Main Points

History is Now

Here's our gallery of useful offsite links. There are many internet resources available, even if most of them are not public domain. This is a collection of some of the best.

Art and Culture Resources

Literature including the fantastic Project Gutenberg, art, and other cultural sites.

  • Project Gutenberg - An amazing catalog of public domain literature (Shakespeare, Homer, Dickens, and thousands more...) in dozens of languages; all of them freely available for download. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/09/22]
  • New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Photo Gallery - Amazing collection of thousands of research quality digital photographs. Sadly, it's not quite public domain, but it may serve your needs. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/10/30]
  • Olga's Art Gallery - The best online art gallery that I've found. There are museums and galleries that may have more impressive collections, but unless you want to travel to them, Olga's is the place to go. Everything is posted with excellent analysis of the artists which makes it worth the visit all by itself. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/10/30]
  • Quoteland - Dedicated to archiving the quotes and sayings that you want to look up. If they don't have the answer, there are tips galore for finding it yourself. Plus, they are locked and loaded with a bulletin board where quote geeks hang out to talk shop or help newbies with their questions. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/12/07]
  • Scriptcrawler - An extensive collection of scripts from movies, TV shows, radio programs, etc. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/10/30]
  • Absolute Write Forums - The website has valuable information for people serious about breaking into the writing business. The forums are even better; the most extensive boards in virtually any genre and the most active board for writers I've found anywhere. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Latin Library - An extensive collection of ancient texts in the original Latin, or English translations, or both... depending. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) - A website that is, sadly, no longer maintained, but still online. There are other resources, but there is no more understandable and well designed site that offers Sumerian literature and background information on Sumerian literature, language, and history. Virtually every text is provided in two forms: transliterations into the Latin alphabet and translations into English. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • The Encyclopedia of Arda - A great site for Lord of the Rings information. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 - The most complete website available dedicated to the epic sci-fi series. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • History of Alice in Wonderland - Includes background and many of the original illustrations from Lewis Carroll's classic. [chroniclemaster1, 2006/02/16]
  • Art Renewal Center - A large very cool online art museum with an entire education wing attached. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • Omniglot - Extensive catalogue of ancient scripts and their glyphs. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Free Public Domain (Fairy Tales) - Hans Christian Andersen collected stories, as well as other Fairy Tales, and selections from the 1001 Arabian Nights. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • IPA Preview - Preview site for the best linguistic software available today. The preview provides training on the phonetic alphabet through audio files that pronounce each sound; a great online audio resource. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]

Science and General Information Resources

Websites devoted to science specifically, or including general information of all kinds.

  • Wikipedia - One of the inspirations for our website. Though we disagree on a couple key points, we are big Wikipedia fans and hope their website will continue to improve. They grow faster, so if you don't find what you're looking for here, they may have it. There's a small search box on the left sidebar to help you find what you need. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) - One of the prominent scientific institutions in the world, JPL boasts an extensive public domain library of images from its joint missions with NASA. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Akiyoshi's Illusion Pages - If there is one gift we can give you, we hope this site is it. Akiyoshi is a Japanese psychology professor, and probably the world's foremost expert in visual perception. His website is an astounding collection of optical illusions that illustrate the subtleties and counterintuitive nuances of vision. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Random.org - A critical programming and internet security website, but it's application is much wider than that. Random.org provides a number of free services from generating random numbers and strings to randomly sorting lists of items. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Archaeological Institute of America - Go on a dig, take a vacation to a World Heritage site, and get current archaeology news from this excellent and prestigious site. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/10/30]
  • Ask An Astronomer - The excellent website of the Cornell University Astronomy Department. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/10/30]

Public Domain Image Resources

Public domain images are difficult to locate. Here are some of the resources we turn to in our web design work.

  • Wikimedia Commons - Far and away the largest resource of "non-copyrighted" material. Most of it is copyleft protected, but because of the sheer volume there is still a large quantity of public domain material; you just have to sift through a lot to get to it. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Public Domain Photos - A smaller collection, but everything is public domain. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Public Domain Pictures - A smaller collection, but everything is public domain. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Free Photos.se - A smaller collection, but everything is public domain. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]

Web Design and Development Resources

There are many different kinds of websites necessary to pursue web design or web development and our broad experience has brought us into contact with many valuable sites that do vastly different kinds of things.

  • W3C (X)HTML Validator - Webpages behave badly when written poorly; it's the number one reason for pages that display fine in one browser but not another. Validation eliminates most of these problems by identifying your errors so you can fix them. Note that it works poorly once the initial error has been detected so correct the first error in the list and revalidate. You'll often find that a number of other error messages have gone away. This is a great way to learn XHTML; you'll soon find that your pages have few if any errors to begin with. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • W3C CSS Validator - If the XHTML Validator is awesome, the CSS Validator is only slightly less important. Plus, CSS is so much more challenging that this tool will likely save you more time than the XHTML version. If you call multiple stylesheet files, it's best to post everything live on the internet and use this tool to check the URL. It automatically runs down every stylesheet you're using and checks it, saving you lots of time. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool - No tool can adequately evaluate all the criteria necessary to guarantee that your webpage is truly accessible. WAVE is so effective, because it doesn't try to; it checks those things which a tool can check and then tells you to go test which is good, honest advice. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Sitepoint Forums - This Australian website is probably the best site on the internet for solid, robust, web standards based advice. While good for beginners, it's fantastic for intermediate and advanced developers looking to take their skills to the next level. And they host the most vibrant forum of developers on the internet; Sitepoint Forums is an amazing place to learn, swap secrets, and make connections. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Wrox P2P Forums - While not always tuned in to best practices, Wrox P2P (peer to peer) is one of the best .NET and XML websites online today. Chat with other developers and interact with some of the authors from perhaps the most popular series of computer programming books. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Google's Webmaster Tools - The most informative resource that Google provides for website administrators and developers, not that this is saying much. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - Matt Cutts is an important manager at Google, and his blog seems to have become the primary unofficial outlet that Google uses to communicate with the rest of the world. Given how tight lipped Google is about official pronouncements and documentation, that makes Matt's website a critical SEO resource. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Yahoo Site Explorer - Get an estimate on the extent to which Yahoo has indexed various websites (probably most importantly your own) including some information about the inbound links pointing to each page. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Font Forge - The font authoring and editing tool for serious artists and students of fonts. Requires Linux, or you need to download a Linux simulator; but this is manageable... especially as there is no real alternative for font designers. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Portland Patterns Repository - Ward Cunningham's wiki on design patterns which are used specifically by programmers but are a powerful (if more advanced) tool for thinking about any facet of web design and development. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/12]
  • N.Design Studio - Possibly the most beautifully crafted website on the internet. An all flash site that I refer to for design inspiration from time to time. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Village at Northstar - A beautifully crafted all flash website, I refer to for design inspiration from time to time. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]

Multi-lingual Web Development Resources

Depending on your needs, you may also need tools listed elsewhere, like Font Forge for building your own fonts, Omniglot for researching scripts (both ancient and modern), and IPA Preview for pronunciation lessons in linguistics.

  • Alan Wood's Unicode Resources - A British programmer and photographer, Alan Wood has collected the most authoritative and useful set of Unicode resources on the internet. Includes extensive test pages to see what Unicode ranges your fonts actually cover, and useful advice about how to cover ranges that you need, from new fonts to system configuration. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts - George Douros's amazing set of fonts which start by covering the Unicode ranges for cuneiform and ancient Greek scripts. However, it even includes ancient scripts for scholars whose work is still stuck in the Unicode consortium awaiting official approval. Spectacularly, these are all public domain fonts; the single most important font resource on the internet. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • W3C Internationalization Home - The W3C's resources on the principles and techniques of internationalization for your website; step one in creating versions of your website in multiple languages. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]
  • Non-Roman Script Initiative - Unicode lets you encode documents in hundreds if not thousands of different scripts, but how do you type them in using your keyboard? NRSI includes resources for tackling multi-lingual input issues. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/11/06]

Corporate Websites

I generally prefer websites that participate in the spirit of Earth Chronicle. While the material at these sites is completely copyrighted, there are some topics like news where that's not so critical a failing. These are some excellent sites run by corporations, like Amazon.

  • National Geographic - Everything is copyrighted, but it's photographers prove they are the best in the world every single year. If you want to know what kinds of images and media we're interested in. Open up National Geographic magazine or visit their website. That's photography. That's what we want. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • Amazon - The world's most famous online bookstore; they have great deals and provide access to an amazing collection of used book sellers. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • CBS Sportsline - One of the best websites for sports news and updates. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • YouTube - The granddaddy of all video sharing sites and still the most diverse and extensive collection. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/10/26]
  • New York Times - A great source for news articles of all kinds. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/10/26]
  • CNN - An excellent current events news source. [chroniclemaster1, 2009/10/26]
  • Encyclopedia Britannica - The granddaddy of information archives in its fairly limited online incarnation. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]
  • History Channel - The official website for the cable TV channel. [chroniclemaster1, 2005/04/06]