Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-12-28

  • If I were going to launch a blog this very moment, and if my intention was to start from zero and re-create the success I’ve enjoyed on this blog… hm. I guess my first move would be to get a domain name.
  • For Fireworks, there are countless extensions, that expand the program allowing additional web & screen design functions
  • Yahoo, which earned $1.6 billion in revenue last quarter, is “sunsetting” Delicious because the unprofitable acquisition “is not a strategic fit“. The tech and blogger community, along with Delicious fans, are crying ‘no.’ Michael Arrington says Yahoo is in “absolute disarray“. Even though Yahoo’s Delicious home page says it’s “the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe”, many most internet users have probably never heard of the social bookmarking site. So, what’s the big deal? Forget all the PR blunders for a moment and the significant damage its done to consumer confidence. Here’s why it matters. Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005. At the time, a post on the Delicious blog said: We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team
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    Categories
    Delicious

    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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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-20

  • Quality product descriptions can transform e-commerce conversion rates — it’s common to see increases of 30-100%. As well as converting more visitors, search traffic increases drastically when unique copy is written for each product. Most online retailers use manufacturers’ copy or rely solely on images to sell products. They then use inadequate copy elsewhere on their site and fail to achieve a consistent tone to persuade their audience. This creates a compelling opportunity for savvy retailers — by writing quality e-commerce copy you will create a unique competitive advantage. Essentially, your copy must achieve two goals: 1. Establish trust and 2. Convince visitors that your product is right for them. Potential customers cannot see or touch the product since it’s not physically there in front of them. This is why it’s important that your copy anticipates the needs of your visitors while convincing them that your company can be trusted to provide excellent products.
  • Wirify is a bookmarklet that lets you turn any web page into a wireframe in one click.
  • Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network.
  • After giving millions of users a good 24 hours to express their anger and frustration at wide reports of a plan to kill off web bookmarking service Delicious, Yahoo got around to explaining that there was no need to panic. A leaked internal presentation had showed on Thursday that Yahoo was planning to “sunset” some services, including Delicious, and Yahoo statements to the press that it was “cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products” encouraged the idea that this meant Delicious was doomed.On Friday, Yahoo said something new: “We are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company”, officials wrote on Friday on the Delicious home blog. The service will stay up as Yahoo talks to potential buyers. Perhaps the company changed plans after a torrent of criticism.
  • (No joke. This is actually how I deal with Lawyers. This isn’t just theory, this is my experience.) Have you ever seen the movie “Monsters Inc.”? It’s a cute animated Disney film about Big Scary Monsters. All day long they go through magical doors, each leading into a bedroom of a young child sleeping at night, and the monster’s job is to scare the shit out of that kid and extract screams for money. That’s very much like the life of a lawyer. He goes about his work day, new situations come up, he gets involved and scares some people, he gets paid. The better he is at scaring people, the better paid he is. I’m not attacking lawyers for doing their job, everyone’s got to eat and earn a living. I just want to show you how best to deal with him. You have to understand this fundamentally: When someone hires a lawyer to threaten you, he’s not hiring someone to figure out the legal matters involved, he’s hiring someone to threaten you.
  • We are all obsessed with sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the moment but rewind a few years to when the term Web 2.0 first popped up and a whole host of different sites were the hot young startups destined for great things. It’s amazing what a couple of years do though because as we can see below, some of the biggest sites from the “Web 2.0 generation” are either on a massive decline, facing huge competition or about to be closed down. There’s a good lesson here to highlight; how the hype cycle around websites and services can come and go and what was once lauded and destined for great things can within a couple of years shut down and be abandoned…
  • In a blog post today, Delicious says “No, we are not shutting down.” But they aren’t staying at Yahoo either. Yesterday, it was all but confirmed that Yahoo! was sunsetting Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. They do admit that they are not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, and are looking for a home outside of the company. From the blog, “We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.” In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “Don’t Panic.” Delicious says they are maintaining the site and encourage users to stay active.
  • For busy websites, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to transfer static content such as images, javascripts, stylesheets, Flash etc. is highly recommended (as listed in Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site) as it reduces server load and bandwidth thus improves stability and availability. There is a catch – Commerical CDN’s like Akamai and Limelight are not cheap at all. Good news, we have an exception however – the free, P2P-based CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage of a powereful CDN without spending a dime. How to use it? Well, basically, just append `.nyud.net` to the hostname of any URL, and that URL will be handled by Coral – simple. This plugin takes that simplicity one step further (or closer?) by rewriting your static files’ URL’s (JavaScripts, CSS, images etc.) so that they are served from Coral servers instead of your own. You don’t have to touch anything! Just enable it, and boom! your static cont
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-16

  • First things first, I love Photoshop. It is the world’s best program for image editing. I do not intend to say Photoshop is a bad program, I just wish to clear up the misunderstanding that Photoshop is the right tool to use for web and screen design. Photoshop was designed to be used for image manipulation. It was not designed to create effective pixel-precise layouts for computer screens, or to make quick changes to screen layouts. Photoshop tends to be used for this purpose however, because users are familiar with the program, and are not aware that Fireworks was designed for this specific purpose. Users generally try to compare Fireworks with Photoshop. Of course you can do a lot of things you can do in Fireworks somehow in Photoshop. It is also possible to do the same tasks in InDesign as you can do in Photoshop, but is this effective and efficient way to work?
  • For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others. In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier. Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks Under “Merge” are: Upcoming, FoxyTunes, Sideline, FireEagle, Yahoo Events and Yahoo People Search. It also looks like sundry Yahoo properties like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo Calendar will be made into features.
  • Del.icio.us, a beloved social bookmarking service, is being killed off as part of some "organizational streamlining" by Yahoo and we're already in tears. Here's some advice on how to preserve the memories—and bookmarks—we have with the service. Simply head over to this link and you'll be offered the option to export all your bookmarks—you'll be provided with the option of including your tags and notes as well. Once you're done exporting those bookmarks and mourning, you can check out this list for some alternative bookmark management tools. [TechCrunch]
  • Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.
  • Compositing is a skill and process that spans the entire spectrum of creative industries. At the high end, compositing boasts its own specialized profession in film and television post production and visual effects. Dedicated software such as NUKE and Shake have taken the craft to powerful levels of its own, leaving behind the relatively basic compositing toolset of Adobe Photoshop. However, for many graphics practitioners compositing is a vital everyday process — and as with all pixel-pushing endeavors, Photoshop remains the entry point and hub to learning and ultimately mastering the fundamentals of this important skill. In this article, I’ll share some of my own time-saving tips for compositing in Photoshop. Tips such as these should never replace a solid understanding of your craft; however, being able to adapt a technique to make it work for you is part of being a creative professional. I encourage you to share your own creative compositing tips in the comments to this article
  • Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-12-10

  • It’s no secret that we love textures and patterns here at WDL. They’re great for easily adding lots of interest and depth to a design, whether it be a huge background pattern or just some subtle textures here and there. So to continue our “Best of 2010? series, this week we’re covering textures and patterns. We’ve seen a lot of them this year, but some really stood out. So here’s our picks for best textures and patterns of 2010. We picked our favorites, but tried to include a mixture of styles.
  • The Web Design Ledger is a publication by web designers for web designers. We cover a wide range of topics such as Photoshop, web design, photography, programming, and more.
  • "Tron: Legacy" is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn , the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the digital world of Tron more »where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey of escape across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.
  • The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen. The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.
  • I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    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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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-11-30

  • Three day work week! Woohoo! Now, what are you going to do with all of that free time? Sure, you’ll probably get in the regular Turkey/Shopping/Football Thanksgiving activities, but here’s a few more ideas from The Loud Few if you are in St. Louis over the holiday.
  • After your Google Apps accounts are converted, your users will have access to most Google products. Previously, many Google products — such as Blogger, Reader, and Picasa Web Albums — were available only in personal (consumer) Google Accounts. See the list below for which Google products are accessible to users for use with accounts on your domain. Note that this list is subject to change without notice, and that not all products are available in all areas.
  • Digital marketing is gaining traction in a number of industries, and business-to-business (B2B) marketers are in on that trend, too. Increased spending on online marketing is driving companies to try new and innovative means of getting the word out about their products and services — one area that’s getting a lot of buzz with B2B marketers is social media. The following five case studies lend insight into how B2B marketers can use social media to generate leads, create specialized communities, improve SEO, become knowledge sources, and strengthen marketing campaigns. Let us know how your brand uses social media for B2B marketing in the comments below.
  • At noon on November 13, 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a surprise while enjoying their lunch. A flash mob singing the Hallelujah Chorus!
  • Irvin Kershner, director of the best Star Wars film, has died at 87 in LA. Kershner also directed such genre hits as the Bond flick Never Say Never Again and Robocop 2, and the cult favorite TV series Seaquest DSV.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-11-29

  • This best web 2.0 stripe generator on the net! Generate seamless stripe patterns and textures of any two colors, harnessing the power of AJAX. Generate beautiful transparencies too.
  • As designers, we are used to having quite a bit of control over how things are displayed in a browser. Sure, differing rendering engines don’t always agree on everything, but for the most part we can at least find ways to mitigate variance through workarounds, or by writing for the lowest common denominator. By far, one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with browser inconsistencies has got to be forms. There are two distinctively differing schools of thought regarding (not) styling form elements. For the longest time, we’ve had people on both sides of the proverbial fence, neither group being particularly pragmatic. Some designers advocate styling form elements to match the brand of a site. Others would tell you to leave them alone entirely, so that they adhere to the native look and feel of a given operating system.
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    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-11-16

  • SoTel Systems, LLC is the premier wholesale supplier for business communications products and services. We offer traditional refurbished and unused voice and data equipment, authorized distribution of VOIP equipment, and commercial SIP Services for both inbound and outbound traffic. With nearly 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry we provide your company with quality products, valuable expertise, and lightning fast delivery.
  • Only the best commercial- use free fonts Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. Here are some of our favorites:
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