Month: December 2008

Learning the art of photography is exciting, especially because so many resources are available to beginner photographers online and off. Some of the best of these resources are blogs, and they highlight gear, techniques, inspiration, and more that can help you learn to be a better photographer. Read on to discover 100 of the best photography blogs out there.

Digital Cameras seem to be one of the gifts of choice this year for Christmas if the questions in my inbox are anything to go by. As so many new camera owners are starting out with photography in the new year I thought I’d compile a list of photography tips and techniques that new camera owners might like to work through in the coming weeks. Some are very basic while others go a little deeper – but all have been selected from our archives specifically for beginners and new camera owners. Enjoy.

At Deal Linker, our goal is to make it easy for you to find the best deals, freebies and coupons. We do this by compiling deals from leading bargain hunting sites and retailers; and then analyzing them to find the best of the bunch. Since deals can come and go quickly, we update the site constantly throughout the day..So please check back often.

Yes, I know that there are thousands of tutorials regarding rounded corners with CSS, but anyway, I wanted to show you this way too. Hopefully, you will find it useful. It's important to point out that this tutorial is quite advanced regarding CSS, but I'll try to make it as simple as I can for CSS begginers. CSS3 is still not fully here, so until then, let's keep our work W3C valid.

Google Analytics is a very useful free tool for tracking site statistics. For most users, however, it never becomes more than just a pretty interface with intersting graphs. The resources below will help anyone, from the beginner to those who have been using Google Analytics for some time, learn how to get the most out of this great tool.

If you use WordPress as your publishing platform, you’ll find a ton of useful tools you can grab off the web that’ll help you improve your productivity and make sure your WordPress site is running smoothly. In this collection, you’ll find a few convenient applications, plugins, and browser extensions that will help you accomplish a variety of blogging tasks that range from easier screen captures to making sure your WordPress site is secure.

Star Trek used to hoard all the nerd love for itself. Starting with its debut as a wildly unsuccessful TV show in 1966 and continuing after its cancellation three years later, Star Trek was the only space adventure franchise in this sector of the galaxy — until the arrival of Star Wars in 1977. Since then, Star Wars and Star Trek (and by extension, Fox and Paramount) have had their ray-guns trained on each other in a heady standoff for dork dollars. Star Trek and Star Wars are like matter and antimatter: They cannot truly exist without each other (for both are necessary to keep the geekosphere supplied with oxygen in the form of new material), yet both cannot occupy the same place at the same time. An ascendant Star Trek precludes a strong Star Wars and vice versa, as both vying simultaneously for sci-fi fans’ attention would prove too nerdsplosive for the mainstream media to handle.

Anthony Breznican of USA Today paints a harrowing picture from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico: The United States military has declared war on giant, shape-shifting alien robots. Amid blinding platinum dunes baking in the 105-degree sun, scores of elite servicemen and women cluster in and around real tanks, rocket launchers and personnel carriers as they unleash a machine-gun barrage at an invisible (and entirely fictional) enemy: Transformers. Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on whether alien invasion was a childhood dream or nightmare), the scene, like the enemy, is entirely fictional. It's from next summer's Transformers sequel, Revenge of the Fallen.

Back in the day when the (then) current version of the most popular RPG was known as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition, the company that owned D&D, TSR, released a great number of highly imaginative campaign settings, such as Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Al-Quadim, Birthright, and Dark Sun. Sadly, none of these settings were very successful compared to Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, so all were officially discontinued when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. And to be fair to WotC, TSR had already stopped supporting most of them. In those days I was still in high school, and so could never afford any of these settings, even though they fascinated me greatly. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, now that I have a job, I have a second chance at getting my hands on this great stuff. As a result I'm now collecting a lot of books that I always wanted to have back then. Sadly, I don't have as much time to actually read the material,

website and contents © BROM

Well, here's the mother of all SEO Expert Quizzes, designed to test your mettle with 75 action-packed questions covering all corners of the SEO universe from beginner knowledge, to sneaky tricks only true Dark Lords of the SERPs will know. Take the next 25-35 minutes and see how badass you truly are, then share in your triumph (or tragedy) by slapping your SEOmoz SEO Quiz badge on your site to let the world know how hard you rock the SEO game. Test your SEO Expert knowledge to earn your knowledge level.

Imagine you’re a young child at the Dodge Renaissance Academy, a predominantly black school in Chicago. You’re going about your regular day, learning about decimals, which is boring and, you suspect, not important. You’re probably staring aimlessly around the classroom and daydreaming about dinosaurs, maybe wishing you had some Dunk-a-roos. Then, suddenly, the greatest, coolest, most important person in the world, the guy you see on TV all the time, and that your parents talk about at the dinner table and voted for and were jubilant over when he won, actually walks in your classroom. And he’s answering your questions! Well, now the whole day has turned completely around. This is great! President Obama mentions how he wants to teach his daughters responsibility with their dog, that “if they do their business, if they got some poop, you gotta make sure that you're not just leaving it there.” Ha-ha! He said poop! Ha-ha! Someone unexpectedly passes you a packet of Dunk-a-roos.

Star Wars fans, play free star wars games online! We have great games to choose from including Flashwars, Jedi Training, Stardestroyer and more. Feel free to bookmark us. We plan on adding more star wars games soon! Play Star Wars Special Edition below. (May take a few seconds to load…)

Christmas is a holiday of love and family. It is the time of year when people come together to celebrate, when they realize that some things are more important than others. So why don’t you impress the people who are important to you with some unique Christmas cards or beautiful personal desktop wallpaper? In this post, we present 60 beautiful Christmas Photoshop tutorials. You’ll learn how to design Christmas trees, snow globes, snowflakes, Christmas candles, Christmas balls and much more. Some designers go even further, taking the time to draw Christmas illustrations or replace old icons with festive ones. Often, designers will draw Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and friends or create a Christmas theme for their website layout.

In this tutorial I will be teaching you how to create this complete, festive Christmas-themed web layout! Note: This tutorial may be more well-suited for intermediate Photoshop users, as it does require quite a bit of Photoshop knowledge and work! Please feel free to try it though, if you’re unable to get it right, just try it over again a few times.

CSS frameworks have been here for some time. About the usefulness of these frameworks has been discussed for numerous times. Some say CSS isn’t advanced enough, others say these frameworks saved them many hours of developing time. We will not repeat this discussion here. I have discovered CSS frameworks just a while back. After experimenting with the Malo CSS framework, the Blueprint framework and 960, I came to the conclusion I like the 960 CSS framework most. This tutorial will explain the basics of this framework so you can start developing with 960 pretty fast.

The 501st Legion is a worldwide Star Wars costuming organization comprised of and operated by Star Wars fans. While it is not sponsored by Lucasfilm Ltd., it is Lucasfilm's preferred Imperial costuming group. Star Wars, its characters, costumes, and all associated items are the intellectual property of Lucasfilm. ©2008 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ All rights reserved. Used under authorization.

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

Now that version 1.3 is out, Thesis is literally anything you want it to be. Want a 3-column layout with your content in the middle? Done. How about a 2-column layout with content on the right? You get the idea. No matter which layout you select for your site, the core Thesis framework will remain the same, and that means you still get all the ultimate site-building and SEO benefits that Thesis offers. Best of all, you now have a true foundation for your Website—a core code framework that can accommodate any design or layout customization you might wish to make in the future. When you think about it, it simply doesn’t make sense to change your core code every time you change your design, yet this is how most of the Web still operates (by getting a new theme, paying for a custom design, etc.). Thesis solves this problem in an efficient, intelligent, forward-thinking way. You want real change for the future this election season? Get Thesis, my friend.

It may be inconceivable for you to misuse a word, but a quick look around the web reveals plenty of people doing it. And it’s all too easy when we hear or see others use words incorrectly and parrot them without knowing it’s wrong. We know by now that great copy and content often purposefully break the rules of grammar. It’s only when you break the rules by mistake that you look dumb. So let’s take a look at 27 commonly misused words. Some are common mistakes that can cost you when trying to keep a reader’s attention. Others are more obscure and just interesting to know.

A free online role-playing simulation game based on the Star Wars universe.

Welcome to the Bravenet Resource Center. Use these resources to help make your web pages more advanced and fun to use.

Bravenet Mailing List – Build your own email lists and send newsletters

Just a simple man, making his way in the universe…

Welcome to Stylin Online! Check out our selection of Star Wars T-Shirts, Empire Strikes Back T-Shirts, Return of the Jedi T-Shirts, Revenge of the Sith T-Shirts and other Star Wars Movie products!

Star Wars And Sports Combine To Create The Greatest Christmas Present In The Universe – Christmas is coming, and it's time to think about everyone. From the sports fan in the family to the hard core Star Wars fanatic. Or both. If you know someone who is both a fan of sports AND Star Wars, and who isn't, I believe we've found the best gift ever. Seriously. It's the Star Wars themed sports jerseys, because what hardcore Star Wars fan isn't secretly a serious gym rat? Or at least it gives you something dope to practice your light saber skills in. For the bounty hunters among us, there's the Boba Fett "Assassins" jersey, as modeled above by Boba himself. There's also a Fett baseball jersey, and a vintage style football jersey as well:

A blog where I tell cute animals what's what.

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A survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture of the internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives.

Select from the Domain and DNS videos below for a demonstration on how to manage your domain.

More than a decade after the Internet revolutionized how we shop, innovation in e-commerce has hit a wall. Make no mistake: Online shopping is still amazingly convenient and the best way to comparison shop. Who doesn't like buying gadgets in their underwear? Yet somewhere along the line the big players just stopped changing the online shopping game. Think about it: Is your experience shopping online any different now than it was 10 years ago? Same old user interface, same promotions on the home page, same shopping cart, same too-long checkout process. E-commerce is at a crossroads. The industry can delude itself that growth will pick up once the economy rebounds, or innovate its way to higher sales. Public companies aren't the best innovators, so I'm betting that it will be scrappy entrepreneurs who use the downturn to start a new e-commerce upheaval.

For frustrated customers needing Dell computer help, there is now a $12.95/month or $99/year upgrade available, that insures your call is answered “in North America”. No more hard-to-understand, underpaid operators in Banaglore if you’re willing to shell out some dough.

Styled Menus offer website navigation menu bars designed by professionals. This site is been maintain by two guys Sainath Chillapuram and Santosh Setty. Css Menus here are cross browser compatibility and with valid w3c code. All the css menus here can be easly used in dynamic websites / shopping carts like drupal, joomla, os-commerce, zen cart, shop, magento, joomla virtuemart, wordpress, blogger etc… All the css menus here are for free download but you need to buy psd if you need, as we too have life and spend are time in designing for giving professional stuff.

Here are a few simple tricks to add some flavor to your typical bland images. Using Photoshop to style each image can be tedious and difficult to maintain in the long run. These following CSS techniques will help you ease that pain! If you have some of your own techniques, please share them!

Typically when creating a stretch effect with CSS backgrounds, we would take a fixed width of the background and repeat it on the X-axis until it fills the page. Of course to achieve this effect, the center aligned header image would have to match the repeating background on both ends.

Remembering the good all days, when me and my friends were playing Doom, Mortal Kombat, Quake or War Craft on a Pentium 133 MHz computer with Sound Blaster and a 4MB video card. A lot has changed since then. Video games actually are a lot older than that we used to play in the 90s. The first video game was created in 1947 called Tennis for two and it was played on an oscilloscope like device. With the release of Apple II, Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum in late 70s early 80s people could afford to buy such devices and to play video games from their own home. By the mid 80s the video game industry started to evolve in a fast phase releasing games such as Zork, Battlezone and Bard’s Tale.

Phasing out an old operating system is nothing new for Microsoft, but Windows XP is unique in that it may be too good to die. This week, Dell announced it will offer systems with the aging Windows XP for a surcharge of US$150 over the newer Windows Vista–this only five months after it stopped offering XP on its Inspiron consumer desktop and laptop PCs. The deadline for Windows XP downgrades has been pushed back twice now, remaining in effect until July 31, 2009-a strong indication that enough users want to stay with the aging XP rather than give Vista a chance. Though market share for Windows XP dropped nearly 10 percent in 2008 as Vista slowly made gains, XP still has a market share of 66 percent, according to Web metrics company Net Applications.

Google's free online dictionary service.

Free business courses are a great way to get a university-level education without the hassle of student loans. There are a number of top-ranked universities that offer free business courses online. Examples include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley.

We’re back with another icon set. But first of all we’d like to thank you for all the feedback, comments and of course for all the downloads. Baggy Icon Set was designed by Paul Kadysz. It contains 5 high quality icns. This time we’ve got 3 different formats (.ico, .icns and .png) and 6 sizes! 512px-16px (except .png). We want to improve our products and it’s impossible without kowing your opinion. Tell us what you think so our next set will be even better!