Not everyone should learn to code, but if it's on your list of priorities you've got a friend in Mozilla. They've just announced a program called Webmaker that aims to teach the average user to create rather than consume. While the lessons are still forthcoming, you can join or create a "code party" to learn with others so you're not going it alone. So what is a code party, exactly? Mozilla explains:

We're inviting everyone to join or volunteer at free local events and teach-ins around the world. With new Webmaker tools, event kits and starter projects designed to make it easy, social and fun. We'll end with a big wrap-up September 23.

While we've seen plenty of other ways to teach yourself to code, and even created our own series of lessons to help, this is the first collective learning initiative we've seen. You can certainly teach yourself from the privacy of your own home, but if you learn better with others you should definitely check this out.

Introducing Mozilla Webmaker: helping the world make the web | Mozilla Blog

On countless occasions, you've likely said to yourself "I wish I knew how to do ______." Then, of course, life got in the way and you put it off until you could find the time. Maybe you wanted to become fluent in a language, learn a new instrument, start performing your house repairs, or a master a myriad of other skills. With the vast amount of knowledge online, you're now your only excuse. Here are the top ten most highly desired skills that you can teach yourself—and should.

10. Repair Just About Anything

Sure, you don't need to repair anything anymore. You can just pay someone else to do it. But where's the ingenuity in that? Plus, who wants to waste a bunch of money on simple tasks you can handle on your own? If you've adopted the DIY spirit, learning to repair your own stuff is one of the easiest and more rewarding skills you can acquire. It's especially fruitful because as you learn new things, you can put them to use right away. So how do you teach yourself? We've outlined tons of repairs you can learn on your own to get you started, but if you're looking for something specific there is no shortage of how-to videos available on YouTube and VideoJug. There will be occasions when you do need to call a professional, as you're not going to be a master repairman (or woman) instantly, but do remember that there is an opportunity when things break: you can learn how to fix them.

9. Pick Up an Artistic Skill Like Illustration, Painting, or Photography

Although it often won't earn you the big bucks, artistic skills are highly desired because they provide you with the technical abilities required to create something beautiful. You're going to have to find your own inspiration and subject matter, but the skill you'll need is really just a matter of technical aptitude and practice. Picking up a book of anatomy and drawing different bones and muscles will teach you how to draw people. Drawing grids over photographs can show you basic perspective. Obviously it isn't as simple as that, but focusing on learning to draw one simple thing, like the petals of a flower or the human hand, will help you learn how it works and get in a reasonable amount of practice. When you're ready to move on from the basics and start illustrating on your computer, check out our digital painting lessons. For those of you interested in photography, we have lessons for you, too.

Whatever you're looking to learn, just set aside 15-30 minutes every day to practice a very small part of that skill. It'll take awhile to teach yourself how to draw, paint, take better photos, make hamburger sculptures out of clay, or whatever it is you want to do, but breaking the daunting task into pieces and practicing each part slowly will do the trick. Plus, it's a really nice way to unwind at the end of the day.

8. Learn to Defend Yourself

Who likes getting their ass kicked? Probably a very small majority. If that's what you're into, it doesn't require much skill—just endurance. If you'd prefer to not end up hurt or injured as the result of an unexpected attack, perhaps it's time to pick up some self-defense skills. While you'll probably want to have a partner around to help you out—at least when you want to test your skill—we've outlined several self-defense moves that you can learn on your own. Although you will hopefully never need to actually employ the techniques you acquire, if you do you'll increase your chances of coming out of a fight unharmed. Plus, it's pretty cool to walk around with the confidence of being able to take on most anyone in a fight.

7. Improve Your Design Skills (or At Least Acquire a Sense of Style)

Design and style aren't an exact science, as tastes differ and change as time goes on, but there are a few principles you can pick up that'll make your work, home, or whatever needs an aesthetic boost looking better than average. If we're talking traditional design, you'll first want to learn the basics of type and layout. These are skills you can employ in your everyday work to make it look a lot more attractive. This may seem like a nearly-useless skill, because spreadsheets aren't getting entered in any beauty contests, but when something looks good it can have a greater impact. That's always a plus in your work. If you want to take things a bit further, you can bump those skills up a notch and apply them to web site design in Photoshop. Your sense of style is even a useful thing when choosing a great wallpaper and creating a clean and organized desktop on your computer. If your home is boring, just follow these guidelines for awesome interior design. You don't have to be a pro, but learning the basics of design can make your life a lot brighter.

6. Pick Up Just About Any Subject You Missed In College

Whether it's science, finance, math, humanities, law, or anything else, if there's a course you wish you took in college you're not out of luck—you can probably find it online. To help you out, we've rounded up every great source of online education so you can gain that knowledge you missed. What's great about learning online is that you can take it at your own pace and put in as much time as you can spare each day. You don't necessarily have to master a subject, either, but learn as much as you need or want to know. While you won't end up with a degree for your hard work, you will be a little bit smarter—and that's the most important part.

5. Build and Hack Electronic Hardware

We love technology, and we love it more when we can make it do pretty much whatever we want. There is almost no end to what you can hack, but getting started does require teaching yourself a few skills. Learning to build a computer is a good place to start. Soldering is especially helpful, and understanding the basics of arduino can help you build some really neat stuff. One of the best ways to get started is to pick a project and learn by doing. If you're not sure where to start, our DIY tag page can offer a few ideas.

4. Play a (New) Instrument

Whether you already know how to play an instrument and want to learn something new or are musically inept, you'll find plenty of resources online to help you teach yourself to play just about anything. If guitar is your thing, you're in luck as you'd be hard-pressed to not find online lessons. JustinGuitar.com offers over 500, and we've rounded up plenty more. The internet can also teach you piano, drums, and even orchestral instruments like the flute and violin. Just like with repair skills, you can find a lot of how-to videos on both YouTube and VideoJug.

In addition to the instrument, you're also going to want to learn a little music theory. Ricci Adams' musictheory.net offers a bunch of free lessons to get you started. When you're starting to get good, you can put together a home recording studio on the cheap to start capturing your talent and sharing it with others.

3. Cook Like a Pro

With so many recipe sites and cooking skill how-to videos online, it's a surprise that everyone isn't a master chef at this point. There are so many simple things you can learn that can vastly improve your culinary skill set really quickly, many of which we've covered. We've written so much on the subject of learning to cook better that this little paragraph isn't enough to cover it all, but there are a few posts in particular that you'll want to read to get started. First, these tips and tricks for budding foodies will make your learning process easier. Second, follow this station-by-station kitchen guide to stay organized and efficient when cooking. Finally, these must-know recipes will help you round out your arsenal of cooking knowledge. For more, we like recipe and how-to sites Epicurious and How2Heroes. And, of course, you can always check our how to and kitchen tag pages for more great tips.

2. Become Fluent in a New Language

When we asked you which skills you really wanted to learn, language was at, or close to the top of many peoples' lists. Fortunately for you, this clever technique offers a way to all but master a new language in a short period of time by teaching yourself. You'll still have to work hard and put in the minutes every day, but you can come out speaking fluently in about half of a year. Pretty cool.

1. Make a Web Site, Create an App, or Just Learn to Code

Learning to code is something most of us Lifehackers aspire to do at one point or another, as it's not only a great way to create cool apps and tools that we want to use but it's also an incredibly marketable skill when trying to get a job. To get you started, we've put together two helpful sets of lessons: the basics of programming and making a web site.

Both sets include further resources, but there are plenty of others that we've learned about or have cropped up since. For starters, commenter mistermocha suggests using the "learn ___ the hard way" series. For example, if you wanted to learn Python, you could visit learnpythonthehardway.org. If you just fill in the blank with the language you want to learn and put that into a web search, you'll likely find what you're looking for. (You can also find most of the series here.) If you prefer more interactive lessons, you'll want to check out one of our favorites: Codecademy. I learned by subscribing to online learning site Lynda.com (and through a few basic classes back in college), which is still excellent, but I'd probably have gone with Code Academy at this point since it's in the free category. Regardless of how you decide to learn, programming skills are becoming more and more useful as time goes on. Code is not as complicated as you think, so go get started!

Photos by Mister Wilson, Alex Indigo, Andy Mangold

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Web development and design are two great skills to have because they allow you to work from anywhere and create amazing, beautiful sites and apps. Nonetheless, it can be hard to get started when you don't know what to do. We can help you out with these ten great tips and tools.

10. Get Educated

Tips and tools are useless if you don't know the basics. If you're still struggling with the initial concepts of programming and design, we've got a few lessons that can help you. To get started with web development, our Lifehacker Night School series can teach you HTML and CSS as well as JavaScript, which pretty much covers the basics. We also have Photoshop lessons which can teach you how to mock up a web site layout. We also have a basic lesson on color theory. To pick up a few more design skills, check out this list of resources. It'll help you get inspired and discover ways to learn more of the basics. If you want to learn more, check out Code Academy for additional programming lessons. When you're ready to take your first coding project from start to finish, be sure to read this.

9. Build Up Your Font Library

Picking the right font can make or break a great design. I mean, just imagine replacing every instance of Helvetica Neue with Comic Sans. Right? Right? Whether you've got a font of font knowledge or you don't know your serifs from your sans-serifs, you can always benefit from a good font collection. My favorite resource is DaFont, but that's just one of many. FontPark offers over 70,000 free fonts and YourFonts will even let you make your own. For more places to find free typefaces, check out our fonts tag page.

8. Use Dummy Tools

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Man, I could go on writing that genius material for pages with this Lorem Ipsum text generator. If you're not familiar, Lorem Ipsum (or Lipsum for short) is what many designers and developers use to generate fake placeholder text for their designs. You don't necessarily have actual content when you're creating a design for a web page, magazine, or other layout with lots of text. Lipsum generators supply you with placeholder text designed to fill titles, sentences, and/or paragraphs when you're lacking. But you don't have to rely on the standard stuff. There are many varieties of Lipsum generators, such as Cupcake Ipsum. Bear claw sugar plum sweet roll. Sesame snaps gummies gummies sweet roll oat cake chupa chups lollipop lemon drops!

Text is not the only thing you might need to generate for your designs. What if you don't have images? The Dummy Image Generator is basically the Lipsum equivalent for pictures. You just enter a size and it spits out a placeholder. This is very handy during both the design and development processes.

7. Steal

You know how there are no original ideas and everything is a remix? Don't feel like you have to come up with a design nobody's ever seen before or original code when there are tons of existing code snippets freely available on the web that you can use as you please. Great ideas come from building on the ideas of others, so feel free to steal a little bit. Obviously you don't want to copy anyone's idea verbatim or use anything without permission, but you can gain a lot of inspiration from looking at the work of others and borrowing little things they do to make your design look great and your code even more powerful and efficient. I like Snipt for finding code snippets. When it comes to design, you just need to browse the web. Pinterest is quickly becoming a large resource for posting examples of great design, but you don't really have to look any farther than the Lifehacker community. We have a number of designers in our midst and recently we featured the landing pages of a few along with tips on how you could learn from their process. Check it out and see if there are any techniques or ideas worth "stealing."

6. Pimp Out Photoshop

For most web designers, Photoshop is an essential tool. It's capable of a whole lot, but you can expand its capabilities by adding new actions, brushes, shapes, and more. Actions are basically macros for Photoshop, allowing you to automate tedious tasks you don't want to do "by hand." Here are 100 existing Photoshop actions to expand your collection, but if you need something specific you can always just create your own.

Expanding your shape and brush collections can also provide you with new options. Shapes give you vector images you can use in your designs, and brushes will let you paint with a variety of objects and styles. This ultimate shape collection should give you a good start, but you'll quickly find that if you perform a web search for "Photoshop shapes" and whatever type of shape you're looking for (start with silhouettes for a good set of options) you'll turn up some good choices. You'll find that Photoshop brushes are in an even greater abundance. Just take this collection of 2,000 for example. Brushes can allow you to paint with shapes, emulate real paintbrushes, or even create interesting effects. It's also easy to create your own.

5. Quickly Generate Complex CSS Code Visually with a CSS Generator

The CSS3 Generator, the CSS3 Maker, and the CSS3 Border Radius Generator are all great examples of ways you can generate the more complex CSS code you often forget. Drop shadows, animations, and rounded corners are very cool effects you'll want to employ on occasion, but since you'll use them less often and they require a bit more effort than your average style it helps to have a generator handy to create the code for you. It's important to know what you're doing when you're writing the code and to understand the code that comes out of the generator, but you can save yourself a little time when you're in a hurry or just can't remember the exact syntax. Here are plenty more you can add to your arsenal.

4. Download Free Resources

Design can be tough when you have to take your own photos, draw your own pictures, and create virtually everything from scratch. Sometimes it's best to have a little help when you, say, need to add an iPhone 4S with interface elements to your layout. The internet is filled with plenty of free and available Photoshop-ready resources to help you enhance your designs without putting in additional hours of work. Take these 30 free gadget PSDs for example. Most of the time, all you have to do is search for the item you want. That said, you can find plenty of great images, backgrounds, icons, and more at sites like psdGraphics, The Noun Project, Design Kindle, and PSD Collector. DeviantART can also be a good resource. Some assets will require attribution and others are simply available for your benefit with no reciprocation required. You don't want to overuse these great resources, but they can be very helpful when utilized in the right ways.

3. Get a Great Programming-Friendly Text Editor

Just as Photoshop is an indispensable tool to a web designer, a great programming-friendly text editor is to a programmer. We have favorites for Windows and OS X, so be sure to check those out if you're looking for some good options. You may also want to check out our favorite text expansion apps as well so you can store your favorite code snippets and insert them into your code with just a few keystrokes.

2. Know How Your Site Will Look on Different Kinds of Screens and Web Browsers

It's easy enough to put together a design for a web site when you're the only person who's viewing it. When it's live on the web, however, it'll be showing up on screens of all shapes and sizes in various web browsers. Before you deploy, you're going to want to test and make sure things look the way you want. Screenfly can show you how your site will look on different displays. Browsershots will let you see how your site is rendered by many different browsers running on Windows, OS X, and Linux. All you have to do is choose the browsers you want and wait for screenshots to appear. It may not be as efficient as testing your site on an actual computer, but it's certainly much more affordable.

1. Use a Framework

Frameworks can make the development—and even design—process go a lot faster. This is because most web projects are not particularly unique in the way they're created. Just as you'll end up stealing little ideas and code snippets around the web, you'll also end up borrowing grand concepts and principles that have long been standard. Frameworks let you take advantage of this by taking a lot of the effort out of standard coding. This saves you time and a lot of the headache that often comes with the tedious process of starting from scratch.

So what frameworks should you use? On the development side of things, Blueprint is great for CSS layouts, Ruby on Rails for Ruby programmers, Zend and CakePHP for PHP developers, and Django for Python coders. You generally won't hear the word "framework" in a conversation about design, but the idea does translate nonetheless. The Grid System and the 960 Grid are two great examples. If you want to save a little time by following principles that have worked for ages, check out a framework. It'll help you adhere to best practices, and you won't regret it.

If you haven't heard, the ethically questionable web host known as GoDaddy is supporting SOPA. In addition to their terrible customer service and elephant-killing CEO, GoDaddy is backing the bill that wants to cripple your internet as if it's some sort of moral obligation. That means you can't expect GoDaddy to have your back if SOPA passes. They'll just shut you down for a potential violation. (Although apparently they're already doing that.) If you didn't get around to ditching them already, there's no time like a present. Here's how you can do it an even save some money in the process.

UPDATE: GoDaddy has retracted its support for SOPA. It's nice to see we can make a difference with a little effort. That said, GoDaddy's simply caved due to outside pressure and we still have plenty of reasons why we don't recommend them as a host or registrar. If this action leads to better things in the future for GoDaddy, we'll change our opinion. For now we've just added two more coupon codes.

If you're ready to leave GoDaddy behind, you'll want to read our GoDaddy abandonment guide that'll walk you through the entire process. It might be a little tedious, but definitely worthwhile. Once you've left, however, you'll need to find a new host. Your favorite and ours has always been Dreamhost, but you may want to check out a few others as they're offering promo codes so you can have a host that opposes SOPA and saves you some money. Here's what's available:

• Dreamhost is offering $50 off and four free domain registrations to anyone who signs up for a year of hosting using promo code SOPAROPA.
• HostGator is offering 50% off your first month of hosting with coupon code NOSOPA.
• Namecheap (your top pick for domain name registrars) offers up coupon code SOPASucks, which will get you a $6.99 domain transfer to their registration service.
• A Small Orange also doesn't support SOPA and is offering 25% off shared hosting plans with coupon code OrangeYouGlad.
• Name.com will give you 10% off any domains you want to transfer to them. They support .COM, .NET, .ORG, .TV, .INFO, .IN, .US, .CO, .ME, and .TEL. Just use coupon code NODADDY.
• Hover.com is offering 10% off domain transfers with code SOPA. This includes their "transfer valet" service, in which they take care of all the tedious tasks that go along with moving a domain to a new registrar.

Switching web hosts is always a pain, but hopefully our guide and some savings should make the process much easier.

Thanks to Justin Boswell for the tip!