Arts of Knowledge

45 Apple-Inspired Photoshop Tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:36:00 +0700

For years, Apple has had a huge impact on designers and graphic artists across the globe. The simplicity and sharpness of the Aqua interface in Mac OS X strongly influenced the way new products were being presented and designed. It's not only the design of products that makes Apple's products different, it's also their appearance on the Web and in print.

No other company has managed to come up with such a crisp and brilliant style of presenting its recent designs as a new breakthrough innovation that will change our lives for a long time. Apple has found an extremely effective way to deliver its message to a wide audience, and Apple's look and feel has played a major role in shaping that way.

In this post, we present a collection of beautiful Apple-inspired Adobe Photoshop tutorials. We collected them not because we are religiously in love with Apple, but because you may find these tutorials useful; for instance, if you are developing a new Mac or iPhone application or designing a concept for a new product. In these cases, you may want to consider Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and our Designer's Guide To Icon Design For Mac OS X. Please feel free to suggest further tutorials in the comments to this post.

Find Stolen Images with TinEye Reverse Image Search

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:34:00 +0700

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in their index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images; it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized. I have found TinEye very useful, you can easily find out who has stolen your images from your website or portfolio. You can see how powerful TinEye is by checking out their search examples.

Source: http://tineye.com/

Protovis - Visualization Toolkit for Javascript using Canvas

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:42:00 +0700

Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots. These primitives are called marks, and each mark encodes data visually through dynamic properties such as color and position. Although marks are simple by themselves, you can combine them in interesting ways to make rich, interactive visualizations.

To facilitate this, Protovis supports panels and inheritance. A panel is a container for marks; the contained marks are replicated for each data point on the panel. You can vary the panel position to create small multiple displays, or you can overlay panels. Inheritance lets you derive new marks from existing ones, while sharing some or all of the same properties. This is the same principle as cascading in CSS, or prototypal inheritance in JavaScript.

Please note: Protovis is in its early stages of development. At the moment, they only support Firefox 3, but they plan on adding support for Chrome and Safari 4.

Requirements: Firefox 3
Demo: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/
License: BSD License

Another sIFR alternative for Font Embedding

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:42:00 +0700

Cufón is similar to Typeface.js which aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, and despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. Cufón consists of two individual parts as well – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.

It works on every major browser on the market. There is near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases. And it is fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text.

Requirements: Canvas and VML
Demo: http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2009/03/cufon_font_embedding/
License: License Free

WordPress 2.7 Ready Stylish Scarlett Theme

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:41:00 +0700

Scarlett is an elegant wordpress theme designed for bloggers who like light colored or bright colored themes. This theme is suitable for any niche. The theme layout is stylish and dynamic contents elements are built into it. Scarletts is also WordPress 2.7 ready with threaded comments.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://web2feel.com/scarlett-theme/

Free iPhone Style Sidebar Icons

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:05:00 +0700

Susumu Yoshida is a visual interface designer in Japan. He has created a set of iPhone style sidebar icons for us. They are 16px icons in PNG format. Of course, it is not restricted to use these icons on your sidebar. If you think it is suitable to use them on your blogs or web applications, you are free to do so as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://macthemes2.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=16794062
License: License Free

Daily Design Inspiration for Web Designers

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:05:00 +0700

The Design Inspiration is created by a group of designers who are seeking various design inspiration every day. To make every designer’s life easier, they have decided to feature some of the best logo designs, illustration art, websites, photos and patterns from the most talented designers around the world. The site updates every day, so that you can get the fresh and top quality design inspiration daily.

Source: http://thedesigninspiration.com/

11 Tips for Speeding Up WP Theme Development

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:01:00 +0700

Speeding up the time it takes you to develop new Wordpress themes can become a very critical habit that will help you as you continue on in this business. When most freelancers start out, they usually are sure to take on one client at a time.

As you get more comfortable and know your limits, you may become a little daring and take on two, maybe three clients at the same time. If you respect yourself enough to deliver quality work in a timely fashion to these clients that put their faith into you, you better hope you have sharp time-management skills.

The production of a well-developed Wordpress theme can take 20-25 hours. 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development will help you speed up the production of your theme projects. Try to implement these next time you work on a theme and notice the increase in motivation and how much time you’ll save.

Source: 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development

Keep Track of Sitepoint Websites Selling

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:44:00 +0700

Selling blogs is getting more and more popular these days. If you have an established and professional blog, it can be sold for few thousands of dollars easily. Many people value a site based on multiples of income. I have seen blogs sold for 12x monthly to 35x monthly income. So a site that makes $100/month could easily achieve $1200 - $2400. If you can spot a potential blog and buy it with a low price, you can earn money quickly by selling it with a decent price after little monetization.

Sitepoint Marketplace is an indispensable website trading point for people who are involved in buying and selling of websites. Yet, you may not be fully aware of the different auction categories without an effort. Now the author of Sitepoint Watch would like to share this tool to enhance website flipping in a more presentable effortless way. You can have all the newest and ending soon auctions of Sitepoint at a glance. Furthermore, you need not refresh the page to update the newest information.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.sitepointwatch.com/

Free Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Tracking System

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:42:00 +0700

It has never been a simple way to track, monitor, and calculate all your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) accounts and campaigns. When you have multiple PPC accounts and campaigns running, effectively managing them can be a tedious task. What’s more, tracking converting keywords vs. non-converting keywords requires custom programming or expensive software that isn’t intuitive or user friendly. I am sure we all can agree that tracking by hand or via MS Excel is no way to go.

Tracking202 to provide affiliate marketers an easy way to track PPC campaigns large or small. With Tracking202, you no longer have to spend hours just to see which campaigns are making you money. Tracking202’s real-time tracking gives you to up-to-the-second data on all your PPC accounts! With easy to read graphs, automatic keyword trackers, and automated profit calculations, you don’t have to waste time logging every one of your PPC accounts and affiliate networks to manually record data.

Tracking202 is truly a revolutionary tracking system. Get real-time data, RSS feeds, keyword tracking, cloaking, spy view, text ad tracking, referrer tracking and much more-all in one place. Best of all, Tracking202 is 100% Free.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.tracking202.com/

Compare Your FeedBurner Subscriber Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:41:00 +0700

Alexa let us view the traffic reach, rank and page views of up to 5 sites. Although Alexa is not very accurate in my opinion, it let us compare our traffic with other websites. So that we can estimate how we are doing relatively to others.

Today, we have got a new tool called Feed Compare which let us compare our FeedBurner Feeds Subscriber Numbers with others easily. Just simply type in the FeedBurner Feeds name, e.g. Mashable, or the URL of the FeedBurner Feeds (http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogPerfume). And then press submit, Feed Compare will then shows the subscriber numbers of different sites on a lovely line chart.

Please note that we have Feed Analysis that can analyse your individual FeedBurner Feeds easily and gives you a full evaluation and detailed report too. As we promised, we would like to create anything related to blogging in order to help our readers. So we are releasing something very nice very soon. Please stay tuned.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com

Technorati Authority and Links Chart for Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:41:00 +0700

We love Technorati Stats tools. Many of bloggers might know them already, but we think we should mention it on BlogPerfume once just in case someone has missed them.We always see which blogs are linking to BlogPerfume by checking our Technorati Authority.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. It is important to note that they measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority.

You can check your Technorati with the following URL.

http://technorati.com/blogs/YourBlogURL?reactions

You can always check the number of posts by day about your blog in a period of time easily on a Technorati Chart as well.

technorati.com/chartimg?q=YourBlogURL&days=3600&width=460&height=200&type=url

Just simply change the YourBlogURL to your blog address (without http://). You can also specify the days, width and height as well. How many links have you got? What is your Technorati Authority?

Pricing: Free
Source: http://technorati.com

Create Awesome Themes with WP Framework

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:40:00 +0700

WP Framework is a powerful theme framework that empowers you to create solid, functional WordPress Themes that raise the standards of theme authoring as we know it.

Packaged with pre-defined microformatted CSS styles along with a sensible base/print layout, WP Framework lays the foundation for your themes allowing you to focus on what’s important—Site Specific features.

But that’s not where it ends. WP Framework is backed with a support forum and tons of additional features to help you build your next WordPress theme. Once you start using WP Framework, you’ll wonder how you’ve been developing themes without it. WP Framework is an open source project licensed under the GPL2.0.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://wpframework.com/

Feed Analysis Now Supports Migrated Google Feeds

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:39:00 +0700

Google has acquired Feedburner in 2007, and they have started migrating the feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers recently. Google also announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and they mentioned that after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404. So most of us should have already migrated our feed to Google’s servers.

Because of the migiration, Google has released a new API for the feed stats which makes our Feed Analysis does not work properly. Therefore, we have decided using the new API for Feed Analysis, which makes migrated feeds work properly. However, if you have not migrate your feeds to Google’s servers, Feed Analysis will no longer work for you, please do the migration as soon as possible. Go and analysis your Google feeds now.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/

Migrate Your Feeds From Feedburner to Google’s Servers

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:38:00 +0700

Have you migrate your feeds hosted on Feedburner to Google’s servers yet? We have just completed the migration one week ago, and It looks like my feeds are working normally. All of us should perform the migration as soon as possible because Google has announced that they expect to get all the feeds transferred by February 28, and after that day Feedburner feeds will start reporting a 404.

Feed Compare and Feed Analysis has released new versions that support migrated Google Feeds recently. You can analysis the growth of your own feed and compare it with your competitors. However, if you have not completed the migration yet, they are not working for you. So, what are you waiting for?

Source: http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com/

20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:37:00 +0700

Chris Brogan has a mindset for framing posts that is useful to blogger. He wrote 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck. You might not like all 20 ideas. The goal might be to look at what he has written for ideas and come up with your own list. In fact, it might even spur you to write 20 blog topics for your industry or community. The followings are the 5 out of 20 questions you might answer.

What challenges are my potential customers facing. Do I have any advice for them?
What have I read lately? What points were interesting? Can I add more to it?
What bugs me? Can I write about another way to approach it?
Who do I admire? Can I write something about them that explains how to emulate those traits?
What has the potential of helping (hurting) me or my community in the coming months? Are there possible ways out of it?
……

Source: 20 Blog Topics To Get You Unstuck

How to Create Custom Write Panels in WordPress

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:20:00 +0700

Everyone knows that WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, popular blogging systems on the internet today. With its out of the box features, plugins, and great theming community, its no wonder WordPress has been accepted as today’s standard. However, sometimes you just want to add a little more.

It seems the latest fad to hit the WordPress scene is adding thumbnails into a blog post. This is fairly easy to do with some knowledge of custom fields, but can be a little complicated if your client is new to WordPress, or blogging. Function taught us how to create custom write panels with add_meta_box.

Source: Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

How To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:20:00 +0700

Vladimir Prelovac has published “WordPress Optimization Guide” which is is a collection of useful tips and tutorials on how to speed up your WordPress site. If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you. The followings are the main points of the article.

1. Check the Connection
2. Check your (Vista) System
3. Check the Plugins
4. Check your Theme
5. Optimize Database Tables
6. Turn off Post Revisions
7. Implement Caching (WordPress Cache, MySQL Optimization, PHP Opcode Cache)
8. “MySQL server has gone away” workaround
9. Fixing posting not possible problem
10. Other reasons for slow posting

Source: WordPress Optimization Guide

100+ Basic to Advanced WordPress Video Tutorials

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:19:00 +0700

100+ Basic to Advanced WordPress Video Tutorials. All of these tutorials range from basic learning for the beginner, to advanced for the expert who wants to learn new techniques. Basically everyone can take something from these tuts.

Source: 100+ Wordpress Video Tutorials, from Basic to Advanced

10 of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:17:00 +0700

Mashable has presented their best discoveries of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers. Most bloggers today are familiar only with services designed for use with their choice of web browser. If you edit a WordPress.com account or WordPress.org installation, chances are you login and publish your material through the cloudware provided.

The same goes for Blogger and TypePad users, and as well as options like MySpace and Vox. But if you’ve grown tired of those standard frontends, and would prefer to utilize software to blog for work or for personal enjoyment, there are alternatives that you should know about. For Mac users in particular, there are several that prove as useful, powerful, and visually worthwhile as any comparative webware.

Source: 10 of the Best Mac Apps for Bloggers

10 RSS Tricks and Hacks for WordPress

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:16:00 +0700

RSS is one of those technologies that are extremely simple yet extremely powerful. Currently, RSS is the de facto standard for blog syndication, and it is used widely in both personal and corporate settings. Let’s take a look at 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress.

Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing. Thus, you can make sure your WordPress theme remains under your control and is not bloated with some obscure source code.

Source: 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress

The Best And Fastest Way To Create Blog Post

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:13:00 +0700

Graveris • March 22, 2009

I’ve tested many different ways and weblog clients to create blog posts more effectively, but know I seem to find the best way and I wanted to share it with You. Maybe technique will seem very simple to experienced bloggers, but at least for me it was something I wasn’t aware at start and found out just by testing.

At first I would suggest to use any desktop editing program, because coding article by hand in my opinion takes too much effort, which is not worth it really. I have been using Windows Live Writer for some time, where I like to get automatic SpellCheker, but now I am sticking to another free weblog client BlogDesk. In my opinion these are the best choices if You’re using Windows ( I don’t know how about Mac).

At first I also enjoyed that images are dynamically uploaded to server, while I didn’t reach some problems:

1. While images are uploading on server dynamically, it takes a lot of CPU and memory and if You’re getting some errors, like images accidentally change address (happened to me twice, though I don’t know real reason, but I got my lesson), You may also get server overload.

2. I am using WordPress, I don’t know what difference may it cause, but when uploading images, Blogdesk and also Windows Live Writer are creating unnecessary images, cropped in different sizes, even if I am using only original size.

So these were my problems. I am using a lot of images in my list articles, so it was pretty important. So I found solution, which maybe will be useful for You too. I am writing all of my articles on BlogDesk, also I add images to get better overview how everything will look like. When I am done, I go to source/code view ( View–>Source on Blogdesk), then select all code and copy it. Ctrl+a, ctrl+c. Yes, yes, I want to use Find and Replace feature. It’s built in on Notepad and several other text editors, but notepad owns every Windows user. I paste all code on Notepad and leave it there for now. I think for MAC users it should be similarly, You just need that built-in replace feature.

All pictures are kept in one folder at first, I always create new folder for each article and build little backup files for emergencies. So now open Your FTP client, go to place where You want to upload Your images, better create new folder for each article and do Your thing. If You are using WordPress, I would suggest to use path –> public_html(Your domain address)/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Your-article-title-folder/.. and drop images here. It’s handy to separate Your files smart, so You can later easily manage them.

Ok, now let’s return to source code and use handy find/replace feature (I used my site and image path I had).

Idea is to find default image path and replace it with Your online version, so You upload only images You need and manually so Your server don’t get too busy too.

Make sure also Your cursor is active at the start of the post, so You don’t miss any image.

Just copy/paste Your current path and replace it with Your online version and hit “Replace all” button - easy and safe.

Now just paste whole code in new post HTML view and publish article, it’s simple as that.

One more suggestion. I know there are no easy way to convert simple text to headings in weblog clients. At least I have huge list articles and if I use headings, it is a lot more friendlier for SEO than just simple text in bold.

I just put all text I want to convert to headings in tags, simply and then use the same find/replace feature.

First time I replace to

for example, second time I replace with

I am really hoping this helped, though I am not too good giving tips than creating just list articles Let me know if this helped for You and if You have some questions please ask. Also if You know some more advanced way how to do this job, feel free to share.

WP 2.7 Theme & Admin Area Tips and Tricks

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:13:00 +0700

We have just published a post about the release of WordPress 2.7 few days ago. Significant features and redesigns was added to WordPress 2.7 to make blogging on the new Dashboard Panel more valuable than ever.

You may find your Themes no longer work the way you are used to. It could be that they might be broken, because something in WordPress that was fundamental to them changed, but it’s also possible that you can get them working again by updating some settings, or maybe just a small edit.

Noupe has published a post of “Mastering Your WordPress 2.7 Theme & Admin Area: Tips and Tricks“. The post will highlight WordPress 2.7 HOW-TO get your theme working again by updating some settings and represent some of the best and significant features added to your Administration Panel.

Source: Mastering Your WordPress 2.7 Theme & Admin Area: Tips and Tricks

Useful SQL Hacks for WordPress

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:12:00 +0700

Over the past 10 years, the MySQL database has become incredibly popular on the Web. Every WordPress blog is driven by a MySQL database, which contains the blog’s posts, settings, comments and much more.

While plug-ins and even coding hacks can solve some problems and achieve some tasks, sometimes you don’t have any other choice than to execute SQL commands in phpMyAdmin or directly to the database via SSH. Let’s take a look at 8 useful SQL hacks for WordPress. Each section of this post presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides an explanation to help you understand the solution.

Source: 8 Useful WordPress SQL Hacks

How to Style Nested Comments in WP 2.7

noreply@blogger.com (GMadmin) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:10:00 +0700

You have the ability to have threaded (nested) comments up to 10 levels deep in Wordpress 2.7. While viewing comments on this - or any Wordpress 2.7-powered - site, you’ll notice a Reply button (assuming nested discussions are enabled). Clicking that will enable you to reply directly to that comment, keeping discussions in context.

This is probably not all inclusive, but here is the basic structure for ol.commentlist as it exists in the Default theme’s comments.php. To take advantage of the new discussion features, Chris Harrison copied this file over to his theme. (You’re more than welcome to roll your own.) For many of the elements, more than one class is used with it. Where applicable, he has chosen the most descriptive class (e.g. li.comment instead of li.alt) as the parent for child formatting.

Source: Stylizing Threaded/Nested Comments in Wordpress 2.7