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links for 2010-02-01

  • CSS3 is coming. Although the browser support of CSS 3 is still very limited, many designers across the globe experiment with new powerful features of the language, using graceful degradation for users with older browsers and using the new possibilites of CSS3 for users with modern browsers. That’s a reasonable solution — after all it doesn’t make sense to avoid learning CSS3 (that will be heavily used in the future) only because these features are not supported yet. The point of this article is to give you a glimpse of what will be possible soon and what you will be using soon and provide you with an opportunity to learn about new CSS3 techniques and features. In this post we present 50 useful and powerful CSS3/jQuery-techniques that can strongly improve user experience, improve designer’s workflow and replace dirty old workarounds that we used in Internet Explorer 6 & Co. Please notice that most techniques presented below are experimental, and many of them are not pure CSS3-technique
  • Like many other web developers, I definitely hate Internet Explorer, especially the version 6. At a time where new and powerful techniques as such as HTML5 and CSS3 are emerging, it’s not surprising that IE can’t handle them correctly. Luckily, a few tricks can make your life easier.
  • On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.
  • This update covers tutorials, tips and techniques that you should have read in January 2010. Featured publications include: A List Apart, Perishable Press, DevSnippets, Webdesigner Depot, Nettuts+, Inspiring Pixel, Gaya Design, PV.M Garage, Line25, Woork Up, Six Revisions, Tutorialzine, Papermashup, WPWebHost, TechPortal, Yehuda Katz, Codrops, NuRelm, Queness, PHP Web and IT Stuff, DLOCC, WebM.ag, Jon Galloway, DevMoose, CSSKarma, AEXT, Viral Patel, and JankoAtwarpSpeed. Featured authors include: Lam Nguyen, Tuhin Kumar, Chris Spooner, Jason Schuller, Louis Lazaris, Dan Wellman, Martin Angelov, Siddharth, Ashley Ford, Navjot Singh, Gaya Kessler, Burak Guzel, Piervincenzo Madeo, Peter Verhage, Yehuda Katz, Jeff Starr, Mary Lou, Chris Taylor, Kevin Liew, James Padolsey, Noura Yehia, Jason Cranford Teague, Devin Walker, Bill Peña, McBonio, Jon Galloway, Jean-Paul Bernadina, Tim Wright, Viral Patel, Shelley Powers, Janko Jovanovic,
  • If you consider yourself a geek, or aspire to the honor of geekhood, here’s an essential checklist of must-have geek skills. The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. A geek is one who isn’t satisfied knowing only the surface facts, but instead has a visceral desire to learn everything possible about a particular subject. A techie geek is usually one who knows a little about everything, and is thus the person family and friends turn to whenever they have a question. If you’re that type of person and are looking for a few extra skills to pick up, or if you’re a newbie aiming to get a handhold on the honor that
  • We all know some of the famous on-liners from the movies, but some of them are so commonplace that you may not even know that it’s a quote from a movie or from which movie it originated. But there are some quotes from movies that everyone should know. Some of them have really stood the test of time and are very old. Ironically, these are sometimes the ones that we know the best. Here’s a list of one-liners that everyone should know and also which movie it came from and who in the movie said it. I’ve started with the earlier movies and have continued to go in chronological order.
  • The World Wide Web is a privileged channel for spreading good ideas and, in this time of crisis, it could be very useful to improve a business. Internet provides many possibilities to enhance, in different ways, our activities and one of this surely is the electronic commerce. Here the first words on Wikipedia to describe the electronic commerce: “Electronic commerce consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.” Issues Behind An E-Commerce Website The main goals for an e-commerce website are to sell and promo
  • It’s time to solve a mystery. (A boring technical coding mystery.) It’s been bothering me for years: Why does my site go down when I get linked on Reddit or Stumbleupon? It shouldn’t. I use Hosting Matters, and they host blogs that are far larger than mine without difficulty. Usually my site will just vanish for a few hours, and after the fact I’ll be able to sort out what happened by looking at the incoming traffic.
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    links for 2010-01-31

  • Earlier in the week I released a new HTML template called Jamba which is a single page resume and CV template. In this post I’d like to show you how I designed the template in Photoshop (check out the Jamba features page and the live demo). Before we get started though, let’s quickly cover what needs to be included in an online resume and CV design. There are a number of details that are obviously required such as your name, contact details (email and contact number), and ideally a warm and friendly photo of yourself. It’s also important to include other key areas such as the work experience you have, your academic background, any specific skills you’ve developed, and details of any other related achievements. You may want to include other things as well, but most resumes and CVs will include these sorts of details. Given that potential employers are likely to be very busy they’ll probably only have time to scan the page – so, to avoid irritating them, it’s important that the essent
  • The free bolt on e-Commerce Plugin is WordPress framework designed to help you sell online. We make setting up shop incredibly easy. Plus we've had over 500,000 downloads!
  • Freelancing isn't something you should just jump into, but it makes sense for a good number of workers. If you're looking into, or getting started with, working on your own, here are 10 resources we think every freelancer can learn from.
  • The Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000 – Featuring Windows Live compatibility, World Class VGA Optics, superior low-light performance and a fun flexible design. Share more experiences with family and friends.
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    links for 2010-01-30

  • It is a little hard to talk hard numbers here since this will vary wildly from agency to agency, firm to firm, freelancer to freelancer. But let’s just throw some out there just for fun. $75 / hour. That’s a fair rate, I think, for a reasonably skillful freelance web designer.
  • Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
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    links for 2010-01-29

  • President Obama traveled to a House Republican retreat in Baltimore on Friday and delivered a performance that was at once defiant, substantive and engaging. For roughly an hour and a half, Obama lectured GOP leaders and, in a protracted, nationally-televised question-and-answer session, deflected their policy critiques, corrected their misstatements and scolded them for playing petty politics. (Full video and transcript available HERE.) White House officials told the Huffington Post they were absolutely ecstatic. MSNBC's Luke Russert, who was on the scene in Baltimore, relayed that a Republican official and other GOP aides had confided to him that allowing the "cameras to roll like that" was a "mistake." Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy So effective was the president that Fox News cut away from the broadcast 20 minutes before it ended.
  • Zoom from the edge of the universe to the quantum foam of spacetime and learn the scale of things along the way! Learn the size of the Pillars of Creation and marvel at the minuscule scale of a neutrino! ARROW KEYS! ARROW KEYS! You can use arrow keys if the scroll bar is too sensitive. Thank you so much for your high ratings and rave reviews!
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    links for 2010-01-27

  • In the autumn of 1971 Don McLean's elegiac American Pie entered the collective consciousness, and over thirty years later remains one of the most discussed, dissected and debated songs that popular music has ever produced. A cultural event at the peak of its popularity in 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard 100 charts in a matter of weeks, selling more than 3 million copies; and at eight and a half minutes long, this was no mean feat. But this was no ordinary song, either: boldly original and thematically ambitious, what set American Pie apart had a lot to do with the way we weren't entirely sure what the song was about, provoking endless debates over its epic cast of characters. And these controversies remain with us to this day. But however open to interpretation the lyrics may have been, the song's emotional resonance was unmistakable: McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it. Opening with the death of sin
  • Over the past few years with the influence of premium themes, High quality free WordPress Themes have become harder and harder to find. Designers and developers are selling their themes, which is right for their awesome effort and work, the free wordpress themes are not coming in the flow as they were used to some time. Nevertheless, we have went through many sources and are presenting a showcase of beautiful, but rather lesser known themes you might have missed. Here are 31 High Quality Free WordPress Themes.
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    links for 2010-01-25

  • "The Free Database about the St. Louis Area that anyone can edit!"
  • When it comes to free software, the open-source community certainly has a monopoly on high-minded posturing and puffy rhetoric. Just take a look at the Philosophy page of the GNU operating system's website: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms." But when it comes to free software, those free-loving, free-wheeling open sourcers have an unlikely challenger: Microsoft. Yes, you heard us right, Microsoft: the ice to Fedora's fire; the night to Ubuntu's day. But as unlikely as it may seem, Redmond actually has a thriving – though largely unsung – library of free applications available to download. And we're not just talking about freeware cobbled together in bedrooms by people who don't get
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    links for 2010-01-24

  • Tags are keywords people use to describe their bookmarks
  • The most popular bookmarks on Delicious right now
  • The freshest bookmarks that are flying like hotcakes on Delicious and beyond.
  • The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien: Fri, Jan 22, 2010
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    links for 2010-01-23

  • What’s the point of semantic markup if users will never know or even care about it? There are a number of good answers, of course. Developers like web pages created with semantic markup because that makes it easy to add presentational and behavioral layers to the underlying structural code, and because it means future maintenance gets easier. Beyond that, however, developers can make such semantic markup useful for site visitors by exposing that information with a variety of easy to use tools. Here are some examples of such tools that turn semantic information, in the form of microformats on a web page, into something useful for a site visitor with nearly no extra effort required.
  • I'm an idiot. Last week, someone commented on a post I wrote for SEOMOZ's YouMOZ service that they'd like a Google Analytics Cheatsheet. I wrote back "OK, I'll do it." Guess what? Google Analytics has a ton of features. And even more tricks and hacks that folks have developed over the years. So this 2-page cheat sheet, which took 3 days and nights to pull together, is a tiny sliver of the whole system. But it does cover the stuff that I'd want my staff to use. You can download it for free, no strings attached: Version with links: The Google Analytics Cheatsheet Printer-friendly version: The Google Analytics Cheatsheet, Printer Friendly
  • Custom Visualization
  • Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. Pause and explore at any time by pressing the play/pause button under the video to stop and look around. The video below was shot on Monday, January 18, at 9:52 a.m. EST in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
  • Owning a web server that has its own SSL certificate from a registered Certificate Authority (so it won't trigger any browser warnings) does have its advantages. However, the price of a certificate issued by Verisign or a similar vendor usually tends to put a quick end to such fanciful ideas. Israeli vendor StartSSL offers free SSL server certificates that are valid for a year. Since StartSSL's root certificates are already included in all the mainstream browsers, opening a certificate from the vendor doesn't trigger any error messages. This article gives examples of all the steps required to add StartSSL certification, from signing up with StartSSL to integrating the certificate into an Apache web server under Linux. The only requirement for obtaining a certificate for a domain is that a user must be able to receive emails to an administrative account (postmaster, hostmaster or webmaster). There are no additional checks to verify whether the user actually owns the respective domain
  • Twitter has become very popular and has turned into a tool that a lot of websites have used to connect with their customers and promote themselves. A great, and now popular, way to show those who visit your website that you have an active Twitter account is to add a Twitter feed to it. In this post I will show you how to add a custom Twitter feed to your website, providing you with code and styling tips (don’t worry… it is actually very easy). Twitter provides you with various free widgets that are easy to integrate with your website for those who are not capable of easily designing anything custom, but if you can, try to go the custom rout of creating (or having someone create for you) a custom looking feed.
  • Despite any financial recession and economic stress, online purchasing continues to grow. Expansion of the market and evolving technology that simplifies our daily lives help to set the pace of e-commerce design. Customers want the shopping process to be quick and easy, and merchants want to increase sales by making their stores attractive and popular. Thus, e-commerce design tends to combine a look and usability that is at once unique and eye-catching. In this post, we showcase 35 attractive online store designs. One of the trends we observed from this collection is a minimalist design style. Small details and accents (e.g. unobtrusive background patterns, icons, pictograms and typography) reflect a brand’s spirit and match the character of its products. Some websites, though, are unconventional, rich in visual effects. Please note that the selection of stores featured in this showcase was based more on design aesthetics than usability. But we made sure that the websites included her
  • The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (Late night TV show) official NBC page features headlines and videos!
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    links for 2010-01-21

  • A few weeks ago I was reading an article on form UI by Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo!. For those who aren’t familiar with Luke, he (quite literally) wrote the book on good form design. In the article, one certain section about placing labels inside of form fields stood out to me: Because labels within fields need to go away when people are entering their answer into an input field, the context for the answer is gone. So if you suddenly forget what question you’re answering, tough luck—the label is nowhere to be found. As such, labels within inputs aren’t a good solution for long or even medium-length forms. When you’re done filling in the form, all the labels are gone! That makes it a bit hard to go back and check your answers. Luke Wroblewski He brings up a good point. Generally speaking, you can look at a field that says “Tim Wright” and know that it was a field for your (my) name. But for long forms, yea, I do agree that you can forget some of the questions you answered. For best
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    links for 2010-01-19

  • The presence or lack of good stock imagery can make or break a design. My best advice is to use custom photography/artwork whenever possible. However, I’m a big fan of stack art because there are tons of scenarios when it makes good sense to purchase someone else’s work over taking the time to create your own. To keep it classy, here are ten things to avoid when you’re working with stock images.
  • With the progression of the Web, hundreds of web design tools have been established around the world to serve the growing demand for such work.Many of this tools are available and widely used by Web Designers and Webmasters. These tools help Them to explore, learn, design and build their projects from scratch.If you’re also a beginner Web designer, these simple tools can help you create the Layout,StyleSheet,Favicons,Buttons,Wordpress Theme and much more quick easy.If you found this post useful please Retweet it.
  • For web developers and designers, it can be difficult to memorize the syntax for multiple programming languages and frameworks, especially since they are always evolving and growing. This is where cheat sheets come in handy. Most cheat sheets are designed to be printer friendly, so you can have them laying around on your desk as quick reference cards. Here is a collection of useful cheat sheets specifically for front end web development that will help you with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  • Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology.
  • Now imagine you are an agency with 12 designers who all need (want!) to move to the latest version of Creative Suite. Even more expense. Now imagine you are a looking to learn web design and don’t have pots of cash to spend on the industry standard software. How can you get your hands on a suite of software tools that will help you plan, design, build, debug and deliver a website without spending a penny? Here’s how. We’ve compiled a list of free software, mostly for the Mac, but with a few exceptions where absolutely necessary! We’ll take you through the process of planning, completing and delivering a project, and what free software is available to you at those stages. Be sure to add your comments below and let us know of anything we have missed.
  • CodeRun Studio: A free, cross-platform browser-based IDE CodeRun Studio is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE), designed for the cloud. It enables you to easily develop, debug and deploy web applications using your browser. CodeRun Studio can be used instead or alongside your existing desktop IDE. You can upload existing code in order to test it in the cloud or for sharing with your peers. CodeRun Studio also enables you to instantly compile, package and deploy your code to the CodeRun Cloud. CodeRun Studio is a free service. Try It Now!
  • Instructions: Slide the orb Find comfort zone Enjoy auditory zen Uses of White Noise: Aid Sleep Enhance Privacy Block Distractions Mask Tinnitus Configure Audio Equipment Soothe Migraines and more…
  • Having a say in what Google says about you is extremely important these days, especially for professionals such as freelancers, for whom a Google search result of their name is a first impression for potential employers. You definitely want your blog or professional web site to show up before your non-professional social networking profiles. Kirkpatrick discovered a small HTML tag that was missing from his own blog, yet present in Twitter, that could make all the difference: So the long and short of this story is that if you want to make sure that Google understands your blog to be your primary beacon on the web, then you should add the words rel="me" to a relevant link on your blog. I've added that tag to the link on my sidebar that goes to my feedback page, because that's a good page for me. It's as simple as making the link text read a href="http://marshallk.com/feedback" rel="me". It's not necessarily a foolproof solution, but it should help (and certainly shouldn't hurt). If
  • Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found. The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army. U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents. One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light o
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