BloggWP

Let me explain the title real quick, in case any readers aren’t in the know yet. LOMO is a russian optics company that makes cameras. They use the word Lomography to mean a wide-angle, shoot-from-the-hip, distorted colors, plastic lenses, expired film kind of photo asthetic.

Another thing a lot of Lomographers like to do is x-pro, or cross processing. This is the act of developing one kind of film in the chemicals meant to develop another kind of fim. For a lot of photographers, this means shooting onto slide film and bribing a friend who works at a developing lab to develop it as normal film.

This tutorial is fairly quick and easy, we’ll show you how to get that great x-pro lomo look. We’ll tweak the color, explore a new method of vignetting and definitely widen it up and blur it up a little, since most of these nice, cheap cameras have nice, cheap lenses. And funny names; I have a Diana, a Holga, and a Lubitel myself.

Open an image and let’s get started. (If you’ve been working on the image previous to this, make sure to flatten all the layers before you start.)

Step 1.  The first thing we’re going to do is widen up the lens angle a little bit. Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction and drag the top slider (Remove Distortion) a tiny bit to the left. Don’t overdo it, but make it look like the lens warps out a little.

Step 2. Next, copy the image layer and hit Q to enter quickmask mode. Press D to make sure you’re painting in black, and B to select the brush tool. Select a nice, big, fuzzy brush, at full opacity and a low flow, paint in most of the image. Stay away from the corners.

Step 3. When you have kind of a big, red, fuzzy circle, press Q again to exit quickmask mode. Go to Select > Modify > Feather and enter 10 to 20 into the box. Press OK. 

Step 4. Use Filter > Blur > Lens Blur to give it just a little bit of low-quality blur. I used a triangle shape with Radius: 8, Blade Curvature: 67, and everything else at 0. Press OK.

Step 5. Press Q again, B for your big, fuzzy, low-flow brush, and paint in almost all the image again, staying away from the corners like before. Then press Q again and use Select > Modify > Feather at the same number as before. Create a Curves Adjustment Layer and drag that line down in a couple places to make the very corners of the image really dark. 

Step 6. Create another Curves Adjustment Layer. Give your image a tiny little “S curve” to start out with, then go to the Red Channel. Drag the top right point over to the left a little less than one quarter of the way. Then move the bottom left point over to the right a little more than a quarter of the way. 

Step 7. Open the Green Channel. Create a dot around the top right quarter of the line and drag it up and to the left just a little bit. Go to the Blue Channel and make a dot in the same place, but drag this one down and to the right a little bit. (see screenshot).

Step 8. Press Q again, B for your big, soft, fuzzy, low flow brush, and this time just draw a big circle almost the whole height of your image, not quite centered, not quite perfect, in fact the less perfect the better it will look.

Step 9. When you’re done, press Q to exit quickmask, Select > Modify > Feather again for a little more than your last number, and then create a Curves Adjustment Layer. Make a dot in the middle of the line and drag it down about 1/4 the way toward the bottom right of the square. 

And you’re done! Your image looks like it was shot on a little plastic toy camera with film that was processed wrong. Pretty neat, isn’t it? Fool around with the settings I gave you in these steps to find the numbers which work best for you, and have fun!

Post from: Tutorial Blog

With the increase in bloggers using WordPress over the last couple years combined with the increase in the use of social media, one of the most frequent questions blog owners have is how to bring the two together.

You’ve heard the stories about bloggers that use twitter, facebook, stumbeupon or digg to generate daily traffic in the thousands or tens of thousands. And now you want to know… “How do I get me some of that social media love?”

Here are 10 of the best social media plugins for WordPress.

1. Social Media Page. The social media craze has caused blogs and websites to look for ways to grow their network, and there’s no easier way to do this then with Social Media Page. This application lets you add buttons to posts or pages, so that  users can click on the buttons to go to your profile on different social media sites. With buttons for over 100 social media sites, you should be well-covered for any and all of your networks.

2. Twitter Tools. This plugin offers a variety of features,  integrating your Twitter updates into your blog, making it easy to create blog posts from your tweets. Other features include creating a weekly digest of updates, auto update of your Twitter updates when a new blog post is published and archived tweets.

3. Digg This. If you’re “dugg” in on Digg, then you’ll definitely want to add this to your blog. This feature encourages visitors to digg your posts and then tells you how many people have dugg it.

4. Photo Dropper. It can sometimes be tough adding photos to your blog because of licenses, however, Photo Dropper makes it much easier by searching and adding Flickr photos to your posts that have been Creative Commons licensed.

5. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button. Everyone loves submitting their posts to different social networking and bookmarking sites to gain exposure and increase page views, but it makes it easier when your visitors start submitting your posts, which is where this plugin comes in. Visitors can choose from over 100 social media sites to submit your posts to.

6. WP-Gravatar. Add a face to your commenters by letting them add an avatar to their posts.

7. Tweetmeme. Increase your exposure and page views with this button that lets visitors tweet your blog post with one click.

8. Stumble Reviews. After you’ve gotten a strong following on your blog and are getting good feedback, you can add this application to put comments and reviews on each blog post of what others have said about it on StumbleUpon.

9. Twitter Updater. Automatically sends new blog posts to your Twitter page and shortens the link to a TinyURL.

10. Social Traffic Monitor. This is a great tool for monitoring which social media outlets your traffic is coming from.

Post from: Tutorial Blog

We all have days were we just can’t get our creative juices flowing.  What we really need is a good jump start that gets our imagination off again to put us on the right track.  When it comes to logos, something so simple as a type face or choice in color can make everything flow just right.  If you’re in need of inspiration, here are 15 sites that will get you going!

Logopond

Need that quick, spur of the moment inspiration to drive you to your next logo design?  Logopond offers a huge selection of beautiful designs that are a feast for the eyes.  You don’t have to do much clicking, just hit the site and browse at your leisure.  Take a deep breath and dive into this inspiration pond!

Creattica

A creative site designed to showcase gorgeous and inspirational designs of all types.  Their logo section is 120+ pages strong and growing and the smooth layout displays the designs to their best advantage.  Another great collective to encourage your imagination.

LogoFury

LogoFury is another logo design gallery that features designs you can rate.  The selection is massive, upwards of 2000 logos with more being added daily!

LogoLog

An intriguing site by Denis Radenkovic where he posts designs he finds inspiring or just cool.  It’s about his preference and is not a critique of designs. But he has a great eye and the logos he finds are beautiful.  The site is a bit different to navigate, click on ‘articles’ and use the left hand text links to go from one logo to the next.  I had a lot of fun on this website!

Logo Design Love

Need some textual discussion to get your head into designing?  At Logo Design Love you not only get some great tips and information but also fantastic showcases of visual designs and logo branding.

LogoOrange

LogoOrange Design Group’s site is a great place for logo inspiration.  Not only do they have a huge portfolio of excellent work to browse but they also have some great posts on logo trends.  Browse their past articles for some great insight from these professionals.

RajaSandhu.com

This is the personal website of Raja Sandhu, a very talented logo designer whose work has been featured all over as ‘inspirational’.  Check his website and scroll down to browse his designs, definitely inspiring!

LogoGala

Having only been around only since January, Logogala.com is new to the scene of inspirational logo websites.  Already Deron, the site developer, has presented us with some great featured designs by other designers.  Every month he features picks from the previous month, all this while keeping up with a small design/logo oriented blog.  Also, you can search by color!  Such a nice feature!

Logo Sauce

Now this is fun, Logo Sauce showcases some great designs and are indeed ‘oozing with logo goodness’ but that’s not all they sport.  They have a logo contest system which is rather brilliant.  Contest holders post a contest, the minimum value of compensation must be $200.  Others can participate in said contests, offering logo designs, etc following the contest holder’s standards.  What’s fun is that you get to see all the logos submitted before and after the contest.  It’s a great way to see the same idea done in different ways!  This site is in it’s beta but it has fabulous potential and is already inspirational.

Logo Faves

A nice solid collection of highly inspirational logo designs, very nicely laid out with large thumbnails (which I love).  The site owner scours the web for stunning logos and adds them here to showcase the graphic designer’s work.   Really nice and easy to navigate, make sure to check the ‘highest rated logos first’ link, there are some great ones!

The Design Inspiration

Wow.  This site is just a little overwhelming but in the best kind of way.  Of course they have a fantastic selection of logos (some of them may look familiar from other sites) but they also have illustrations, web design, font design, creative photography…even textures and patterns!  It’s a lot to take in but chock full of inspiration.

Logo Moose

A fun and cool little layout featuring some very impressive logo works.  Like a lot of the sites they offer the chance to upload new logos but they also have logo of the month awards.  They tout themselves as being simple and easy to use for the purpose of inspiration and they are right.  I found myself easily browsing through pages of beautiful designs without being stopped by huge ads or too much text.

Identity Works

Need a bit more brain food for thought?  Identity works has reviews on larger company logos.  Their reviews are interesting and insightful, giving the reader a different perspective on design.  While most of the navigation is based on the text name of the company it definitely got my brain thinking!

Mis I Pile

Luka manages this design portfolio for his small studio and it is highly impressive.  Kindly enough Luka has posted 300 of his logos for people to browse and get inspiration from.  Thanks Luka!

LOGOfi

Here is a great looking site, beautiful layout and easy to browse too.  Here are a lot of logos I’ve never seen before, a definite must if you’re browsing for inspiration.  There are forums there too and quick links to ‘tweet’ your favorites.

Now thats a lot of inspiration!  Feel like hitting the the drawing board yet?

Post from: Tutorial Blog

Live Streaming video from WordCamp Dallas thanks to Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.tv. Thanks to WPTavern for the link.

I was at WordCamp Dallas last year but could not make it to this one. I am jealous!

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Live Stream and Chat from WordCamp Dallas

News Plugins

External Files

External Files provides a shortcode [external] that wraps around a file path or url. The contents of the file/url are imported and outputted in an xhtml-friendly way. What’s more, the plugin auto-guesses the syntax of the file (by looking at the extension of the path or the content-type of the url).

WordPress Console

It provides an in-browser interactive console for the WordPress environment.

SEO Blogger

Whether you blog about business, politics or the hot topic of the moment, SEO Blogger allows you to find the most sought-after keywords for your subject without ever leaving your blog editing screen.

SearchTerms Tagging 2

The function of this plugin is to displays some of the last unique keywords (default is 30, adjustable from plugin admin page) that visitors used to find the blog post from search engine. Each keyword will be changed into a link to that page. The goal is to get more traffic to the blog post by adding related search terms below the blog post.

Clickcha

Clickcha is a unique CAPTCHA system that more secure than traditional text based CAPTCHAs yet easier to use. Clickcha will replace the Wordpress post comment button with an image based CAPTCHA that requires a single click to solve and post the comment.

WP Theme Showcase

WP Theme Showcase ext and i18n (Showcase ext for short) displays uploaded themes with information extracted from the style.css of each theme as well as links to readme files. Showcase ext supports internationalization, CSS-styling, and is highly configurable with user-defined screenshots etc.

Amazon Niche Store

Allows you to automatically display Amazon products on your blog. You just add a simple tag to a post or page, along with your Amazon Tracking ID, and the relevant keywords for the products to be displayed.

Updated Plugins

WP-Simpleviewer

WP-Simpleviewer enables you to easily add SimpleViewer Flash galleries to your posts and pages. The admin interface helps you to create the thumbs for a new gallery and change its settings, it is now compatible with WP 2.8.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support.

WP SimpleMail

WP SimpleMail allows you to access your email directly from wordpress.

Possibly Related Recent Posts

Automatically displays possibly related posts at the end of each post using a filter on the_content. List generated on the fly by recency and the categories the current post is in. Does NOT use tags.

ImageShack Offloader

Saves you bandwidth by offloading your images to ImageShack.

Store Locator

Store locator plugin for WordPress web developers & web site owners who need to show any set of important locations on a website. Locations are easily searchable. Uses Google Maps.

GD Simple Widgets

This plugin contains several widgets with simple functionality. Some of them are based on standard WordPress widgets but with extended options and rendering. You can also disable default WordPress widgets if you choose to use Simple Widgets versions.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Plugin Releases on 06/24

WordPress 2.8 just crossed the 1 million download mark today, you can see the live counter for WordPress downloads on the download counter page.

This is definitely great news since this milestone was reached in 12 days, have you upgraded to WordPress 2.8 yet?

Here is a screenshot when WordPress 2.8 hit the 1 million download mark, thanks to @scoutdude.

Thanks @photomatt via twitter. Follow us @weblogtooltips.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress 2.8 Crosses 1 Million Downloads

Short answer? It is jumpin! Have you checked out the Plugin Competition Blog recently? There are six new plugins announced for the competition and all of them look fantastic. The comments have been very positive and visitors have been actively rating the entries as they come in. Here is what we have so far:

• Tweetable: Another Twitter integration plugin for WordPress (we really need to consolidate these, but there is feature differentiation)
• Live Blogging Plugin: Setup a live blog within minutes, needs Meteor
• ImageShack Offloader: Move your image hosting to ImageShack
• Max Image Size Control: Finer granular control of image sizes in WordPress
• WP Devel: Add a whole bunch of debug options to your WordPress blog
• WP Update Message: Tweak and refine the update messages in your WordPress admin panel

In addition to these plugins, I know of at least 10 others that are being developed for the competition and I am hoping for many more. A couple of links and stats of interest:

• There is now a page for the Rules and Regulations for the WordPress Plugin Competition 2009
• Sponsors and well wishers have donated almost $3000 as prize money for the competition. They include: WPMU/WPMUDEV, BuySellAds, White Shadow, WPWebHost and Ozh
• Use the WLTC Community Plugin Groups page to post ideas for new plugins and offer to create new ones
• Send us tips and ideas through Twitter @weblogtooltips
• The Plugin Compeition Blog is checked by hundreds of visitors every day for new entries and to download the old ones

So if you are a plugin author and would like to get your name out or would like to win the prize purse for the best plugin, be sure to throw your hat into the competition and show us what you are made of. If you are a corporate sponsor and would like to help us reward the plugin development community, please drop us a line.

You don’t need to be shy. Come on in, the water is just fine.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

What is going on with WordPress Plugin Competition 2009?

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments, the Associated Press reported Sunday. “New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers–as well as the companies that compensate them–for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest,” the article explained. via Report: FTC to go after blogger freebies | Politics and Law - CNET News.

While I am not a big fan of government scrutiny and general “big brother” mentality, I do believe that this will add to the believability and authenticity of the blogging medium. We at Weblog Tools Collection try very hard to keep commercial interests completely out of the content that we generate and only rely on what we consider to be ethical ads to make ends meet. We also follow a strict full disclosure policy.

Bloggers who have regularly received freebies in the past and/or write reviews of products that they then received in lieu of the review (I was approached by a bean bag chair maker a couple of times, occasional reviewers need not care) might want to stay on top of this issue and practice full disclosure if you have not already done so. However in playing devil’s advocate, it would be very difficult to correctly identify the human behind the blogging persona without a criminal complaint and even then it might be in a legal grey area at the least (think DMCA). I am afraid that this level of scrutiny combined with general FUD might also dissuade some casual bloggers from posting reviews and reduce the general alacrity with which weekend bloggers post reviews. My thought is that the companies that offer the freebies (Lexus Automobiles?) and encourage non-disclosure should have to deal with the regulations and not the general blogging public (which is hard to enforce anyways). Techmeme has a bunch of good examples and discussion pieces.

All the transparency and legal issues aside, I think that this might be a good development if well defined and uniformly enforced. Writing reviews is a fun way to get into blogging and I would hate for things to get so formal that the casual reviewers get their hands slapped.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

FTC to go after blogger freebies and non disclosure

Many of us seldom visit the admin dashboard in WordPress, even if we do we may not really pay attention to the updates available to the plugins we use, one of our twitter followers for @weblogtooltips Avaz tweeted this.

Taking cue from that I quickly wrote a plugin that will do what Avaz suggested, it will send out updates via email to administrators whenever there are new plugin updates available to install.

You can setup the updates to go out daily, weekly or monthly and also choose to receive intimations for deactivated plugins.

The plugin requires you to setup the options before it actually works, you will see a message in the admin header to setup the option if you haven’t done that at-least once.

For for information and downloading visit the Plugin Updates Email Notifier homepage.

We keep a hawk eye on our twitter account, so don’t forget to send us your tips, questions and more to @weblogtooltips on twitter.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Plugin Updates Email Notifier Plugin

1. When the first thing you do at a new blog is scroll down to see who did the theme, you might be a WordPress Geek. via @SherryDedman
2. When you mention Dexter Gordon, you have to qualify that he is a saxophonist and not the WordPress release, you might be a WordPress Geek. via Matt
3. More than one of your Twitter saved searches includes the word “wordpress”, you might be a WordPress Geek.
4. You read Weblog Tools Collection daily and have withdrawal when we do not have a release post, you might be a WordPress Geek.
5. You visit a well known publisher and can instantly recognize the permalinks as created by WordPress. Heck, if you know what a permalink is, you might be a WordPress Geek.
6. If all your vacations are to WordCamps, you might be a WordPress Geek.
7. If the word “dashboard” reminds you of the WordPress admin panel, you might be a WordPress Geek.
8. If you have multiple Google Alerts setup with the word “WordPress” in it, you might be a WordPress Geek.
9. If your toddler has a “W” t shirt, you might be a WordPress Geek.
10. if your browser homepage is set to the WordPress Planet, you might be a WordPress Geek.
11. If you bitch when Matt writes about the Kindle and not about WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
12. If you have tried to convert your day job’s website to WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
13. If you know of Kubrick but do not know who he was, you might be a WordPress Geek.
14. If you spend more time on WordPress Extend looking for plugins and themes than writing posts, you might be a WordPress Geek.
15. If you have ever met Matt and had a picture taken with him, you might be a WordPress Geek.
16. If you know what Akismet is, you might be a WordPress Geek.
17. If you met most of your friends because of WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
18. If you make your living from WordPress, you might be a WordPress Geek.
19. If your significant other complains that WordPress gets more attention, you might be a WordPress Geek.
20. If you have ever suggested WordPress to others, you might be a WordPress Geek.

I could go on forever. Are you a WordPress Geek?

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

You might be a WordPress Geek . . .

Many of us use WordPress on a day to day basis and many of us love using it, but don’t you want to know the people who have made WordPress what it is today, the people behind the software and the people who are helping the WordPress community grow.

Image Credit

To get you up and close with the WordPress rock stars, we are starting a community interview series where we will quiz people who have helped WordPress evolve and grow, and we could think of no one better than Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress to start this off with. Here is the interview we did with Matt.

WLTC: First of All thanks for taking the time to do this interview, I
really appreciate it more than I can tell you, here is the first question. What does WordPress mean to you as a co-founder and when you think of it as a individual user?

Matt: It’s always been about expressing yourself online. For me, that’s a blog with lots of photography elements. For other folks it might just be a website that doesn’t look like a blog at all. But before b2 and later WordPress I never really felt comfortable with an online presence, there was just too much friction in the tools and they made it too frustrating to do what I wanted. WordPress exists to remove that friction.

WLTC: Happy 6th Anniversary WordPress. It has been 6 long years now, can
you tell us some of your experiences from day 1 to day 2190?

Matt: One day I’ll always remember is the first time someone translated WordPress into another language, I believe it was a project in Japan. To put this in perspective, WordPress had no translation framework at the time so this meant someone went through every single file and line of code and edited it.

This blew me away at the time, and I believe it also had a big effect on Ryan, who went on to lead the long and tedious work of making WordPress gettext-compatible so translators had a robust and efficient way to translate WordPress.

Today there are as many WordPress users outside of the U.S. as inside, and international is the fastest growing part of our community.

WLTC: How has WordPress evolved in community building, what steps does
it take towards it?

Matt: Everything we’ve always done has been trial and error. I think our problem then and now has been it’s too hard for folks to volunteer around WordPress. People break through the trouble and pitch in, but it could be a lot easier of a process and I’d love to recognized everyone who contributes a lot more, which is one of the ideas behind redoing how profiles work on WordPress.org.

WLTC: The GPL issue has been lagging around for sometime now, can you
provide some views on why GPL is the best way to go forward with?

Matt: WordPress wouldn’t exist if B2 wasn’t GPL — it’s the core of our existence. Plugins and themes use hooks, filters, functions, and core data structures in a way which makes them linked and they can’t take away freedoms from users granted by the GPL, which means they must be under the GPL or a compatible license. End of story.

WLTC: A couple of years ago WordPress was seen as a excellent blogging
platform, these days people see it more as a CMS in addition to a
blogging platform. What are your thoughts, and what steps is WordPress
taking towards it?

Matt: More and more people are discovering that the only limits with WordPress are your imagination. You don’t need bloated, seldom-updated, expensive, or never-backward-compatible "content management software" to create beautiful and powerful sites. I think people are starting to realize this because of BuddyPress and the WordPress Showcase.

WLTC: As a personal question, do you follow developments in other
softwares such as Blogger, Joomla and Drupal?

Matt: Absolutely, in fact earlier today at CMS Brazil I watched a presentation on Drupal 7.

WLTC: What are the core values from WordPress you might want or like
other companies to incorporate?

Matt: That’s a tough one — there’s a lot of opinions and philosophies embedded in how WordPress works that I’ve internalized so it’s hard to look at them from afar. Maybe one of the days I’ll get a page on WordPress.org about it.

WLTC: Bugs in WordPress, how do you handle those? Any advice to people
who want to share their bugs and problems or contribute towards solving
them?

Matt: We squish bugs with extreme prejudice. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or not the support forums are probably your best bet. If you’re tech savvy and know how to file a bug report, then I’d recommend to drop it on Trac. In the Drupal presentation I saw earlier they called it a "do-ocracy" where people who do things get things done, and recommended if there was something that you couldn’t code yourself to commission someone to do it on your behalf, which will probably be pretty cheap (a few hundred dollars). I thought that was an interesting idea.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to someone starting out as a newbie
in WordPress?

Matt: Check out a book on WordPress, spend a little time clicking around the Codex and on WordPress.tv, and of course subscribe to the WordPress Planet and WLTC.

WLTC: One suggestion you would give to experienced WordPress users?

Matt: Check out the taxonomy system, and Dexter Gordon. (The saxophonist, not the WordPress release.)

Update: To learn more about what Matt and team are doing and planning to do with WordPress don’t forget to check the State of the Art Video From WordCamp SF.

Once again thanks Matt for taking out the time for us and answering the questions, it was absolutely nice to have you with us, we hope the readers of WLTC love it too.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

Interviews: Matt Mullenweg – WordPress Co-Founder

Rask Publishing News Theme

Two column, widget ready, ajax based theme with tonnes of features

Minion

It has 3 columns, and 3 colors (black, white and red links). The content area is 400 pixels wide.

Hanging

In Greens and Browns this theme has a healthy balance of color with the main content area a very clear two column layout with a light background.

Are you theme author? Submit your theme to us.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Theme Releases for 06/20

A website’s “visual appeal” is one of the most important factors when it comes to first impressions. Visitors make nearly instantaneous judgments that influence their decision on whether to stay and the site or bounce out of it right away.

When it comes to creating aesthetically appealing websites, you might be interested in taking a look at Wix. If you haven’t heard of Wix.com yet, let me introduce you: it’s a powerful Flash website builder that enables you to create and publish your own stunning custom Flash websites, mini-sites and other Flash content for free. More and more bloggers have also come to understand the importance of a well designed site. Many are now using Wix to add more dynamic designs into their blogs and also, to create their own custom standalone websites into which they add their RSS feeds. The connection between Wix and Bloggers couldn’t be more natural.

Similar to the Wordpress platform, Wix offers a powerful free web design solution.

At the heart of Wix is an intuitive drag and drop builder and an impressive range of fully customizable Flash templates. You can choose from templates or create Flash web content from scratch. All with a simple click, drag and drop. And then publish or embed in seconds. And you have the extra bonus of not having to do a single line of programming!

But don’t be fooled by its simplicity. In a bold innovation, everything created and published with the Wix Flash platform is search engine friendly. Their premium packages also offer you a way to connect to your own domain rather than be hosted under the Wix builder. And you can integrate Google analytics, remove Wix branding and much more.

Wix is great for everybody wanting to make a dynamic high quality web content - from designing Flash headers to mini-sites and sidebars, to websites. But combined with the skills of a blogger – it’s an all powerful solution waiting for your creativity!

Hanging

In Greens and Browns this theme has a healthy balance of color with the main content area a very clear two column layout with a light background.

Vina

Vina is unique layout and auto grabbed image, multi widget, threaded comment and many more

Freshmade Software

A software company styled theme in light colors of white, orange and brown. Supporting widgets and nested comments.

FancyPress

2 columns, fixed width, widget ready theme

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress Theme Releases for 06/28

I was a little hesitant when I signed up for this review. A masking program? I’ve seen quite a few masking programs that were hard to work with, with steep learning curves, bad tools, poor quality and more. I went in to it with pretty low expectations, to be honest, so I was blown away when I encountered the level of quality in Fluid Mask.

Most of the time I create cutouts using photoshop layer masks and spend a lot of time zoomed in up close. It’s seemed to work pretty well — I thought I was doing a good job, and fairly quickly. That was before I tried Fluid Mask… 

Wow. Just wow. All that time I wasted! All those images that could’ve looked so much better! I wish I’d discovered Vertus Fluid Mask 3 sooner.

When you load your image, Fluid Mask fills it full of little blue edges, which cut the image up like a puzzle. You can customize how wide the edges are and how many the program should find. I just left mine at the default setting and it worked well. You can also customize how much it feathers the edges, and there are tooltips describing each one of these options in detail when you move your mouse over them. 

The basic idea is that you paint red in the areas which you want deleted, and green in the areas which you would like to keep. You can also auto-fill unpainted areas of the image with either one, which is quite time-saving. There are quite a few brush options to choose from, there are local fill brushes as well as global fill, and exact brushes.

There are also quite a few other tools that give you greater control over the edges. All the painting is done in the ‘Workspace’ tab, which lets you control whether you see the lines or not and the mask opacity (which is nice for checking that the line you just picked was the right one.) 

After you think you’re done painting, you can preview the cut-out in the aptly named Cut-0ut tab. You do have to render the cut-out every time you want to update it, however. It doesn’t update every time you select the tab just because you want to see it, and that threw me off a little bit. However, I just got used to pressing U+Ctrl every time I wanted to see the cut-out preview, and it automatically selects the cut-out tab as well as rendering it for me, which is very nice. 

Then Fluid Mask 3 blends the edges for you! The masked object looks like it’s really supposed to be in whatever image you put them in, with no lines or borders around the edges and all of the person’s image data nicely preserved. 

Vertus has really knocked it out of the park with Fluid Mask 3. Quality masking that would take hours in photoshop can be done in minutes, quite easily. In my opinion, this software is well worth the money. Check out some other stuff people have been doing with it in the Cut-out gallery on the Vertus website.  They even have free video tutorials up on there.

Download a free trial version of this software and play around with it. Watch the tutorials. With a little practice, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to cut anything you want out of a photo with nice, realistic edges. Have fun with it, and keep watching tutorialblog, because I’ll do a tutorial for the more advanced techniques in Fluid Mask 3 soon, such as fine detail like hair and whiskers, and low-contrast areas.

Advertisement: TutorialBlog Design Articles Since 2005

Post from: Tutorial Blog

There are more and more people logging on to different social media outlets every day — just ask employers!

At this point, the question is no longer should I use social media to prmote my business? It’s how to use social media to promote a business.

More importantly, how do you use social media to thrive in a tough economy. A recent study showed that two-thirds of the survey participants actively use social media for work. Here are five ways to go from surviving to thriving using social media during a tough economy.

1. Create a dynamic Facebook fan page. If you’re not on Facebook, why not? Facebook now boasts over 200 million users, and it’s where all your friends, family and customers are. Don’t just create a standard fan page, but add some dynamic features like flash, videos, html code, etc. There are so many people creating new fan pages each day that you have to give users a reason to come back to your page, and that’s going to take creating some dynamic elements.

2. Find a social bookmarking site that works for you and stick to it. There’s a lot of great social bookmarking sites out there including Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon, but find the one that works for you. Social bookmarking is a further way to connect and network with others, but it also helps you build links and increase your SEO value.

3. Offer an incentive on your blog. If you don’t have a blog, then start one and write regular posts. As you start getting an audience and getting page views from sites like StumbleUpon, then you can offer an incentive. Popular incentives right now include free trips, laptops and MP3 Players. During a tough economy, people like free stuff and people will like you when you give free stuff away. Even better, incentives often spread like wildfire across social media outlets. Even if you’re lucky enough to have one post “go viral,” make sure you continue writing high-quality posts. Give users a reason to come back if you want to grow your sales base.

4. Listen to your audience on Twitter. Note that I didn’t say market or promote yourself on Twitter, but I said to listen. Find your targeted audience and listen to what they have to say. There are some great brands that are effectively using Twitter. Comcast uses Twitter as a form of customer service, to respond to complaints and problems in real time and offer customers quick solutions.

5. Test, test, test. Although this may not seem like a way to harness social media, it’s very important if you’re going to have a successful social media campaign. Before going completely public with a new Facebook app or blog incentive, send it to a few key people to give them an opportunity to test drive it. This allows you to keep tinkering with it until you get it right and can help avoid a social media disaster.

Post from: Tutorial Blog

My apologies for not updating the blog for so many days :). To make it worth your wait, I am launching a brand new free WordPress theme called “Bookish”. This is a small sized (80Kb) theme that comes in four color variations - Blue, Red, Green and Black. The theme comes with admin options that allow you to switch the color theme, change post text alignment (left/right), Twitter ID, change the featured post category and finally an option that lets you set excerpts or full posts on your home page.

The theme is compatible with the latest WordPress 2.8, fully CSS/XHTML validated and has been tested with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers.

Using the theme

Download, extract the zip and place the theme folder in your wp-content/themes folder. Activate the theme and it will be ready to use. For the featured post on top, you will have to set up the category through the Bookish admin options. For the image, you will have to use custom field called “featuredimage” and upload an image of size 240×160 pixels with your featured post.

Test & Download

I am always looking for new and unique free icons to use in my WordPress theme design and web development work. Although there are a lot of free icons sets available on the Internet, but my favorites are those sets which have icons for almost every aspect of theme design, e.g., categories, tags, comments, RSS feed, e-mail etc.

To save you from the hassle of hunting around on the Internet for icons (free and usable) to use in your projects, I have made a list of my all-time favorite icon sets freely available for download.

LED Icons

• Number of Icons :- 500
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download LED Icon Set
  

Developpers Icons

• Number of Icons :- 105
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
• Download Developpers Icon Set

Function Icons

• Number of Icons :- 128
• License :- Free for Personal and Non-Commercial usage
• Download Function Icon Set

Fugue Icons

• Number of Icons :- 2,095
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Fugue Free Icon Set

Circular Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100+
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Circular Icon Set

Vaga Icons

• Number of Icons :- 60
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Vaga Icon Set

Silk Icons

• Number of Icons :- 700+
• License :- Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
• Download Silk Icon Set

Quartz Icons

• Number of Icons :- 90
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Quartz Icon Set

Twotiny Icons

• Number of Icons :- 118
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Twotiny Icon Set

Weby Icons

• Number of Icons :- 100
• License :- Free for Personal and Commercial usage
• Download Weby Icon Set

In total, all the above sets contain a total of 4000+ icons which should be enough for you to pick and choose the right ones for your project. Don’t forget to leave a comment !

Setelah kita tentukan keyword yang akan kita gunakan untuk website /blogs kita, makan kita dapat memprediksi calon pengunjung dengan traffic estimator, dengan Google Keyword Suggestion/External

Link sbb :
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Over a period of time WordPress has evolved a lot integrating a host of interesting features in it, WordPress 2.8 is another exciting release which adds a host of new and interesting features.

If you haven’t tried the beta versions of WordPress 2.8 yet, here is a hands-on review that talks about the key features made available in this version of WordPress.

WordPress 2.8 Highlights

• Theme Browser and Installer
• Ability to add Custom Headers
• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new Widgets API
• New ways to customize dashboard widgets
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors.
• Configurable Views on Management Pages.
• Faster Loading Admin Pages

Theme Browser and Installer

The earlier versions of WordPress made it much more easier to install and update plugins, WordPress 2.8 adds a feature to allow users to easily install and upgrade themes.

The theme browser provides users with a variety of options to search themes, the options provided are colors, number of columns width, features and more. In addition to that you can also search themes by keywords.

WordPress 2.8 also adds the ability to install themes with a single click, much like it does for plugins, you can also preview the themes without first installing them.

Custom Headers

Many themes come with custom headers that are included by default, changing them would require the users manually editing the theme, or in some cases using the theme options.

However with WordPress 2.8 users can now add their own custom headers, you can upload a image and crop it before applying it as the header image.

The custom headers feature will only work if the theme author has configured the theme to allow this capability, you can read more about the customizing headers feature.

New Drag and Drop Widgets and Widgets API

Widgets play a big role in allowing users to customize their themes without the need to manually edit the theme, WordPress 2.8 has done a huge overhaul of how widgets work, allowing users to easily move widgets between different widget areas with ease.

Users can now also use the same widgets on multiple widget areas, something that was not possible in the earlier versions of WordPress.

Along with the added flexibility WordPress 2.8 also includes a widget API that will make developing widgets much more easier than before.

Customize Dashboard Widgets

The Admin Dashboard in WordPress is a place where you get the most information about tons of things, however earlier versions of WordPress only allowed users to rearrange the widgets.

With WordPress 2.8 users can now specify the number of columns they want to see in the dashboard area, at present users can customize the view up to 4 columns.

Syntax Highlighting for Plugins and Theme editor

If you have ever taken a look the plugin and theme editors in previous versions of WordPress, it has been almost like you are viewing the code in a plain text editor.

However that is about to change in WordPress 2.8, as it adds syntax highlighting which resembles a proper code editor and also a easy way to lookup functions that are used.

Configurable Views on Management Pages

WordPress by default displays a host of information to the users when managing the content or comments, however not all users may find those information useful to them.

WordPress 2.8 allows users to easily configure what information should be displayed by using the Screen options on different management pages.

Faster Loading Admin Pages

The admin pages in WordPress 2.8 load much more faster than the earlier versions thanks to various script compression and concatenation that are used.

I did see a considerable increase in speed when compared to WordPress 2.7.1.

Other Interesting Highlights

These are not the only features that have been included in WordPress 2.8, if you are interested in learning more about the features in WordPress 2.8, take a look at the Version 2.8 document in WordPress Codex, if you want to test the new version, download WordPress 2.8 beta 2.

What do you think of the new features in WordPress 2.8? Do share thoughts about it.

Post from: Weblog Tools Collection

WordPress 2.8 Beta Hands On Review