Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information. Show all posts

March 24, 2009

Daily Design Inspiration for Web Designers

The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers who are seeking various design inspiration every day. To make every designer’s life easier, they have decided to feature some of the best logo designs, illustration art, websites, photos and patterns from the most talented designers around the world. The site updates every day, so that you can get the fresh and top quality design inspiration daily.

The Design Inspiration

Source: http://thedesigninspiration.com/

11 Tips for Speeding Up WP Theme Development

Speeding up the time it takes you to develop new Wordpress themes can become a very critical habit that will help you as you continue on in this business. When most freelancers start out, they usually are sure to take on one client at a time.

As you get more comfortable and know your limits, you may become a little daring and take on two, maybe three clients at the same time. If you respect yourself enough to deliver quality work in a timely fashion to these clients that put their faith into you, you better hope you have sharp time-management skills.

The production of a well-developed Wordpress theme can take 20-25 hours. 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development will help you speed up the production of your theme projects. Try to implement these next time you work on a theme and notice the increase in motivation and how much time you’ll save.

time-management.jpg

Source: 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development

March 23, 2009

Migrate Your Feeds From Feedburner to Google’s Servers

Have you migrate your feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers yet? We have just completed the migration one week ago, and It looks like my feeds are working normally. All of us should perform the migration as soon as possible because Google has announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404.

Feed Compare and Feed Analysis has released new versions that support migrated Google Feeds recently. You can analysis the growth of your own feed and compare it with your competitors. However, if you have not completed the migration yet, they are not working for you. So, what are you waiting for?

Analysis Google Feeds

Source: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com/

20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

Chris Brogan has a mindset for framing posts that is useful to blogger. He wrote 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck. You might not like all 20 ideas. The goal might be to look at what he has written for ideas and come up with your own list. In fact, it might even spur you to write 20 blog topics for your industry or community. The followings are the 5 out of 20 questions you might answer.

  1. What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?
  2. What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
  3. What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?
  4. Who do I admire? Can I write something about them that explains how to emulate those traits?
  5. What has the potential of helping (hurting) me or my community in the coming months? Are there possible ways out of it?
  6. ……

Source: 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

March 22, 2009

How to Create Custom Write Panels in WordPress

Everyone knows that WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, popular blogging systems on the internet today. With its out of the box features, plugins, and great theming community, its no wonder WordPress has been accepted as today’s standard. However, sometimes you just want to add a little more.

It seems the latest fad to hit the WordPress scene is adding thumbnails into a blog post. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress, or blogging. Function taught us how to create custom write panels with add_meta_box.

WordPress Custom Write Panels

Source: Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Vladimir Prelovac has published “WordPress Optimization Guide” which is is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site. If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you. The followings are the main points of the article.

1. Check the Connection
2. Check your (Vista) System
3. Check the Plugins
4. Check your Theme
5. Optimize Database Tables
6. Turn off Post Revisions
7. Implement Caching (WordPress Cache, MySQL Optimization, PHP Opcode Cache)
8. “MySQL server has gone away” workaround
9. Fixing posting not possible problem
10. Other reasons for slow posting

Source: WordPress Optimization Guide

100+ Basic to Advanced WordPress Video Tutorials

100+ Basic to Advanced WordPress Video Tutorials. All of these tutorials range from basic learning for the beginner, to advanced for the expert who wants to learn new techniques. Basically everyone can take something from these tuts.

wordpress-video-tutorials.png

Source: 100+ Wordpress Video Tutorials, from Basic to Advanced

10 of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers

Mashable has presented their best discoveries of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers. Most bloggers today are familiar only with services designed for use with their choice of web browser. If you edit a WordPress.com account or WordPress.org installation, chances are you login and publish your material through the cloudware provided.

The same goes for Blogger and TypePad users, and as well as options like MySpace and Vox. But if you’ve grown tired of those standard frontends, and would prefer to utilize software to blog for work or for personal enjoyment, there are alternatives that you should know about. For Mac users in particular, there are several that prove as useful, powerful, and visually worthwhile as any comparative webware.

mac-apps-blogger.png

Source: 10 of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers

10 RSS Tricks and Hacks for WordPress

RSS is one of those technologies that are extremely simple yet extremely powerful. Currently, RSS is the de facto standard for blog syndication, and it is used widely in both personal and corporate settings. Let’s take a look at 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress.

Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing. Thus, you can make sure your WordPress theme remains under your control and is not bloated with some obscure source code.

Wordpress RSS Tricks

Source: 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

The Best And Fastest Way To Create Blog Post

Graveris • March 22, 2009

title-blog-postI’ve tested many different ways and weblog clients to create blog posts more effectively, but know I seem to find the best way and I wanted to share it with You. Maybe technique will seem very simple to experienced bloggers, but at least for me it was something I wasn’t aware at start and found out just by testing.

At first I would suggest to use any desktop editing program, because coding article by hand in my opinion takes too much effort, which is not worth it really. I have been using Windows Live Writer for some time, where I like to get automatic SpellCheker, but now I am sticking to another free weblog client BlogDesk. In my opinion these are the best choices if You’re using Windows ( I don’t know how about Mac).

At first I also enjoyed that images are dynamically uploaded to server, while I didn’t reach some problems:

1. While images are uploading on server dynamically, it takes a lot of CPU and memory and if You’re getting some errors, like images accidentally change address (happened to me twice, though I don’t know real reason, but I got my lesson), You may also get server overload.

2. I am using WordPress, I don’t know what difference may it cause, but when uploading images, Blogdesk and also Windows Live Writer are creating unnecessary images, cropped in different sizes, even if I am using only original size.

So these were my problems. I am using a lot of images in my list articles, so it was pretty important. So I found solution, which maybe will be useful for You too. I am writing all of my articles on BlogDesk, also I add images to get better overview how everything will look like. When I am done, I go to source/code view ( View–>Source on Blogdesk), then select all code and copy it. Ctrl+a, ctrl+c. Yes, yes, I want to use Find and Replace feature. It’s built in on Notepad and several other text editors, but notepad owns every Windows user. I paste all code on Notepad and leave it there for now. I think for MAC users it should be similarly, You just need that built-in replace feature.

All pictures are kept in one folder at first, I always create new folder for each article and build little backup files for emergencies. So now open Your FTP client, go to place where You want to upload Your images, better create new folder for each article and do Your thing. If You are using WordPress, I would suggest to use path –> public_html(Your domain address)/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Your-article-title-folder/.. and drop images here. It’s handy to separate Your files smart, so You can later easily manage them.

Ok, now let’s return to source code and use handy find/replace feature (I used my site and image path I had).

Idea is to find default image path and replace it with Your online version, so You upload only images You need and manually so Your server don’t get too busy too.

Make sure also Your cursor is active at the start of the post, so You don’t miss any image.

cursor

Just copy/paste Your current path and replace it with Your online version and hit “Replace all” button - easy and safe.

replace

Now just paste whole code in new post HTML view and publish article, it’s simple as that.

One more suggestion. I know there are no easy way to convert simple text to headings in weblog clients. At least I have huge list articles and if I use headings, it is a lot more friendlier for SEO than just simple text in bold.

strong

I just put all text I want to convert to headings in tags, simply and then use the same find/replace feature.

First time I replace to

for example, second time I replace with

I am really hoping this helped, though I am not too good giving tips than creating just list articles :) Let me know if this helped for You and if You have some questions please ask. Also if You know some more advanced way how to do this job, feel free to share.

WP 2.7 Theme & Admin Area Tips and Tricks

We have just published a post about the release of WordPress 2.7 few days ago. Significant features and redesigns was added to WordPress 2.7 to make blogging on the new Dashboard Panel more valuable than ever.

You may find your Themes no longer work the way you are used to. It could be that they might be broken, because something in WordPress that was fundamental to them changed, but it’s also possible that you can get them working again by updating some settings, or maybe just a small edit.

Noupe has published a post of “Mastering Your WordPress 2.7 Theme & Admin Area: Tips and Tricks“. The post will highlight WordPress 2.7 HOW-TO get your theme working again by updating some settings and represent some of the best and significant features added to your Administration Panel.

wordpress-comments.png

Source: Mastering Your WordPress 2.7 Theme & Admin Area: Tips and Tricks

Useful SQL Hacks for WordPress

Over the past 10 years, the MySQL database has become incredibly popular on the Web. Every WordPress blog is driven by a MySQL database, which contains the blog’s posts, settings, comments and much more.

While plug-ins and even coding hacks can solve some problems and achieve some tasks, sometimes you don’t have any other choice than to execute SQL commands in phpMyAdmin or directly to the database via SSH. Let’s take a look at 8 useful SQL hacks for WordPress. Each section of this post presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides an explanation to help you understand the solution.

wordpress-backup.jpg

Source: 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks

How to Style Nested Comments in WP 2.7

You have the ability to have threaded (nested) comments up to 10 levels deep in Wordpress 2.7. While viewing comments on this - or any Wordpress 2.7-powered - site, you’ll notice a Reply button (assuming nested discussions are enabled). Clicking that will enable you to reply directly to that comment, keeping discussions in context.

This is probably not all inclusive, but here is the basic structure for ol.commentlist as it exists in the Default theme’s comments.php. To take advantage of the new discussion features, Chris Harrison copied this file over to his theme. (You’re more than welcome to roll your own.) For many of the elements, more than one class is used with it. Where applicable, he has chosen the most descriptive class (e.g. li.comment instead of li.alt) as the parent for child formatting.

nested-comments-wordpress.png

Source: Stylizing Threaded/Nested Comments in Wordpress 2.7

How to Write a Chrome Extension Easily

Are you interested in developing some plugins for Chrome too? We have seen lots of browser plugins for Firefox at the moment, it would be nice if we can see some nice plugins for Chrome as well.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has published an article about “How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps“. Here is a brief introduction of how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps:

1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome
It takes maybe 3-4 minutes, you basically run a small program to indicate your preference. The developer version also gets new features (such as pressing “F11″ to get full-screen mode) way before the beta/stable releases of Chrome.

2. Read the initial documentation
Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. Your plugin has to have a unique identifier. And you have to bundle your extension directory into a “.crx” Chrome Extension file.

3. Try it out
If you’re running the developer version of Chrome, you can install the “hello world” plugin from the extension howto page just by clicking to download the .crx file. Then type “chrome-ui://extensions/” .

Google Chrome Plugin

Source: How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps

March 20, 2009

WP WebHost - A Web Hosting for WordPress Users

wordpress hosting

WP WebHost is a web hosting for WordPress Users. They tailor made the servers and configuration for WordPress. Now you can get the best compatibility and maximum performance for every of your WordPress-powered site hosted with them. WP WebHost differs from other hosting companies by providing WordPress-related issues support. They will help you on any WordPress installation, configuration, plugins and themes issue.

You can install new WordPress on your site with just a click of your mouse through their Control Panel. They also invest heavily in ensuring our servers are not overloaded, have the fastest network connections, and guarantee 99.9% of network uptime. If you are not, within 100 days from when your initial order was placed, you’ll get your money back.

WP WebHost seemed new and too good to be true. Are you sure are not one of those ‘overnight hosting companies’? They can assure you - they are not. WP WebHost started in 2007 and backed by a reputable international hosting company - Exabytes Network. They are an award-winning hosting company, having been in the industry for more than 7 years with more than 20,000 satisfied customer.

With only $5/month, you can get 50GBs of web space, 500GBs of monthly bandwidth and host up to 50 domain names. Would you like to give it a try?

Source: Sign Up Now

20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

Chris Brogan has a mindset for framing posts that is useful to blogger. He wrote 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck. You might not like all 20 ideas. The goal might be to look at what he has written for ideas and come up with your own list. In fact, it might even spur you to write 20 blog topics for your industry or community. The followings are the 5 out of 20 questions you might answer.

  1. What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?
  2. What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
  3. What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?
  4. Who do I admire? Can I write something about them that explains how to emulate those traits?
  5. What has the potential of helping (hurting) me or my community in the coming months? Are there possible ways out of it?
  6. ……

Source: 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

Easy Cross-Browser Testing with SuperPreview

Every web developer today faces the challenge of checking website compatibility across a large pool of browsers and browser versions in the marketplace. Up and until now, either you could install every browser, verify the website via a visual inspection and debug with tools specialized to that browser, or you could send a URL to a third-party screenshotting service like BrowserShots for an all-in-one visual inspection.

The former is messy and tedious but gives you more control and an opportunity to diagnose problems, whilst the latter is simple but slow and useless to fix the problem. Long Zheng has shown us SuperPreview is the best of both worlds.

SuperPreview as a tool allows you to compare different rendering engines in a single unified interface. Simple clicks gives you comparisons between Internet Explorer 6, the native version of Internet Explorer installed, other browsers you may have installed locally - Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, Safari 4 - and even an bitmap images of website prototypes.

Expression Web Super Preview

Source: Expression Web SuperPreview

March 13, 2009

Blogging About Freelancing and WordPress

adii.png

Adii (pronounced “ay-dee”) is a freelancer designer, Wordpress rockstar, blogger and Web 2.0 strategist. He is from sunny Cape Town, South Africa. He has been freelancing, since February 2007 and it’s not because he has a phobia for commitment - it’s been a way of paying the bills.

He specializes in designing pretty websites, with strategic aims and he is a whole lot more comfortable designing blogs. He uses Wordpress for 90% of my personal and client projects, although he has recently ventured into doing just designing and CSS / XHTML work on request.

He is getting really popular recently because of his excellent wordpress blogs design skill. He has released some of the most beautiful magazine style wordpress themes that you are willing to pay for it. Adii.co.za is a showcase for his design work, as well as serving as a outlet for his ideas and experiences related to Web 2.0, Designing, Wordpress and Business Strategy. You will benefit a lot from visiting his blog.

Source: http://www.adii.co.za/

March 12, 2009

Multi Author Blogging Guides

bloggingtips.png

BloggingTips.com is a multi author blog which is dedicated to helping bloggers create, maintain and improve their blogs. Their experienced writers also give tips on coding and design, increasing traffic to your blog and explain how you can make money for all your hard work.

BloggingTips has been online since March 2007. The blog has been targeted to one group since it’s inception - Bloggers! They try our best to post articles and news that interest both new and experienced bloggers with topcs ranging from promoting your blog to design and coding as well as industry news and views. The majority of posts in the first few months were written by the site founder Kevin Muldoon but the blog has since evolved into a multi author blog.

BloggingTips has been doing really well and now has more than 1000 subscribers. They publish 1 - 3 posts everyday, most of the posts are very useful and inspiring. Add this blog to your daily reading is a good move.

Source: http://www.bloggingtips.com/

WordPress WebDev Playground

wpdesigner.png

WPDesigner is the personal WordPress and web development playground of Small Potato (main blog author). A pre-dystopia for fellow design-loving small potatoes to evade the gravitational pull of hot oil, WPDesigner has been a home for free WordPress themes since May 2006.

Beside boasting his arrogantly promoted collection of humble WordPress themes, via Jedi Mind Tricks, Small Potato (SP) occasionally materializes intangible step-by-step and layman-termed WordPress tutorials out of thin air.

Currently, the potato head is busy slaving away at launching a web hosting service for high traffic WordPress-powered blogs.

Source: http://wpdesigner.com/