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After showing you A Showcase of Clean White Web Designs a couple weeks ago, it’s time for us to add some textured designs to our lists. Textures are a great way to give a special touch to a website. They can be used in a specific part of the layout – the header/footer, for example, or they can be used in the whole page as a background. The thing is that textures are versatile, beautiful and stylish. So here are 50 excellent examples of textures in web design to inspire you.

One of my favorite new features in jQuery 1.4 is the new $.proxy method. It allows us force a particular context when calling a method. In JavaScript, there can be times when it’s difficult to hold on to the this keyword. For example, when it’s bound to some event handler, this now refers to the target of the handler, rather than your desired object.

Perhaps more than any other topic, I’m most often contacted about how to build cross-browser navigation menus. Understandably, the reason is because every web designer has built one at some point, if not during every project! Nonetheless, it can absolutely be a tricky task. In this video tutorial, I’ll teach you how to build an attractive cross-browser navigation menu; notable features include CSS3 gradients, multiple sub-menus, and jQuery animations.

IconShock has designed Social Network icon-set exclusively for Smashing Share readers. The IconShock – icon sets are awesome and free to use for both your personal and commercial projects. Included icons are for following services. Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter and Delicious.

In lesson nine of our CodeIgniter series, we’ll build a small image gallery that allows you to upload files, and automatically create thumbnails.

The jQuery method $.grep() is one of those methods that isn’t used as often as it should be. This is mostly because, until you understand exactly what it does, it can be a bit confusing. Hopefully, this video quick tip will explain when and why you would use it.