Wordpress Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin | Tips and Tricks
Posted by ivanoats | Filed under Bookmarks, wordpress
‘Wordpress Easy Paypal Payment or Donation Accept Plugin’ is an easy to use Wordpress plugin to Accept Paypal payment for a service or a product or Donation in one click. Can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages.
Tags: Bookmarks, paypal, plugins, webdesign, wordpress
The Lazy Blogger?s Guide to Finding Great Post Images
Posted by Sonia Simone | Filed under Web Design
Writing a great blog post is a lot of work. There’s the planning, the headline, the writing, the rewriting, the rewriting, the rewriting.
As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. So why not let your images do some of that writing for you?
When you’re trying to get the biggest bang out of a blog post (while putting in the least amount of work), it’s smart to let strong imagery do some of your heavy lifting. But what’s the difference between an image that works hard and one that just looks good with your blog theme?
Images are steroids for your headline
You may remember the immortal advice of copywriting genius Joe Sugarman: the job of the headline is to get the reader to read the first line of your ad. (And the job of the first line is to get the reader to read the second line of your ad.)
Let’s face it, writing great headlines is hard. (Worth the effort, but still. Hard.) A great image can give your headline a big boost. The image might be beautiful, odd, heartwarming, instructive or just curiosity-provoking, as long as it makes the reader want to read that first line of your post.
Set an emotional tone
A powerful image zaps right into the primal bits of your readers’ brains and gets them in the emotional state you want. In an instant, a terrific image can create an emotional reaction you might otherwise slave for hours to craft with words.
Images of puppies and cute little children will set one tone for your blog. Gritty street scenes will say something very different. I use a lot of images of apes and monkeys over on Remarkable Communication, in part to convey the primate emotional drivers that shape our communication, and in part because, hey, everybody likes monkeys.
In fact, “lighten up” is a major Remarkable Communication theme, and that’s consistently reflected in the images I choose.
Some images just make people feel good. And associating yourself with feeling good is a smart move if you’re trying to persuade. While a steady diet of kittens and rainbows gets cloying, it can be a good move to choose a photo just because it makes you smile.
What’s the personality of your blog? Funny? Combative? Compassionate? Goofy? Imagery can set the emotional tone of a single post or for your whole blog.
Lazy Blogger Tip: If you can’t find a good, relevant match for your post’s main idea, look for an image that conveys the emotional content of your blog as a whole.
Arouse curiosity
Just like making a ridiculous comparison can intrigue the reader and get her to keep reading, a striking image can work in the same way. The image can either create a seeming paradox with the headline, or just amplify the headline in a surprising way.
(The most notorious example to date on Copyblogger was probably on my own Feel Great Naked post.)
A feeling of “What is this doing here?” can move the reader forward and right into your terrific post. The effect shouldn’t be too jarring, but a little unexpected juxtaposition can be just the ticket.
Where lazy bloggers go to find great images
There are free sources for stock photography out there, but in my opinion it takes more time and energy than it’s worth to dig around and find what you need.
I use two sources for nearly all images I use. The first is iStockphoto, which has a wide selection of stock photography at very good prices. For a blog post, you can use their smallest size image, which will run you a little over $1 depending on how many credits you buy at a time.
The great thing about iStockphoto is that it’s cheap and efficient. You use their search tool to find a couple of options, click, click, click, and you can get back to scrolling through the latest LOLCats.
The second source I like is the Flickr Creative Commons. I shied away from this for a long time, thinking the licensing issues would be too complicated. Skellie set me straight on that with this useful, comprehensive post. Just search for images under the Attribution license and you’re set. The only thing that’s required is a credit, which is satisfied by a pleasingly effortless link back to the photographer.
Other Creative Commons licenses have limitations on whether you can modify a photo (such as cropping it) or use it in a commercial context (which could be a factor if you’re monetizing your blog). Stick to the Attribution license and you won’t have to give any of it a second thought. Trust me, there’s virtually no limit to the fantastic Attribution images to choose from.
The quality you can find on Flickr Creative Commons is as good or better than what you’ll get for iStockphoto, but each has different strengths. Flickr has terrific macro, landscape and botanical photography, and you can find great (and unusual) images of people. iStockphoto often does better than Flickr for animals and machinery, and offers high-quality shots of any object you can think of isolated against a white background.
More lazy fun you can have with images
Flickr isn’t just a great resource for images, it’s a magnificent way to waste hours and hours of your time. Try doing some searches on your major themes from time to time, and mark your favorites for later posts. Instead of “procrastinating,” you get to call it “building your image library.” You can do the same on iStockphoto, building extensive lightboxes of subjects you tend to use again and again.
As a lazy rule of thumb, the more iStockphoto imagery you use, the more professional your blog will feel. Using more Flickr images will create an artier, quirkier flavor.
Try letting your images do a little more of the work in your blog. Your posts will be more effective, and you’ll save precious energy you could be using to play Rock Band.
About the Author: Sonia Simone is an Associate Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.
Tags: webdesign
PhoneGap Provides Javascript Access to iPhone API
Posted by Omar McFarlane | Filed under Web Design
There is no doubt that developers are coming from far and wide to write iPhone applications. While some are coming from household names Mac users have come to know and love, others are coming from developers who have never laid hands on a Mac before.
However, regardless of background, sometimes, learning a whole new programming language can be a tall order. Enter PhoneGap.
Developed by Brock Whitten, Rob Ellis, Colin Toomey and Eric Oesterle; PhoneGap hopes to be the bridge between Javascript and the iPhone’s Objective-C by acting as a Webkit wrapper for a web app. Having currently implemented the Geo Locating and Accelerometer, the PhoneGap team plans to provide access to the camera, sounds, vibration, local SQLite, and push services. This should come as good news to web app developers looking to write more robust programs and to those who have since avoided writing programs due to the disparities between the iPhone SDK and the web app SDK.
Give PhoneGap a try and let us know what you think.
Tags: webdesign
AppLoop brings automated application development to the iPhone
Posted by Ivan Storck | Filed under Web Design
With the iPhone SDK , Apple is pioneering a new mobile development platform that is ahead of it’s time; however, this innovation comes with a major caveat: It requires Cocoa (or Objective-C ) programming knowledge. … AppLoop is a brand-new service that allows anyone with a web browser and RSS feed to create an application similar to the AP News app and submit it to the App Store — without ever writing a single line of code.
Tags: iphone, rss, Web Design, webdesign
Coming Soon From ENTP: Propane
Posted by Web Design and Programming on NewsGator Online | Filed under Web Design
We don’t use Campfire at ENTP. We use a Campfire chat room, but we view it with Propane.
Here’s ENTPer Trevor Squires talking about why he wrote Propane:
Campfire is about immediacy. When you want to share a file, you just upload it. Seen a cool image? Copy in the url and Campfire shows it inline.
With Propane I’m trying to take immediacy and turn it up to eleven. In a desktop app I can do stuff that a web app can’t do.
When you drag an image from Safari and drop it into Propane, what are you trying to communicate? Sure, Campfire displays the image, but where did it come from? How many times have you been asked “where’s that from?”. Propane does that for you.
Same thing with text from a web page.
When you copy in a tweet url, why are you doing that? If you want to share the tweet, the actual message is what you meant to share - not some opaque URL. Propane turns it into a twicture because that’s what’s recognized as a great way to share tweet messages.
How many clicks does it take to upload a file? 3? This is supposed to be immediacy. Just drop the file on Propane.
And one application’s ‘immediacy’ should not get in the way of the same quality of other applications. That’s why Propane strips out stuff from Campfire that a native client doesn’t need. Navigation bar? Don’t need it when you’ve got control of the app’s menu.
When you copy text out of the transcript, did you really mean you wanted all that markup and crazy-ass “lets turn table contents into something legible”? Or did you mean to copy:
trevor: this is cool
giles: indeed it is
matt: I like turtles
Campfire is great. Propane just improves it. The “why” - immediacy - is the killer feature for me.
The fact that ’space’ or any punctuation mark commits your tab completion is important to me. I thought long and hard about “what does a user intend” and tried to make Propane behave in a way that doesn’t disrupt their intentions.
It’s the only reason I wrote this.
Tags: webdesign
The Sustainable Scoop Gets a Facelift!
Posted by Kerry | Filed under Web Design
As you’ve probably noticed, The Sustainable Scoop has a new design. There was nothing inherently wrong with the old design, exactly, though as I mentioned before I just couldn’t seem to get away from the feeling that it was “formulated” somehow. In short, my personal blog had become much less personal, and I could feel myself beginning to lose interest.
I chose this new design for several reasons, not the least of which are the features of this new theme. Thesis is by far the most comprehensive theme I’ve found, in both SEO and in design. I’m a designer by trade, but lately I’ve had a lot of work come my way, and I just don’t have the time to make a million tiny little design changes here and there. Chris Pearson, the designer behind Thesis, has done an amazing job of allowing users to make myriad design and function tweaks without having to edit any code. This has already saved me a lot of time.
I like that the sidebars in the new design are both on the right. I always found the old design, with the main content in the center, to be distracting. This way, all of the “extras” will be on the right side of the page, allowing readers to focus on the content much more easily. This does lend itself to the problem of an unbalanced page, particularly once you scroll down past the end of the sidebars; but I decided that this issue wasn’t enough to keep me from loving the new design.
I’ve also simplified some things here at the Scoop. For one, all of the archives will be organized in an “Archives” tab at the top of the page. I’m also going to simplify some of the content, but I’m not sure how yet. I’ve decided that I can’t really eliminate any categories, since the stuff I write here has such a broad scope. I’m just going to reduce some of the time it used to take me to write, manage, and update the site. I used to have to manually update the Pages for several types of posts, and this effort became a deterrent to posting anything. So, anything that wastes time will be removed or redistributed.
I’m going to be focusing more of my posts around gardening (biointensive, in particular), since this has become a major passion of mine. The image currently in use in the site’s header is a photo of the garden at Ecology Action in Willits, California. As my own garden grows and changes, I’ll be updating the header with photos from my own garden. That’s the idea, anyway, and I hope that in this way I can share some of my gardening with you guys.
Another feature of the new site that I’m particularly proud of are the six colorful squares in the top of the sidebars. These are resources that I’ve deemed worthy of occupying that space, I receive no money whatsoever in exchange for featuring those resources. I just really believe in what each one of those organizations are doing. What I’ve chosen to feature also resonates with my own sustainability practices, so I really wanted to share them with you.
If you guys have any thoughts on the new site, please let me know. I’m not aiming to please everyone, but I do want to make reading the Scoop as pleasant for as many of you as possible. If you have thoughts, please share them in the comments. Thanks!
Tags: webdesign
Pricing Tables: Examples And Best Practices | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine
Posted by ivanoats | Filed under Bookmarks
Pricing tables play an important role for every company that offers products or services. They are a challenge from both a design and usability standpoint. They must be simple but at the same time clearly differentiate between features and prices of different products and services.
A pricing table should help users pick the most appropriate plan for them.
Tags: Bookmarks, pricing, pricingtables, webdesign, webstandards
Validating slugs against existing routes in Rails
Posted by Henrik | Filed under Web Design
On a web site, it's neat to provide URLs like http://community.com/some_username or http://blog.com/some_category. It's only slightly shorter than /users/some_username or /u/some_username, but looks much better.
Having usernames or tags directly under the root of the site means they can collide with other routes, though. If you're using /login, you don't want users to be able to have that username.
The first thing to do is, of course, to put the username route at the very end. You will need to, or its wildcard nature will catch every request (well, every request not including the path separators . and /). This means that if a user would somehow end up with a name like "login", the login action will still work – but the less-important user page will be eclipsed.
Let's assume our routes are
map.user ':username', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show'
You could then do this to avoid route collisions in usernames:
validates_format_of :name, :with => /\A[\w-]+\Z/
validates_uniqueness_of :name
validate :name_is_not_a_route
protected
def name_is_not_a_route
path = ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path("/#{name}", :method => :get) rescue {}
errors.add(:name, "conflicts with existing path (/#{name})") unless path[:username]
end
end
ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path("/#{name}", :method => :get) takes a path (must begin with a slash) and an optional environment hash. With the routes specified above, we could have left out the :method, but we'll need it for RESTful routes or other routes with method conditions (otherwise they may be recognized by the wildcard route instead, or fail to be recognized altogether).
If the method fails to match a route, you get an ActionController::RoutingError. If it succeeds, you get a hash. The inline rescue above ensures we get an empty hash even if recognition fails.
Note that the user wildcard route will recognize a lot of stuff (the controller, not the route, will then get to decide if there is such a user), so we actually shouldn't get routing errors, assuming we don't let usernames contain periods or slashes (path separators), but it's good to be defensive. Especially since the model above runs the route validation independent of the format validation.
So if the method succeeds in recognizing a route, you will get a hash:
=> {:controller=>"sessions", :action=>"new"}
>> ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize_path('/some_username')
=> {:username=>"some_username", :controller=>"users", :action=>"show"}
If the hash has a value for the :username key, it was recognized by that route. That implies two things: no earlier route matched the username, and it has a format that means it can be properly routed as a username (again, usernames containing slashes or periods would fail here).
If you have other routes that also have a :username key, you may want to make this condition more strict, also confirming the controller and action. No need to worry about query strings, though – they're not part of the recognition process:
# ActionController::RoutingError: No route matches "/login?username=foo" with {:method=>:get}
The uniqueness validation is there to make this point: the route validation only avoids collisions with earlier routes; it doesn't run any controller code, so it has no idea if the username is already taken.
Of course, this code can't look into the future and prevent users from taking the names of routes you add later. You could run code on every deploy to check that there are no new collisions due to this.
A simpler, but limited, solution I've heard of is to keep all routes shorter than say six characters (/login is fine but /logout would be too long) and only allow longer usernames.
Tags: webdesign
Full Page Screenshots On a Mac
Posted by David Appleyard | Filed under Web Design
Taking screenshots on Windows used to a laborious process, consisting of performing a print screen then editing the result in Photoshop. Leopard (and indeed, earlier editions of OS X) goes a long way to simplifying the process with different key combinations to achieve different results. It is possible to grab the whole screen, a single window, or a user defined area of the screen. However, I commonly find myself needing to take a screenshot of an entire webpage — not just the portion that is viewable in my browser window.
This is where WebKit2PNG and Paparazzi come in. The former is a command line utility for OS X which uses the WebKit engine (the software powering Safari) to generate full page screenshots. The latter is a piece of software which offers a user friendly interface to the command line utility, making it much easier to use. I’ll focus on the features of Paparazzi first before going a little technical to explain some of the extra features offered by WebKit2PNG.
Paparazzi
Using Paparazzi is simple. Open up the application and enter your URL. You can choose the size of the window that you’re emulating and also choose to crop the resulting image. It takes a few seconds to download the screenshot, then there are several export options to different image formats.
(more…)
Tags: webdesign
Zarra Studios Releases iWeb Buddy v1.1
Posted by prMac | Filed under Web Design
Zarra Studios announced today the release version 1.1 to iWeb Buddy. iWeb Buddy is a post processor application for iWeb that is designed to bring additional functionality to iWeb that professionals and “pro-sumers” have come to need on their web sites. iWeb Buddy allows the user to add Google Analytics, Social Bookmarking and more to your website automatically. In addition, iWeb Buddy allows you to have multiple domain files in iWeb.
Tags: webdesign
