Of course, there are fewer resources this week. I’m okay with that, though. Time was spent better elsewhere :).

• SendGrid is a service that aims to help developers replace the overhead of managing email infrastructure for larger applications. Easy integration, flexible API, and analytics.

• psd.js is a JavaScript library that accepts a PSD file and can return out various pieces of information such as image size, layer information, color modes, etc.

• Devise, the authentication library for Rails, just released version 2.0. The update includes the introduction of reconfirmable, removal of database authentication, support for engines, and support for Rails 3.2.

• Beautiful Web Type is a showcase of the best Google Web Fonts.

• jQuery 1.7.2 Beta 1 was released.

• Bear CSS is a simple little web application that accepts an HTML document and returns a CSS template based on the ID’s, selectors, and elements in the provided HTML file.

The full list of resources, articles, and promotions are included in the newsletter each week.

Resumable.js. A JavaScript library for providing multiple simultaneous, stable, fault-tolerant and resumable/restartable uploads via the HTML5 File API.

jEditable. A jQuery plugin for converting a number of HTML elements into in-place editable containers.

24 Extremely Useful Ruby Gems For Web Development. Envato provides a killer round up of a variety of Ruby Gems that can help prevent you from reinventing the wheel and help make your life easier in future Rails projects.

Minimut Gallery. A customizable jQuery plugin for galleries, slideshows, carousels, and so on.

Upgrading To Rails 3.2. A recent Railscast that gives clearn instructions of how to upgrade your Rails applications to version 3.2.

Poshy Tip jQuery Plugin. A jQuery plugin for generating tooltips from the title attribute of anchor tags.

HTML5 Please. Look up HTML5, CSS3, etc features, know if they are ready for use, and if so find out how you should use them – with polyfills, fallbacks or as they are.

Font.js. Font.js adds new Font() functionality to the JavaScript toolbox, akin to how you use new Image() for images.

HTML5 Reset is a simple set of files that provides a basic foundation for HTML5-based projects. With all of the heavy boilerplates that exist, this is a nice alternative.

jQuery Collapse is a jQuery Plugin for adding collapsable sections of your web-based UI. It’s ARIA compliant and the menu positions are saved via cookie persistence.

pxLoader is a JavaScript Image Preloader speciifcally for HTML5 applications. The website provides extremely easy intructions for getting started.

js.js is a JavaScript Interpreter for JavaScript. The interpreter is worth playing around with and the source code is worth browsing especially for the CS junkies.

Note that the Newsletter is currently being sponsored by Site5. If you’re looking for a free domain or a month’s worth of hosting, be sure to subscribe and check it out.

Exciting, sure, but my ultimate goal for it is not only to provide a resource for others but to act as a resource in and of itself. So, starting this week and running for the next month, the Newsletter will begin offering it’s first deal for subscribers.

I’m a big fan of Site 5. In fact, I use them for all of my client work, personal sites, and Rails applications. They’ve got the best implementation of cPanel I’ve seen and excellent customer service.

Starting this week and running for the next four Fridays, the guys at Site 5 have sent over two coupon codes exclusively for More Code subscribers. To receive them, all you gotta go is sign up!

So if you’re looking to purchase a new domain or looking for some killer hosting, subscribe to the Newsletter and take advantage of the promo. It’s all for you guys.

Note that I received no affiliation fees or commission fees for this promotion, nor did I receive any form of compensation. This promotion is purely for newsletter subscribers.

• jQuery.mentionsInput is a plugin that makes it easy to introduce the ability to “@mention” someone within the context of your web application exactly like you would if you were on Twitter or Facebok.

• Pokki is a platform for creating desktop applications using the standard web-based programming languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

• A collection free fonts provided by Smashing Magazine. These are always good especially if your design-handicapped.

• Ingredients is an application for offline viewing of Apple’s Cocoa documentation.

• Growl Notifications achieved in nothing more than HTML5 and CSS3. Really good looking, IMHO.

• Impress.js is a JavaScript-based presentation tool that borrows heavily from Prezzi. A cool alternative to, ahem, PowerPoint for your next presentation.

• jQuery UI Bootstrap takes the Twitter Bootstrap libraries and applies them to jQuery UI widgets. Exceptional resource for client-side developers looking for clean interfaces.

• Color Thief is a great tool for pulling the dominate colors out of an image. Utilities like this are especially useful when you’re looking to put together a pallete for a design.

• JSDev is a new utility by Douglas Crockford for activating selected comments and making them executable. You can read more about the application on his Google+ Post.

• twss.js is a simple JavaScript library for adding “that’s what she said” to the end of content throughout your project.

If you want more, don’t forget to subscribe!

• Masha is a JavaScript application that makes it easy to mark and share interesting parts of a web page and share it. It’s easy to drop on your own site, too.

• Initializr is an HTML5 Template Generator that provides a responsive boilerplate for your HTML5 projects. For those that prefer the base level of functionality, the site generates a simple one page template. It also provides advanced template creation.

• UIParade currently has a killer UI Toolkit for $8. It includes icons, backgrounds, glyphs, photos, etc. Worth it for web-based applications or sites.

• If you’re new to HTML5 or looking to take a deeper dive with it, reading Nettuts guide on HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility is worth a read, especially for those of you building sites and applications targeting specific audiences.

• For those of you that do a lot of client-side development (especially with JavaScript and JSON), check out Tmpltr. Similar to JSFiddle, it provides a way to tinker with templates, JSON, HTML, and binding it all together.

• Scrollorama is a jQuery plugin that provides a variety of effects for scrolling content. Much easier for you to check it out than for me to try to explain it.

• For those of you that have set aside 2012 to learn to code, check out Code Year. It’ll help keep you honest with your resolution.

Hope you guys had a killer holiday – on to the new year!

The series of posts tends to be one of the more visited areas of the site but has little engagement. I considered ending it, but it appears that many of you enjoy reading it. So I considered spinning it off into a newsletter where it can be a little more in-depth, a little more complete, and can offer a little bit more than a typical blog post and receive some positive feedback.

The first issue will be dropping this Friday. Here’s everything you need to know…

Administrative Stuff (Blah, Blah, Blah…)

I’ll be highlighting exactly what you can expect from the newsletter later in the post, but first, a few specifics…

First, you can register for the newsletter by heading over to this page. Simply provide your email address and I’ll take it from there. Note that you’ll be able to opt out at any time.

Secondly, this is largely an experiment. I’m committing to running this for the first quarter of this year after which I’ll evaluate an determine if it’s worth the time to continue to doing it. Note that this will be largely contingent on feedback from you guys! If you like, dislike, want more, want less, and so on, let me know!

Third, I’d appreciate any form of link love you can give the newsletter. Be it a Tweet, a Facebook mention, an email, a blog post, a +1, whatever. Anything that will help get the word out. All of those sharers are also available on the newsletter homepage.

Lastly, I’ll still be running a few resources on this site on Fridays. Think of those posts as a teaser for the newsletter on which I’ll almost be urging readers to subscribe as their inbox is where more of the goods will be delivered.

What To Expect

As mentioned above, the newsletter is going to be more in-depth than the weekly round-up of links that I’ve been posting. Specifically, my overall vision and goal for the newsletter is as follows:

It’s time consuming to pour over Twitter, Google+, and our various RSS feeds to find useful stuff that keeps us sharp and makes our jobs easier. The Newsletter aims to provide filtered, high quality resources for you regardless of your level of experience.

Simple, right?

In addition to the standard round up, I have a few long term plans for the newsletter that will hopefully make it more valuable for many of you. For example, as the newsletter takes off, I’d love to callout projects the subscribers are working on and promote them each week.

So, again, sign up here and be sure to give it some link love. I’ll have the first issue out on Friday.

Rather than through them out, I thought I’d try to give then out to those of you that are looking to get your feet wet in code, brush up on your development chops, or just add to your own bookshelf. So, I’ve got four books that I’m giving away completely free (all I ask if that you pay shipping):

• Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition. A heads up: This is not the most recent entry into the series. It’s still a strong book, but doesn’t cover some of the most recent topics (such as the Asset Pipeline, CoffeeScript, etc).

• Teach Yourself C in 21 Days, Fourth Edition. Highly recommend this for someone looking to get familiar with lower-level programming at a very introductory level.  Teach all the basics constructs of the C language.

• jQuery In Action, First Edition. Stellar book for those of you looking to learn jQuery. It assumes you know very little about the library and teaches by example. By the time you finish the book, you should be more than capable in thinking of “doing things the jQuery way,” and knowing where to look in the API when you need additional help.

• PHP In Action. A solid book on software engineering in PHP. Covers basics in PHP, test-driven development, object-oriented programming, and more. Highly recommend this for budding PHP programmers looking to get deeper into the language and into development.

Here’s how to enter: Simply leave a comment with the title of what book you want. Ideally, one book per person. First come, first serve. I’ll use the order in which comments come in to the blog. After that, I’ll email you privately to get your address.

I’ll be in touch by Friday.

• URI.js is a JavaScript library for working with URL’s. Looking at the interface of the library, you’ll notice that it resembles jQuery’s method chaining and that it provides somewhat of an interface to a URL (with methods such as username, directory, suffix, hash, etc).

• Here are 22 of the Most Popular jQuery Plugins of 2011. The Top X of Y posts have begun to decrease in popularity (thankfully!) but there’s a still a place for them in the blogosphere and this one was a good example.

• For those of you that author plugins and custom functions for jQuery, check out this refresher on jQuery’s pushStack functionality.

• My second post in Managing Premium WordPress Projects post went live on Tutsplus this week.

• Yet another jQuery Ajax Autosuggest plugin.

• With the development cycle of Ruby on Rails, it can be easy to fall behind if you aren’t regularly working with the framework. Ryan provides a traditional Getting Started with Rails railscast this week.

• Andrew Burgess had a great post on 10 New Year’s Resolutions Every Web Developer Should Make. I agree with nearly every point he makes.

• My good friend and designer Jared released a free wallpaper for January 2012. Makes your desktop look better than anything you could come up with.

• John Resig, author of jQuery, wrote an interesting piece on using JavaScript as a First Language to someone that’s never seen a programming language before. For anyone with a background in computer science, I think it’s a great read.

• Your jQuery: Now with 67% Less Suck is a great article on ways to improve your jQuery code for performance and readability. Dug this article.

According to feedback and analytics data, this particular section of the site has a fair amount of traffic so I’m thinking of experimenting with improving it in the next year. Though I’d still likely run the resources on the site, I’m thinking of creating a newsletter and expanding the content with some more exclusive information. If you’re a developer (of any type), I’d especially like to talk with you about this.

Although, this is probably the worst time of year to gauge interest on this given that most people are traveling, taking time off, and are generally disconnect, but if you’d be interested in mixing things up with the resources, let me know either via comment or via email.

On to 2012!

• The first release candidate for Rails 3.2 is on deck. Here’s a blog post detailing some of the stuff that’s included (faster dev mode, tag logger, explained queries, and more!)
• Mobi Pick is an Android-style date picker control for jQuery Mobile.
• A little older (in Internet time, at least ) Keymaster.js is a library for easily adding keyboard shortcuts to your web applications.
• UglyJs.net is a site highlighting ugly JavaScript. Funny to read through.
• HTML Email Boilerplate should be self-explanatory. It’s a boilerplate for creating email newsletters that look good across various clients.
• Smashing Magazine published a case study on turning small projects into profitable businesses.
• Here’s a killer set of JavaScript audio codecs.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you guys!