✏ Issue #493: 20 Best New Sites, OMG SVG Favicons FTW, The Internet Is Rotting, 5 Creative Photo Editing Tips, and more…

Online stores can’t compete with their real-world rivals when it comes to appealing to the full spectrum of senses, but some sites come close. In this month’s roundup of the best new sites, we look at the ecommerce stores that are solving that dilemma, as well as the rest of the best new sites on the web. Enjoy!

If you spend your day cycling through sites to check on your metrics, then you’ll love Radar. Radar is a simple macOS app that sits on your menubar and instantly updates you on the numbers that matter to you, from your Twitter follower count to the traffic on your site to the current price of your favorite cryptocurrency.

The code you’ve been using for favicons hasn’t changed in years, and if you want comprehensive browser support you’ll need to stick with PNGs a while longer, but resolution-independent SVGs are a much better option in 2021. Austin Gil takes a look at implementing SVG favicons, including the CSS for dark mode.

When the Internet was constructed, no one could predict the huge growth that would come. As a result, it wasn’t built to scale or for longevity, and much of its linking data — the references that make the Web, the Web — are now rotten. Jonathan Zittrain explores the growing problem in this eye-opening article.

Ackee is a self-hosted, open-source analytics tool for people who are serious about privacy. You install it on your own server, and it gathers data on sessions in a way that respects anonymity, then displays insights in the dashboard in a beautiful, minimal UI. Ackee is entirely transparent, easy to integrate, and free to use.

Radix Colors is an open-source color system for designing websites and apps. The collection includes 28 carefully curated colors, each with 12 shades, each selected with accessibility in mind, and there’s even dark mode support. The excellent documentation includes full usage instructions for building color scales with the system.

Editing images is one of the core skills that every designer should have in their locker, and one few creative courses teach. In this handy guide, Isabella Foreman explains 5 photo editing techniques, from cropping to contrast manipulation, that will take your images from so-so to a central component of your portfolio.

Image Extractor is an incredibly helpful tool for developers who need to extract assets from a designer’s prototype. It’s a Chrome extension that exports all of the images on a page in a single click. It’s a huge time-saver for anyone who finds themselves trawling source code for asset files, and it even handles background images.