General

Today I’ve got for you a prac­ti­cal tu­to­ri­al about cre­at­ing a ready to print cool sea­son’s greet­ings card in Photoshop. We will use the brush­es, tex­ture and blend­ing com­bi­na­tions to the vi­su­al im­age, then we will se­tup a new doc­u­ment in InDesign to make the card ready to print file which you can use for your next ap­proach­ing hol­i­days. The on­ly nec­es­sary skills to get through this tu­to­ri­al are the ba­sic knowl­edge of how to use the most com­mon tools in Photoshop and InDesign. Let’s get start­ed! (...)

By Frances Robinson, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal EBay Inc. may have to change the way it pro­tects L’Oréal SA’s trade­marks after Europe’s high­est court said Thursday that the cos­met­ics com­pa­ny can pro­hibit the sale on the auc­tion site of free sam­ples and prod­ucts in­tend­ed for out­side Europe. However, the European Court of Justice’s ad­vo­cate gen­er­al, Niilo Jaaskinen, in giv­ing his opin­ion, said eBay could con­tin­ue to pur­chase ad­ver­tis­ing key­words, in­clud­ing L’Oréal trade­marks, in order to (...)

ExpressionEngine 2 is a won­der­ful CMS and ar­guably the most de­sign­er-friend­ly one out there, used by many well-known names like A List Apart, Andy Clarke and Veerle Pieters. Ironically, how­ev­er, its de­fault con­fig­u­ra­tion is poor­ly suit­ed for use in a pro­fes­sion­al web de­vel­op­ment work­flow, which usu­al­ly in­volves mul­ti­ple sites, servers, and de­vel­op­ers. This tu­to­ri­al will show you how to cus­tomize ExpressionEngine 2 so you can hit the ground run­ning with a rock solid yet flex­i­ble start­ing (...)

After as far as we have come in equal­i­ty of the sex­es, it is still al­most im­pos­si­ble to work with men/wom­en. They are so strange and just don’t do things the way they should be done. They are moody, grumpy, too fa­mil­iar, emo­tion­al, threat­en­ing and just plain men/wom­en! Add the pop­u­lar no­tion that all hu­mans have the­se odd traits when in­ter­act­ing with other hu­mans and you have the mak­ings of a sex­u­al ha­rass­ment train­ing video. From the mo­ment you step in­to a cor­po­ra­tion, or (...)

With the hy­pe around HTML5 and CSS3 ex­ceed­ing levels not seen since 2005’s Ajax era, it’s worth not­ing that the ex­cite­ment comes with good rea­son: the two spec­i­fi­ca­tions ren­der many years of fea­ture hacks re­dun­dant by re­plac­ing them with na­tive fea­tures. For fun, con­sid­er how many CSS2-based round­ed corners hacks you’ve prob­a­bly glossed over, look­ing for a mag­ic so­lu­tion. These days, with CSS3, the mag­ic is bor­der-ra­dius (and per­haps some ven­dor pre­fix­es) fol­lowed by a cof­fee break. CSS3’s (...)

Its that time of year again where we take a look at the best and freely avail­able icon sets for web and ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ers. Its been a tremen­dous year, with many new high qual­i­ty sets be­ing re­leased, all per­fect for your next pro­ject. The icons have been split in­to sev­er­al cat­e­gories, start­ing with the Awesome Packs, which is a round-up of our fa­vorites, fol­lowed by the General cat­e­go­ry (which is a se­lec­tion of mul­ti-pur­pose sets), the Mobile de­vel­op­er cat­e­go­ry, the Minimal, Wireframe (...)

Q: How do I con­vert songs in iTunes to plain MP3 files? I want to use them in an­oth­er pro­gram that doesn’t rec­og­nize the AAC song for­mat that iTunes prefers. A: Assuming you are us­ing the lat­est ver­sion of iTunes, for ei­ther Windows or Mac, first go in­to the General sec­tion of pref­er­ences, se­lect “Im­port Settings” and then change to “Im­port Using MP3 Encoder.” Next, choose the AAC song you want to con­vert, go to the Advanced menu, and se­lect “Cre­ate MP3 Version.” Note that this works with (...)

The port­fo­lio site is crit­i­cal fac­tor in the suc­cess of a free­lance de­sign­er or a de­sign stu­dio. Today we’ll be go­ing through the pro­cess of cre­at­ing a home­page lay­out of a port­fo­lio site in Photoshop. The de­sign we will be cre­at­ing is avail­able for down­load to Vandelay Premier mem­bers. The down­load in­cludes the PSD files for the home­page and 2 sec­ondary pages in three col­or schemes. Here is a look at what we will be cre­at­ing (click the im­age to view it in full size). Step 1: Creating the (...)

jQuery 1.4.4 is now out! This is the fourth mi­nor re­lease on top of jQuery 1.4 and lands a num­ber of fix­es for bugs in­clud­ing some nice im­prove­ments over 1.4.3. We would like to thank the fol­low­ing com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers that pro­vid­ed patch­es, in­put and their time to­wards this re­lease: Rick Waldron, Dan Heberden, Alex Sexton, Colin Snover. Along with the fol­low­ing mem­bers of the jQuery core team: John Resig, Dave Methvin, Karl Swedberg, Paul Irish. We al­so thank our bug triage team who (...)

The GitHub Project It might have tak­en a while, but two weeks ago I fi­nal­ly got in­to GitHub. For those not fa­mil­iar, GitHub is a site fo­cused on the ver­sion con­trol sys­tem Git, and al­lows. It’s not the on­ly place that you can get host­ed Git repos­i­to­ries from (e.g. Beanstalk), but it does have a much more open-source friend­ly en­vi­ron­ment. It’s no co­in­ci­dence that their tagline is “So­cial Coding”. As part of my ori­en­ta­tion to GitHub, I want­ed to con­tribute some­thing to an ex­ist­ing pro­ject. As (...)

Boxee, which makes soft­ware that makes it easy to watch Web video on your TV, cel­e­brates a big mile­stone this week, when the first Boxee-brand­ed hard­ware starts ship­ping to con­sumers. The star­tup is cel­e­brat­ing with an event at New York’s Irving Plaza. But the com­pa­ny’s next big move like­ly won’t hap­pen in pub­lic view: Sources say Boxee is out try­ing to raise a sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing round, like­ly in the $10 mil­lion to $15 mil­lion range. I’m told that ex­ist­ing in­vestors Union Square, Spark and (...)

So you’ve just launched your web­site. The on­ly thing left now is to start cre­at­ing con­tent and ar­rang­ing for some pro­mo­tion, right? Well, not so fast. You first have to do sev­er­al things to en­sure that your site is set up prop­er­ly and ready for the pub­lic. Here are a few things you should do right after launch­ing a web­site (and if you can, do them pri­or to launch­ing your web­site pub­licly). Create a Sitemap.xml File and a Robots.txt File What are the­se files? These files are essen­tial for (...)

I like to think that there might be one per­son out there that no­ticed that I didn’t post last week. If you are that per­son, then let me tell you why. Last Monday was a big one for us at SitePoint. We mi­grat­ed our fo­rums (and sev­er­al other sys­tems) from our old le­ga­cy servers to Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Service. The move went in­cred­i­bly smooth­ly, with on­ly a cou­ple of hours of down­time and no huge glitch­es. It did mean that it was a busy day for me though, hence no blog post. With any luck, you (...)

cred­it: what­e­va87 @ Flickr This is the sec­ond ar­ti­cle in my series of re­sources for the trav­el­ing free­lancer.  You can find the first one here. Finding Friends & a Place to Live through Hospitality Exchange When trav­el­ing ex­ten­sive­ly a per­son starts to feel a bit alone and her wal­let starts to get lean quick­ly.  Measures must be tak­en to al­le­vi­ate the­se neg­a­tive side ef­fects when liv­ing out a dream!  An op­tion for the ad­ven­tur­ous trav­el­ing free­lancer is a hos­pi­tal­i­ty ex­change, which is (...)

Usability test­ing is test con­duct­ed to col­lect feed­back and in­for­ma­tion from your web­site’s vis­i­tors or reg­u­lar read­ers that can be very use­ful for fu­ture web­site re­vamp, en­hance­ment or other ad­just­ments. Designers and de­vel­op­ers may have cre­at­ed web­sites ac­cord­ing to spec­i­fi­ca­tions, but ul­ti­mate­ly it is the users who will de­cide its cred­itabil­i­ty (how far it is us­able), the high­lights of the site and what does it lack of. How to know whether a vis­i­tor likes your web­site? Usability tools (...)

Creativity and in­spi­ra­tion can give us many dif­fer­ent re­sults. In this ar­ti­cle, we've round­ed up the web­sites of 60 very well known com­pa­nies. Some of the­se are very dif­fer­ent from other things we see, and some have a more tra­di­tion­al look. We sug­gest that you click the links to vis­it the web­sites in order to see it all live. Maybe you'll find some new tech­niques or looks that can add a new di­men­sion to your de­sign vi­sion or see what works and doesn't work for you. Either way we think (...)

Observing web­sites from par­tic­u­lar in­dus­tries can be a good learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence, as you will tend to see a lot of trends and sim­i­lar­i­ties from sites in the same in­dus­try. In this post we’ll show­case more than 30 web­sites from cur­rent TV shows. As is the case with other types of me­dia (such as movies and mu­sic) the web­sites of TV shows tend to be an im­por­tant part of their mar­ket­ing and brand­ing. As you browse through the sites fea­tured be­low you will no­tice some trends in­clud­ing: Large (...)

jQuery 1.4.3 is now out! This is the third mi­nor re­lease on top of jQuery 1.4, fix­ing some bugs and land­ing some nice im­prove­ments. I would like to thank the fol­low­ing com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers that pro­vid­ed patch­es and in­put for this re­lease: Anton M., Justin Meyer, Colin Snover, Ryan Tenney, Louis-Rémi Babé, David Petersen, Rick Waldron, Dave Reed, John-David Dalton, tem­p01, Heungsub Lee, J. Ryan Stinnett, Robert Katic, Juriy Zaytsev, James Burke, Jeffery To, Carl Fürstenberg, Jacob Wright, Jeff (...)

Todd Forsyth, Vice President of Global Campaigns, Salesforce.com gave an en­er­get­ic pre­sen­ta­tion at the Marketo 2010 User Summit (Marketo is a TopRank Online Marketing client) on how Salesforce aligns mar­ket­ing and sales.  Fol­low­ing is a sum­ma­ry of the high­lights of his pre­sen­ta­tion – which in­cludes key take­aways for B2B mar­ket­ing and sales teams: Sales and mar­ket­ing align­ment are sec­ond na­ture at Salesforce.  Today, we’ll ex­plore how as a brand, Salesforce in­te­grates sales and mar­ket­ing (...)

WordPress was on­ce a sim­ple blog­ging plat­form but it has now evolved. Today, WordPress is used as foun­da­tion of cor­po­rate web­site, pho­to gallery, port­fo­lio site or Content Management System (CMS) and its un­der­tak­ing in the fu­ture is lim­it­less. As a WordPress user, we un­der­stand that it is im­por­tant to keep up with its lat­est ver­sion. On 17th June 2010, WordPress launch­es 3.0 and took a sig­nif­i­cant leap from its pre­vi­ous 2.9. It has made tons of changes and added new fea­tures such as (...)