Social Marker brings all of your link submissions together. What great potential this website has. This site could save a lot of time for people who like to participate in both the social networking and social bookmarking aspect of web 2.0. Social Marker allows you to submit your post or link to any or all of the 47 websites they have integrated with. The interface is very easy to use. I have listed below some of the features that Social Marker boasts.
- Free Service - What a great price! You can submit your links through this tool absolutely free.
- Browser Compatibilities - Although they recommend using firefox, the service is compatible with all major web browsers.
- Bookmarklet - They have designed a simple bookmarklet that you can drag and drop into your bookmarks' toolbar. The bookmarklet automatically fills in the URL and the title of the page. All you have to do is select the text you want used as the description. Once you have highlighted some text, just click the bookmarklet and it loads the Social Marker web page with the submission forms pre-filled.
- 47 Site Submissions - The service is compatible with 47 of the biggest social bookmarking services available like Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us to name a few.
- WordPress Plugin - They have developed a wordpress plugin that enables you to add their service links to your posts to help spread the word about your posts directly from your blog.
- Javascript Button - For those of you who don't use wordpress, you can use their pure javascript version of the wordpress plugin that enables you to post the link on any page on any site with just a couple lines of javascript.
- Easy Interface - Their interface for submitting your link to all the different sites is very easy and intuitive. They have designed a form that automatically fills in most of the fields and harnesses drag & drop capabilities for the rest.
This website is definitely worth watching. There is a lot of potential for it. They are also looking for developers to help them continue in the development of the service. You can visit the website at www.socialmarker.com for more details.
Caveat: You have to have an account for each website you are attempting to submit to.
Here is a list of the best Web 2.0 Photoshop tutorials, for those of us who aren't natural geniuses with Photoshop. We've all looked at the beautiful buttons, badges, logo design, and other images that the Web 2.0 style has given us, and it's all about the glass/gloss-look in Web 2.0. A lot of the following tutorials cover the techniques that create the glass/gloss-look. I hope you enjoy!
- Web 2.0 Buttons
- IRIS Design
- TechTut
- Free Your Design
- Photoshop Support
- As Button Generator (Free Service, Not A Tutorial)
- Web 2.0 Badges
- Ajax Lessons
- Free Photoshop Guides
- Photoshop Candy
- Photoshop Lovr
- Web 2.0 Badge Generator (Free Service, Not A Tutorial)
- Web 2.0 Logos
- Design Phase
- FX Designing
- Linkrain
- Alleba Blog (Video)
- Web 2.0 Logo Creator (Free Service, Not A Tutorial)
- Web 2.0 General
What are the best tutorials you've used to get the image/graphic you wanted? Comment below and let us know.
LightWindow is a JavaScript framework based on Prototype and Scriptaculous. If you aren't familiar with these two amazing resources, it is definitely worth your time to become familiar with them. They are two of the most useful resources available for Web 2.0 developing. LightWindow takes the combination of those two frameworks and adds some really cool things to it. The reason I decided to use LightWindow the first time was to embed media easily into my website. I needed to show some videos and wanted a better way to do it than just embedding it into the page (I hadn't designed a good spot on the page for a video). LightWindow was not only able to meet the needs of the video I wanted to show, it ended up meeting needs I didn't even have at the time. Here is a listing of all the great features that LightWindow boasts.
- Media - You are able to load various types of media, including YouTube videos, Flash videos (SWF), QuickTime videos, and Flash Paper PDFs. There is support for all and every media type; that's pretty hard to beat.
- External Websites - You are able to load an external source as well as an internal source. This creates a type of pop-up window, but it is much cooler!
- Images - You are able to load images from internal or external sources. You can also load image galleries for viewing multiple images in a nicely laid-out design.
- Forms - You are able to load and use forms within the LightWindow. Full functionality is provided with easy to follow instructions for setup.
- Pages - You are able to load various page types, including fluid, fixed, and specific dimensions.
- Inline Content - You are also able to load basic content from a container. (The author calls this one a "gimme.")
- Themes - You can create your own theme for colors, styles, and animations. This is not easy to accomplish however. The author has not released any tutorials or help files for this, but says that it is possible.
- On the Fly - You can create and instantiate a window on the fly without needing to create it first when the page loads.
- Parameters - You can use various parameters to customize your window. Some examples are title, author, and caption.
This is one of the easiest frameworks to learn and to use. At the cost of free, I don't think there is a better choice out there that boasts all the features, ease of use, and quality of LightWindow.
You can visit the LightWindow website and download your copy of the framework (v2.0). If you like what Kevin has done, be sure to donate and show your appreciation!
I ran across a new website, W3Counter, that offers free tracking of your website stats. It has the look and feel of Google Analytics. I was registered, set up, and ready to add the tracking code in only a few minutes. This site has some definite potential.
The Good:
- Real Time Stats - The website offers you free real time tracking of your website. You can have up-to-the-second information about what is happening on your website.
- Attractive Interface - The website offers a nice and easy to follow? interface to allow you to easily find and view your data. It is easily navigated and easy to follow the flow of drill-down information.
- Attractive Information - The website offers nicely designed graphs, charts, and reports to help you turn data into useful information. It is easy to know what your are looking at and understand what is being presented. There is not much of a learning curve.
- Online Now - The website offers a nice feature that shows you who is currently visiting your website.
- Live Map - The website offers a live map to show where the people that are viewing your site are located at the moment they are viewing your site (Paid version). The visitor locations are mapped on a Google Map.
- WordPress Plugin - The website offers a free plugin for WordPress integration. The plugin adds an overview to the dashboard and lets you get an idea of where you stand at any given time. This works very well and is easy to install and set up.
The Bad:
- No Free Lunch - The saying "there is no such thing as a free lunch" applies here. Although the website offers free tracking, there is a cap of 5,000 page views per day before needing to upgrade to a pro account for $9.95/month. 5,000 page views per day is a small number. This would be alright for websites starting out, but wouldn't last very long once a reputation is established and quality content is driving traffic.
- Visual Presence - The free version requires a visual counter or link on your page and will show up wherever you place the tracking code. Again this can be removed for $9.95/month.
- Website Limit - The free version only allows you to track 1 website per account. Again, this is probably alright for some, but not feasible for many webmasters that maintain multiple websites.
- No Exports - There is no way to export the data as a PDF, CSV, XML, or any file for that matter. The paid version offers an RSS feed, as well as email updates regarding your stats.
I have used many shared hosting providers throughout my years as a webmaster. Shared hosts have many great points, namely, price, and then they have their major drawbacks. For me, one of the major drawbacks is the limited use of the machine on which your site is hosted.
For instance, I love phpMyAdmin for maintaining and managing my databases, but I am not a fan of the need to log in to backup the databases. The easiest way around that of course would be to execute the mysqldump command that comes bundled with MySQL. Unfortunately, most shared hosts, all that I have dealt with, disable the ability to use exec() or system() with PHP to execute the MySQL native command. If these were available, creating a cron job on a simple PHP file that ran mysqldump would have worked perfectly. However, this wasn't the case. After looking around for a long time at a possible way around this, I came up empty handed. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or looked in all the wrong places, but I was left with nothing. I needed to back up my databases at regular intervals and found it frustrating to log into phpMyAdmin to do this each time. So I did what I should have done to begin with... wrote my own back-up tool.
It is pretty simple and self-explanatory. I did not create it as a function to be called, although you are more than welcome to do so. The main advantage to calling it, I think, would be to pass variables. For my needs, I simply set it up in the directory. I wanted it to run and back up whichever database needed to be. The script simply backs up the database specified in an sql file located in the same directory as the script itself. The file is named in this format, "DB_Backup_YourDatabase_YYYY-MM-DD.sql"; this could be easily modified to save anywhere you have permissions to save. The code is completely free and you can do what you would like with it. If you are feeling generous, throw a shout out my way or maybe even donate, but neither is not required.
This script was written and used on a server running PHP Version 4.4.2 and MySQL Version 4.1.22.
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 Beta. This release is meant mostly for developers and designers, so that they can test the new browser. "Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page. Internet Explorer 8 introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or a user discovering a new online service" (Microsoft.com). Here are some new features and improvements worth noting.
- WebSlices - WebSlices are similar to live bookmarks in FireFox. They provide a way to get updated content without visiting the website a bunch of times a day. Unlike the RSS text version of FireFox's live bookmarks, IE8's WebSlices allow for parts of a web page to be updated (It looks like a website, not like an RSS feed). There are WebSlices available from eBay and StumbleUpon already.
- Activities - Activities enable you to access other services from within a webpage, such as submitting to Digg, looking up information, or mapping an address. The Activities icon? is loaded in a context menu similar to a right click menu in windows.
- Layout Engine - IE8 has a new layout engine with many improvements for how a page is loaded and rendered. As always, this upgrade can cause problems with websites that were developed for IE7. Microsoft took this into account, however, and allows for a webpage to tell IE8 to render the page as IE7.
- CSS 2.1 Compliant - IE8 will eventually be fully CSS 2.1 compliant. They are continuing to work with developers and designers to work out bugs in the Beta, but will have it fixed in the final release.
- Improvements - IE8 has had an overhaul and now has improvements in HTML rendering, namespace support, and platform performance. These improvements will help IE8 run better as a whole.
- Developer Tools - IE8 now has developer tools built into the application. They provide most of the functionality of the web developer FireFox extension.
- Improved Security - IE8 has also been given more security features to protect you as you browse. There are 3 main exploits that are protected against in IE8: they are social engineering, web server, and browser-based exploits.
You can download you copy of IE8 here. Please comment below and let us know what you think of the IE8 Beta.
Who doesn't like a helpful cheat sheet to have around? They save so much time and really help you learn what you are working with in an easy to understand format. I have gathered a list of the cheat sheets I have found to be the most helpful. There are cheat sheets from PHP to CSS to RegEx, and I have listed over 40 different cheat sheets to help!
- Programming
- Other
For even more resources check out this blog post on the Virtual Hosting Blog.
Update
Hey everyone. DZone also has some great cheat sheets. They have one of the best layouts available. They have topics ranging from ajax to Eclipse. You can check them out here.
What cheat sheets did I miss? Leave any missing cheat sheets you found helpful in the comments.
For those of you that are new to podcasting, you should really jump on the bandwagon. Podcasting is a great way to keep people engaged and involved. Podcasting is just one of the many amazing resources available to companies, personal sites, and churches alike. Many churches (TRBC & Mars Hill) are now putting their sermons online for members and others to listen to.
- What is a podcast?
- A podcast is basically taking a recording of some sort and posting it online. Once the recording is ready to be posted online, you put the information in a specific format (you can get the specs here from Apple). This Apple format is then able to be submitted to the iTunes directory and displayed through iTunes. iTunes users can then subscribe to updates and listen to your recordings directly through iTunes. How cool is that?!
- Why use a podcast?
- Why wouldn't you want to reach millions of people? I mean really... what better way to reach millions of people than through an incredible tool given to us by Apple. The hard work has already been done. Reaching a million people is not an easy task, but we have the opportunity to utilize the popularity and credentials that iTunes has already established. Why not allow people to use one of their favorite applications for your content as well?
- How do I create a podcast?
- Great question! Thankfully there are many applications out there that will create podcasts for you; all you have to do is provide the content. You can use web applications like podOmatic, download and install your own web application like the Podcast Generator, or you can use the specs listed earlier from Apple to write your own RSS feed.
- Once you have created your podcast and are ready to publish it to the iTunes store, you can follow the very simple instructions here on how to submit your podcast to iTunes.
What did you use to help create/learn podcasts? How were you able to implement podcasting for your site? Let us know in the comments.
The Problem
Here is a quick tip on how to fix an all too common error when using WordPress on a shared host. I have been using WordPress for a while now, and I was comfortable with how it works and operates, until yesterday. When trying to edit a post I received a "403 - you are forbidden to access post.php" error. I was obviously worried and frantic to get it working again so I could continue writing posts. After some searching on the Internet I found what I thought may be a solution.
The Background
It is normal practice for hosts to utilize strict security measures and lock down their servers. In a lot of cases they use the mod_security restrictions with extremely high filters. This causes a problem with access rights when using Apache's mod_rewrite. The mod_rewrite versions of posts for WordPress are so much cooler than the default addresses ("?p=22"); therefore, most installations end up using mod_rewrite.
The Solution
Fortunately, the solution is incredibly easy to implement. All you have to do is add the 2 lines of code, located below, to the mod_rewrite section of your .htaccess file. The first 2 lines should be the following:
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
I hope this helps save a lot of time for anyone with this problem. This is a problem with an easy solution, fixable in just minutes!
In an attempt to break the world record for most downloads, the traffic generated reiked havoc on both mozilla's main website as well as the spreadfirefox website. For a split second the main website went down and was showing an "http://1.1 Service Unavailable" error (Reminds me of the error seen on the US Amazon.com page a few weeks ago. For coverage on that outage check out this article.). It looks to be back up and was only down for a split second. At the time of this post the spread firefox website was still down.
What's all the hype about?
Firefox 3 is the newest release from Mozilla regarding their web browser, FireFox. You can download your copy at getfirefox.com (as long as that site hasn't been rocked by the traffic surge). The new version boasts a number of improvements, a few of which I have listed below.
- More secure
- Easier to use
- More personal
- Improved developers platform (More info on this here)
- Improved performance
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