This is a bit of a brain dump - and is in no way a complete list - but it may be helpful to someone (especially the drupal theming bit).
My work flow is to first get the nuts and bolts of the site working - then play with the design - and finally add the content.
Assuming you have a basic install of drupal then here we go!

AJAX is one of the newer buzz words floating around these days and sites with fancy AJAX scripts for you to cut and paste are springing up all the time. So what are the basics of AJAX? How does it work? And is it easy to write your own simple AJAX scripts?
Follow this short AJAX guide and with nothing more than a text editor and a browser you'll grasp the basics in no time.

In Part 2. of this AJAX guide we create a very simple XML text file and run through the steps to get the data to update into a web page without refreshing the page.

Using responseXML and the DOM instead of responseText
So far we have been looking at AJAX using an XML file, however we have really only been treating the XML file as any other text file. This could have been a .txt .htm or some text generated by a server side scripting engine (PHP, ASP etc.)

A starter guide for implementing google maps on your site.
Step 1: Getting a Map to show on your site!
First up you need a key, which is straight forward – just ask google for one! So long as you have a live domain, just sign in to google and click here.


Create a page and add the following to your header;
</p> <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=abc123" type="text/javascript"></script><p>

When running a website, it’s important to know who your visitors are. How many are there? Are there enough to pay for your site? Are the numbers growing? Where do they come from (physically / electronically)? How do they get to your site? What were they looking for? Are you giving it to them? Which pages did they visit? What browser were they using? Does your site look right on their browser? How long did they stay on your site? Was it easy for them to find what they were looking for? Did they convert, from visitor to customer? Did they do what you expected?

When starting a web business, it's important to Know Your Customer! If you are going to design a site, you need to know who you are designing it for. OK, we can just build a site that looks neutrally appealing to any potential visitor, but you'll have a bigger impact if you design for a particular customer - plus you'll stay focused more easily.

Pretty URLs are good to have. People like pretty. There are various ways to accomplish this, but I will go over a simple way that I’ve personally never heard before. That means I invented it, even though many other people have already invented it, but never told me.

So, I've just got back from a "photo shoot", where I've been gathering images for a website I'm working on - I load them up onto my computer and find "AAARGH!" there is a datestamp on the images. (My wife has used the camera to take the more important images of our new baby son, and I didn't know she'd switched the date stamp feature back on!) So, without spending another day out taking photos - what can I do?! Fortunately I have several options available:

1) Use the images with the datestamp on them.

Web 2.0 is here, and with it Tag Clouds. In this article I look at improving Tag Clouds. What are Tag Clouds? Tag Clouds are a simple visualisation depicting the key tags used in a webpage (or website). What are Tags?