The Dandelife blog put me on to Particls and the Particls blog which in turn took me to a re-post-worthy "The Top 60 Web 2.0 Applications in Australia" (Particles is based in Oz as far as I can tell). The top 60 Web 2.0 applications is an interesting list, and I ended up clicking through to a few sites. Well worth a read. Tags: web 2.0, rss, desktop, australian

Last week there was a post on Lifehacker about a free online button maker (the post also mentioned "Classy Glassy Buttons", a site I have used before). I've found that there's lots of tutorials for making modern looking buttons in Photoshop, some with downloadable Photoshop files, but not having Photoshop means I can only "ooh" and "aah" at the resulting output. If I was to use a tool for making graphic elements like buttons or tabs for use on web pages, it would need to be free. Since my main line of work is not graphic design, so I don't have the...

In Reporting Services, the syntax for changing the text color of a table cell, say to red if the value is negative, is to set the "Color" property to this expression: =IIf(Me.Value < 0, "Red", "Black") Another useful formatting tool is changing the background color of a cell depending on the cell's value, perhaps to achieve a "heatmap" effect. I find it's far better to do this using code than the macro-type language I used above. Setting the background color in code can be achived by putting an expression like the following into the "BackgroundColor" property, replacing the section in square brackets with...