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links for 2010-08-26

  • Photography as both a profession and a hobby is an incredibly expansive topic that covers a remarkably vast range of subjects from science and art. No matter where you lie on the professional spectrum, there is simply always more to learn. We spent countless hours scouring the web for the best content we could find and share with you, and today we’ll help you expand your knowledge with 100 photography related tutorials!
  • These whitepapers are designed to educate all users of ad servers, from startups to seasoned professionals
  • St. Louis based online marketing and Internet junkie with in affinity for shiny objects, cold beer, dance music, and good books. This blog is about online marketing and generally just things I like. – Click Because You Like It
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    links for 2010-07-07

  • The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”
  • How many times have you heard someone say, I just want that top search result on Google? For a business website, the top spot in the search engine returns can be a lead generating machine. Think about it. Google is where most people go when they are researching. What if there was a way to get your company’s website on that coveted first page? Well there is… One of the best ways to gain that top spot is by blogging. Incorporating a blog into a website can have a huge impact on the overall website’s search engine rankings.
  • Today’s blog post we have decided to do a massive collection of 99 icon sets which can each be used within commercial design projects. This compilation was put together simply because of the lack of free icon sets which are available to be used in commercial design projects, what’s the point creating an icon set if its not free to use ? A great blog post of high quality icon sets which is a greate reference to bookmark for future reference. This post was time consuming putting together therefore any comments on your thoughts about the article would defiantly be really appreciated.
  • There are over 10k plugins available in the wordpress plugin directory at this moment and they are still increasing. Now the thing is that, how to choose the must have plugin after a fresh install of wordpress on your blog and what are the basic wordpress plugins needed for your blog. Here I am listing top 10 must have wordpress plugins according to me which I think they should be installed and running on your blog. I am pretty much sure that if you are a blogger then you must be having all of them installed but still I am listing down so that it might be useful for a new blogger .
  • Photography for the Web by Paul Duncanson is the latest release from the SitePoint book publishing stable. It contains all you need to know to transform photos taken on your standard camera into gorgeous images that impress. You may already know that we’ve made Chapters 1 and 2 available as part of the free sample PDF of the book, and a few weeks ago we ran an article on Exposure, taken from the book. This article is an excerpt from chapter 2, addressing the principles of composition. Read on to learn more, or download the free sample to read both chapters offline at your convenience. Composition is the art of placing elements in a scene to make it more aesthetically pleasing. It’s a subject on which many books have been written. Here I’ll give you an overview of some of the basic principles of composition. Rather than tell you to take pictures in a certain way, we will show you some well-established techniques that engage the viewer’s interest, encouraging them to explore the picture
  • Designing Email templates has proven to be a tricky thing. Between the many possible variables with different email clients and an effective message that communicates with the end user, email has basic elements that must be followed for success. Below I have outlined the difference and strategies of design and functionality. Enjoy!
  • Seeing CSS3 on actual functioning websites is a lot like spotting a Himalayan Snow Leopard or a Giant Panda. Because roughly 53 percent of browsers in use don’t support CSS3 (ahem, IE, ahem), most web designers just don’t use it on a regular basis. At least they don’t use it on sites they design for work. As such, most people don’t see it regularly, and if they do, it’s just a fleeting glimpse. That’s not to say it’s not out there – again, like with snow leopards and pandas, to see CSS3 in the wild, you need to be stealthy, smart, and patient. So, with out further ado, here are some examples of CSS3 in the wild. But please – make sure to avoid big, sudden movements. You don’t want to scare it off. To learn more about CSS3, you should also check out these articles and tutorials:
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    links for 2010-05-27

  • Throughout my career in interactive marketing, I have maintained a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) checklist for my own use. I have updated the best practice guidelines for each item on the list along the way. It's by no means comprehensive, but I still find it extremely helpful as I approach any new project. I thought I'd share it with you and see what you might add to this list to help make it more useful. As with any check list, it needs to be broad enough to fit most websites, but most high-level SEO guidelines generally are that broad. The other thing to keep in mind with SEO is that the formulas are not definite. Google does not publish the exact formula for title tag length or keyword frequency/density, but throughout years of SEO expert analysis and commentary, these general best practices have come to light and tend to drive top 10 results for medium to long-tail keywords for any business with a relatively "search engine friendly" site. I will tell you that the last few
  • Star Wars Starring You!
  • Spider crawls across News 4 camera
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    links for 2010-04-26

  • Social plugins enable you to provide engaging social experiences to your users with just a line of HTML. Because they are hosted by Facebook, the plugins are personalized for all users who are logged into Facebook — even if the users haven't yet signed up for your site.
  • How_to_draw_all_sorts_of_crap_by_Coelasquid.jpg (JPEG Image, 700×5000 pixels)
  • My wife and I have been engaged in an ongoing game of Stephen King for about fifteen years. The game began when we moved into our first home, back in 1996. The real estate agent described the house as pre-Colonial, and it was primitive. We wrote an offer for the house on a sunny day. We moved in during a three-day thunder storm. The previous owners left behind a sort of housewarming gift: Two shopping bags filled with Stephen King paperbacks. There was at least one copy of each of his books, and multiple copies of his really popular titles, like Carrie, Cujo, and The Shining. The bags even contained his pseudonymous books, written under the names Richard Bachman, John Swithen, and Cleo Birdwell. My wife didn’t want to throw the books away, so she put them in the basement. I thought it would be funny to place the books on the dining room table one evening and deny that I had put them there. Then I thought it would be funny if I put the bags of Stephen King novels in the refrigerator a
  • Sistine Chapel interactive 3D environment
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    links for 2010-04-21

  • Our free guides help you successfully create your email using industry best practices and our 9+ years of practical email marketing knowledge. With topics ranging from 'creating a newsletter' to 'going green with your marketing', you'll find our guides to be helpful, valuable and relevant.
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    links for 2010-04-15

  • Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.
  • Instead of paying good cash for cd cases, which eventually break and end up in a landfill, how about creating your own, unique folded-paper cd cases that are biodegradable and take up a fraction of the space?
  • You couldn’t have failed to notice that pretty much every website on the face of the planet has a homepage, and that every homepage uses the same basic layout. Masthead at the top, navigation underneath and/or along the side(s), main content taking up most of the page, and a footer at the bottom. It’s common because it works. It differentiates the content that needs to be differentiated, it presents it in a logical order that follows how people read and interact with websites, and it’s relatively simple to code. In fact, HTML5 encourages you to code this way. If you want to succeed as a web designer, you should stick to this paradigm. The trouble is, although you know you need a header, navigation links, main content and a footer, it’s pretty hard to decide exactly where to position each, what margins and padding and fonts and colors to use, what items to include or exclude, and all those other details. You need a process you can rely on to ensure that you meet your client’s needs,
  • This is a tutorial on creating a PHP website template starting with HTML and CSS. We will start with the basics and you can also download the final product. Please remember that I am using very basic CSS styling in this example just for you to get the idea, and not so much to make it look pretty. The download will contain both the styled example as well as a complete blank template that you can use for your own starting point for any project personal or commercial. The demo files are released under GPL V2. This tutorial assumes you have basic understanding of html and css. At the end of this tutorial you should have a basic understanding of using php and converting an html site to php.You can also download the demo files here. The actual template will be created in 10 easy steps. I will then take it a step further to show you how to add variables to your template.
  • Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank or IT department — time to reset those codes, for safety’s sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you’ve concocted won’t last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year’s batch? Who can remember?). Now, a study has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the
  • Start selling in 60 seconds
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    links for 2010-02-28

  • Jeremy built the form to work as you'd expect. You can tab between the "blanks" just the way you tab between standard Web form input fields. You can click on any "blank" to start entering text. The password "blank" masks any characters you enter just like a standard password input, and the whole form manages errors if you answer any questions incorrectly. In other words, it works like a standard Web form but it looks quite different. The presentation is inviting and fun, which is quite unlike a standard Web form. After seeing the Huffduffer form in action, I was curious how it would perform against a traditional form. Would people be more inclined to complete it because of the narrative format? Or would the unfamiliar presentation format confuse people? Thanks to Ron Kurti and the team at Vast.com, I now have some early answers. Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative "Mad Libs" format. In Vast.com's testing,
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    links for 2010-02-16

  • We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress (WordPress) blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are already a variety of Google Buzz (Google Buzz) plugins and add-ons available. While it’s clear that people are really taking to using Buzz to share content and communicate, the service will undoubtedly reach more users as its sharing tools are integrated into other social sites. From buttons to social stream in your side bar, here’s how you can integrate Buzz with your WordPress blog. Google Buzz Buttons Mashable (Mashable) started sporting some nifty Buzz buttons a few days ago and lots of our readers have wanted to know how to add a similar feature to their own blogs. As it stands right now, how our Google Buzz buttons work (and how the buttons other sites are using also work) is that they create a share link from that post to Google Reader (Google Reader). As long as
  • Welcome to Discogs a community-built database of music information. Imagine a site with discographies of all labels, all artists, all cross-referenced. It's getting closer every day.
  • Twenty years ago, Wade Davis rocked the anthropological world with his claim to have discovered the secret formula that can turn human beings into zombies. The word zombie comes from the Kongo word Nzambi which means “spirit of a dead person.” For generations, westerners had been horrified and fascinated by rumors of the zombie, or the walking dead. Travelers returning from Haiti told lurid tales of unsuspecting victims who had been poisoned by evil bokors, or witch doctors, who then disinterred the corpses of the victims and revived them with a magic formula. The hapless victim, stripped of volition and memory, was then rebaptized with a new name and taken away to be put to work as the bokor’s slave. These stories were derided as a racist myth by Haitian intellectuals and ignored by the scientific community at large, until a case of reported zombification came along that was too well-documented to ignore. This was the case of Clairvius Narcisse. The facts of the case of Clairv
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    links for 2010-02-13

  • These are some important Yahoo! pages that all SEO specialists should have in their arsenal… Webmaster Contact Form Webmaster Guidelines and Help Submit a Site Report Spam Report Copyright Infringement Reinclusion Request Yahoo Search Blog Jeremy Zawodny Blog If you have any questions about these pages or realize something is missing from the list, please post
  • These are some important Google pages that all SEO specialists should have in their arsenal… Webmaster Guidelines and Help Webmaster Contact Form Submit Your Site Submission to Google Local Report Spam Report Copyright Infringements Google Trends Google Keyword Tool Webmaster Tools Reinclusion Instructions You will need to go to the contact form (listed above) after reading here Official Google Blog Matt Cutts Blog If you have any questions about these pages or realize something is missing from the list, please post
  • This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences arbitrarily decided to nominate ten films for best picture, instead of the usual five. Well, I have to ask, since were going crazy with it anyway, why not nominate five more? (Or at least ANY of these instead of The Blind Side or the shiny-looking quality-void ‘Avatar).
  • I am not just a Linux professional, I also happen to use Windows quite often. In fact, Windows is my primary desktop from which I connect to all the other boxes and do my work on. During the years of Windows usage, I have accumulated a list of must-have Windows programs that I wouldn’t be able to work without. Some of them are commercial, some are freeware, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how productive you are with your setup. If you’re really productive on Linux with your own set of tools, it’s perfectly fine and you have done a great job of finding the best tools of trade.
  • The Escapist presents its first ever Webcomic Contest! Beginning February 1st, The Escapist will be accepting submitted user-created webcomics and granting one lucky winner a grand prize of a webcomic contract with The Escapist. If you're an artist, illustrator or talented writer and want to submit a webcomic to The Escapist's Webcomic Contest, please follow these instructions: Style and Structure * You must submit one (1) single frame of logo or brand and four (4) pieces of art, totaling 5 submissions * All of your work must be submitted at the same time for any particular title * The Escapist uses the complete width of our site to provide the highest possible viewing quality, which fills the page from side to side. We would like to see a full width comic to maintain this quality, so please submit your pages as follows:
  • This site was created by Philipp Lenssen in 2010. Please email me at philipp.lenssen@gmail.com for feedback. Some content of this site is from Creative Commons licensed Wikipedia with credit to its individual authors.
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    links for 2010-01-16

  • First-Person Tetris
  • No matter what topic, you should always be focused on where your pages will be placed. When creating a page, the first thing to check is where it will rank once it hits the search engines. The following 6 steps will show you how: 1 – Make a list of all possible keywords Brain storm lists of all possible keywords that may be relevant to your business. Try to figure out what possible searches someone would be typing into a search engine and would like to find your content at the other end. You're not trying any sort of linkbait here. What the goal is here is to picture someone saying "I was searching for XYZ and I came across the perfect site." This is the time to get far out and come up with words and phrases that your competition may have not. It is true that the more out there you go the less search traffic there will be but, the less traffic, the less competition for these keywords. If your just starting out, there is a good chance that you don't command the authority to rank for
  • Every semester I agonize over how to help my students learn to write more meaningful, interesting papers. Not just in my class, but altogether. Writing well is a key skill in today’s information-heavy society, and above all else my job is to help prepare students to become active participants in the society we live in. Writing well is about far more than proper grammar and spelling. In fact, good writing often violates the rules of good grammar, sometimes violently. It is also about more than simply developing a good style. Hemingway and Proust have very different styles, but both were good writers. One piece of advice often given to students is to write conversationally, and while that can be helpful – particularly for students (and others) who feel that good writing means using a lot of big words and complex sentences – not all good writing is conversational. Malcolm Gladwell’s writing is very conversational, and is quite effective for it; on the other hand, David Mamet’s writing i
  • No Windows geek or PC support pro should be without these must-have utilities
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