Issue 83
11 of the best tools, stories, and websites from the internet last week.
🔥 HOW TO NAME A COLOR. PLUS, AI TOOLS FOR DESIGN, JAVASCRIPT BUDGETS, AND ALCHEMY.
Welcome to another edition of Bizarro Devs with the best, underrated, links from a week of solid internet browsing.
I've got a site seeking names for anonymous colors, how to live up to your values, AI-generated faces for your projects, tricks you can play on the marketing team, and a couple more.
Enjoy,
Chris.
📰 From the Newsroom
Having the guts to say no to bad money. 😍
We all love working for a values-driven company. And with good reason, it sounds better than we make widgets, it means more than we loan money.
Curious about how it plays out in real life? It turns out things get pretty sticky when you're offered a year's revenue to dance with the devil.
Great tips here to help you turn down filthy lucre and help maintain your company values.
louderthanten.com
Sticking with values and adding sustainability with a Jack Lenox Interview.
Jack Lenox is a values-driven web designer and he shares all of his secrets in our interview. If you're looking for the easiest way to sustainable websites and happy clients, Jack's back baby, Jack's back.
He specifically mentions AWS Frankfurt which is a nice way to segue into the Bezos-Amazon sustainability pledge.
themeisle.com
🕸️ The Cool Side of the Web
No color left unnamed.
Naming things is better when it is a collaborative effort. Join in the fun of color naming and take a chance with an anonymous color.
You will be assigned a random color; all you need to do is add something creative. Names are voted on and moderated, before taking their place in the annals of history.
colornames.org
Cramming for a Mario Kart tourney? Tick Tock Clock has you covered. 🏎️
This is a museum dedicated to classic video games. They took a bunch of game data from a bunch of classic games and repurposed them for the web.
Guaranteed to help you dominate lounge room tournaments for the rest of the year.
noclip.website
R2bEEaton's Phonetic Reverser is the only site I trust when I want to learn how to speak backwards. 👿
If you ever wanted to know what Black Sabbath was really all about, then you can just paste the lyrics in.
On the other hand, if you just want a pretty visualization of Paranoid there's also a website for that.
r2beeaton.com
⚒️ Tools and Resources
Sticking with WordPress and awesome CMSes. This tool will help you uncover the themes, plugins, and CMS for a bunch of awesome sites.
gochyu.com
100,000 AI-generated faces for you to use in your projects. 😐
These faces have all been created using Machine Learning but you should still be careful with your selections. I love the fact that some of the pictures look like they were taken a second too soon, or late, which adds to the authenticity.
Another tool you might like for your design process is Visual Eyes which will run artificial eyes over your designs. It will give you a good heat map without the hours of data collection.
In a big week for AI, they (it?) also managed to finish a Picasso.
generated.photos
🕷️ Design & Development Arena
SEO stats! Stats! Stats! Stats!
I am sneaking in a marketing link here for you to share with the marketing team.
Watch them drool like Pavlov's dogs when you drop some backlink statistics into general conversation.
See the horror when you mention bounce rates.
Hours of fun with this one.
codeinwp.com
A fellow soldier in the battle against Medium. ✍️
I am a WordPress guy but that has little, if anything, to do with my Medium prejudice. That paywall is brutal, for one, and that really impacts reach and traffic.
buttercms.com
How Wikipedia realized their 28 KB JavaScript initialisation budget.
wikimedia.org
🎮 Fun & Games
Little Alchemy 2 ⚗️
You can't have more fun mixing elements without becoming a Forgotten Realms enchanter. Take fire, earth, air, water and then use them to recreate the world. A lot, a lot, a lot of fun in this game.
If you're a Windows user then I also have this space ship builder which could be fun. I run a Mac Mini at the office, so I haven't been able to test it. Let me know if it is any good.
littlealchemy2.com
Outro
And that's all I have this week.
I am logging back into Twitter now that notifications have stopped working. You can find me, and throw links at me, here.
If you've time for a forward, a share, or a mention, then that's great too.
If this is your first time seeing this email, then you can sign-up here
See ya next week,
Chris.