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links for 2010-12-29

  • CSS3 is truly amazing. It gives web designers the ability to create flexible and easily reusable design elements, and reduces our reliance on images and graphics editors. This is a guide shows you how to create stylish social media buttons using CSS3, HTML, and some freely available social media icons.
  • Although it’s common for agents to use social media platforms, very few actually leverage the technology to its full potential. With literally thousands of social networking sites to choose from, it can be a little overwhelming to choose the right one. The big three are obviously Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. To put things into perspective, Facebook houses half a billion members while Twitter holds 75 million and LinkedIn boasts 80 million. Each of the groups is growing at an astounding rate, but not every platform is suitable for business purposes. In a recent study conducted by NetProspex, it was found that 43 percent of employees at the largest companies in America use LinkedIn while 11 percent use Facebook and 3 percent use Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are generally geared for personal use while LinkedIn is 100 percent business. LinkedIn has proven to be a powerful resource for businesses, but even more so for channel partners.
  • FontsMadeEasy.com is a fonts download and view tool that helps people to choose and download a new font.
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    links for 2010-12-23

  • Today we are going to use jQuery and CSS3 rotations, along with the jQuery rotate plugin, to create a beautiful slideshow. You can use it to spice up your web sites, product pages and other projects with some CSS3 magic.
  • Earlier this year, Mozilla convened a privacy workshop that brought together some of the world’s leading thinkers in online privacy. People from the FTC to the EFF were there to answer the question: What attributes of privacy policies and terms of service should people care about? This lead to a proposal presented for the W3C, among other places, which further refined the notion. We are now ready to propose an alpha version of Privacy Icons that takes into account the feedback and participation we’ve received along the way. We’ve simplified the core set dramatically and tightened up the language. While the icons don’t touch on all topics, we do think they significantly move the discussion on privacy, as well as the general level of literacy about privacy, forward. We do not want to let perfection or devotion to taxonomy get in the way of the good. Keep in mind that the target adopters of Privacy Icons are 2nd-tier sites—
  • With Wix its easy to make a free website and enjoy the benefits of a strong online presence. Make a free website with the Wix website builder. Get your business noticed.
  • An anonymous reader writes "I'm looking to build a family tree for a holiday gift. Do the Slashdotters of the world have any recommendations on open source genealogy software? I did try a 14-day free trial of Ancestry.com. What a scam! I submitted the personal information for my parents, grandparents, and me. Then, I received a pop-up telling me that if I would like to get information on my family, I would have to upgrade my subscription for $29.95 US. So, I took the chance. Turns out that the only information they had was my previous addresses for the past 20 years." The venerable GRAMPS is still actively developed, and its site lists several other possibilities, too. Any favorites, or anti-favorites, out there?
  • You can set up Microsoft Outlook 2010 to send an automatic response to some or all of the people who send you e-mail messages. You can combine an Outlook e-mail template with Outlook rules to reproduce the functionality of the Automatic Replies feature available only to Exchange Server accounts.
  • WordPress Shortcodes are very useful, especially in wordpress theme development. People who buy themes aren`t experts in web design, so a shortcode will be very useful. But what is a shortcode? As the name says, a shortcode is a simple and elegant way to display complicated codes using just a word.For example: Imagine that you want to insert inside a post a nice info-box. You have to create div-classes after div-classes and finally you make it. A shortcode gives you the possibility to do this just adding “[information]lorem ipsum[/information] . That`s wicked, don`t you think? WordPress shortcodes are a set of functions created of course inside functions.php (which you can find it in your wordpress theme folder) for creating macro codes for use in post content.I`m going to show you how to create some nice boxes powered by a bit of CSS3 and how to split content in 2 columns. Then, you can extend it in 3,4 and how many columns you want.
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    links for 2010-12-06

  • In this tutorial, I will start and finish a logo while documenting the entire process. I encourage you to open up photoshop and follow every step, it will help you learn a lot more than just reading it.
  • This is the time of year that many of us are thinking about what we didn’t do in 2010 and what we should do for 2011. Even professional online marketers have a long ‘to do’ list of things to improve their online marketing performance – made up of tasks to specifically improve ROI or something to save time and improve efficiency. For those of you that are doing your own online marketing, this sort of tasks may be way down on your list, way below items more specifically related to your business. These are the types of tasks that may not be ‘sexy’ and fun, which is why they are easily ‘put on the long finger’ (as they say in Ireland), but are critical to bring the best results from your online marketing activities.
  • I hope you had a blast fine-tuning your blog with testimonials last week. It’s really encouraging to hear that some are trying out the methods, can’t wait to receive more feedbacks on that! In the mean time, I will be sharing few more practical ways to display testimonials (and portfolio) on your LinkedIn and Facebook Page! Now there are definitely limitations comparing to working on a self-hosted blog because application is the main key. Not the best of plans but hopefully you can be inspired by this post and work out creative ways to promote your brand:
  • Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels.
  • Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results. For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website. This Google cheat sheet [PDF] has a nice overview of all the popular search operators that are supported in Google. Other than this “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’
  • Looking for an alternative to the Windows native Windows Media Player? If yes, then look no further; fortunately for you we have gathered a list of 7 great audio players for people running Windows computers. Find the players detailed below and check out which one will suit you best.
  • Google today unveiled its long-rumored entry into the e-book sales world, not called Google Editions, as was previously speculated, but a more anonymous-sounding Google eBooks. The basic idea is to provide an entirely web-based e-book platform accessible from any device with a browser. The business model they’ve opted for is slightly less centralized than the competition, but not quite the distributed seller network I envisioned last week. My wool-gathering regarding the decentralization of the e-book store model are all in that post, so we’ll just focus on the particulars of eBooks service for now. One quick note: I’m going to continue to use the term “e-book,” though the service has opted to drop the hyphen. Like so many new tech-related phrases, the word and its relatives have yet to settle into a single standardized form.
  • Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere.
  • Google's thrown open the doors to an online bookstore stocked with over 3 million titles, which you can store and read in the cloud as if they were Gmail messages. Google's also offering free reading apps for Android and iOS devices. Beyond Android and iOS, Google's eBookstore supports Nook, Sony readers, and other devices, as well as offering straight-up access through the web. Other retailers, like Powell's, will offer Google's eBookstore offerings for sale, and Google claims it will offer "unlimited storage" of your purchases, with your page progress synced across everything. Google's made an effort to offer up lots of modern, popular books at reasonable price, but there are also a lot of free books in the collection, culled from Google's scanning of more than 15 million items in library archives. A video demonstration of Google's new Books and eBookstore is available, but it's neither playing nor embeddable for us—we'll update soon.
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    links for 2010-11-17

  • If you’re one of the countless small business owners who have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, we have two things to say to you: congratulations and beware. Even big companies, like MacDonald’s, get flamed for their Twitter missteps, reminding us all that social media can be a free for all where good intentions sometimes go terribly wrong. It’s tough to navigate this world when so much is out of your control, but there are elements of your social media strategy that you can and must manage. I recently spoke to Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Vancouver-based HootSuite, a popular social media dashboard for groups, who offered five tips for tweeting entrepreneurs.
  • The Loud Few is an interactive marketing agency focused on delivering measurable results through the smart execution of user experience and digital marketing strategy.
  • Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store. Loren, Leland, and the rest of the Mobile team have artfully crafted an application that takes the Twitter experience to a whole new level of awesomeness. We hope you'll love it like we do. Something worth noting is that you don't need a Twitter account to enjoy this application. Browsing trends, reading Top Tweets, finding popular users, and checking out public tweets geographically nearby are all possible immediately upon download. Discovery and consumption of interesting, relevant information is a central focus. However, quick and easy signup exists within the application so new users won't need to visit our web site to create an account.
  • Earlier this year we launched a Google Voice HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app. With this native app, you’ll continue to have access to all the major Google Voice features on your iPhone, like: Cheap rates for international calls Free text messaging to U.S. numbers Voicemail transcription Display your Google Voice number as caller ID when making calls In addition to these benefits, the app provides some features that make using Google Voice on your iPhone a much better experience: With push notifications, the app will alert you instantly when you receive a new voicemail or text message Most of your calls will be placed via Direct Access Numbers, making them connect just as quickly as regular phone calls
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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 2010-06-11

  • Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading. Follow the steps below to install Readability in your Web browser.
  • Researchers at Tokyo University have come up with a technology that is a first and significant step away from the mouse and keyboard – touchable holograms.
  • Whether you have a brick and mortar or you want to bring a new idea to life, the online world is likely a good option to explore. So, where do you start? Hopefully I can walk you through the steps I took to create my own website (www.UrbHub.com) and show you some useful things to do (and not to do).
  • In your WordPress theme folder, there lays the most powerful theme file known as functions.php. As the name suggests, this file adds unique functions to your WordPress installation. This file works just like a plugin within your theme. So you can modify/override WordPress core features without editing any core file. If used correctly, this file can do wonders for your WordPress site. It also speeds up development because you can have all the codes at one place. In this article, we will share some of the most incredible and most wanted tricks for the WordPress functions.php file. Note: This article is targeted for WordPress theme developers. You may need have some PHP knowledge for some hacks.
  • One of the lesser-known jewels of HTML 5 is link prefetching. The idea is to extend the time-honored concept of image preloading to HTML content (and without any messy AJAX code). Here’s how it works: You add a line like this to your page: <link rel="next" href="page2.html"> Then the browser automatically downloads page2.html in a background process as soon as the user’s computer is idle. When the user finally clicks a link to page2.html, the browser serves it from the cache, and so it loads significantly faster. Link prefetching is currently only supported by Firefox. But since Firefox is the second most popular web browser in the world, you can noticeably decrease load times for a significant chunk of your users just by adding one line of code to your HTML. Pretty cool, huh?
  • Free fonts – designers always looking for free fonts because client always can’t afford to put money on expensive fonts due to tight budget of some projects. So, in this article, I am gathering high quality free fonts, which are almost suitable to be used for any design project. And I am sure it will surely save lot of time of designers out there which they spent on computer surfing for free fonts. Please be sure to read copyright and legal documents before using it for commercial projects because some of these are only for personal use. Clicking on font name and image will redirect you to the font page where you can read terms and conditions to use these free fonts and make your design more beautiful and professional. So we have a collection of fonts from dafont.com. I hope you like these fonts and appriciate the designers for this wonderful work.
  • Use Aviary's music creator to simulate dozens of musical instruments including piano, guitars and drums. Create music loops and patterns for use in Aviary's audio editor (Myna) or as ring tones.
  • When it comes to email marketing on the web, you have many choices. Two of the most popular hosted services for internet marketers include aweber.com and getresponse.com. They both offer good service at an affordable price (at around $20 per month). But if you are just starting out and prefer to run your own email marketing software, here is a free script for you to use. It is called Phplist from phplist.com. It is fairly easy to install and configure. You could be ready to run your first email campaign within an hour. Here is a quick lowdown on how to install the free email marketing software.
  • Brian Casel is a web designer and owner of ThemeJam WordPress Themes and CasJam Media. You can follow Brian on his blog at briancasel.com or on Twitter @CasJam. WordPress (WordPress) is the fastest growing CMS platforms in today’s web design industry (yes, it’s a true CMS). Much of the action in the WordPress community is largely driven by the market for WordPress themes. The vast selection of free and commercial themes is what makes WordPress so attractive. But the theme is often only a starting point for further customizations. Web developers and DIY website owners like to start with a great theme and tweak it to perfectly suit their (or their client’s) needs. Many themes, particularly commercial themes, come packaged with a robust theme options page, which lets you to configure many aspects of it. You should check out those available options before diving into the code. That said, all themes are different, and sometimes you need to get your hands dirty to fully customize it
  • Welcome to the world of Dark Sun! Beneath a crimson sun lie desolate wastelands and cities of cruel splendor where sandaled heroes battle against ancient sorcery and terrible monsters. This is Athas, the world of the Dark Sun setting. Rich Baker, lead designer for the new 4th Edition Dark Sun setting, and Rodney Thompson, lead developer, introduce you to the process of creating a new D&D game world from the bones of one of TSR’s most popular 2nd Edition settings.
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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 2010-01-23

  • 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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