Design & Development | Linux and Open Source Blog

Almost all websites have them, and they are just extraordinary ugly: Dotted borders around text links. They show up when you click a link and won’t go away till you clicked somewhere else, reloaded the page or moved to another page:

Yes, I know that you saw that before… But why are all those sites displaying those ugly borders? I don’t know, because you don’t need to know any advanced techniques to remove the border! Just add the following code to your CSS document:

a {
outline: none;
}

And gone are the dotted borders!

But does that validate?

It’s easy to think that everyone isn’t using this because it doesn’t validate, though it does validate! Check it out on the W3C Validator on your page if you don’t believe me.

But why isn’t everyone using this?

Because most people don’t know that it is possible… In the past it was necessary to have the dotted border around licked links to see if you actually clicked it or not (in he past we had sow computers, so it took a while before the thing actually started downloading the new site). Today we don’t need that anymore in most cases, so please add this code to your Cascading Style Sheets and stop the ugliness!

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We’ve talked about about all the ways to design and build your site, but where are you ever going to get content to fill it with? We’ve gathered 25+ sources of content licensed under Creative Commons. Enjoy!

Audio

ArtistServer.com - Thousands of MP3s for you to download and try out smaller bands.

ccMixter.org - A site to try your hand at mixing and mashing music that is all offered under the CC.

Jamendo.com - A music site providing free, full-length albums for you to download. You pay the artists what you want, or just spread the word about them.

PodShow.com - A site filling your MP3 player with Creative Commons licensed music, that allows you to discover old and new music alike.

SoundClick.com - A site for bands, both signed and unsigned, to be promoted. Offers free, downloadable, legal MP3s from some bands.

TheFreeSoundProject - A huge collection of CC licensed sound effects files.

General Searches

Archive.org - Known mainly for their “Wayback Machine” as a means for seeing old pages on the net, they have also collected together a huge collection of free-to-use recordings and texts.

Freebase.com - A community powered search engine to search the web for CC licensed work for you to use.

Google Advanced Search - Google gives you the option to include forms of licensing in your search.

Wikimedia Commons - The central clearing area for the Wikimedia projects CC files.

Yahoo Creative Commons Search - Yahoo allows you to search the entire web for what you need based on the licenses attached to the content.

Images

DeviantArt.com - A site for artists to display their works. Some are nice enough to license under CC for your use.

EveryStockPhoto.com - Indexes over 1.4 million Creative Commons photos for your use.

Flickr Creative Commons search - Search Flickr for all the derivatives of the Creative Commons licensing.

Geograph.org.uk - An attempt to photograph the entirety of the British Isles, and at the same time, license all the photos under the CC.

OpenClipArt.org - An archive of free-to-use clipart numbering around 11,000 pieces.

PhotoEverywhere.co.uk - A travel & tourism photo site offering stock photography for everyone’s use.

TakeIdeas.com - Share your photos, or find ones that inspire you.

TravellersPoint.com - A wiki for travellers with a large collection of CC licensed travel photography.

Yotophoto.com - Indexes photos in the public domain and free-to-use licenses.

Texts

IntraText.com - A site featuring thousands of texts from 900 B.C. to this decade. Most works are under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

UnearthTravel.com - Read travel guides about your favorite destinations.