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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 2010-12-28

  • 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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    links for 2010-12-25

  • This morning I saw a couple of tweets from @seangaffney and @maxvoltar about the CSS text-rendering property, which is in the W3C Working Draft. Aesthetically Loyal has outlined the differences in kerning pairs and browser support for text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; quite nicely, and after seeing how well capital As, Vs, Ys and Ts display I had to test it for myself. Similar to Kyle Meyer’s experiment, I noticed a significant improvement and added the property to my body CSS for this site.  Overall, type looks much tighter and successive capital letters, like “CSS”, seem more evenly spaced.  Firefox uses optimizeLegibility by default for font sizes 20px or larger and I agree with Paul Irish’s thought that Webkit should do the same.
  • A lot of shit happens in comic books, and a lot of shit happens in real life, so every once in a while they're bound to coincide, right? That still doesn't explain some of the freaky stuff comics have gotten right. Like…
  • Sam Brown is an interface designing standardista from Edinburgh, Scotland who specialises in usability and web standards, is a geek and loves all things technology. Get in touch!
  • Transparency is one of those things that can really add depth and make a website design pop – when it’s done right of course! We’ve collected 40 websites that make great use of transparency. Some of them are using transparent PNGs and others are using the CSS opacity property. Enjoy!
  • Attracting customers to your website is the first concern for any business, and the initial step would be design the best website making it a grand one, but this may not always give you the desired results. Keeping today’s competition and creativity in mind, new ways are designed every where to keep the business on the move. One such new move is the E-mail Newsletter Designs. Newsletter, the word may sound boring or spam to you, but an attractive newsletter design is sure to give visitors a second thought for your website. But be careful, about choosing the right design since inbox is always flooded with e-mails and your mail could be the one among them. Your newsletter design should be able to convey the information at the first glance without forcing the visitor to read till the last and explain your discounts, updates or any information u want to convey.
  • Video.ME by Go Daddy is a growing video-sharing community where you can easily post videos to the Web and share them with your family and friends on Video.ME–or on your Web site or blog, via email, or through a variety of social networking sites.
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    links for 2010-12-24

  • Brad Colbow is a web designer, illustrator and cartoonist This is the online home of his illustration work and The Brads, a web comic that thrills and delights about a half a dozen people every week.
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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 2010-12-21

  • Helping people like you learn to use Comic Sans appropriately.
  • This is my final blog post for The Atlantic. Five years ago, as a way to boost the competitive metabolism of The Hotline, Chuck Todd hired me away from ABC News to create "Hotline On Call." I was to be the first political reporter working for a mainstream news organization whose output would be exclusively online. "On Call" made its debut in early September, the same week that Chris Cillizza began "The Fix." Back then, reporters didn't blog. Newspapers and magazines hired curators to update their websites, and reporters would occasionally post online, but there was a strict separation based on platform. You were considered legitimate only if your byline appeared in print. You were considered a blogger if it didn't. And you didn't want to be a blogger, because bloggers back then were second-class citizens of the country of journalism. Bloggers were partisan activists, yellers, provocateurs and upstarts.
  • It was announced today that Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious. So we thought we’d help you out with some solutions to export the bookmarks to other services. Users have a few different choices. You can choose to export your bookmarks into an html file and import them into your browser or directly import using services like Diigo, Xmarks and Faviki. Export Your HTML After logging into Delicious users can export the bookmarks along with their tags into a single html file. This file can then be added to most browsers by opening the bookmarks tool bar and locating the “import “ feature. On Firefox an import can be achieved by going to Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > click on the icon with the star> import.
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    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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    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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    links for 2010-12-14

  • Ladies and gentlemen, it is the second decade of the third millennium and we are still kicking around the same 2-D interface we got three decades ago. Sure, Apple debuted a few apps for OSX 10.7 that have a couple more 3-D flourishes, and Microsoft has had that Flip 3D for a while. But c’mon – 2011 is right around the corner. That’s Twenty Eleven, folks. Where is our 3-D virtual reality? By now, we should be zipping around the Metaverse on super-sonic motorbikes. Granted, the capability of rendering complex 3-D environments has been present for years. On the web, there are already several solutions: Flash; three.js in <canvas>; and, eventually, WebGL. Finally, we meagre front-end developers have our own three-dimensional jewel: CSS 3-D transforms!
  • For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.
  • Yummygum designed 60 free vector Photoshop icons with care. Perfectly suitable for iPhone & iPad apps or your new web project!
  • Yummygum is back with another iconSweets; a huge FREE icon set containing over a 1,000+ icons, all in a vector-shaped Photoshop format. iconSweets2 will crunch your icon thirst for all of your iPhone, iPad & Android apps or new web projects!
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    Categories
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    links for 2010-12-13

  • Create a simple CSS folded-corner effect without images or extra markup. It works well in all modern browsers and is best suited to designs with simple colour backgrounds.
  • I know you may not like Wikileaks and view what they did as irresponsible and harmful. I want to take the time to give you all a second opinion on the situation. I want to express why I feel the media is horribly misrepresenting this issue. I have heard in news reports the accusations of Wikileaks being a hacker organization or indiscriminately leaking 250,000 diplomatic cables. They have been blatantly lying about leaks themselves, Wikileaks, and Julian Assange. Let's get the facts straight before jumping to conclusions or forming opinions. Wikileaks is a journalist organization who's mission is to help whistleblowers remain anonymous. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, is the site's public figure. Here's a short list of previous publishings that wikileaks has been lauded for: * Systematic killings and disappearances by the Kenyan Government; this leak changed the Kenyan election. * Illegal Cayman Island activities of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer.
  • Your browser of choice may have changed a lot in the past year, but luckily the best extensions for making your browser better have kept up with all the most popular browsers. Here are our cross-platform, must-have favorites. Last time we looked at our favorite browser extensions, we only looked at Firefox. A lot has changed in a year, and now our favorite-extension pool has expanded to several other browsers.
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