As you’re all no doubt aware, digg is a traffic-delivering juggernaut—some of the busiest days in SitePoint’s history have come off the back of hitting the front page of digg.

The ability to move massive amounts of traffic to one site has many marketers, site owners, and entrepreneurs salivating at the very prospect of producing something that the digg crowd will, err, dig.

So much so, in fact, that it is possible to engineer your way to the front page of digg.com.

Don’t believe me? Try these approaches and see for yourself...

In the last issue of the Tech Times, I mentioned I was hard at work with the team here on a new front page design for sitepoint.com. While most of our time has been split between tweaking the CSS styles and crafting the PHP code that will generate the page, any major redesign brings with it the opportunity to improve the HTML code at the heart of your site. Of course, any newly-written HTML code these days should validate. But there’s more to good HTML code than validation. Validation is the bare minimum you should be doing to assure the quality of your code. This issue, I’d like to take a look at four simple things you can do to make sure your HTML has that nice, new markup smell...

This is just a short roundup post to touch base with our NETTUTS readers. Just a few tidbits of info, including unofficial announcements of new TUTS sites and a link to an interview with our very own Collis Ta’eed [...]

Web pages are full of buttons. Navigation, links, “next” buttons, “submit” buttons, “OK” buttons, “close” buttons… the list goes on. When you go about designing a new web page, chances are its going to have a lot of buttons. Make life easier for yourself by creating a button class that you can reuse over and over in your HTML whenever you need a button. Not only is this a favor to you, but it’s good for your users and aesthetics as well. Consistency is a key factor in usability. Let’s get started...

You often hear people extolling the virtues of multitasking: you get more done, It’s the way of the future. Balls. Multitasking is great if you want to fill your time doing a lots of things not very well, over a long period of time. Sure you can: flicking between checking your email, Twittering, writing a report, trying a new web app and chatting on Facebook. Are you busy? Probably. Are you productive? Probably not. As I see it, there are two key problems here:

1. Doing non essential tasks Due to procrastination and self-distraction you are putting off certain tasks, by doing everything else but, the task you are supposed to be doing.
2. Task switching The other often overlooked issue is that of task switching — moving between one task and another. This is the issue I want to draw your attention to in this post.

Let’s go back in time and look at Windows XP system icons. We’ll get inspired by an old computer icon. Then we’ll create a simple monitor icon in that style. Icon Factory is the company that created the icons for both Vista and XP Windows operating systems. Their works serves as inspiration for not only this tutorial, but many icons created today...

...or why I think Mashable is wrong.

Mashable has an interesting article that places Twitter's popularity purely on its simplicity. Even more bold, it believes that people haven't left Twitter because of its simplicity. Its competitors are simply too complex [...]

I read this morning in the SitePoint Industry News forum that BusinessWeek had compiled what is being referred to as The 10 Commandments of Web Design. The experts who contributed to this list include widely read authors and speakers like Dan Cederholm, Dave Shea, Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Zeldman. Here it is...