Month: October 2008

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Dres of Black Sheep remixes hip-hop favorite "The Choice is Yours" in support of Barack Obamas Presidential campaign. Video serves to inspire & remind voters to use their voice on election day.

Let’s face it: in the online arena, distractions are imminent and inevitable. There are just too many online properties that beg for your attention — and before you know it, hours have passed and you didn’t finish that project you meant to complete. This is especially more challenging for the Marlas in the house, as creativity requires being ahead of the curve. Marla is consistently kept busy, and that’s probably because she’s kept abreast of those technological innovations. But that could be a time sink too, unless she has the right tools to manage her emails, projects, and time. Those who are like Lou, though, don’t know that it’s possible to everything one can do in the corporate world at home at a fraction of the cost (for even better returns). Without being armed with that know-how, how does a guy like Lou actually take the initiative to do what he can — at home (as he soon may have to)?

This is the wonderful list of 17 free and online web based tools for designers and developers which may be very helpful for you as well when you are at work. Designers and Developers will must like this list but you can also use them and will love whether you are office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc. Most of them are not very well-known but, they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thought’s here. You are welcome to share if you know more free tools for designers that our readers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed.

Growing up in the Bowling Green neighborhood of Sacramento, I was taught how to read and mark houses with the Halloween Candy Code. For kids with an early curfew these codes were invaluable. Once we tagged a house, our peers could use our marks to reap the best full-size chocolate bars while avoiding Chex mix and dried apricots. Most marks were left in bright chalk at the bottom of the driveway.

For some, Halloween means costume parties and drunken debauchery. That’s never really been my style. Personally, I like to spend my Halloween evenings eating candy and watching scary movies. Yeah, I’m a nerd – I know. This Halloween season has had me reminiscing of the brilliant horror and sci-fi movie posters of years past. Particularly, I am a fan of the illustrated posters that used to be the staple of nearly every science fiction and horror film released. These posters are able to communicate so much about a film with a single, masterfully created image that it’s a shame this style isn’t so popular nowadays. Since there were so many amazing posters to showcase, I have split this post into two parts. Part two will be posted on October 31st. But for now, you may feast on the first half.

Visit http://www.BarackObama.com for more information.

There’s no doubt that rock stars can be creative entrepreneurs, just like entrepreneurs can be creative rock stars. But Kurt Cobain? It may seem a stretch to call Kurt Cobain and Nirvana entrepreneurs. After all, Cobain was so disturbed by fame that he ultimately took his own life to escape the pressure. The success of the album Nevermind was an accident of creative genius by punk rockers who reluctantly hit it big, right? Not exactly.

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID. By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Welcome to Dragon Avenue, your home for all things Dungeons and Dragons. Here you can find news about D&D 4th edition as well as other geeky things that most gamers are interested in. We are one of the nicest communities of role-players you'll find, so feel free to join our forums and sit a spell.

When Dan Walsh, a 33-year-old technology manager in Dublin, started posting doctored versions of the comic strip “Garfield” on his blog in February, he thought he might amuse a few friends. Instead, his site on Tumblr started receiving as many as 300,000 hits a day from the United States and beyond. More recently it has leveled off to 30,000 to 35,000 a day, which is not bad for a site whose content takes about five minutes to create.

Garkov is an application of the Markov model to transcripts of old Garfield strips, plus some extra code to make it all look like a genuine comic strip. Feel free to screenshot and share Garkov output.

The Halloween is around the corner and the atmosphere is filled with pumpkins, skeletons, bonfires, horror movies and other scary things spread across the houses, stores and, of course, web sites. Just the right time to spice up your desktop and your designs with an appropriate Halloween spirit. And for this purpose you may use Halloween Photoshop Vectors or Halloween Icons (even more Halloween icons). Alternatively, you can change your desktop wallpaper and prepare some traditional pumpkin carvings. In this post we present some beautiful Halloween wallpapers, art works, recipes and tutorials for your scary Halloween party. All these screenshots are linked to their source. You may also want to take a look at our Halloween Special from last year to get some more ideas for Halloween costumes, recipes and DIY-tutorials and related posts:

These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title. And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email.

In recent months, many web designers have been asking the question, “How can I make my dynamic site accessible?” Unfortunately, good answers have been slow in coming from the accessibility community. While some articles have touched on the problem, not many have gone into details. Here is our first attempt at rectifying this situation. Why is it so difficult for us to come up with some simple recommendations like we did for web 1.0? A large part of the problem stems from the complex nature of JavaScript. There are so many things to do with it, and so many ways to do them, that making blanket statements about what works and what doesn’t becomes a challenge. For example, screen readers seem to vary widely in how they support and react to JavaScript events. Nevertheless, if we are to have any hope of ever solving this problem, we have to start somewhere. Hence, this article.

Like Elvis in '68, Microsoft is itching for a "comeback," and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference, Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through the often deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft's people are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something (anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.

Songza lets you listen to any song or band. Search for it

Small businesses have a fantastic opportunity to bypass conventional media and advertising to directly reach their stakeholders. Whether thats through social networks or blogs, entrepreneurs and marketers can engage their conversations in one on one relationships. Join us on October 29th at 1pm Eastern for this free, live video conference. You'll hear from 34 renowned small business and online marketing experts. Details at www.solutionsstarsvideo.com.

We all know Luke Skywalker as the main protagonist throughout the original Star Wars movies and onward into the novels of questionable quality. We all grew up wanting to be him—learning to use the Force, blowing up the Death Star, saving the galaxy. But the thing is, despite all his badass moments, he actually kind of sucks. Perhaps not as much as his father Anakin, but that could be due to Mark Hamill’s acting ability, in that he can act. Sure with the emotional music and all the screen time Luke Skywalker seems to be the hero, but really he’s an idiot who makes bad decisions and has a series of terrible ideas, and he's lucky it all kind of works out for him, his friends, and the Rebel Alliance in the end.

Shortly after I selected Monster Commerce as my e-commerce solution, it was announced that Network Solutions had acquired the company. Apparently I wasn’t the only one that thought they had some potential. NS put a big emphasis on the next version of the cart software, and in 2007 they announced that existing MC customers would be migrated to the new software sometime in 2008.

On October, 29, 2008 from 1 p.m. until approximately 3:30 p.m. EST. , Network Solutions proudly presents the "Solutions Stars Video Conference," a series of videos and live discussions featuring 32 of the world's leading business and marketing experts. The live video conference will coach small business owners and entrepreneurs on how the Internet can benefit their business. Nine content areas featuring vignettes of the Solutions Stars will run during the conference:

The Pointer Sisters' Sesame Street song!

CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community.

What if our current view of human history which Darwin's theory of evolution propagated is fundamentally flawed?

SEATTLE, Washington, July 22, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) — Eighty years after the infamous Scope trials, more than 400 scientists from all disciplines have signed onto a growing list of those who are “skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” “Darwin’s theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought,” said Dr. David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher of science with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture (CSC). “It is large, almost completely useless, and the object of superstitious awe.” Discovery Institute first published its Statement of Dissent from Darwin in 2001 and a direct challenge to statements made in PBS’ “Evolution” series that no scientists disagreed with Darwinian evolution.

CSS tables solve all the problems encountered when using absolute positioning or floats to create multi-column layouts in modern browsers. Specifying the value table for the display property of an element allows you to display the element and its descendants as though they’re table elements. The main benefit of CSS table-based layouts is the ability to easily define the boundaries of a cell so that we can add backgrounds and so on to it—without the semantic problems of marking up non-tabular content as a HTML table in the document.

In the early part of 2008, the band recorded a four-song demo, titled "Logan County EP." Primarily, it's being used in press packets, but it makes for good net-content too. So please, enjoy it with our compliments. (Right click and "Save As…" to download.)

In the early part of 2008, the band recorded a four-song demo, titled "Logan County EP." Primarily, it's being used in press packets, but it makes for good net-content too. So please, enjoy it with our compliments. (Right click and "Save As…" to download.)

In the early part of 2008, the band recorded a four-song demo, titled "Logan County EP." Primarily, it's being used in press packets, but it makes for good net-content too. So please, enjoy it with our compliments. (Right click and "Save As…" to download.)

In the early part of 2008, the band recorded a four-song demo, titled "Logan County EP." Primarily, it's being used in press packets, but it makes for good net-content too. So please, enjoy it with our compliments. (Right click and "Save As…" to download.)

This game while good, doesn't really have much that makes it spectacular. If you want a Star Wars themed RTS, then this is a good start. It will play like A.o.E., so it won't take long to get going. Naturally there are Hero units. The building of fighter craft, Naval vessels and Jedi/Sith units are basically what makes this stand out from some RTS games. Anyway the gameplay is solid and the game story works within the confines of the Star Wars universe. Plus providing some background stories for movies 4, 5 and 6. Unfortunately, this game(like most) suffers from the inevitable repetitiveness and boredom that occurs from playing it for too long. The Map editor or Scenario editor, is a great way to breathe life into the game if you've gotten bored with it. There are cheats that can make it a bit more interesting as well. It has just about everything there to use. Considering all the units and characters available, experiment with it.

It can seem difficult to explain to the uninitiated the steps needed to get a website online. It's not actually difficult, but there is a checklist of things that should be followed each time and it can be confusing to navigate. Here is a video that Network Solutions put together that makes it much clearer.

Monster is part of the domain registrar Network Solutions. It appears to be in the midst of migrating to a more cleaned up and modern interface. Whether old or new, however, they provide a broad range of cart functionality, for example, the ability to handle variants and map quantities to each type of variant. If you sell a shirt in three sizes, you can set prices for each size shirt and track quantities as they're sold. To set up your page design in Monster, you select the HTML and Layout links on the left side of the old interface, the Design tab on their new interface. There are many design sub options. However, for example, in their older interface, it should be fairly obvious that the HTML for the top of your pages is pasted into the Top of Page HTML Editor page. The Layout options are primarily settings that you define for your cart overall, for example, color schemes.

Soft Drink Can Generator

This room was quite a project (big by my standards, anyways). The point of this room (pun intended) was to get the kids into a closed room, then have spikes emerge from the ceiling and have the ceiling start to lower downward. It required a sturdy 4' x 7' x 10' frame, thirteen carved foam-cast skulls, 26 flexible foam spikes and a false ceiling. I almost gave up on the project because, of all things, I couldn't find a good way to make the spikes. Eventually, I figured out a way that worked. The finished room was a big hit and really creapy. Well worth the effort.

Our Search Engine Spider Simulator strips out the HTML tags from the page you specify and shows you how the page would look to search engine spiders.

I'm an iGoogle addict. I check my news, email, stocks, feeds and weather there and sometimes even manage to squeeze in a game or two during the day. Having everything in one place is super convenient, but I often wish I could deal with all my stuff without having to leave my iGoogle page. With today's release, I can. We've rolled out an updated design for iGoogle to all U.S. users, which includes full canvas views for gadget and support for full feed reading. Not all of our gadgets have canvas views yet, but here are some of the best:

With Wall Street’s recent decline and the economy in such an uncertain place, many people are fearful of losing their jobs and lifelong investments. There are countless simple online services and tools dedicated to helping you take control of these elements. We’ve put together a list of over 200 to help you do everything from manage your personal and professional finances to find a job in your given field, get discounts at local and online stores, and much more. Whether you live here in the United States or abroad, we hope these will help. Which online services are you relying on to help you weather this storm?

Plan a trip using public transportation

* Register & use it anywhere anytime Make screencasts / tutorials / demos / high-scores show-offs… * Record your screen in one click No download. Compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux. * Share videos on the Internet in Flash Embed them on blogs/webpages or send them by email.

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SELECT a subject from the top menu and watch the countries on the map change their size. Instead of land mass, the size of each country will represent the data for that subject –both its share of the total and absolute value.

So your client emails you and asks, "Can you put one of those flashy maps on my contact page so that users can actually see our building from a satellite's view?". You've used Google maps many times, but there is only one problem: you have no idea how to use the API. Well get out your spoon and dig in!

ThemeForest is a marketplace for buying and selling website templates and CMS themes for all sorts of products, like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site. Let me back up and give you a little history. When someone comes to your site’s webserver and asks for a page that doesn’t exist, like http://www.mattcutts.com/asdfasdfasdf , most web servers are configured to return an HTTP status code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors. Now Google’s webmaster portal lets you see who is linking to your 404 pages. Once you register your site, click on Diagnostics, then Web crawl, and select “Not found”. You’ll see something like this:

Last week in our quest for de-junking the spaces around us, we walked through cleaning a workstation and keeping it that way. This week, we're taking on a more personal, and often intimidating, space: The home. Personal because it is, after all, your home, and intimidating because it's the place you don't have to keep clean—until somebody's coming to visit. For anyone looking to cut back on clutter to create more living space (and space for awesome projects), read on for tips on putting your house in order. Photo by Carey Tilden.

Note: The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager. Click the tabs to see different panels, and click the options in the panels to change your Flash Player settings.

You already know about all of the different ways to watch TV online. Now you just want links to your favorite shows (plus all those new ones) as quickly as possible so you can ditch your TiVo and TV once and for all. Our Internet TV remote has the best links to every prime-time show currently streaming online at full length. Bookmark it and check back often, we'll update it as new shows come out… Note: Many of these streams will not work outside of the US, but if you're out of the country and need your fix, you know where to go without any help from us.