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links for 2010-05-23

  • In our earlier article about Web design trends for 2010 we covered the strong influence of print design techniques, keypress navigation, horizontal layouts, rich typography and aesthetically pleasing designs. Web design today is developing rapidly, breaking the limitations of conventional approaches and exploring the possibilites of upcoming technologies. Designers are not only experimenting with new techniques and design approaches, but they are improving the quality of their designs in both technical and conceptual respects. Modern websites have great strengths, such as flexibility, cross-browser compatibility and personalization, but they are also becoming increasingly simple and intuitive. This is being done through the application of subtle usability enhancements, drawn either from the Web itself or from offline interactive systems. The Web today is increasingly complex, while usage of the Web is becoming increasingly simple. In this article, we’ll explore some new design approa
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    links for 2010-05-21

  • Rock trio Muse has canceled and rescheduled dates on their upcoming fall tour due to the expected arrival of a new member of the Muse family. Bassist Chris Wolstenholme and his wife Kelly are expecting a child in November. Consequentially, the band has canceled the November 2nd show in Kansas City, MO and the November 3rd show in St. Louis, MO. The November 5th show in Columbus, Ohio will now be October 12 and the November 6th show in Cincinnati will be moved up to October 11. Tickets previously purchased for the Ohio show will be honored at the new dates. Refunds for canceled/rescheduled shows can be obtained at point of purchase.
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    links for 2010-05-20

  • Join BookSneeze and we'll send you free books in exchange for an honest review on your blog.
  • Portal™ is a new single player game from Valve. Set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, Portal has been called one of the most innovative new games on the horizon and will offer gamers hours of unique gameplay.
  • Dave Matthews Band • Kings of Leon • Stevie Wonder • Jay-Z • Conan O'Brien • Tenacious D • Weezer • The Flaming Lips performing Dark Side of the Moon featuring Stardeath and White Dwarfs • The Dead Weather • Damian Marley & Nas • Phoenix • Norah Jones • Michael Franti & Spearhead • John Fogerty • Regina Spektor • Jimmy Cliff • LCD Soundsystem • The Avett Brothers • Thievery Corporation • Rise Against • Tori Amos • The National • Zac Brown Band • Les Claypool • John Prine • The Black Keys • Steve Martin & the Steep Canyon Rangers • Jeff Beck • & Many More!
  • The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers. View font details to get the code needed to embed the font on your web site. Please also visit our quick start guide and FAQ page. For more help and suggestions, use our moderator page
  • Five important items of note today relating to Mozilla’s support for the VP8 codec: 1. Google will be releasing VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. VP8 is a high-quality video codec that Google acquired when they purchased the company On2. The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. 2. The VP8 codec will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container format to build a new standard for Open Video on the web called WebM. You can find out more about the project at its new site: http://www.webmproject.org/. 3. We will include support for WebM in Firefox. You can get super-early WebM builds of Firefox 4 pre-alpha today. WebM will also be included in Google Chrome and Opera. 4. Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting
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    links for 2010-05-19

  • Netflix: DVDs by mail plus instantly watch some movies on your PC, Mac, or right on your TV via an Internet connected Netflix ready device.
  • This ain't your parents' birth announcement (that would just be weird). Nerdy couple Jeff and Jessica, fans of "Star Wars" and procreation, got creative when it came to announcing their twins and re-edited "Star Wars" to tell the tale of one, singular "kick ass sperm." Coming to us a day after the unofficial "Star Wars" holiday ("May The 4th Be With You"), you can tell this couple is awesomely nerdy and really excited for their upcoming spawn. They say they won't name the twins Luke and Leia, but how about R2D2 and CP3O? OK, maybe that's taking it a little too far… (Via The Daily What)
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    links for 2010-05-18

  • There’s something about an old video game that does a body good. The 16-color graphics, the 8-bit sound — something about it conjures memories of simpler times, when joysticks seemed larger because our hands were still small, and a dollar seemed like a heck of a lot more money than it does right now. Allow us to take you on a vintage voyage with a time machine of links, if you will. Here are ten computer and arcade games we all know and love that you can now play online and free of charge. If you’re of a certain age, you probably played these games while waiting for your mom to finish grocery shopping. Or they might have been on your very first video game console. We hope you remember them fondly and enjoy playing them again.
  • This Template Repository is a place for the submission of new templates made by you, the community! You created a nice template? Submit it, get feedback and help others to be more productive!
  • You'd be hard-pressed to find a company more beloved than Google. And why not? They make the Internet easier to use, pamper their employees and foot the bill for YouTube even though it loses money like it's got a gambling problem that's made of cocaine. Unfortunately, much of what is awesome about Google also makes them increasingly terrifying with each passing day.
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    links for 2010-05-17

  • Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Guide – Hunt holocrons and droids with our guide to the force.
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    links for 2010-05-15

  • Foldr Monitr is a free tool that runs in the background and watches a selected folder (and optionally subfolders) waiting for you to add photos to it. When photos appear in the folder, Foldr Monitr automatically uploads them to your Flickr account for you. Set it to watch the location you transfer your photos to from your camera and they'll be automatically sent to Flickr straight away. Photos can also be uploaded to a chosen set or to automatically generated sets based on the names of the subfolders in which they reside on your computer.
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    links for 2010-05-13

  • Peregrines have nested at the Cathedral of Learning since 2002. Dorothy and E2 are the parents at this site. Dorothy began nesting here in 2002 with her first mate, Erie. E2 arrived in the fall of 2007 when Erie disappeared. Dorothy fledged 22 chicks in seven years with Erie and 7 chicks since 2008 with E2. For recent news on Pittsburgh's peregrines, Kate St. John’s Bird Blog.
  • What you need to know
  • If one of your users clicks through to a product or service and buys something you automatically earn a commission. In return for the service we typically take 25% of those commissions. There is no risk, you only pay us a share of what you earn. Often you earn more with VigLink due to collective bargaining on commission rates, even after our 25% cut.
  • If you’ve ever found yourself scratching your head at a 3-letter acronym in an ecommerce related article or document, this post is for you. We’ve compiled 99 of the most common 3 letter acronyms you’ll find in online business, from a wide range of functions including IT, marketing, web development, SEO, web analytics, web design and logistics. Roll over any acronym to see its title, or click its link to see a full definition. Or quiz yourself, and see how many of these acronyms you know off the top of your head!
  • Though small, the call-to-action button (add to cart, begin checkout, continue, submit, etc) can have a major influence on conversion. The size, placement, color, wording and even shape matters, but you don’t know what’s optimal until you test variations of each variable. In a recent interview, conversion optimization legend Bryan Eisenberg recently shared one of his secrets for great call-to-action buttons, using irregular shapes (rather than typical rectangle or oval shapes). This includes buttons with icons like big plus signs or shopping carts. It’s the “unusualness” of the button that catches the eye and captures the click. There is no shape proven to work best (remember, everything must be tested as every website’s design and target customer is different). Your website may even convert better with a conventional button shape. But if you’re daring enough to test an irregular shape, here are some shape ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
  • Shopping cart abandonment is an epidemic in online retailing, with some companies reporting that more than 60% of checkouts end without a conversion. Preventing even a relatively small percentage of these abandoned carts would significantly improve revenues and profits. While purchase price and shipping costs are the leading reported causes of shopping cart abandonment, ease of use is close behind. Fighting Frustration One increasingly popular method used to slash cart abandonment rates is to introduce single-page, Ajax-driven checkout forms that combine the convenience of a single page format with asynchronous form validation. As we start this discussion of the pros and cons of single-page, Ajax checkouts, I need to describe why these two methods—one pagers and Ajax—are employed and what frustrating problems they seek to solve.
  • At some point, you may have a situation where you want to center multiple elements (maybe <div> elements, or other block elements) on a single line in a fixed-width area. Centering a single element in a fixed area is easy. Just add margin: auto and a fixed width to the element you want to center, and the margins will force the element to center. There really should be a similar simple way to center multiple elements evenly spaced. It would be nice if CSS had a property called “box-align” which you could set to “center” then the child elements would be centered evenly within their parent. Well, you can achieve something similar by taking advantage of CSS’s flexibity with “recasting” elements (for lack of a better term). View a demo of what I’ll be describing in this short tutorial.
  • Zoomooz is an easy-to-use jQuery plugin for making any web page element zoom.
  • 8 Websites You Need to Stop Building – The Oatmeal
  • We are providing you fresh and new Html/Css Web Templates of April 2010 for free Download . These Template are totally free for editing, modifying and colors according to your requirement. Last month we had presented 10 best Html/CSS Web template for free download which has been appreciated a lot. I hope this time you will again like these web templates and would appreciate gorgeous work of designers. We have come up with new designs, layouts, and color themes that will attract you and will inspire you to create more exciting for your future projects.
  • Space is black. I mean, duh, right? But really, it’s black because it’s almost entirely empty, so even with stars scattered around, there’s nothing to light up. hst_ngc1999But some parts of space are bright: clouds of gas can be lit up by nearby stars, making them glow. However, just to make things more fun, there can be thicker patches of dust mixed in that block the light from the stars and gas behind them. We see lots of those, they’re pretty common. But there’s yet another "however": that dust only blocks the visible light. In the infrared, that dust should itself glow because it’s warm. NGC 1999 — seen here in a famous Hubble picture — has all these ingredients. It’s a thick region of gas and dust. Stars are being born in and around it, brightening it with their reflected light (as seen in the image; the star V380 Orionis on the left is lighting up the surrounding space junk) as well as warming it up and making it glow on its own. Even so, the oddly-shaped patch to the right was
  • With its release of a black Wii this week, Nintendo has tempted current owners of its videogame machine to trade their white consoles in for the slick new paint job. There’s just one problem: Nintendo does not offer gamers a way to transfer games purchased online from one console to another. Neither the Wii nor Nintendo’s portable DSi consoles have an upgrade path for downloadable content, since games are tied not to user accounts but to specific machines. It’s impossible for a user to copy content from an old console to a new one. Even some Wii owners whose machines have malfunctioned said it was difficult, or impossible, to get Nintendo to transfer the software licenses at its headquarters. “It shows extreme lack of foresight on their part,” says Wii owner Nathan Gillmore. “Did they really think the general public would be content to have all of their purchased content bound to a specific device?” Like all modern-day gaming machines, Wii and DSi can download games directly from an
  • Microsoft Office has been the best selling piece of software for five years running. How does the company plan to compete when it releases Office 2010 Wednesday? Make most of it available for free. To counter the popularity of Google's online Docs application, which bundles a word-processing tool, spreadsheet editing, presentation functionality and more into one free app, Microsoft is adding its own free online component: Web apps. The Office 2010 suite , which Microsoft will release to business customers tomorrow and to consumers in early June, will include the ability to create, edit, view and share files online using the company's SkyDrive website. In fact, you won't even need to buy the program to use the online tools; Microsoft will make the majority of Office functionality available for free to anyone — whether they've bought the new suite or not. To use the online functions, simply visit SkyDrive.com (or the Facebook-ified version at docs.com). You can also save a file fro
  • This week Microsoft will take its Office 2010 suite out of beta. If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs. If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed. Google Docs has been providing rich real-time collaboration to millions of users for nearly four years. It lets employees edit and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the browser from anywhere in the world. We recently made tremendous strides in improving Google Docs formatting, speed and functionality, and a growing number of companies are now using it as their primary productivity software. Of course, you probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000?), and there’s no need to uninst
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    links for 2010-05-12

  • Facebook has made all kinds of privacy changes lately. It's made some users uncomfortable and, thanks to a couple poorly-timed screw-ups, Facebook is getting a lot of heat about the changes from Senators, media, and watchdog organizations. We don't think any of that will ever cause you to quit Facebook. You love what Facebook does for you too much to quit. But if you're going to stay on Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.
  • Facebook fan pages number among the few social media channels that allow page customization for users. Instead of a mediocre interface, business owners and professionals can now apply HTML code to enhance their Facebook fan page presence to promote and build business branding. Rich content creates a memorable interface that gets people talking, lets a special announcement or contest go viral, improves fans’ engagement and so much more. To create an important hub to reach out to millions of potential supporters, you need to up your game and optimize your fan page to meet its ultimate purpose. Everything is possible, thanks to the powerful Facebook application known as Static FBML. Many people may be unaware of the advanced functionality FBML gives a fan page, such as creating and naming your tabs or boxes freely. For those who are curious just how powerful Static FBML can get, we’re going to inspect it all here:
  • Google chrome is a relatively new web browser but it has already gained huge popularity with its great speed and features. Web developers must work more faster and more productively – what could help more than these extensions aimed to ease your daily development process and save time. At least for me – none of extensions have made browser load speed slower – I cannot say this about Firefox though, which I don’t use anymore. Scroll through this list – I am sure you will find at least few new extensions to use daily!
  • This picture was taken at the Vancouver airport by Michael Lonergan when he felt a disturbance in the atmosphere.
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    links for 2010-05-07

  • WordPress is the most popular and the best (in my opinion) blogging platform, created by Automattic. It’s really easy to use and it’s very powerful, giving you the opportunity to build any kind of site, from blogs to shopping carts and CMS’s. In this series of tutorials, we are going to create our first WordPress theme. For this tutorial you need to have a little more than basic knowledge about HTML and CSS. Let’s get started.You can Download source files and you can also Live preview the theme here. It’s a basic css layout so it will be easy for beginners to convert it into a working WordPress theme.
  • When we talk about editing, resizing, manipulating of pictures/images most of the people use adobe photoshop program and few other softwares. But now we have so many other softwares in the market that are free for download and they allow us to edit and manipulate pictures of any type. Purchase of photo editing softwares is not easy for every one so, we came here with 20 best and useful softwares which allow us to edit photos without spending a penny.
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