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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 2010-05-27

  • 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 2010-04-28

  • About a month ago I was reading the New York Times online and they had an article which showed a road in Brooklyn that had been reconstructed to make it safer and more pleasing to the eye. To show the difference in the reconstruction project, they showed a before and after picture using Flash that let the visitor drag a slider over the images, which were sandwiched with one on top of the other, so that you could easily see how dramatic the changes were. I immediately thought that this could be done in JavaScript using jQuery, so I set out to do it.
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    links for 2010-04-23

  • Starter kits are great timesavers for web designers and they are particularly useful for those who often create mock-ups for project pitching on daily basis. If you are a designer-cum-programmer think of it as your code snippets So what’s in a starter kit? We think it varies – depending on what each designer routinely worked with. For GUI designers, keeping a copy of form elements (buttons, checkboxes, tab, drop down menus, etc) helps speed up the process of creating screens and layouts; on the other hand, browser (IE, Firefox Safari) templates with web safe area keep web designers reminded how/where they should prioritize their contents. Experienced designers will usually customize and keep a personal version of starter kit, some might have few too! In today’s article, we attempt to show you some of the best design starter kit we’ve come to know. You can download (for free) and use them right away, or customize your own copy that will come in handy in future, your choice. Full list
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    links for 2010-04-13

  • CSSDesk – Dynamic CSS Sandbox
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    links for 2010-03-25

  • Creating a good website isn't an easy task, but there's a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked.
  • Many people live, work, and vote based on their belief in the Bible. This affects you. Should the Bible have that authority? View the evidence and judge for yourself.
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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 2010-02-15

  • The journey continues as our film web site has launched its e-commerce web site for the film and with the configuration still a work in progress, we are starting to turn our focus to getting the site found. Specifically, the task of getting your e-commerce site found is similar in many ways as traditional web site SEO but in other aspects completely different. During our implementation of an e-commerce site, we evaluated many different types of shopping carts, self-managed and installed, WordPress plugins and out-of-the-box hosted solutions. Initially we went with a WordPress plugin because it was cheaper and we thought it would suit our basic needs. But that had technical issues and we decided to re-evaluate our needs. We ultimately chose the Network Solutions e-commerce package and we found it to be mature and extremely sophisticated yet easy to use for even the most basic of shopping carts. Now I am not here to pitch this solution, but I will say is you get what you pay for in many
  • There’s little doubt that “Star Wars” was inspired as much by Oedipus as it was “Star Trek,” with its lightsaber battles and “I-am-you-father” revelation in “Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.” Some 30 years after Darth Vader’s stunning declaration, another “Star Wars”-related Oedipal battle is set to hit the big screen: a new documentary, “The People vs. George Lucas,” in which (predominantly male) geeks tear down the king-daddy of the fanboys. This is no ordinary film: the documentary is stitched together largely with homemade contributions from fans, many of whom were inspired by the movies to create their own “Star Wars” tributes – and anti-Lucas rants. The first reaction to this might be to quote William Shatner’s three-word response to obsessed fans from a classic 1986 “Saturday Night Live” sketch set at a Trekkers convention: “Get a life!”
  • Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:
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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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