The Six Nations 2012 cheat sheet is an essential guide for rugby fans. Includes the 2011 table and results, full fixture list, Six Nations teams world rankings, a little Six Nations trivia and even current odds on the eventual winner.

Downloads

The Wikipedia cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet for budding Wikipedia editors, including formating tips, some handy links and a run-down of some of the more common shortcuts and abbreviations used on Wikipedia.

Contents

The Wikipedia cheat sheet includes:

• Headings
• Text Effects
• Links
• Lists and Indents
• Lines and Signatures
• Allowed HTML Tags
• Tables
• Images
• Citations
• Useful Pages
• Abbreviations and Shortcuts

Downloads

The Vimeo API cheat sheet is for those of you who work with the Vimeo advanced API, and need a quick reference for their API methods.

Downloads

The Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet for UK historians, listed monarchs and their reigns since William the Conqueror.

Contents

The Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom cheat sheet includes:

• The Houses of Normandy, Plantagenet, Lancaster, York, Tudor, Stuart, Hanover and Saxe-Coburg / Windsor
• Wives of Henry VIII
• Commonwealth Rulers

Downloads

Ladies and Gentlemen ... now the moment you've all been waiting for, the world famous just starting out Cheatography Cheat Sheet Contest!

At the end of January, every web development cheat sheet released on the site between now and then will be weighed and measured, and the very best will earn its creator a shiny new pile of money adding up to one hundred of the finest US dollars!

I'll give you a moment to catch your breath. I know what you're thinking ... $100 is so much! Perhaps too much? I only wish it could be more.

Here are the rules:

• You can enter as many cheat sheets as you like.
• Entries must be related to web development (if you want to check your cheat sheet is on-topic, email me).
• Entries must be published (made live for the first time) between now (16th December) and the end of January.
• Entries are automatic - you don't need to do anything other than create an on-topic cheat sheet to enter the competition.
• The winner will be announced on the Cheatography blog and will be emailed.
• The prize can be sent either via Paypal or Amazon gift certificate.

What makes the "best" cheat sheet is rather subjective, but here are a few hints and tips for what might help make your cheat sheet stand out:

• Original - please don't just copy cheat sheets from elsewhere.
• Concise - make good use of space and try to fill all of the pages you use (staying under one page is usually good).
• Organised - try to group similar blocks of content together, and focus on things people are most likely to make use of.
• Stay on Topic - try to stick to a single topic.

So without further ado, I declare this contest ... open! Head on over to Cheatography.com to get started!

Four weeks ago, I launched a new website, Cheatography , into public beta. It felt very good to get it seen by fresh eyes, and all those extra visitors, users and contributors have helped improve the system so much that I cringe when I think of all of the problems it had when I launched it. Still, better to have the thing out and being used, even if a little rough, than have it collecting dust and stagnating.

I know some of you are involved with various stages of starting up your own websites and online businesses, so I thought it might be useful to share what it's been like in this first few weeks. Hopefully it won't put you off your own projects!

First, the Numbers

I am in a rather good position to start with, in that this site gets some significant traffic for cheat sheets already. So getting a small amount of starter traffic was just a matter of adding some extra links to the existing cheat sheets.

So the first month saw around 22,000 visitors to the site, average 2.7 page views per visit. Of those, 121 signed up, producing a massive 162 content blocks, 27 content blocks and, best of all, 14 new cheat sheets (of which 9 were from new members, with another 35 cheat sheets in progress). Most of those numbers have risen steadily through the month (and long may that continue). Revenue wasn't stellar, but things are still new, so I'm not going to worry about that for a fair while yet!

I wasn't expecting the signup rate to be particularly high - most people just download or view a cheat sheet and move on - but would like to find a way to convince people to stick around and contribute some content. I'm also hoping that as the community grows there will be more communication between members. I'm looking at adding some collaborative tools, which may help with that.

What's Changed?

Most of the changes so far have been led by the community, either through emails or the Get Satisfaction support system. My thanks to everyone who got in touch and shared their ideas and thoughts. Please keep them coming!

Cheat Sheets

There have been a lot of changes since launch, but by far and away the most significant is the addition (finally!) of PDFs! I'd been working on PDF support for over two years, trying every technique or tool I could find, but nothing worked. In the end, I found the wkhtmltopdf project, and PDFs of a high enough quality were achieved. There are still some issues (mainly with pagination), but at least there's now a high quality printable version of everything!

The PDFs also include a footer bar, added since they went live, which includes some more information about the author, relevant dates (so you know how old your cheat sheet is) and there's a space for a sponsor advert, which at the moment is being used by me to promote my other incubating project, Envoy, but will be a paid advertising spot in the future.

The last cheat sheet related change is the addition of thumbnails, which show up in listings, helping reduce the text-heavy feel of a lot of the pages.

Building

The build system has been completely rewritten (actually, almost twice) in the last four weeks. The front end has been changed substantially to combat problems with large lists of content blocks, and bugs in the JavaScript that allows you to drag and drop the contents of your cheat sheet. The mechanism to add content blocks to cheat sheets has also been changed. And a whole host of bugs have been fixed related to image editing, special characters and formatting.

The system now also provides draft preview URLs, so that you can solicit feedback for a cheat sheet while you work on it.

Site Stuff

When the site launched, all the links that were important to you - your favourites, your cheat sheets (and so on) were in a dropdown from the main menu. I converted these to a new "you bar", which is always visible while you are logged in and gives you easy access to your favourites, your cheat sheets, and so on. It also alerts you when you have new comments on the site.

In order to make signups easier, I integrated Facebook and Twitter logins. These have proved a reasonably popular option for signing up, although it is difficult to tell if it increased the number of people who joined, or just provided more convenience to people who would have joined

Finally, there's a new blog on the site, which I am already behind with posting to. I will try harder! There are RSS feeds for the blog and new cheat sheets too.

What's Next?

Top of the list at the moment is a cheat sheet request system. You'll be able to add and vote for cheat sheets that you'd find useful. You'll also be able to comment on a request, to say what you'd like to see on the sheet, and you'll be able to see who's working on it already.

Next (and this has been quite fun to work on so far) is what's been dubbed a "Cheat Screen". This is a javascript-powered, full-screen cheat sheet. The idea is that you can build and bookmark a single page on the site with the content you find most useful - a configurable, personal cheat sheet.

More formats for cheat sheets are planned, including a JSON-based format (that's right, an API for the content!) and hopefully PNG and JPG format (although long, multi-page, cheat sheets might be problematic).

There are a few other ideas in the works, and obviously mobile support and integration would be nice, but I'm sure there will be lots more ideas from the community, so mobile interfaces may be a while off yet.

Back to the Coal Face

Given the level of enthusiasm of the community so far, and how far the site has come in the last four weeks, I can't wait to see what happens in the next four!

The NaNoWriMo cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet for NaNoWriMo 2011. Good luck with your books everyone!

Contents

The NaNoWriMo cheat sheet includes:

• Useful links
• A word count tracker
• Rules for effective writing (by George Orwell)
• Dramatic situations by Georges Polti
• The Hero's Journey
• Inspirational quotes from other authors

Downloads

The Linux Command Line cheat sheet is a one-page reference sheet for bash, nano, screen and a few other everyday tools on the Linux command line.

Contents

The Linux Command Line cheat sheet includes:

• Bash commands, shortcuts and variables
• IO Redirection (pipes etc)
• Directory and file operations
• File permissions and ownership
• Process management
• Options for the "ls" command
• Shortcuts for nano
• Shortcuts for screen

Downloads

The French cheat sheet, built with the help of wonderful people in the cheat sheets google group, contains a whole host of useful words and phrases to take with you on holiday

Contents

The French cheat sheet includes:

• Greetings and Pleasantries
• Days and Time
• Transport
• Buildings and Shops
• Pronouns
• Lost Items
• Directions
• Numbers
• Essential Phrases
• Signs
• Friends and Family
• Miscellaneous Words

Downloads

After several years and plenty of different versions, my new cheat sheet project has open doors. Come check out Cheatography! (There are three new cheat sheets too!)

Cheat-what?

Cheatography was born a long time ago, the spawn of the Added Bytes cheat sheets and the short-lived cheat sheet request system. It was obvious from the requested cheat sheets and number of votes for each that there was no way I could produce as many cheat sheets as were wanted and that I did not know enough about many of the topics to provide a decent reference for them.

The solution seemed obvious - build a site that allowed people to make their own cheat sheets. And so, Cheatography was born.

Building begins ... and stalls

The first few incarnations of Cheatography were an attempt to build a system that would allow anyone to create a PDF cheat sheet in the style of the others on Added Bytes. This, it turns out, is harder than you'd think. Despite the proliferation of PHP-based HTML to PDF converters, issues like line wrapping, nested tables, font kerning and distribution, page headers and file sizes stopped me from finding a way to produce PDFs that were of a high enough standard to produce and print.

Bit of a shame, that. I'm still working on it though, and hope to add high quality printable versions of cheat sheets to Cheatography in the near future (and things have been looking up recently thanks to TCPDF).

Better than PDF

But as one door closed, another opened. While I couldn't do PDFs the way I wanted to, I could now use HTML, and that meant I could include all sorts of new goodies - comments, videos, images and links just to start. It also meant cheat sheets could be properly bookmarked, were quick to download, and best of all quick to update and add to.

The down side, unfortunately, is that they don't print nicely at the moment.

And that is where Cheatography is up to now. It's a resource for cheat sheets and a platform to help you build your own.

What to look at?

There's plenty to see already on Cheatography. I'd suggest starting with the newest content though - while building the site, I had the opportunity to put a few new cheat sheets together:

• French Cheat Sheet
• Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom Cheat Sheet
• Vimeo Advanced API Methods Cheat Sheet

Most of the cheat sheets from here have also been transferred over into HTML format, and several have been improved and had some long standing bugs fixed. You can see them on my Cheatography profile. I've also linked to them from the cheat sheet pages on this site.

What if I find a mistake or bug?

The site is in beta at the moment, which means it's a bit new and there are still bits that aren't quite perfect. If you find a problem with anything relate to the site, please email support@cheatography.com (or leave a comment here if you prefer). I'd also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions for how I can improve the site!

What was that site called again, Dave?

I'm glad you asked that, anthropomorphically personified website. Come check it out at Cheatography.