One of the most crucial components of being a web developer is constant education.  Every web developer should constantly be reading blogs about the industry just to keep up in this fast paced environment.  Of course blogs shouldn’t be your only source of information. You should also be reading books and magazines, experimenting with new techniques, attending conferences, etc., but blogs are most definitely an important source.  I have compiled a list of my top 5 favorite web development blogs because, lord knows, there are a lot, and it can be difficult to sort through them all.

A List Apart

An excellent blog written by some of the greatest minds in the web development industry.  The topics covered on this site range from web standards to tutorials to industry trends, and every entry is top notch quality.

Think Vitamin

Think vitamin is a blog run by Carsonified [the same people that bring you fowa, fowd, and their new app matt].  I’ve always thought this blog was similar to A List Apart only shifted slight toward business and entrepreneurship.

Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine really puts it all together and provides excellent content for developers.  They update often with tons of tutorials, freebies, tips.

NETTUTS

More of a tutorial site than anything else but great none-the-less.  NETTUTS is an amazing site by eden, the creators of PSDTUTS and Freelance Switch.  They produce high quality tutorials for web development.

Wakeuplater

And let’s bring it home with wake up later.  Wakeuplater is a blog solely dedicated to the freelance web developer.  Wakeuplater has some real excellent entries and resources for the freelance web developer and pretty much any freelancer regardless of industry.

These are my favorites.  There certainly are other great web development resources, and I am always interested in finding new ones so please post your favorites in the comments.

Every web developer/design relies on a great set of tools to get their work done, and I mean more than just Adobe products. The Internet is choc’ full of excellent tools. Here are some of the tools I use on a daily basis. If I miss anything amazing please add it in the comments.

Firefox Plugins

First off, Firefox is a must for any developer. The plugins can be beat.

firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

web developer

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Awesome tools. I love the CSS tools as well as the form tools and the view port resizer. Really helpful.

colorzilla

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.

MeasureIt

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a web page.

ietab

Allows you to embed Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox or switch your current window back and forth between usinging the firefox rendering engine and the ie rendering engine. It may not replace testing in ie but is a great tool for quick on the spot testing.

yslow [for firebug]

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites.

Internet Resources

Here are some web sitesi keep on hand and ready for action.

sxc.hu

Whether you just want to browse our huge image gallery or want to share your personal photos with others, this is the site for you!

ColorSchemer

Browse color schemes, find inspiration.

w3schools

At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

Blogs

Some helpful and interesting blogs that cover web development from design & code to entrepreneurial tips.

A List Apart

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

Think Vitamin

Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs.

This is just a start. There are tons of other resources out there. These are just a few of my favorites. If you have any others or suggestions please add them in the comments.

When learning php and mysql, everywhere I turned I would find that you need to open your connection to the db using

mysql_select_db("my_db", $con);

then run your query, followed by your mysql_close() function

mysql_close($con);

I followed this protocol for ages, after all this is similar to how I have dealt with different databases in different languages in the past. Naturally, in db heavy sites I adapted this to open the db connection in the header and close the db connection in the footer as to allow me to throw many queries in each page.

The other day I was working on an app when I got an error message that this practice was causing a conflict. Apparently, the page I was working on wound up opening and closing the same database multiple times and well it just didn’t like that. I got the “connection to the same database” error.

After a little research I find that, despite this being the common connection method, it is not necessary to close your connection.

mysql_close() closes the non-persistent connection to the MySQL server that’s associated with the specified link identifier.

- php manual

Once I removed the close function I was good to go.

Just thought I’d post some explanations on why when and where to use the mysql_close function for posterity.

It is not necassary to explicitly disconnect from your MySql server or to free the space allocated to you SQL results. However, if you have a popular script that takes more than 5 seconds to execute, you should do all you can to conserve resources. Therefore, it is smart to explicitly free up your MySql resources rather than wait to let php do it on your behalf.

- PHP in a Nutshell (O’Reilly)

If this interests yo you might also want to read up on the mysql_free_result() function. This is similar to the mysql_close function but is more applicable to a situation where you would have multiple users (100+) connecting to your db all at once. It will enable you to better handle the mysql connections.