, in this case a small image. When you open an account and upload your avatar, the Gravatar service will show it on blogs, forums, or any other web site that supports them when you do something like comment on a blog post or participate in a forum.
But I digress. Gravatar is not the gem I am talking about, although I believe it will prove to have value. Gravatar.com is the starting point that led me to 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends, a wonderful collection of web design and development articles and tutorials posted each year on the first 24 days of December. The authors are a diverse group of rather pretigious personas in the web design and development world such as Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, and Kevin Yank. As you might expect, the design is a good example of blending functionality, information architecture, and content. Make no mistake, it’s the content (as should be with all web sites) that is the real value here.
I’m interested in what you think about 24 Ways, so leave a comment.
