From the page: "The Thesis Theme for WordPress is a premium template system designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website." Sounds like a pretty good theme. I'm going to have to look into this more.
UPrinting.com is another online printing service similar to 48 Hour print or OverNight prints. Prices look affordable, and the reviews seem great. I'm getting my sample pack in the mail, so let's see how the quality is.
Better keep an eye on this one – create your own branded, social network, for free? Very interesting. From what I can tell, this could definitely challenge FaceBook.
Great article on adding flash files to your Blogger blog. Please note: You don't need to use Amara Flash Software to create SWF, you can use whatever animation tool you like, as long as it can export a SWF.
From the page: "Want to save time on boring compatibility testing? Litmus will help you get your website designs and email templates to work correctly. Faster." – I need to check this out.
"MFA Graphic Design Thesis project of Dave Harper" – I found David's work to be truly inspiring. Great stuff. You should really check it out and watch it.
Creatives, are you looking for a way to copyright you work? You should take a look at this. From the page: "Myows seeks to not only make the process of verifying works as attractive and efficient as possible, but to add in tools that will help rightsholders deal with cases of infringement, making it a more complete rights-management tool. Jonathan Bailey, PlagiarismToday.com"
From the page: "THE MASTERS OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES IN BRANDING IS A ONE-YEAR GRADUATE DEGREE PROGRAM THAT WILL EXAMINE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DESIGN AND STRATEGY, AND THE POWER OF DESIGN THINKING AS A WAY TO COMBINE CREATIVE SKILLS WITH THE PROBLEM-SOLVING AND DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES OF DESIGN AND BUSINESS."
From the page: "Designing websites can be a long and complicated process. Dealing with clients, designing prototypes, coding, programming, and testing – there’s a lot to keep track of and a lot to make sure gets done. That’s where checklists can make your life a whole lot easier. With lists of points covering multiple areas from content to usability to accessibility to standards, you’re a lot less likely to overlook important parts of a site."
From the page: "Color offers an instantaneous method for conveying meaning and message in your logo designs. It’s probably the most powerful non-verbal form of communication we can use as designers. Our minds are programmed to respond to color."
From the page: "Dan Schawbel has put together a first-rate magazine about personal branding called (of course) Personal Branding Magazine. The latest issue includes an article from yours truly, which I've included below. I also included one of my PowerPoint presentations when I do in-person workshops on personal branding (this article was based on that presentation)."
From the page: "As I searched for a complete resource of online generators, I did not find any. I found multiple different categories of online generator lists such as favicon generators, css generators, badge generators, color generators, and so on. So I decided to create this ultimate list of online generators. Each of these generators are hand picked by myself and categorized so it is easy to browse. I believe each of these are extremely useful and time efficient. I use quite alot of these myself. So check out these posts, and I guarantee that after viewing all of these you will be bookmarking this post."
From the page: "Picking the right domain name for a blog is an essential step to success. Think of a domain name as a brand to your website, and like any other product, a blog will be really hard to rebrand if you decide to choose another name. Some people underestimate the process of picking the domain, and we urge you to take it seriously and make the right choice. With that in mind, pick what you think is the best using the tips and tools we provide in this article."
From the page: "Press releases are not authentic. They’re written in an obsolete sleazy PR lingo, trying to get embellished bullshit past the editorial desk. They’re usually rejected by the Internet crowd. And to us, the web crowd is the one that transports our message."
From the page: "There are lots of questions to be asked when preparing to design a logo. I do NOT suggest you ask a client all of these questions, but hope that this list will help you think of a few useful questions you’ve never considered before."
There are times when you need to move WordPress around within your server, and times when you need to move WordPress from one server to another. You don't need to reinstall. WordPress is flexible enough to handle all of these situations.
From the page: "Many people want WordPress to power their site's root (e.g. http://example.com) but they don't want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. WordPress allows you to install the WordPress files to a subdirectory, but have your blog exist in the site root."
From the page: "Although it can have some issues, PayPal does provide a very simple way to take payments on a website. And with a little tweaking you can easily turn a PayPal "Buy Now" button into a form where the user specifies how much they'd like to pay and what they are paying for. "
I've been digging deeper into PHP lately, trying to learn more and more every day, and this tutorial on NETTUS I thought was great. It taught about some best practices, better ways to do things, and some hidden tricks that I never even knew about. A definite must read for any beginners getting into PHP.
From the page: "Big Cartel is where artists set up shop. We provide clothing designers, bands, jewelry makers, crafters, and other artists with their own customizable store to sell their stuff online." Looks promising if you're a start up or an artist trying to sell your work.
From the page: "Know When to Start your Business – It is important to start your business at the ideal time, because you will need to be able to put 100% of your time and energy into your business when you are just getting if off the ground. Even if you are starting the business on the side, your mind has to be in the right place in order to succeed."
From the page: "In this post, I will discuss how to establish an appropriate price for a website, when you do freelance. So, you have started doing freelance, but cannot decide what to charge? I know the feeling. When I first started doing freelance, deciding the price gave me a great deal of difficulty."
From the page: "We’re almost finished! All we have to do is insert a little more PHP to output two kinds of messages. The first message is to notify us in case there were errors after our submission, and the other is a message to tell us that the email was already sent and no errors were found. The code for that will just sit right inside the contact-wrapper div but right before the form markup."
From the page: "Are you posting links to your company's products on Twitter? Peashoot is a campaign manager made for you! Peashoot tracks your conversions and shows you how to improve your future campaigns to increase sales, signups and more. With Peashoot you'll be able to…"
From the page: "Getting started as a freelancer ain't easy. Fortunately there are several good books and e-books available that help you get your business on its feet."
From the page: "In the design community, there are so many resources at our finger tips to help us express our creativity. Here are of 110 excellent websites, tutorials, and articles, and scripts to help you work with the more popular Adobe products including Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flex, Flash, and After Effects."
From the page: "Displaying related posts is a very great way to help visitors staying longer on your blog. You can use a plugin, but you also can use tags and a custom code to show related posts. Let’s see how to do!"
reate a list with events/appointments/concerts/future happenings and show them on your site.
The plugin features a straightforward user interface in the Wordpress dashboard to add/edit and delete events and set some options. Thanks to Ulisse Events now also ships with a widget for even easier integration in your theme! Additionally, Events allows you to list Events on a seperate page. Here you can list Old (archived) events future events and if you want, today’s events.
From the page: "The aim of this tutorial is to help you to create a simple (tableless) contact form using AJAX, JQuery & PHP. We will have a HTML page which will contain the form, a CSS file, a php page where the data will be sent and another file where the validation function(s) will be located. JQuery is a new and powerful library which simplifies the way that you write JavaScript." – Read more from Bit Repository
From the page: "Today I am going to speak a little bit about a quick and easy way to make a jQuery AJAX Contact Form that employs a honeypot to foil pesky email bots. You can also check out the demo here to get an idea of how the end product will act. You can use the form anywhere you like, but a courtesy link somewhere is appreciated. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Let’s rundown the goals:" – Read more from MidMo Web Design
From the page: "Ajax Forms with jQuery – There are so many different javascript frameworks out there, but I have recently started to use jQuery, and I love it. Not only is the library much smaller than others, but it is so simple to use. I wanted to show how easy it is to turn a regular form into a AJAX form." – Read more from Trevor Davis
Want to see how much your website domain name is worth? Check out here. BTY: I looked up my domain name, davehanas.com, and it's estimated value is $12,459. Nice:)
From the page: "This tutorial will be like an intro to a more detailed and complex series of php articles that in the end will result on the interaction of php and flash in a cms system. Hope you enjoy the tutorial…"
I’ve decided that this series won’t be 100% “by the book”. Though you MUST learn the fundamentals, I think it might be nice to learn some more “fun” things right now. Otherwise, you’ll go mad trying to memorize the if, for, foreach, while, and switch statements.
WP Campaign Monitor – By Dan Milward | April 21, 2008 – The WordPress Campaign Monitor Plugin is an email newsletter / SMS tool built for WordPress. Users can send campaigns, track the results and manage their subscribers.
Sending emails has been modified and now works on WAMP WIMP LAMP WinApache, WinIIS, LinuxApache servers.
Several CSS developers have wished for the use of variables in the past. Come on, let's face it, typing in the color #d8a1d9 several different times isn't exactly saving you time. But what if you could define the variable lightpurple and have something automatically paste the #d8a1d9 value in for you? What if you could have different stylesheets for different browsers automatically load for you? Now you can, and believe it or not, it's not hard at all. PHPMYCSS crosses over server side features to make sure that your CSS is dynamic and setup the way you want.
Everyday we work with CSS and try to workaround its shortcomings. We’ve tried building frameworks, and more frameworks, and even more frameworks. But this ‘framework’ word gets thrown around so much these day you can call just about anything a framework.
Social discovery site, StumbleUpon is not the most hyped or talked-about site in the social medium. Yet, it has reportedly accumulated over 7 million users, making it almost 50% larger than the much-hyped Twitter.
Based on Luke Howell's quote rotator plugin, the flexi quote rotator plugin allows you to add the quotations to your site using a shortcode or php snippet in template instead of only as a widget. Also adds a settings panel to the admin and provides additional flexibility with styling.
We are going to take a look today at the technologies or skills that enjoyed the greatest percentage increase in 2008 by keywords listed in job postings on oDesk. The numbers in the table below show the number of job postings on oDesk in which the skills were listed as “required,” and their relative increase from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008. You will notice some variance in the numbers between the table and the charts below as the numbers on the charts show keyword mentions in the job post titles, not required skills.
From the page: "Kristen Fischer – Recently a client of mine tried to low-ball me. She knew our standard rate for the project in mind, but asked if I would consider going lower–of course, just this once."
From the page: "Return on investment is easy to measure. You put money in, you measure money out, divide and prosper.
But return on design? (Design: graphics, system engineering, user interface etc.)
Design can take money and time and guts, and what do you get in return? It turns out that the sort of return you're getting (and hoping for) will drive the decisions you make about design."
from the page; "WordPress blogs are getting increasingly social, giving readers the ability to bookmark your site to a number of services, get to know you better in more ways than just your comments section (and vice versa), and view your activity on a variety of social sites. We’ve compiled a list of more than 30 plugins that will let you make your WordPress blog more social."
From the page: "Ever since Lincoln announced he is offering readers a chance to guest post on his blog, i was excited. Why? Because i knew Elgg 1.0 was close to being released and being a massive fan of open source social CMS’s, i knew this could be my opportunity to shine! So here i am! For those who don’t know, Elgg originally started as a CMS for creating social networks such as Myspace and Facebook but over the past few years they have grown into much more."
Have you ever wanted to add an external RSS feed to your WordPress blog? This is a great way to promote one of your other blogs (if it is in a similar niche) on a more popular site you run.
Most of you will probably remember that about a month ago we finally got around to launching our WordPress Forums, which has an RSS feed associated with it. In order to cross-promote our forums on this site, I wanted to display our most recent forum posts in the sidebar here at WordPress Hacks.
In order to accomplish this, I grabbed the following code from Jean’s post over at Smashing Magazine:
From the page: A full featured and beautiful CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) framework which combined the best of Blueprint, Tripoli (hence the name), Hartija's print stylesheet, 960.gs's simplicity, and Elements' icons, and has now found a life of its own.
The way to execute PHP on a .html page is to modify your .htaccess file. This file may be hidden, so depending upon your FTP program you may have to modify some settings to see it. Then you just need to add this line for .html: AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
wonderfl is a service where you can write Actionscript3 code in a textarea, and your code will be compiled server side. Your compiled Flash will be reloaded automatically in the right side of the page, so write code and see it real-time.
Bonanzle is a new up and comming eCommerce site that is looking to replace eBAY and it's controversial policies. It has a nice interface, friendly community, and low transaction fees.
Yesterday, we wrote that Citigroup had decided to spend $50 million of its bailout money on a French luxury jet to ferry execs around town. The White House was not pleased about this.
Interesting concept. Practice investing in the real stock market with a $1,000,000 practice portfolio.
Compete with friends and other investors.Test strategies. And then you can earn real money by having performed better than the S&P 500 in the last month and containing at least 1 stock in your portfolio. Let's see if this thing takes off.
This is the swfObject code for embedding the flash in the HTML. There's a couple of download options, such as an Adobe AIR app that helps you generate the needed HTML markup. You can also link to the code from a website, making it easier for updates, and so you don't have to host it.
Matt Wilcox and the fundamental problems with Css3 is an amazing article. For anyone who has ever wished CSS could do more, but wondered why it's not going that way, you need to read.
This Newt Edge site is created not for the faint-hearted browsers, but more specifically to highly standards compliant browsers, such as Gecko-based browsers.
ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.
From the page: "The CytoCare robot is the world’s first and only automated robotic system for the safe preparation of hazardous, patient-specific chemotherapy medications and intravenous admixtures. It is ISO Class 5 certified and uses the same space requirements as a standard chemotherapy hood (7'6" x 6'6" x 3'6")."
Devon Robotics’ CytoCare robot and i.v. STATION are simply amazing. From the Page: “The CytoCare™ robot features state-of-the-art robotics technology that eliminates human handling of chemotherapy and other hazardous drugs during preparation, greatly improves accuracy, and reduces potentially fatal medication errors – and has changed the ways pharmacists and hospitals administer cancer therapies.” Read More
cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!
Most contact forms take a name and feedback from a user and mail it off to the administrator but don't store any information in the database. This tutorial will show how to use CakePHP's models, even when no table is being used.
Explore a world of publications by people and publishers alike. Collect, share and publish in a format designed to make your documents look their very best.
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem. 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith.
We all have them – little coding tricks and snippets of knowledge that we’ve picked up over years of experimentation and evolution of our processes, that are now part of our regular routine and save us time, gnashing of teeth and allow us to work quickly and efficiently. Here’s some of mine – perhaps you know a few of these already – I’d be interested in hearing yours in the comments.
The jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX. The main methods, ajaxForm and ajaxSubmit, gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process. Both of these methods support numerous options which allows you to have full control over how the data is submitted. Submitting a form with AJAX doesn't get any easier than this!
This article is going to review a project called Phalanger. Installing this on your ASP.NET web server allows you to deploy PHP code, even full applications like phpBB. The PHP code will be compiled to .NET code and run as an ASP.NET application.
BlogEngine.NET is an open source .NET blogging project that was born out of desire for a better blog platform. A blog platform with less complexity, easy customization, and one that takes advantage of the latest .NET features.
Presstopia Blog is a standalone, open source weblog application that runs on the ASP.NET platform. The software is 100% free of charge, and licensed under an Apache Open Source License.
I recently finished a web project with David Oberholtzer of Oberholtzer Creative. The portfolio section of the site is flashed based, and really it’s worth a look. We spent a lot of time sharing ideas, working on the animation and movements, and ultimately came up with something special.
The blog portion of the project, Visual Culture, was a learning experience for me as well.
David’s articles on the Visual Culture blog are informative and very much related to the design world. I liked them so much, that if you look at the right column of this page, you’ll see I subscribed to his RSS feed. Definitily worth checking out. Visual Culture
What is SWCMS? Social Web CMS (SWCMS) is a mature, full-featured, and open source social news application written in PHP and utilizing a MySQL backend.
We would like to start with 5 advanced elegant coding solutions and ask you if you are interested in this series and would like to have more similar articles. Please let us know what you think in the comments to this post. Now let’s dive in. You should probably have some CSS-knowledge already before starting reading this article.
I recently finished a website for Ann Chahbandour. She is a very talented sculptor from the Philadelphia area. I worked with Gregory Paone, of paone design associates on the project. Greg runs his own design firm in downtown Philadelphia, and he is an amazing designer / thinker / multitasking person. I was called upon to bring his vision for the site to life by using my programming & motion design skills. It was a great collaboration of two artists, and the end result was something of beauty, refinement, and clarity. It showcases Ann’s work perfectly. See for your self…
Noah Scalin over at ALR Design is looking for submissions for The Design Activist’s Handbook a book that he is working on with writer Michelle Taute and is being published by HOW Books next year. Here’s what their looking for: Artwork and interviews: Socially conscious design projects, both self-initiated and client projects, with good stories to [...] […]
Inneract Project, is an educational program conceptualized by prominent Bay Area graphic designer Maurice Woods. Its mission is to expose under-served youth to careers in design by providing free classes and mentorship. The idea came to fruition when Woods was a graduate student at the University of Washington and has found success in the Bay [...] […]
Follow the games in style with David Watson’s double-sided poster set in Gotham. The piece was developed for Soccer Aid, a British charity that raises money for UNICEF. No doubt we will be following the U.S./England match come this Saturday. Front of Poster Back of Poster About the poster: A doubled sided A1+ typographic World Cup poster designed for [...] […]
Visual Culture