Advent Explosion

An advent calendar that @bakecaker made this year.

The Advent calendar was first introduced in the early 19th century as a physical way of counting down the days until Christmas. The word Advent itself is derived from the Latin word adventus, meaning “coming”, which refers to the birth of Jesus. Traditionally, this was a flat calendar for the month of December consisting to 2 pieces of card stock with 24 “doors” cut into the top layer. Each door was numbers from 1 to 24 and only one door could be opened each day. Inside each door was an image, poem or part of the Nativity story to celebrate the coming holiday.

Kids aren’t easily excited by images, poems, or stories, so the advent calendars I remember growing up with had depth and each door was a little gift box. For each day leading up to Christmas, I got a new Christmas ornament to hang on our tree, or better yet, chocolate. As a craft project for a friend, my wife Amy made the crafty little advent calendar you see on the right.

Over the last few years, virtual advent calendars have become increasingly popular. As a web designer, I’ve always loved the 24 ways calendar (in it’s 6th year already!) which provides a cutting-edge web design article each day of December.

Update:
This post now contains 8 virtual calendars for me to keep up with. I’ll try to archive the daily surprise that each has in store, but I might wait and add a few days at a time. Feel free to let me know if you spot any others. The anchor links below should allow you to jump down to each calendar.

1. 24 Ways
2. FontDeck’s Adfont Calendar
3. HTML5 Adventure Calendar
4. Gowalla’s Gifts On the Go
5. Freelancember
6. 24 Ways to Start
7. Performance Calendar
8. PHP Advent

24 Ways – The original Advent calendar for web geeks.

The articles for this year (so far) are:

1. Finding Your Way with Static Maps by Drew McLellan
2. Using the WebFont Loader to Make Browsers Behave the Same by Richard Rutter
3. My CSS Wish List by Inayaili de León
4. Go Forth and Make Awesomeness by Leslie Jensen-Inman
5. Beyond Web Mechanics – Creating Meaningful Web Design by Mike Kus
6. Wrapping Things Nicely with HTML5 Local Storage by Christian Heilmann
7. Golden Spirals by Drew Neil
8. “Probably, Maybe, No”: The State of HTML5 Audio by Scott Schiller
9. Extreme Design by Hannah Donovan
10. Optimize Your Web Design Workflow by Veerle Pieters
11. Documentation-Driven Design for APIs by Frances Berriman
12. The Great Unveiling by Cennydd Bowles
13. Good Ideas Grow on Paper by The Standardistas
14. An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms by David DeSandro
15. Real Animation Using JavaScript, CSS3, and HTML5 Video by Dan Mall
16. The Articulate Web Designer of Tomorrow by Simon Collison
17. Designing for iOS: Life Beyond Media Queries by Sarah Parmenter
18. Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content by Paul Hammond
19. Sketching to Communicate by Paul Annett
20. Put Yourself in a Corner by Meagan Fisher
21. A Contentmas Epiphany by Relly Annett-Baker
22. Everything You Wanted To Know About Gradients (And a Few Things You Didn’t) by Ethan Marcotte
23. Circles of Confusion by Andy Clarke
24. Calculating Color Contras by Brian Suda

This year though, there’ve been a slew of other virtual advent calendars that are also targeted at designers, developers and other web nerds. I thought it’d be fun to chronicle them all in one place, so here goes:

FontDeck’s Adfont Calendar

A typographic advent calendar that allows you to add a new font to your FontDeck account each day. Note: You can only claim the typeface on that day. The previous day’s typeface expires when the next door can be opened.

1. Museo
2. Proxima Nova
3. Cooper Black
4. Francesco
5. Montefiore
6. Beau Sans Pro
7. Sommet Slab
8. Quatro Slab
9. Crete
10. Malamondo
11. Intropol
12. Clarendon URW
13. Coquette
14. Bliss
15. Ice Cream Soda
16. Oblik
17. Tanger Serif
18. Cordial Pro
19. Reader
20. Bauer Bodoni
21. Calypso E
22. Din Display Pro
23. Mahalia
24. The Shire Types

HTML5 Adventure Calendar

Created by ZingChart, this calendar provides 24 days of killer demos, tutorials, community buzz, and “other stuff” related to HTML5.

1. Ball Pool Chrome Experiment by MrDoob
2. 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web by Google and Fantasy Interactive
3. Agent 008 Ball by Pixel Lab
4. HTML5 Ninja Games: JavaScript Ninja and Ninja Leap
5. The Killers HTML5 Site
6. Endless Mural/Okapi by @mixonline and Joshua Davis
7. WebSocket-Based Games: WordSquared and Rawkets
8. HTML5 <video>:TRON Fan Movie filtered through HTML5 and video + canvas = magic
9. Periodic Table of HTML5 Elements by Josh Duck
10. Anti-ActionScript Heros: Nevermind the Bullets, HTML5 graphic.ly reader and Ben the Bodyguard
11. Canvas Rider
12. <canvas> canvases: http://draw.2x.io/ and http://bomomo.com
13. HTML5 Cosmos: CanvasMol and IE9 Testdrive’s Galactic demo
14. Print meets Web: Lost World’s Fairs – Atlantis, Lettering.js and Curtis CSS Typeface
15. HTML5 <audio>: 9Elements Canvas Audioand The yayQuery jQuery Singalong
16. HTML5 – WebGL: Body Browser – Google Labs and WebGL Asteriods
17. Stupid Awesome: Mario doing the Runningman by Jacob Seidelin
18. Pirates Love Daisies
19. Spirit of Indiana by Christian Heilmann
20. FlowerOscope by @LaSurprise
21. Le Roi de la Garnotte by Revolver3
22. The Museum of Never Ending Art
23. Flight of the Navigator
24. We Break Stuff’s Snow Globe, Graham’s Canvas Snow Globe and The HTML5 Advent Snow Globe 5-Oh

Gowalla’s Gifts On the Go

I’m pretty much a Gowalla addict, so I was excited to hear that they’re giving away a different prize each day to a given number of people who check in. If you visit the site in Safari, the doors have a nice -webkit-transition animation affect.

1. iPod Shuffle (30)
2. Hip Digital Album Download (100)
3. Gowalla Scarf (100)
4. Flickr Pro Membership (50)
5. Incase Ping Pong Cover (75)
6. $20 Threadless Gift Code (50)
7. $25 NBAStore.com Online Gift Card (100)
8. Field Notes Colors Subscription (30)
9. Levi’s Jeans (250)
10. Gowalla T-Shirt (100)
11. LIVESTRONG Hoodie (100)
12. Incase Courier Collection Backpack (10)
13. Charity Water Donations (10k)
14. Nixon Rubber Re-Run Watch (10)
15. GoPro HD Helmet HERO cams (3)
16. Gowalla Hoodie (50)
17. REI Stratocruiser Carry-On Bags (10)
18. $50 Four Seasons Voucher (10)
19. Amazon Kindle (10)
20. Southwest Airlines Flight Voucher (5)
21. Studio Beats Headphones by Dr. Dre (10)
22. Jones Snowboards: The Flagship (3)
23. MacBook Air (3)
24. TOMS Shoes (250)
25. One-of-a-Kind Gowalla Bike

Freelancember

31 days of free gifts for freelancers from the makers of Freckle.

1. Worksheet to Help You ID your Ideal Clients (pdf)
2. Free Vector Gift Image (zip)
3. Top 10 Signs it’s Time to Fire Your Client
4. Top 10 Reasons to Raise Your Rates
5. Bad Client Déjà Vu (pdf)
6. Your Clients Will Help You Charge More (pdf)
7. Top Ten Reasons to Raise Your Rates (pdf)
8. 2 Email Templates
9. Self-Promotion Checklist
10. Weekly Self-Promotion
11. Monthly Self-Promotion
12. Build a Self-Promotion Inspiration Board
13. Annual Self Promotion
14. Daily/Weekly Self-Promo Worksheets (pdf)
15. Monthly/Yearly Self-Promo Worksheets (pdf)
16. Top 10 Things You Don’t Bill For But Should
17. 3 Tips to Bypass Billing Bafflement
18. Package-Building Cheat sheet (pdf)
19. Holiday Thank-You’s
20. 3 Holiday Icons (zip)
21. ??? (Broken)
22. Website Clarity Checklist
23. Pre-Vacation Checklist
24. 48-hour Email Sabbatical

24 Ways to Start

Daily posts for entrepreneurs.

1. Reflections On Entrepreneurship by @MaxNiederhofer
2. Entrepreneurs – so you think you can build a useful product? by @aleyzerovich
3. Lessons from the front: 4 simple rules for success by @NathGaveau
4. How we earned two long-term partners for our $10,000 mistake by @NoahKagan
5. The hunger of a real start-up? by @wilsondan
6. Execution is key by @M0T0chan
7. 3 quick steps to ensure your startup is on the right track in the new year by @THulme
8. My £10 million MBA – the story of Ammo City by @GrahamBM
9. What have you done wrong? by @SeanBonner
10. That two letter word… by @jasonball
11. Designer, Architect, Developer by @mojombo
12. There’s PR and then there’s wasting your time & money by @pjozefak
13. Think you’re good at networking? Properly following up (especially with a VC) by @pfinette
14. Four Steps to Building the Perfect Financial Model by @tdavidson
15. Just Do It by @overdrev
16. It’s not an app you’re building–it’s a product by @stephanierieger
17. Pivot or Persist by @glennbookingbug
18. Getting Your Story Straight by @liaonet
19. Frog Driven Development by @spif
20. Unit Economics by @EoghanJennings
21. Build What You Know by @benwerd
22. The Vision Thing by @tempo
23. Startups Lessons Not Learned or Lame Startup Thinking by @mikebutcher
24. The World Seen Through An Archentrepreneur’s Eyes by @olaahlvarsson

Performance Calendar

Daily posts about enhancing website performance from perfplanet.com.

1. The State of Web Performance Optimization – 2010 by Patrick Meenan
2. The Full Stack by Carlos Bueno
3. All you should know about your first enemy: Latency by Éric Daspet
4. WPO Analytics by Wim Leers
5. An Introduction to Automating Performance with Phing by Tim Kadlec
6. Pushing Beyond Gzipping by Marcel Duran
7. Mod_Pagespeed Performance Review by Aaron Peters
8. Bloated Request & Response Headers by Kyle Simpson
9. Easy Cache Headers by Sergey Chernyshev
10. Coding Better Object-Oriented JavaScript with Closure Compiler by Hedger Wang
11. HTML Lazy Load by Sergey Chikuyonok
12. High Performance Mobile by David Calhoun
13. The truth about non-blocking JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas
14. Benchmark the Network by Tony Gentilcore
15. The new Twitter by Ben Cherry
16. PNG That Works by Kornel Lesiński
17. Fast Ads with HTML5 by Ken Scholz
18. The No-Rocket-Science Guide to Web Performance Analysis by Alois Reitbauer
19. Measuring the Performance of Task Completion by Lindsey Simon
20. Poll: Which waterfall led to greater revenues? by Joshua Bixby
21. Mobile performance analysis using pcapperf by Bryan McQuade and Libo Song
22. Thoughts on Performance by Philip Tellis
23. Bulletproof JavaScript benchmarks by Mathias Bynens and John-David Dalton
24. 2010 State of Performance by Steve Souders

PHP Advent

Daily posts with tips, tricks and tidbits curated by Chris Shiflett and Sean Coates.

1. Localization by Anthony Gentile Anthony Gentile
2. First-Class APIs by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson
3. Profiling with XHGui by Paul Reinheimer
4. The Thing with the Two Heads by Ed Finkler
5. Code for Today by Lorna Mitchell
6. JavaScript for PHP Developers by Stoyan Stefanov
7. Bits and PHPieces by Joël Perras
8. Output Buffering by Nicholas Sloan
9. Building Mobile Apps by Jonathan Stark
10. Everyone Loves PHP by Scott MacVicar
11. Managing LAMP by Marcel Esser
12. Share and Enjoy by Gopal Vijayaraghavan
13. Streams by Lisa Denlinger
14. Usage Statistics by Ilia Alshenetsky
15. Debugging by Nate Abele
16. Legacy Jungle by Mark Story
17. Thumbnails by Owen Winkler
18. Text and Media Files by Anna Filina
19. The Ghost of Christmas Past by Luke Welling
20. Big Data by Laura Thomson
21. Color for the Holidays by Jon Bond-Caron
22. Don’t Panic by Derick Rethans
23. Aspect-Oriented Design by Garrett Woodworth
24. Mistrust and Verify by Kitt Hodsden

Others?

Surely I missed some nerdy Advent calendars. If I missed one that you think should be in this list, please let me know and I’ll add it here.