Great Resources Elsewhere: June 13 to June 19

I work a lot with statistics in my day job. As a result, I’m usually on the lookout for various scripts that would make that job a bit easier (or at least less tedious!). To that end, here’s a collection of 10 chart/graph scripts from WebTecker. Regardless of whether you’re looking to generate graphs using JavaScript, Flash, or something else entirely, you’re bound to find something useful in this list. I found several I’d never used before that I’ll be trying out!

Sure… animated gifs conjure up all sorts of nasty, all-too-visual memories of amateur websites from the 1990’s. But animated gifs are like any other tool on the web: they can be used for good and evil in fairly equal measure. And here’s a technique that falls on the good side of that spectrum. Here, 3point7designs outlines how to combine animated gifs with the CSS Sprites technique to create animated hover states in menus.

And to keep up with our animated menu kick, here’s an interesting tutorial on developing a CSS-based multi-level dropdown menu with an extra kick: the designer uses jQuery to add a bit of animation to the hover states, which add a touch of class to the menus. Who says you need Flash for animated menus?

Andrew Meyer at iloveinnovation.com stumbled across my article on building a Semantic List-Based CSS Calendar from earlier in the week and gave it a bit of an upgrade. Andrew liked the article overall, but felt my examples could be a bit more attractive. And after seeing what Andrew came up with, I’d have to agree! If you liked my article, be sure to check out his calendar example to see what can be accomplished with this technique with a bit of innovation and skill.