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Gulp – we’re two thirds of the way to Christmas! Here’s a reminder of the second 8 days’ worth of tips, in case you’ve missed them: Day 9, we looked at how to use free website thumbnails to liven up site listings Day 10, we found a nice intro to bounce rate in web analytics…

16 Dec: even if you’re not a professional developer, chances are you need to share snippets of code now and again – maybe emailing a colleague that Google Analytics tracking code snippet, or the template for a special CMS page, or maybe a how-to article on your intranet for content managers. But the tools on…

15 Dec: There’s more to putting a new website live than just having the (internal) client’s approval that the design looks nice. There’s remembering to make sure it looks OK in different browsers, checking you’ve added the website analytics tracking code, and emptying out the embarrassing test content, for starters. For the last few years,…

14 Dec: let’s face it, government webbies need two machines. One for the secure work stuff, email, network connection and all that jazz, probably running a secure browser like Internet Explorer 6. And then a work machine, for doing actual internet work, running social media channels, editing video, connecting to FTP servers and liveblogging events.…

13 Dec: you’re a webby, but still having boring meetings people have to go to? So last century, dude! Assuming you don’t have a super fancy video conferencing suite or unfettered access to Skype or Google Talk from your workstation, check out Anologue (and a sorry in advance: this doesn’t work in IE6). Anologue gives…

12 Dec: Size matters. And small is most definitely beautiful online. Here’s a tiny collection of tools to help you shrink things. Yahoo’s Smush.it takes an image file and applies various compression techniques to it, and lets you download a ‘smushed’ version, often quite a bit smaller. A good way to shrink commonly used graphics…

11 Dec: Got a bona fide reason to sign up for multiple accounts with a service like Twitter or Tumblr, but they force you use a different email address each time? Gah. Pretty soon, the stuff heading off to Hotmail, Gmail and corporate mailboxes can get pretty confusing, not to mention the problem of retrieving…

10 Dec: so people talk about ‘bounce rate’, and most of us have a vague sense that high bounce rates are bad, suggesting people are coming to a site in error, or not sticking around very long to enjoy our awesome content. There’s a great little explanation of bounce rate, and some benchmarks for different…

9 Dec: If you’re building a web app or site listing a series of URLs and you want to jazz up the listing a bit, you could do worse than add some little thumbnails of the site in question. I’ve used Open Thumbshots to power website previews over at Digitalgovuk, a listing of government social…

Just a quick one to alert you to the first 8 days of tips, in case you’ve missed them: Day 1, we looked at how QR codes can be used in 26 interesting ways Day 2, we presented the wonderful Morguefile, and some bookmarklets for quick and easy licence-free or CC-licensed images Day 3, we…