Year: 2009

WordPress is a nifty software for managing content, or blogging. Due to the fact that it is open source, many say that it is not the best choice for a serious project due to insecurity and bunch of other nonsense reasons. To prove those points wrong and show you that WordPress can be used for serious projects that can go big scale, we are highlighting the most popular brands that are using WordPress.

Remember that Tauntaun sleeping bag that was supposedly for sale on Think Geek but wasn't, because it was April Fools and they were only kidding? So many people wanted it and got angry that it wasn't available. The company has now decided to try to bring it to life for real–if the suits at Lucasfilms will grant them a license. Think Geek has done great April Fools prank products before (caffeinated meatloaf, anyone?), but this one was exceptional. It had the head of a Tauntaun, a fur outer lining, an inner lining with an intestine pattern, and a tiny light saber on the zipper to simulate the slicing action Han Solo performed to open the animal up so he could stuff Luke into it.

Are You Dreaming Big? This isn't an idle question. Think about it carefully. All things considered, you might believe that you are happy or content in your life right now. And if I asked you if you are living well enough, you'd probably shrug and say "eh". Perhaps you'd even claim a decent happiness. But are you living your dreams? I'm not ignoring the fact that the world is as it is and the current economy would make just about anyone feel cynical. I'm not unaware of how things work. But I'd tell you all those terrible things are blown out of proportion. Life is tough. Life is hard. It all means nothing when compared to the unleashed potential of the human spirit. You may think you are doing good, but it's possible you are letting these worries, concerns and "what-ifs" keep you from doing your best. You artificially inflate these road blocks to the point where they affect your behavior, weigh you down and keep you from DREAMING like a child.

Remember that creative writing class you took your senior year of college because you wanted an easy elective? It turns out that dusting off the notebook where you wrote about plots and characters might be a way to help you lead your company. Organizational storytelling is slowly but surely becoming a hot strategy for conveying important information about your business, both internally and externally. It’s also found its way into the MBA world: The University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business in South Africa has recently announced it will be offering a class in the subject. If you believe Steve Denning, other institutions will be sure to follow.

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now

Build your own professional looking site quickly and easily with our do-it-yourself website builder

GeoMaker creates microformats and maps from geographical information embedded in texts. You can either provide a URL to load and hit the "load content" button or start typing your own text and hit the "get locations" button to continue.

We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of "beta" software as not being yet ready for prime time. Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it's had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase. So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk

From 2001 to 2003, I worked as the local IT admin and jack-of-all-trades for a branch of a collection services company in California. It was fun in that I got to do a lot of stuff that a larger organization would have compartmentalized, but it was also difficult in that I had no one to back me up when I needed to make an argument. The boss happened to not only behave like the "pointy-haired boss" in Dilbert, but he actually had pointy hair — a coincidence that often manifested itself when he showed both his lack of IT knowledge and his poor management decisions. When I first took the job, the network consisted of a hodgepodge of equipment run on cat3 and coax. By "hodgepodge," I mean we had ancient reel-to-reel tape drives and an old mainframe running data "platters" that I had never heard of until then, and the user environment was old orange-screen terminals.

Jedi Knight Aayla Secura has sent a recon team to Florrum on a Republic gunship, but the team has been harried by Separatist droid forces. Command the gunship over the sulfuric acid geysers below and destroy the Separatist droids seeking to capture you.

Clients about to migrate to version 7 should check out the new pre-built templates. You can preview the new templates by going to the demo store and logging in using guest / Netsol1. Then go to Design > Site Design > Templates. However, I thought it'd be easier to just post some thumbnails for all of them. These each link to larger versions.

There are an immense number of tools that have been created to help web developers. Unfortunately, you might never know this; there’s no central index of these tools. It turns out that keeping up with all the development in this space is really difficult–even for folks like us who have been tracking it every day for years. As we’ve explored different tools we could create here as part of the Developer Tools Lab, we’ve come to the opinion that in addition to creating new tools, one of the best things we could do is help developers understand the broad universe of tools that already exist and expose some of the fantastic and amazing work that’s being done.

Fans have asked and LucasArts has delivered! Today the company announced a new initiative in its effort to revive its classic and beloved franchises by making its games available for the first time ever as digital downloads online. In this first round of releases, ten fan-favorite LucasArts PC games will be made available Wednesday, July 8 on Steam Valve Corporation's delivery and management platform for the PC. Scheduled for release are classic adventure titles like LOOM and The Dig and hit action games including Star Wars Battlefront II and Star Wars Republic Commando.

Over the last few hours I’ve been following rumors of a Star Wars live action television series which will be shot in Australia — well I’ve just confirmed from a source who has a friend that works at ILM that this rumor is in fact true! My understanding from what I’ve been able to gather is that the series will be high quality and tap into local talent from Australia from well know film people to science fiction writers. The series is suppose to be aimed at adults (unlike the previous cartoon series) and focus on relationships and emotional landscapes — which means that it might be in more of the “chick flick” tradition. I’d trust Lucas to not let this series get too silly — but frankly it comes down to the team they put on it.

Athas can be year 0, or maybe a 20 years advance it not really a big problem. I see Raam rule by Dregoth and his Drays. Sadira can now be a Sun Empress for Tyr. Andropinis back from the Black. So Every city-state have a ruler who grant spells. ON GODS On the matter of Gods in Athas: Well simply go with Sorceror-Kings, one for each city-state and also platonic Elements for the divine power source. ON CLASSES Paladin: They are not a problem anymore as they can be of any alignment. I see them as templar-knight and elemental crusader. For the Invoker, only say no alignment restriction since elements doesn't care. ON RACES Dragonborn: Dray, Pterrans, Ssurran. Three clans of Dragonborn. Tiefling: They were always there. They come from a old city-state as the elite people of a now dead sorceror-king who have dealt with demons. Eladrin/Gnome: Let them come from the Athasian Feywild now reconnect more with Athas since a new cataclysm, a place where Defiling is standard

With Eberron out properly by the end of July and Gencon Indy coming up in August, it stands to reason that we’ll be hearing from Wizards pretty soon about what the next D&D campaign world to be released will be. There seems to be a general consensus of sorts that Dark Sun is the most likely setting for 2010, but it’s far from the only option available. D&D campaign settings have a long and storied history and with Forgotten Realms and Eberron out of the way, the field looks pretty open for some of the old classics to make a comeback. Let’s take a quick look at some of the choices.

Creating state of the Art Web Development in reasonable time requires access to quality resources, tools and experience. You simply cant afford to start over from scratch all the time when everyone else is taking advantage of all the free goodies making advanced Web Development a easier. This article combines tools, scripts, solutions that I have stumbled over over time and that I find worth knowing. You will find different types of Ajax scripts and tricks ready to use, menus, navigation and tabs, auto completion, form and button enhancements, table and grid aid, powerful stuff you can do with images windows and much more. Get started and boost your development with 125 worth knowing Web Developer Tools and Techniques.

Adobe Photoshop is a given in any designer’s wish list, and it comes with a host of features that allow for excellent and professional photo editing. The biggest obstacle to any designer who wants Photoshop is the price, which can be prohibitive. Fortunately there are a number of open source (and completely free) programs out there that do much of what Photoshop can, and sometimes more. In this collection, you will find 10 excellent examples of open source and free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.

Matthew Paul Turner-On Questions on Vimeo

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Most advice to entrepreneurs focuses on what they should do: build a great product, assemble a great team, provide great service. All are “duhisms.” Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t realize that there are things they should specifically avoid doing too. These are also duhisms, but somehow no one ever talks about them. Here is my list of the twelve most important things that entrepreneurs should not do.

Jeff Goldblum interrupts Stephen's report on the death of Jeff Goldblum. (05:24)

Official site. BioWare and LucasArts bring you the next evolution in MMO Gameplay: Story.

Effective writing skills are to a writer what petrol is to a car. Like the petrol and car relationship, without solid skills writers cannot move ahead. These skills don’t come overnight, and they require patience and determination. You have to work smart and hard to acquire them. Only with experience, you can enter the realm of effective, always-in-demand writers. Of course, effective writing requires a good command of the language in which you write or want to write. Once you have that command, you need to learn some tips and tricks so that you can have an edge over others in this hard-to-succeed world of writers. There are some gifted writers, granted. But gifted writers also need to polish their skills frequently in order to stay ahead of competition and earn their livelihood. We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. You will find copywriting blogs, dictionaries, references, teaching classes, articles,

New month, new fonts collection. In this post I want to share with you some interesting fonts to make inspiration for your new websites or design projects. Take a look at this list with ten beautiful and free fonts you can download and use for your commercial/non-commercial projects.

COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color schemes and themes. With a scratch pad to save colors you're working with, a photo tool to extract colors and an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you tons of color inspiration. Using COPASO you can save your palettes to a private folder or download them to your local computer. When you're ready, click publish and share your color palette with thousands of other color enthusiasts. If you're finding COPASO a bit too rich for your color creating tastes, you can always use our basic color palette tool.

Typography Animation project for class Poem by Taylor Mali (www.TaylorMali.com)

As a web designer, we will always deal with colors. There are a lot of useful online color tools such as color wheel, color scheme, color palette, color picker, and etc. When i try to search for a complete list of online color tools, i can’t found any. So, i decided to collect them and share the list as a useful resource for other web designers. Let’s start looking at the list:

By now I’m sure you figured out that I love minimalist designs. I’ve featured many simple and minimalist websites on Spyre Studios before but this time I wanted to feature sites that not only have a minimalist layout but that also use very little colors. I tried to find sites that use a greyscale color scheme but that also introduce a vibrant and/or contrasting color, usually for links and buttons. Most of the sites on this list use at most 3 or 4 colors (black, white, shade of grey, contrasting color) excluding pictures and images that are placed in the content area. The websites are listed alphabetically. Hope you enjoy it!

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it. No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not. Penn and Teller demonstrate the seven basic principles of magic. The trick is called Looks Simple, and the poin