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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 2010-02-27

  • A 5.1 speaker system with deep bass that immerses you in the sounds you love—even from 2-channel stereo sources.
  • Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as "IE6," is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.
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    links for 2010-02-23

  • Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS.
  • One of the cool features in Windows 7 is XP Mode. However, it’s only available for Windows 7 Professional and above, leaving Home Edition and Vista users out of luck. Today we’ll show you how to create your own XP Mode to run on Vista or Windows 7 Home Premium. How does this work? Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows Vista are not licensed to run the free XP Mode download from Microsoft.  In fact, if you select Home Premium on the XP Mode download site, you will see the following message:
  • Google Chrome, like Firefox, has the ability to increase its functionality and capabilities through the use of extensions. If you’re a web developer, Google Chrome comes with a nice set of developer tools built in that will make your life easier. But there are also a number of extensions that will give you even more tools at your disposal. The great thing about extensions is that they allow you to perform tasks that would normally require you to switch over to another application. Being able to perform certain tasks without leaving your browser can be a big time saver
  • Tools for musicians
  • What is it about the bizarre and mysterious that piques our curiosity? It entertains our sense of wonder and excites our imagination, for sure. Luckily for us, history is marked with strange, logic-defying occurrences to amuse us. Here is a list comprised of 10 more unexplainable and interesting phenomenon and incidents that we crave so much. This list is made up of a mixture of two submissions to the Christmas competition which shared some items, so it seemed a good idea to combine the two to give us ten things never before shown on the site. Also note, this list is in the newly created category “Mystery” and all of our lists involving mysteries can now be found under that category in the archives or on the mystery category page.
  • Pixable offers a fast, easy and superior way to turn your Facebook, Flickr and Picasa photos into home delivered printed memorabilia. Speed: Pixable is the fastest online photo book creator. Until Pixable printing photos directly from Facebook was tedious, since it required downloading photos one by one onto a hard drive, uploading them to a photo finishing site and then re-organizing them. Ease: Pixable is user-friendly and requires no software downloads. All browser based. Superior features: Pixable allows visitors to access and import unique Facebook content, including tagging information, photo captions and comments left by friends. Visitors can search their photos for specific people or use entire albums already organized on Facebook. Once they’ve selected the content they want, visitors can organize the photos themselves or allow Pixable to auto fill the album in mere seconds.
  • Years of development and more than fifty contributors from all the corners of the world – inspired musicians, pianists, developers, writers, editors, and graphic designers- have worked together to create a unique piano-learning experience that will revolutionize the way people learn piano around the world.
  • E-Commerce sites are often considered to be boring and unattractive, however, that is not always the case. This post showcases 25 e-commerce sites that demonstrate creativity in the design. It may be the layout, graphics, design style or site structure, but all of them break the mould of the typical e-commerce site. For more inspiration from e-commerce sites, see our gallery CartFrenzy.
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    links for 2010-02-20

  • Most of the time, L'Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Vatican City, publishes news about the Vatican's day-to-day operations and rad new encyclicals (I wonder if they have a gossip section). But in an apparent effort to reach out to younger readers/parishioners/converts, they have listed their top ten albums of all time. It's a bit of a 180 from the establishment's previously staid stance on rock & roll (although Pope Benedict XVI's predecessor, John Paul II, was known to hang out with rock stars on occasion. And so we get a "semi-serious" look at the best of rock & roll, courtesy of the Vatican:
  • A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance by Dinty W. Moore First published in The Normal School, January 2010: http://thenormalschool.com/ . 17,051 views – Public Created on Jun 12, 2009 – Updated Jan 21
  • There’s good news and bad news about the state of public education in the United States. While the greatest gains have been made in Math and Science education from 1995 to 2003, most Americans still only give public schools a below-average grade. Take a graphic look at America’s Report Card on Education to see how public education in the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world.
  • In recent years Internet Explorer 6 has become the browser web designers love to hate. Security issues, JavaScript errors and inexplicable CSS rendering quirks have made it the brunt of many jokes. With IE6 in its twilight and big companies like Google dropping support, it seems like a good time to take a fond look back at our old foe. In this post we’re looking at what Internet Explorer 6 used to be and why its image changed over the years. You can also see the comic in a larger version. Do we need to review our projects in Internet Explorer 6? Can we stop supporting IE6? If not, how do we handle those users who are still using IE6? And if yes, how can we prompt IE6 users to upgrade? Or how do we convince those who don’t allow their employees to get rid of the legacy browser to upgrade? What do you think? We are looking forward to your opinions in the comments to this post!
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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 2010-02-08

  • The random image generator is a free tool that will generate placeholder or dummy images in your specific dimensions. The images are randomly generated abstracts.
  • Dynamic Dummy Image Generator Sometimes you just need a placeholder image right at your finger tips. Just enter the width + x + height at the end of this URL and off you go! Example: http://dummyimage.com/640×480 FAQ What is this? This is a simple tool for generating dummy/filler images on the fly at whatever size you want. How do I use it? Simply add the width, an 'x', and the height (example) of the image you want and my script will spit out a gray box to the size you want with the image dimensions in black Arial text centered in the middle of the box. Can I use a dummy image url as an image source? Yup, that was what it was designed for. Try this: <img src="http://dummyimage.com/325×123" alt="A Dummy Image"> How many images can I generate? As many as you want until my server collapses. If you would like to run this script on your own server, here are the PHP files and instructions for doing so. Update: Someone made a Ruby version of this script called fakeimage,
  • Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday] As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter. Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.
  • PageRank Backlink Generator software make it easier for you to explore the appropriate backlink to your site theme, was quite easy to use and capable of automating the comments you have previously set… just download the software PageRank Backlink Generator directly here and this is Video Tutorial to use this software, download here PS: Please don’t SPAM with this utility…
  • We’ve compiled six useful tips for all you web designers and developers out there. They cover various topics including: accessibility, SQL, web developer plugins for Firefox, HTML emails, design and jQuery. Feel free to disagree or add your own in the comments below. If you’d like to submit a tip to be considered for future articles, just head over to Tipster and add your own.
  • From the director of the upcoming Captain America movie: The costume is a flag, but the way we’re getting around that is we have Steve Rogers forced into the USO circuit. After he’s made into this super-soldier, they decide they can’t send him into combat and risk him getting killed. He’s the only one and they can’t make more. So they say, ‘You’re going to be in this USO show’ and they give him a flag suit. He can’t wait to get out of it… So he’s up on stage doing songs and dances with chorus girls and he can’t wait to get out and really fight. (Emphasis mine.) They make a super-soldier and then refuse to let him fight, and the captain himself hates his costume. This is incredibly telling, and shows us exactly how the writer feels about the idea of Captain America.
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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 2010-01-16

  • 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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    links for 2010-01-11

  • * With so few jobs currently available and so many people currently hoping to fill those jobs, standing out in an interview is of utmost importance. While jobs themselves are scarce, job advice is overly abundant. And with an influx of information comes an influx of confusion. What career counsel do you take, and what do you ignore? There are a number of common misconceptions related to interview best practices, experts say. Kera Greene of the Career Counselors Consortium and executive coach Barbara Frankel offer tips below that can help you stand out from other interview subjects, avoid frequent pitfalls, and secure the job. Myth #1: Be prepared with a list of questions to ask at the close of the interview. There is some truth in this common piece of advice: You should always be prepared, and that usually includes developing questions related to the job. The myth here is that you must wait until it is "your turn" to speak. By waiting until the interviewer asks you if you have any
  • Replenish your graphic design arsenal with this week’s freshest design picks. Get on the creative groove by downloading free textures, brushes, fonts, icons and even WordPress themes for your design projects. Spread the good news by bookmarking, tweeting and sharing this post!
  • Google owns our Internet Whether we like it or not, “Google” is almost synonymous with “Internet”. Year after year, Google has developed enough online applications for us to be able to do anything you need to, by only using Google Google is almost synonymous with Internet Now we have a search engine, an online email service, an IM service, a blogging platform, photo and video sharing applications, a feed reader, an online word processor, an encyclopedia, a web site creator, an online directory and even an Internet browser! Not to mention His PPC advertising system, its main source of revenue. Now look at the list above. It´s pretty long, isn´t it? Well you know what? It´s only 10% of the programs, applications, widgets or services Google provides today. Internet without Google? Now the question is: would it be the Internet possible without Google?
  • Bear and Fox follows the adventures of two best friends; a bird named Bear and a snake named Fox. Bear’s name comes from his loud, boisterous nature. Fox’s name refers to his clever, thoughtful disposition. They’ve known each other forever. Their personalities and tastes sometimes clash but they always have fun adventures and they are friends to the end.
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