Archive for January, 2008

Don’t have Photoshop, but don’t want to pay $650 for the latest version? Luckily you have some alternatives.

• Amazon currently has several copies of Photoshop CS2 (the previous version) for around $300.
• Here’s a little secret: You can buy a very old copy of Photoshop on eBay (like Photoshop 7) for under $100. Once it arrives, you have a serial number…which you can use with the $250 Photoshop CS3 upgrade disc. So you buy an ancient copy of Photoshop, and upgrade. I did the same thing with Flash. I upgraded to Flash 8 after buying Flash 3. Unfortunately Adobe released Flash CS3 two months after…

Just thought I’d point this out.

Tired of the bloated Coppermine Photo Gallery? The much lighter Zenphoto gallery script may be a good alternative.

The compressed download is under one megabyte, and the installation looks fairly simple. Just upload via FTP, and run the installation script.

The installed gallery is responsive and clean. Don’t take my word for it, though. Look at the demo gallery.

The script is fairly new, and is still evolving. Some features, like RSS support, have just been added.

If you need a gallery (for a design portfolio, to show off your photos, etc), then be sure to check-out Zenphoto.

• The Great Website Design Gallery Roundup - A huge list of design galleries, complete with information like whether or not RSS feeds are available, how annoying the ads are, etc.
• 30+ FREE Desktop Applications for Bloggers - desktop blogging clients, screen capture tools, image editors, FTP clients, and more.
• Have you heard of Live Blogging? It’s where you cover an event live on your blog. You just keep posting short updates with the time attached. With the free (thus far) Cover It Live, it gets even better. They’re definitely, as their tagline reads, “Live Blogging 2.0.” Watch their video demo, and you’ll see what I mean.
• 27 Creative Business Cards You Should’ve Seen
• 10 Simple Productivity Tips for Bloggers - In addition to “Check email less,” I’d like to add Check your feeds less. Email doesn’t take much time to read, but if you keep checking your feeds, you’ll quickly start wondering whee all your time went.
• Bloggers Face-Off: David Peralty vs. John Cow
• XKCD has taken an interesting approach to moderating their IRC channel. From now on, every message must be unique. When someone posts a message in the chatroom, it is logged and will not be accepted again.
• GreenTech WordPress Theme Released
• 10 steps to a more splog-free WordPress blog - A useful read. Spam-blogs are becoming more and more prevalent, and they’re a real pain to deal with.
• DreamHost yet again earns the right to their nickname “NightmareHost.” They’ve just billed their customers a total of $7,500,000. Some customers were individually billed as much as $9,000. Do you really want to trust your website (and credit card number for that matter) to these guys?
• Have you heard about the iPhone’s latest feature? It’s called “webclip.” You can “clip” a website, and put it on the iPhone’s main screen as an icon. The iPhone can even remember the exact place where you were scrolled/zoomed. Web Apps have just started to make more sense. This guide shows how to customize the icon that will appear on the main screen.
• 31 Days to Becoming a Better Blogger
• “How to Make Your Blog Posts Stand Out From the Rest - Lessons from the MacBook Air”
• 101 CSS Techniques Of All Time Part 1 - CSS Sprites, rounded corners, image replacement, sliding doors, drop shadows, transparency, etc. A nice, long resource post.
• How to Create Social Media’s Favorite Type of Blog Post - Step 1, pick a large number. Step 2, think of a topic. Step 3, think-up a headline with the number and the topic in it. Step 4, write the post. Easy.

The biggest Social Bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. I use the term a little loosely, as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are generally referred to as “Social Media” sites, as they’re less about storing things for later reference, but about finding things. If I’m collectively talking about the four sites, though, I use the term Social Bookmarking. After all, you still are bookmarking with the sites, even if that’s not the main focus.

The Social Bookmarking sites are all a bit different, and they all have their own uses.

Digg/Reddit: Digg and Reddit are mainly for finding “news” (which is a broad term on the two sites). Using the sites, you can find things that a large group of people think are interesting/useful/relevant/etc. Looking for the hottest tech news? Head to Digg.

StumbleUpon: SU is channel-surfing for the web. Just click the “Stumble” button on the SU toolbar and you’re taken to a semi-random page in your selection of interests. Do you like the page? Click the “Thumbs-Up” button. Your vote affects how often the page will come-up when other people click their Stumble buttons. It’s fun, and addictive.

Del.icio.us: Wouldn’t it be great if you could access your bookmarks from any computer? Wouldn’t it be useful to see what other users (people you know, people with similar interests) have bookmarked? That’s the idea behind Del.icio.us. You import your bookmarks from your browser (most major ones supported), and then you start bookmarking things with the Del.icio.us instead of your “normal” bookmarks system. If you don’t get why you’d want this, watch this short video.

All of the aforementioned sites are useful, and you should check them out if you haven’t already. In the blogging world, they are useful for finding things to write about, and for promoting things you wrote. Don’t blog in a vacuum.

I’ve been looking-through design galleries again…

Today’s design roundup, 21 High-Impact Designs, will cover highly visual designs that really grab your attention as soon as they load. As usual, they’re the kind of really cool designs that you can just sit and look at for 15 minutes.

Okay, are you ready for the designs?

Put on your 3D-glasses and let’s continue.

(more…)

Do you know what parts of your web browser’s chrome get the most attention (among “average users” anyway)? The are

• The “Back” button
• The scrollbar
• The tab bar

Traditionally, people have argued that you should put important elements (e.g. navigation) near the scrollbar or the Back button, as they were previously the most-used parts of the browser.

Nowadays, the scrollbar isn’t as big of a focus point, as scroll-wheel mice are fairly common. I have one, and I can’t stand using a “plain” mouse anymore.

The Back button is still used a lot, but, personally, I don’t use it anywhere as much as I used to. Since switching to Firefox a few years ago, I’ve used tabs to avoid using the back button as much as possible. If I need to keep going back and forth between a page of links and the linked pages, I just open the links in new tabs.

What does all this mean? Observe the diagram below. (more…)

Polls are a great way to solicit opinions, and add some community to your site.

With a poll, a user can just click a button to give you their two cents. Meanwhile, it takes a lot more effort to leave a comment. Which do you think your readers prefer? While comments allow them to say anything they want, polls enable a quick multiple-choice response (which can be very useful). Also, I’ve found that blog posts with attached polls tend to generate more comments.

Once you decide you need a poll, you need to actually add one. You have plenty of choices for implementing your poll. Here are a few of the better services/scripts: (more…)

I used to use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. It was a great way to read RSS feeds, or it was until my feed collection got too big. Now I use MyNT, which works in a similar manner. When you read feeds in MyNT, you middle-click items to open the post in a new tab (like using Live Bookmarks). That’s how I read my RSS feeds.

There are masses of RSS-users who like to read entire blog posts in their reader, though some like summaries better.

So… What group are you in? Are you a full-feed-fanatic, a Live Bookmarks/MyNT maniac, or do you prefer summaries?

Have you ever tried to put a snippet of HTML/PHP/etc in a tutorial you were writing? The best way is not entirely obvious.

Many will recommend using a plugin for the simple act of displaying code snippets. I recommend, instead, doing it manually.  Here’s what you need to do:

Note: I assume you are using the WYSIWYG “visual editor”. If you’re using the other one, the steps will be similar, but there may be be some differences. If you’re not using the visual editor, then chances are you already know how do this.

1. Open your preferred text editor.
2. Write your code snippet in it.
3. Use the Replace tool to change every instance of ” to ". Do the same with angle brackets, and any other symbols that need to be replaced with character entities. Technically, you can just paste everything into the Wordpress WYSIWYG editor (and it will convert everything), but you will still need to replace the quote marks with "s.
4. Copy and paste the code into the Wordpress editor.
5. Switch to the “Code” tab, and put some <code> tags around your pasted snippet.

That’s it. Do you really need a plugin for that?

• Geek Trends: 15 Footers with great usability
• Survey of ProBlogger readers: Who Designed Your Blog? [POLL RESULTS]
• 10 Best Plugins To Get More Comments - Another great post from ProBlogDesign.com. Encourage commenting, and improve the commenting experience by using these Wordpress plugins.
• Uninstall - Is There Such A Thing?
• Separate Trackbacks from Comments on Your WordPress Blog
• 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part8)
• How to use WordPress to build a website with user-generated content
• How I Redesigned My Blog [by Ben Yoskovitz]
• Let the Smashing begin! 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes from the one and only Smashing Magazine. It’s been awhile since their last WP Theme post, but this one could be the best one yet.
• A German car rental company has found an interesting way to increase their AdWords click-rate by 47%. They’re using ASCII Art in their ads.
• Speaking of AdWords… Google has decided to make some changes to their AdSense Referrals system. In addition to several not-so-great changes, they no longer care about 7/8 of the world! If you don’t live in North America, Japan, or Latin America, you will no longer be able to put referrals on your site. ProBlogger Darren Rowse has authored a post berating them for their stupidity.
• You’ve heard of the registrar Network Solutions, right? They used to be the only place you could get a .com domain (for $80/year…). Well, they’re still in business as a registrar, though it seems they’ve been up to some GoDaddy-esque tactics. If you use NetworkSolutions.com to search to see if a domain is available, their system will log it. If you don’t register the domain withing a certain amount of time (less than an hour), they will. There’s been plenty of buzz about this. It seems that Network Solutions is run by mindless monkeys, who are defending their actions as security measures to prevent “domain frontrunning.” Reddit users have decided to have fun, and are searching for as many available domains as they can, a lot of which are insulting NetSol. I admit to searching a few myself. http://NetworkSolutions-Is-The-Worst-Registrar-On-The-Interweb.com, anyone?
• My first post over at BloggingTips.com has gone live. 6 Plugins No WordPress Blog Should Be Without. I will write some posts over there occasionally. You can follow my posts here.