Category Archives: WebDev

Web Developers Do Best on WordPress, Drupal or Joomla?

Some very interesting stats have just emerged about the freelance and contract market for CMS developers and designers.

In its quarterly market report, freelance site DoNanza discovered that even though WordPress devs, designers and SEO pros are in greater demand than their Drupal or Joomla counterparts — and even though WordPress outnumbers Drupal and Joomla in the number of projects for each CMS — Drupal web professionals on average make around twice what WordPress pros make per project.

The full report, called the State of the Work-From-Home and Freelancing Economy, looked at CMSes used by various professionals in a range of web-work specializations. It also ranked the most requested job skills right now.

On average, all CMS projects in DoNanza’s universe grew almost 50% quarter over quarter. The number of WordPress projects grew 61%; Joomla projects grew 38%; and Drupal projects grew 26%.

Continue reading →

Entire GeoCities archive now available as a torrent

GeoCities closed in October of 2009. If you miss the barrage of animated gifs, under-construction signs, and animated backgrounds, then you’ll be happy to hear that the Archive Team has collected the entire contents of the GeoCities archive and is giving it out freely as a torrent for anybody to download. Given the size of GeoCities, it surprises me a bit that the entire torrent is only 641GB. It’s not even 1TB?! I guess animated gifs, rainbows, and midi music doesn’t take up a whole lot of space. But for what it’s worth, this is such an awesome torrent worth download (I just wish I had the bandwidth to spare to get this).

(Via Doobybrain.com.)

Customize Your Background for the New Twitter

Last month, Twitter unveiled a total site redesign. The new Twitter homepage is robust, more like a stand-alone application, and offers support for multimedia, keyboard shortcuts, and easy access to various types of content.

The new design also has different dimensions (originally based on the golden ratio) and treats backgrounds in a slightly different way. The result is that a carefully customized Twitter background that looked fantastic on the old Twitter, may not work so well with the new design. In many cases, the best solution is to create a new color scheme or background design to fit into the new parameters.

As more and more users are gaining access to the new Twitter, we thought it would be a good time to revisit the area of Twitter customizations. Fortunately, Twitter now offers some fantastic theming tools to make the process less of a chore, and we’ve created some Photoshop (PSD) files mapped to the dimensions of the new Twitter to help give you a head start.

Plan Your Layout

The new Twitter utilizes a fluid layout, meaning that the browser window or screen resolution can impact the width of some of the columns, as well as how much of the background image is visible.

Check out this image that we created to show off the layout of the new Twitter. Although resized to fit this blog post, this screenshot was originally taken at a resolution of about 1440 pixels wide.

There are a few points you need to keep in mind when designing or altering your Twitter background to fit into the new site:

  • The new design has a constant top toolbar that is 40 pixels tall and spans the entire length of the web page. For most designs, this shouldn’t interfere with any of your elements, but be aware that this bar is always there. Also note that there is a 20 pixel tall space between the toolbar and the start of the two columns.
  • The spacing to the right and left of the columns is fluid and will vary based on the resolution and size of the browser window. The spacing is also significantly reduced from the previous design. As an example, in a 1280×800 browsing window, in the old design, there were approximately 251 pixels on each side of the Twitter columns. On the new design, that is reduced to 112 and 113 pixels respectively.
  • The Twitter sidebar on the right is now semi-opaque. The opacity is about 75%, which means that depending on what color you choose and the color or style of your background image, that can impact readability.
  • The timeline column on the left is always 540 pixels in width, but the sidebar can vary. After a certain resolution (about 1130 pixels), it becomes fixed at 500 pixels wide, but on smaller screens or in smaller browser windows, it can be as small as 380 pixels.
  • Because of the way the columns are now laid out, background images should probably only be tiled if they are patterns or seamless. Larger images are much better off transitioning to a solid color rather than repeating.

Use the Built-in Twitter Theme Tool

The excellent Themeleon tool from COLOURlovers has been updated for the new Twitter. You can access the tool by either going directly to the site or by selecting Themeleon from the sidebar in the Design section of the Twitter settings page.

You can login to Twitter in the app and customize your colors and backgrounds on the fly. The great thing about the tool is that until you hit ‘save,’ none of the changes take effect. Think of this as a great way to test out color combinations and various motifs.

COLOURlovers has provided a number of quality pre-built themes using backgrounds and designated color palettes, but you can upload your own background image and set your own color schemes. You can also browse the very large collection of COLOURlovers patterns and tiled background images. One of our favorite features of this tool is that if you use one of the pre-built patterns, you can apply a color scheme that will also change the color setup of that pattern.

COLOURlovers also has a ton of color palettes to choose from and to play with. If you’re already a COLOURlovers member, you can access your own palettes or palettes you follow or have marked as ‘loved.’ It’s a free community, and given the difficulty in actually discovering new color palettes in the theme creator, we recommend signing up so you can favorite your own schemes.

Find Your Perfect Palette

COLOURlovers is a great resource for color fans, but there are tons of other great resources on the web to get the perfect color combination.

We’ve written about some of our favorite web tools for working with color, but here are a few more:

  • Color Hunter – This site offers up some palettes based on photographs uploaded on the site. You can also search through palettes and upload your own photograph to find the perfect palette.
  • ColorCombos.com – This site has a great listing of user-generated color palettes and you can also test your combinations out to see how well they work together.
  • PHOTOCOPA – PHOTOCOPA is another tool from COLOURlovers and it helps pick out the colors that are in an image. What’s great about this tool is that you can not only upload a photo, but you can also link or search for a photo from Flickr. Once you find your colors and create your palette, you can save it in your COLOURlovers library, which can then be accessed in the Themeleon tool.

Test Your Resolution

Because the new Twitter layout is fluid, how things look can vary based on the size of your browsing window. It’s a good idea to test how your background or color scheme looks at different screen sizes.

Fortunately, there are free extensions available for all the major browsers that make resizing your browser window a snap.

  • Firesizer for Firefox – Firesizer is a simple add-on that shows up in the bottom status bar of the Firefox browser. Not only does it show you the current dimensions of your browser window, but right-clicking the resolution lets you select a pre-defined browser size. Your window will be resized as soon as you select your choice. You can customize the extension to add your own pre-set sizes.
  • ResizeMe for Safari – ResizeMe lets you quickly change the size of your browser window. It works as a toolbar button and clicking the button can either auto-change the size to a selection of your choice or give you the option to select various sizes.
  • Window Resizer for Chrome – This extension shows up in the Chrome toolbar. Clicking the button lets you select from a dropdown list of various browser sizes or device types. You can customize this listing. It’s got a great interface and is really easy to use.

Test it Out in Photoshop

Lots of designers like to manipulate their backgrounds or color schemes in Photoshop or other image editing programs. We understand. While there are plenty of PSD files created for the old Twitter layout, we had a hard time finding any good PSDs for the new Twitter.

Thus, we rolled up our sleeves and created this collection of PSD files. They are in resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×800, 1440×900 and 1600×1200. If you need a different variation, let us know in the comments and we’ll see what we can do. The guides and layers are all editable so you can customize these files for your own uses.

You can download these files at http://drop.io/mashnewtwitter.

(Via Mashable!.)

HOW TO Undo Send in Gmail

Did you know you can undo a sent e-mail in Gmail? It’s a lesser known feature, but Google just made it even better than it was before. When it first launched, you were given a 5-second window during which you could hit ‘undo.’

Now that’s up to 30 seconds, Google Operating System discovered.

The feature is hidden from most users who don’t know where to look, so here’s a quick guide to avoiding social and workplace faux pas with the click of a button. Be aware that the feature is part of Gmail Labs, though. That means it’s still in testing and it might not always work as intended.

Go to Gmail Labs

Since the Undo Send feature is part of Gmail Labs, you’ll have to navigate to the Gmail Labs page to activate it. Load up Gmail and look in the top-right corner of the page. Between your e-mail address and Settings you’ll see the green Labs icon. Give it a click.

Enable ‘Undo Send’ and Save Your Changes

You’ll be presented with a list of features Google is testing in Gmail. Some are very useful and some are just fun. We’ve gone into more depth on all Gmail Labs has to offer in previous articles, but this time we’re here just for the Undo Send feature.

You’ll usually find it close to the bottom of the list. We’ve included a picture of it above so you know what you’re looking for. Just select Enable then scroll down and save your changes.

Customize Undo Send’s Duration

By default, Gmail gives you a 10-second window of time in which you may undo a sent e-mail. You can change that to five, 20 or 30 seconds by going to Settings (in the top right corner of the main Gmail page, right next to the Labs icon) and finding the Undo Send section inside the ‘General’ tab.

There you can enable or disable Undo Send and change the duration with a drop-down selection box as pictured above.

Write and Send Your E-mail

Now that Undo Send is enabled, it works each time you send a new e-mail. You don’t have to do anything unusual beforehand to make it possible to use Undo Send with that e-mail.

Click the ‘Undo’ Button After You Send

Now you have either five, 10, 20 or 30 seconds to undo your sent e-mail, depending on what you selected under Settings.

As soon as you hit Send, a subtle line of text will appear above your Inbox saying ‘Your message has been sent.’ It will be accompanied by a few extra options. Among them is ‘Undo.’ Click that within the allotted time and your faux pas will be prevented.

Note that you can hit ‘Z’ on your keyboard, the Gmail shortcut for undo. Just don’t navigate away from or close this page, because once you do, you’ll lose the opportunity to undo your sent message forever.

‘Sending Has Been Undone’

You’ll immediately be taken back to the e-mail composition page, and your e-mail will be in draft form, unsent and ready for further editing — or deletion, if writing it was ill-advised to begin with!

(Via Mashable!.)

Expedition Titanic gives you a virtual tour of the Titanic wreck site

Simon points out that the official Titanic Expedition website is pretty darn cool. It’s run by RMS Titanic Inc. and basically gives you a virtual tour of the entire Titanic wreck site along with important historical facts and figures about the boat and the sea bed that it currently lives on.

The media portions of the site are worthy of a look so head on over to the Expedition Titanic site to check it out.

(Via Doobybrain.com.)

7 Services to Find and Reserve Your Name Across the Web

If you choose a different username for every site you’re on, it can be hard to create a consistent identity across the web. The problem, however — as Twitter-spoofed Megan Fox, BP, and even the Dalai Lama recently found out — is that being the first to claim your name on every site can be difficult. And since most of the hundreds of sites that can host your profile prevent automated sign-up processes, you need to manually create one profile at a time.

These seven services search the availability of your username on multiple sites at the same time, and many also offer the option to create your profile on each of the sites they search for a fee. If you’re aiming to unify your personal or brand presence across the web, these handy tools are worth a look.

1. Knowem

You’re probably not interested in all 400 sites that Knowem features, but whatever you are interested in — blogging, bookmarking, photo, video, business, community, design, entertainment, health, information, microblogging, music, news, tech, or travel — you’ll be able to search that block of sites for your desired username.

For $99, they’ll sign you up for 150 profiles (you handle the e-mail confirmation and profile info). The $599 Enterprise package creates 300 profiles in your name and handles all confirmation and profile information details. The site also launched a domain name search feature today.

2. ud.com

Before you decide on a brand name, check this simple site for domain name, social media, and trademark availability. The site features much fewer profiles than other username checking services, but it’s far more manageable and easier to read: Green, available. Red, taken.

3. namechecklist

Another great free tool for deciding if your username is an optimal and searchable choice, namechecklist tells you what percentage of social media sites and domains have existing profiles that match your choice. The site also runs the name through popular search engines to gauge how common it is on the web.

4. claim.io

You give Claim.io your username and three alternates to use if your first choice has already been claimed. They start signing you up for social media sites with a randomly generated password. In 5-7 days, you receive a report with login information and links to each of your new profiles (which, thankfully, have already been populated with your photo or logo, website, and basic message). They even set up a new e-mail address so that yours doesn’t get spammed by the 300 new sites you’ve just joined. Join 100 profiles for $129 or up to 300 for $329.

5. TM.biz

Policing the social web for trademark infringement can be exhausting. This site helps monitor and protect trademarks by searching more than 500 sites at once. Trademark owners can search name availability for free and opt to purchase a report with screen shots of each profile that uses their name, a service that defensively registers them for sites, or a monitoring service that periodically searches for their trademark in usernames.

The site uses criteria like website traffic and membership size to rank the sites by popularity, and pricing is based on how many of the ‘top’ sites the user wishes to monitor or sign-up for.

6. namechk

A descendent of the since shut-down usernamecheck.com, this site offers a quick-glance view of username availability. A nifty ‘sort by rank’ button rearranges the sites to show you the most popular on top.

7. Domainr

If your ideal ‘.com’ is already occupied, it might be beneficial to explore the nontraditional, often clever, domain suggestions on domai.nr (case in point). The site gives suggestions for creating your chosen URL using domains. For instance, some suggestions for ‘Justin Bieber’ were bieberjust.in and justinbie.be/r. It also lets you know if the suggested domains are taken.

(Via Mashable!.)

How To Get Your Really Important Information Out Of Facebook

Have you ever missed a party because the invites went out only through Facebook? Don’t you just wish that all that useful information in Facebook could be out in the real world where you can see it? Well, it can. Not all of it, but certainly some of the more useful parts.

Facebook do seem to try their hardest to keep some of the information within their walled garden and make themselves the go-to place for all users. In the end this just further separates the people who use Facebook from the people who don’t.

But Facebook actually make it very easy to get hold of some of the best information and it seems that there are many people who have signed up to Facebook, but consider the process of checking it to be hard work.


So we’ll summarise for you all of the best ways to get information out of Facebook.

Event Invitations

To start with, I’d like to apologise on behalf of the people who plan things on Facebook. We’d love to be vigilant enough to always invite people off Facebook too, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Facebook have made event invitations so easy, that inviting people some other way is like walking around to your house to invite you because you don’t have a phone. It can be done, but it’s also likely to get forgotten.

That said, if you’re on Facebook at all (even in a non-committal way) you can still get your party invites out of Facebook. Go to your Events App (from the home page, it’s on the left) then scroll all the way to the bottom. Click on ‘Export Events’ and what you see is an iCal URL for all your future events.

You can use this to import into iCal, Outlook, Google Calendar or numerous other calendars. Right-click and copy the link and (in your preferred calendar) choose the option to ‘add a calendar‘. Paste in the URL and… voila! This calendar will show you anything you’ve been invited to which has an RSVP status for you of ‘not sure’ or ‘attending’.

As an added bonus, in Google Calendar you can also set up email or SMS reminders for the calendar, meaning you can choose to have an email remind you a week before events and a text sent to your phone two hours before any events. So you don’t even need to check Google Calendar! Too easy!

Facebook Birthdays

Use the FBcal application to get birthdays out of Facebook and into an iCal calendar. MakeUseOf have already explained the nuts and bolts of using FBcal, so read that for more information. FBcal can also be used to get events out of Facebook, so if Facebook ever remove their native iCal feed then you can try to do it this way. Personally, I like to keep these calendars separate.

Address Book

Most Facebook applications don’t have full access to your friends contact details, however there is a very quick trick you can use to get this information from Facebook and into a useable format (if you have a Yahoo login, which most people do).

Go to address.yahoo.com and click on ‘Import your contacts from other accounts to Yahoo‘. Facebook is one of the primary options, and it imports in no time.

You can then easily export these contacts from Yahoo in all the normal contact formats and import it in to whatever you use. If you have any trouble, go into your application settings and remove ‘Yahoo! Contact Importer’ and try again.

If you use a Mac, you can also get current Facebook profile pictures into Address Book, then use iSync to get those pictures into your phone.

Backing Up YOUR Information From Facebook

If you’re worried about possible deletion of your account, there’s an experimental Firefox extension called Archive Facebook which will allow you to back up all the data you’ve put in to Facebook.

Facebook Chat

Get your Facebook chat contacts and use them elsewhere. Use a third-party chat client to log in to Facebook Chat: Try Adium, Trillian, Pidgin, Digsby or Meebo (or plenty of others).

Chat History

For those of us that do use Facebook a lot, sometimes we want to back up things like chat records. Fortunately, this is possible using browser extensions (available for Chrome and Firefox).

Your Notifications

Using the notification settings found under account settings, you can choose which notifications you want to get by email or SMS. If you’ll be away from Facebook for a while, I’d suggest getting most notifications sent to you and setting up some kick-ass filters for your email (Hint: all Facebook third-party apps send notifications from facebookappmail.com).

You can also subscribe to your notifications’ RSS feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and getting the RSS feed from the link on the right.

Your Updates

Until quite recently, there was a hack to get an RSS feed of your updates, but it doesn’t seem to generate a feed anymore. To do it, you get the RSS feed for your notifications (as above), then paste the URL into a text document and change the word ‘notifications’ to ‘status’. This should work!

I have a feed generated this way which still works perfectly, however I tried to do it again and the new key generated doesn’t work. Maybe it will work for some of you – or maybe one of you smarties can suss out the new hack? This RSS feed is great for using in your lifestream.

Your Friends’ Links & Notes

Luckily, you can easily get an RSS feed of your friends’ notes and links.

For links, visit http://www.facebook.com/posted.php and you’ll see an RSS link on the right hand side. You can even use a drop-down menu to filter it to just one person (sadly, not a friends’ list yet).

For notes, the place to go is: http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and the RSS link is sitting over the right hand side too.

You can still get an RSS feed of your friend’s status updates using a similar method as above, but Facebook doesn’t seem to want these feeds to work so it will probably be removed in time. So, get it quickly!!

Go back and get the feed for your friends’ notes. Paste it into a text document and change the word ‘notes’ to be ‘status’. That’s all! This feed should now work. I just tried one and it works perfectly. It should look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=XXXXXXXXX&key=XXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20
Some people say you can also filter this by the ID of a friend list, but I tried that with no luck whatsoever, sorry!

Are You Stuck Behind A Firewall?

If you’re reading this article because you can’t access Facebook at work or school, you might be keen to know of some good proxies and tricks for accessing Facebook behind a firewall. Try them with all of the above methods and you won’t miss too much!

So, with all of these neat ways of getting information out of Facebook, you won’t be left completely in the cold if you don’t log in every day. However, I still recommend logging in occasionally so that you can add new friends that have found you in the meantime.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

25 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed

social media icons image

Another beautiful summer week brings another beautiful social media round-up. In case you missed any of the resources published here on Mashable, we’ve got them all laid out in neat little sections for your perusal.

This week we looked at some great podcasts for summer listening, some hilarious infomercials on YouTube and some awesome trailers from Comic-Con 2010.

Tech and mobile fans will be pleased to see stories on the new Samsung Galaxy S, a look back at the last five years in mobile, and an interview with superb designer Jesse Thomas.

If you need some business tips and advice, we’ve got ways to promote your brand on YouTube, how social media can make you more productive, and ways to include multimedia on your website.

Looking for even more social media resources? You can find this guide every weekend, and check out all of the lists-gone-by.

Social Media

risk Image

For more social media news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s social media channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Tech & Mobile

audio Image

For more tech news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s tech channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

Business

stocktwits image

For more business news and resources, you can follow Mashable’s business channel on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook.

(Via Mashable!.)

Apple Releases Safari 5.0.1, Turns on Extensions Gallery

Apple today announced the release of Safari 5.0.1. What’s significant in this point release is that Apple has turned on support for the Extensions Gallery. When Safari 5 was released in June, it included support for extensions so that developers could start building them, but without access to the Extensions Gallery, users had no easy way to find and install those extensions.

The Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible from the Safari menu or via extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, with no need for a browser restart. Extensions can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari.

Safari Extensions are built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards. Every Safari Extension is signed with a digital certificate from Apple to prevent tampering and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions work in a sandbox, so they can’t access information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.

While the Safari Extension Gallery is launching with a range of extensions from the likes of Bing, the New York Times, Twitter and eBay, it’s nowhere near to matching the usefulness of Chrome’s extensions, let alone Firefox’s gigantic range of add-ons. Apple’s decision to include extension support in Safari is a smart one, but until developers start porting the most useful extensions to Safari, I’ll find it tough to switch from my favorite browsers.

You can download Safari 5.0.1 for both Mac and PC for free from Apple.

(Via GigaOM.)