Can I be bothered :)

As you will notice from this post.. i dont have a structure to how I write. It'd be nice if i was a professional writer :).. but I'm not. Ironically, English was the only class I passed in my last year of school.

Well im going to hold off on the new template/css. I'm not an artist, and without having a specific goal, I find myself lacking in the motivation department :).

If someone... anyone has some creative I could use for my template, please write some contact details in comments, and I'll turn my blog into your creative (provided its classy)

The one point I'd like to enforce across all web programming

Keep it simple!
Its the web.. we serve strings to a browser. Do it.. the documented proper way. (hah, who says its proper).

Read up on justifications of standards if you have an argument with that :).

Stuff that rocks:
Ruby on Rails
This rocks more than pretty much everything else web related. I couldnt sleep for 2 days after discovering this gem (hah little pun) of a framework. Still it enthrals me :). Rather than harp on about it, go find out at www.rubyonrails.org.

CSS + HTML/XHTML + standards
I dont care how much experience you have, go learn CSS and tableless layouts if you havnt already.

It's ironic that developers can talk about seperation of layout, business and logic layers and elegance.... but then mash everything together for the HTML... which is the bit that EVERY client will receive.

These technologies are easy and fun :)

If you know how to build stuff in tables, then forget everything you know, and go learn the real way :) (css zen garden, alistapart, w3schools, sitepoint whatever... just do it).

tables = tabulated data. Remember that.

If you know what you are doing, you do more work with less writing.
You become more efficient, more work is reusable. Dont punish yourself and clients by refusing to learn the "right" way.

Google
Google owns me. Without Google.. i'd be a lot worse off in the knowledge department.

.NET 2.0
The next generation of .NET looks to be uber. Master pages, themes, IDE integration, Web server integration.. it really looks like MS have pulled the finger out. (lets hope multiple forms come). The drag and drop components come out as valid HTML. This is all out of the box.

.NET 1.1 was a pile of garbage for web work. I think MS suffered the problems described above in the CSS + HTML section.

Javascript + DOM + XMLHTTPRequest
We all know about Ajax these days. I've been using it for a few years in one way or another. The uptake is becoming a lot better, thanks to the coining of the term Ajax.

No longer do we have to hide iframes and get their onload events to populate divs. YAY.

DOM is cool. I've worked with people who know the buzzword DOM but get lost in their own complex brains so that no one can use/modify/read the code. Maybe years ago I was like that. Keeping it simple is where the power is.

Stuff thats... indifferent
Java... and its plethora of frameworks (hibernate, spring, struts.. whatever)
Flash...
PHP...
XSLT... *sigh* (why do people use this for HTML output?)
I dunno.. everything thats not listed above in the "Rocks" section :)