At first what does Ajax mean?

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. Ajax is asynchronous, in so far as extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality and usability. Ajax function calls are usually made in Javascript using the XMLHttpRequest object. The asynchronous content doesn’t need to be formatted in XML.

Scripts for your Website

As quite every modern website makes use of at least a bit of Ajax you may want to have a few of those cool effects for your page. So I collected the best scripts for you. All of them are free to use and easy to install.

Lightbox 2 – Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

Thickbox 3.1 – ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written in JavaScript on top of the jQuery library. Its function is to show a single image, multiple images, inline content, iframed content, or content served through AJAX in a hybrid modal.

Glider – This script makes it easy to create a sliding carousel component like the one seen at www.panic.com/coda.

TableOrganize – This script basically allows you to re-organize the rows or columns and browse the table using the up/down arrows.

Clickheat – ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones.

Reflection.js – allows you to add reflections to images on your webpages. It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.

AjaxIM – ajax im (“asynchronous javascript and xml instant messenger”) is a browser-based instant messaging client. It uses AJAX to create a near real-time IM environment that can be used in conjunction with community, intranet, and social websites.

Relay – An Ajax directory manager that works and looks like the familiar one of windows and mac systems.

SWFUpload – is a small JavaScript/Flash library to get the best of both worlds. It features the great upload capabilities of Flash and the accessibility and ease of HTML/CSS.

NicEdit -NicEdit is a Lightweight, Cross Platform, Inline Content Editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser.

Vuzit – Vuzit is a web based document viewer you can embed in any web page. It’s fast and it’s free!

flot – Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming.

Control.Tabs – creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute.

IE7 – is a JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Resources for more scripts

Scripteka an extensive library of Prototype and Script.aculo.us based extensions/plugins.

At AjaxDaddy you can see Ajax examples, javascript scripts and web 2.0 demos in action.

MiniAjax, a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts.

And have a look at more than 1000 Ajax examples at AjaxRain.com

Desktop wallpapers express the individual style of everybody. In this post I want to show you the best and most creative digital art wallpapers!

I must admit that I am not the guy who frequently changes his desktop wallpaper, but sometimes everyone needs a new and fresh one. So here you see a collection of websites which offer high quality art wallpapers.

Or do you want to make your own wallpaper? Then have a look at these pages:

• gimp-tutorials.net – Tutorial for a Mac style wallpaper
• tamilia.deviantart.com – Vector-Wallpaper tutorial
• webdesignerwall.com – Chroma wallpaper tutorial

Art Wallpapers

Iunewind – 51 stunning and colorful wallpapers

Desktopography – Many dreamful nature wallpapers

Endeffect – A lot of stylish and dark wallpapers

MyBestDesktops – Many beautiful photographys and digital art

Pixelgirlpresents – Hundreds of awesome digital art wallpapers!

Vladstudio – Very popular designer with a huge collection of free desktop wallpapers.

Ndesign studio – 18 great illustrator works

Dlanham – Simply amazing drawings as desktop wallpapers

Over the past years website design has become more and more beautiful. You can find thousands of inspirations online – Logos, Icons, Websites, Colorschemes…

I have carried together the best and largest sites. So sit back, relax and let yourself inspire!

Logos

LogoPond – Identity Inspiration

faveup – Design Inspiration Gallery

LogoSauce – Logo design, inspiration and information

Icons

IconBuffet – Free Icons, Stock Icons, Custom Icon Design

IconBase – Connect ideas

Iconfactory – World leader in icon design

Website Style Showcases

theBestDesigns – The Best Flash and CSS Web Design

FWA – Favourite Website Awards – Web awards at the cutting edge

Unmatchedstyle – CSS Web Design Inspiration and CSS Gallery

MostInspired – designs from all the popular css and design galleries

Webcreme – Web design inspiration

Screenalicio.us – Get inspired!

CSSbased – Designers love nature

CSSnature – well designed css and xhtml nature based website designs

CssZenGarden – The Beauty in CSS Design

CSSimpress – the most updated css gallery

CSSGalerie – just a galerie

CssFlash – Your daily inspiration dose

CSSclip – Web Design Inspiration and Gallery

CSSmania – the most updated css showcase all over the globe

cssBeauty – CSS Design, News, Jobs, Community, Web Standards

cssvault – The Web’s CSS Site

CssLeak – CSS Gallery, Showcase of beautifull webdesign

CSSElite – CSS Gallery and Website Development Resources

csswebsite – Website Design

CSSdrive – Categorized CSS gallery and examples

CSS Hazard

CSS Remix – A fresh blend of the best css web design

BestWebGallery – CSS & Flash Design Inspiration

stylecrunch – css and standards websites gallery

Apps Mania – Web Applications Showcase

styleboost – showcasing outstanding websites since 2001

PortfolioBase – Showcasing the best portfolios from all around the world

csstux – The best dressed sites on the web

splench – Designs for Creative Minds

Colors

kuler – Explore, create and share color themes

COLOURlovers – Color Trends + Palettes

Forums

DeviantArt – where ART meets application!

Mojizu – A Contemporary Character Design Community

Blogs

SmashingMagazine – useful and innovative information for web-designers and web-developers

thecolorhunter – today’s most happening movements, styles and trends

MOCO LOCO – Modern contemporary design & architecture

netdiver – digital culture magazine + new media design portal

startdrawing – the asia drawing portal

Design in Europe – Design News from Europe

LCSV4 – the illustrator news portal

Ventilate – A portal for artistic ideas, thoughts and works

picli – Constantly changing gallery of photos created and moderated by a large community of creative users

Other

Elements of Design – A Web Design Showcase

DesignFlood – Waist Deep in Pixels

Threadless – Designer Clothing Submissions

Graffiti – The Writing on the Wall

MAilmeART – the ongoing mail art project for artists, illustrators and general doodlers

Design Melt Down – Design Elements, Trends & Problems in Web Design

Time – time management means productivity, means money! In a world of multitasking you have to reduce stress and improve your self-organization. You can use pen and post-its or you try one of these web-based equivalents…

Online Mindmaps

1. Mindmeister is an Ajax driven web application specialized on collaborative mind mapping. Also it allows you to instantly start a Skype conference with your friends/partners.

2. Mindomo, a very heavyset mindmapping tool, enables you to structure your maps in every detail. It’s one of a few which supports image-integration.

3. Bubbl.us uses Ajax and Flash for creating beautiful and simple mindmaps. You can share them with your friends or print your work.

To-do Lists

1. Rememberthemilk is a powerful to-do list tool that allows you to locate tasks, share, publish and get reminded of them via IM, SMS or email.

2. Blablalist is a simple to-do list. It’s fast, and offers all the basic features. It tenders an easy-to-use interface, but loses points because of a nerving pop-up window, launched when setting up a new list.

3. Roughunderbelly is a Ruby on Rails running to-do list, which allows you to set yourself a deadline for your tasks and classify them.

4. Ta-da Lists, also built with Rails, offers a wonderfully simple and clean to–do manager. Ta-da Lists uses a lot of whitespace and big fonts to make the lists more appealing and open.

5. Voo2do provides detailed task management for individuals.

6. Toodledo allows you to group your tasks, assigned to due dates and priority.

7. With Taskthis you can create to-dos with notes and publish them via RSS. If needed you can share your lists with your friends.

Web Calendars

1. Yahoo Calendar – “Access dates and meetings from anywhere, anytime”
2. Google Calendar – “Simplify. Organize. (And relax.)”
3. Hipcal – “it’s about time”
4. Kiko – “dead simple calendar”
5. 30boxes – “it’s so easy my mom can do it”
6. MSN Calendar One of the big three together with Yahoo! and Google.

It’s always difficult to find the right typeface for a logo or even a website. Here are some resources of free fonts but remember if your are using special fonts on your site less visitors will be able to see the site with the actual font and most see the site in a standard font. I recommend you to use rare fonts just for your logo but if you really want to use such a special font for your site be sure to declare alternative font styles in your stylesheet.

Free font resources:

• Dafont.com offers user created free fonts. 7500 typefaces have already been submitted to Dafont.
• Grsites.com has a big collection of about 6800 fonts, including a logo and button maker.
• 1001freefonts.com gives you 1001 fonts for nothing.
  
• There are 11202 nicely categorized fonts on Abstractfonts.com. It’s one of the biggest free anthologies out there.
• Fontriver.com includes a collection of nice fonts for PC and MAC. Also Fontriver provides some useful tools for fonts, e.g. a font manager.
• Highfonts.com offers a well-designed free font site with more than 3000 fonts and another 25000 to pay.
• Fontmaniac.com has nearly 12000 fonts.
• Fontasy.de includes a huge collection of free fonts as well as some links to font tools but attention not all of them are for free.
• Fontviallage.com presents you a nice collection with about 6000 fonts.
• You can get ready-made collections of free fonts on allfreetemplates.org (containing up to 7952 Fonts!!). But in order to get the fonts you have to register once on their site.

Do You want to create your own font?

• Macromendia Fontographer 4.1 is on of the best fontcreating tools but the newest version isn’t available for free. I linked to version 4.1 which is latest one available for free downloading.
• DTL FontMaste can be downloaded for free in a light version. It’s a good alternative to Macromedia Fontographer.

Helpful Web-Applications

• typetester.maratz.com is a website with a realtime font-preview app that lets you easily see how a certain typeface affects you.
• Searchfreefonts.com is a search engine, indexing more than 13000 free fonts.

If you know other good and free font resources or gadgets you can post them in the comments.

Every day thousands of people are surfing through the web – make them click the money into your pocket! Maybe you run a website or blog about something really interesting and want to make money with your page – Start now and earn hundreds of dollars!

Beginner Guides

To start from scratch, read at least one of these beginner guides to site marketing. After you have done that think about it and start to improve your website. Probably you already know a lot of these tips but they are only the first step on your way to richness!

• How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately
• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
• 101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips
• Ways to Make Money Online
• 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
• 27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog
• How to market a website with 100 dollars

Traffic building for Newbies

People always believe in Traffic being the ultimate weapon for making money online and they are right, partially! No-one will make the big thing without massive visitors. But how do normal people, who neither have huge amounts of marketing capital nor influential contacts, can get high loads of visitors? Read a few of these tutorials/guides and you will understand how to make it rolling.

• 10 Remarkably Effective Strategies for Driving Traffic
• How to get traffic for your blog
• The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Link Builders
• The Resource Linkbait – Using Lists to Build Authority, Traffic and Links to your Website.
• How to Set Up a Domino Effect on Traffic
• A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon: How to Build Massive Traffic to Your Website and Monetize it.
• Top 29 Niche Social Media Sites (That Actually Send Traffic)
• Social Proof Optimization: How to Make Your Website Appealing to the Masses
• Stumbleupon mathematics for stumblers
• 7 Ways to Get to the Top of the del.icio.us Popular Page
• Beginners Guide to StumbleUpon

Search Engine Optimization

Another important part in your way of becoming a rich man, is SEO. A lot of traffic to websites is also coming through search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The higher the rank, the more clicks you will receive. But to go beyond the basics and not just read but understand it makes you the winner!

• 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank
• How to Find and Target Long Tail Keywords for More Search Engine Traffic
• 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic
• A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon
• Hitchhikers Guide to Linkless SEO
• 7 Costly Mistakes Webmasters Make About Web Directories
• Why Isn’t EVERYONE #1 on Google?
• Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM

Place Ads – Earn Money

Now, after you have learned how to get a good PageRank and drive a lot of traffic, you probably want to know with what you will earn the money. The typical answer would be something like AdSense (and yes it’s great) but there are several other profitable advertising networks. Not forgetting the ‘pay per blog’ systems and direct affiliate solutions.

• So You Want to Make Money Online: An Extensive Guide to T-Shirt Affiliate Marketing
• Don’t settle for Google AdSense
• Get Paid to Blog – The Full Guide to Money Making Blogging Programs
• Direct Advertising Sales for Beginners: How to Develop an Alternative Revenue Source
  
• Google Adsense – Perfect for the lazy blogger
• Affiliate Programs
• What are alternatives to Google AdSense?

At last you could subscribe to a few feeds of the sites, mentioned above. One I really like is the feed from Dosh Dosh; a really good blog with many posts to current marketing topics.

Every day hundreds of blogs start publishing, but one question always makes trouble – What theme fits my needs (niche)?As WordPress is the common platform for blogs, I collected the most valuable themes for this software. Many pages and blogs offer WordPress themes but they are very often bad designed standard themes.. forget the rest: 10 ultimate designer works for nothing!

1. Redoable

2. Japanese Cherry Blossom

3. Foliage

4. iTheme

5. PlainBox

6. Sakura

7. Resurrection

8. MyJournal

9. Feather

10. Sodelicious 2.0

Maybe you know another well-designed WordPress themes, feel free to post them in the comments or send me in an email.

Not just SY0-101, but 642-812 as well as 70-620 is required as a prerequisite for 642-825. Your previous 640-822 may be of no use at this stage.

About one week has gone since Firefox passed the 400 million downloads mark. A lot of people and of course webmaster use the revolutionary browser to explore the web. So this time I want to present you a bunch of plugins, especially for web development!

Debugging

Firebug – A masterpiece of plugin! If you want to edit your sites CSS and preview it in real-time, this plugin is what you need.

JavaScript Debugger – A powerful JavaScript debugging environment.

Console Two – A plugin/console to display errors filtered by type, language and context.

Analysis

View Source Chart – A cool plugin which enables you to display a color-coded chart of a website’s source code.

OperaView – Open pages in Opera from Firefox context menu.

View Dependencies – This plugin adds a tab to the Page Info window which lists all the files that have been loaded to show the current page.

lori – It can tell you how long it takes to load a page.

HTML Validator – This plugin displays the number of found errors of the site you are viewing.

CSS Validator – As you may guess, it validates a site’s CSS stylesheet.

RSS Validator – One of many plugins to validate a RSS Feed using the W3C Validator.

Window Resizer – A plugin to resize your window to standard sizes; useful to see how your site looks with different resolutions.

IE Tab – Handy extension to see how your site is displayed in Internet Explorer.

ViewSourceWith – An extension that primary allows you to view the source code of a site with an external application but you can also open images with other apps etc…

CSS

Aardvark – This extension can show you the attributes, classes and ids by highlighting a page element with your cursor.

Font Finder – If you ever wanted to see the css-styles used for a certain element on a website, you need this plugin.

SEO

Social Media for Firefox – Really good plugin that shows the stats of 4 social services (digg, reddit, stumbleupon, delicious) for the page you are visiting, in the status bar. Useful if you want to know whether a site you own already has been submitted to one of these services.

Niche Watch Tool – Very good plugin that provides you the technical information like backlinks, page rank, keywords strength… everything a webmaster needs to analyze his site.

KGen – This addon retrieves all words of a page and lets you know how many times they appear; interesting for SEO optimization.

Others

Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript; a Must-Have!

Dummy Lipsum – Not the most valuable plugin for Firefox – it generates a “lorem ipsum” text.

ColorZilla – Nice Addon to pick the color of a page element and see its values.

Screengrab! – A plugin that saves the entire page as image (no flash elements).

Image Zoom – Offers you a zoom in, zoom out function for pictures.

Web Developer – Good extension that adds a toolbar to your Firefox with various web developer tools, e.g. Site Validation, CSS Viewer…

Unicode Converter – Converts entities or character references into Unicode and back.

Platypus – Another great addon which lets you modify a website from your browser. In addition to that you can save your modifications as a Greasemonkey script to make them ‘permanent’!

ShowIP – A useful extension that shows you the ip of the current page in the status bar. Also it enables you to see the whois details by querying some web services.

MeasureIt – Little Firefox extension that enables you to draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width or height of a element

Most of the VCP-310 professionals have 70-291 as well as N10-003 to their credit. They do these courses while studying for their 642-901.

The market of free tracking services is full of good and bad tools. So I collected the best and most innovative tracking services that are available. They are useful for every webmaster to optimize/monetize his site and see what content is appealing to the masses.

Google Analytics is a great user tracking service because it shows you most of all important information you need about your visitors like where they from, what site referred them (and links, keywords etc…). Also it creates handy graphs to easily see how your site grows or not.

whos.amung.us does not offer a lot of statistics (just 3) but 2 very useful services. The first good one is a live-counter, which of course shows the number of current visitors and the page they are browsing on. The second tool is a “normal” graph that displays a few colored bars. The last but very cool one, is a map which allows you, in addition to see what page your visitors are browsing, to locate each user on a map.

Feedjit, originally designed for blogs, is a nice tool to study where your visitors are from, how they have been referred to your site and how they leave your site again. By the way Feedjit just exists since 3 months but already has 3 million widget impressions per week.

FireStats is a plugin for WordPress (a blogging platform). The ajax-driven startpage gives you a quick overview of whats happening on your blog. See user locations, browsers, referrer, page visits…

getClicky, an analytics tool for blogs and small sites (it costs a few dollars for bigger sites). Among the basic features and graphs, Clicky displays the user activity on a map. And beside its fully customizable dashboard it works with users that have disabled JavaScript which is not the standard.

ENQUISITE isn’t a user tracking service like FireStats or Google Analytics but it strengths are the analysis of search engines. ENQUISITE reports how users entered your site and offers a search engine ranking-analysis that gives you information about your SEO, SEM, PPC and ROI and presents you tricks’n tips to optimize your site.

If you want to have stats and graphs about your site’s feed activity, Feedburner is the service you need! It enables you to see how many people are reading your feeds and what reader they use. They also offer a nice badge which shows the number of current readers. Since Google acquired Feedburner in may 2007, PRO stats are available for free.

The video-uploading services like YouTube are taking a big part in the history of the web 2.0. Many people became popular for just uploading a weird video on such a site. So I want to give you a short overview of some big video-sharing services. I compared 7 videoportals in the categories quality and community. I’ve chosen 5 well-known and 2 special-interests portals. I know there are a lot of other good videosites on the internet and maybe, I present them in another article.

YouTube

If someone talks about video-upload services, the first site everyone mentions is Youtube. It was the first big one and has the largest community. And to reach a wide audience, you should upload your video to this portal. Uploaded videos can have a maximum size of 100MB and a maximum length of 10minutes. The allowed formats are: .wmv, .avi, .mov, .mpg. The quality you can present a video is acceptable but there are better services for high quality videos on the WWW (e.g. Stage6).

myspacetv.com

A few month ago MySpace joined the group of videoportals with their new project MySpaceTV. MySpaceTV has a clearly structured menu and all functions you need for watching a video, e.g. fullscreen. Nevertheless I’m really disappointed of MySpace because they copied a lot of things from YouTube. (Netdesignz.de has a comparison of the two portals. It’s a German blog but the pictures show it all.)

Google Video

Google Video is similar to Youtube but it doesn’t has such a big community. The conditions a video must keep are similar to YouTube. (Both sites, YouTube and Google Video, belong to Google, Inc.)

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video is a videoportal by Yahoo! with more than 820Million videos uploaded (that number is from November 2006 – I couldn’t find any newer). In comparison to GoogleVideo Yahoo!Video has a very good design. Also the menu is better and Yahoo! Video offers many features a videocommunities need (e.g. favorites, tags and channels) and so it’s definitively the better choice. Same quality as most flash-enabled sites, large community and an intuitive, clear design.

Dailymotion

Dailymotion is a videportal, based in France. In comparison with other flash-enabled sites it has a appreciable better quality. Also Dailymotion allows you to upload 20minutes lasting videos with a size of 150MB. It support the same file-formats as YouTube but with higher resolutions.

2 ‘HD’-Video Portals

Stage6

A videoportal with a great quality and a fast connection – Stage6. Stage6 just supports Divx because it’s a project of DivX.com but that is enough. It’s still a small site but it’s growing. It offers a great quality in combination with fast streaming, which make this startup my personal favorite.

videocommunity

Videocommunity also is a relative small video-uploading service but as Stage6 it’s one of the #1 choices for quality-lovers. This site allows you to upload video even in HD-Quality which is a big plus and the downloading speed is fast enough to see a video without breaks what you can’t say about YouTube. Another good aspect of videocommunity is that is supports most of all video formats(avi, mpeg, mov, wmf, wmv, mp4, mp3, wav, aiff, wma). But there are also disadvantages. You are just allowed to upload 6 files a month with a total length of 15 minutes. 15 minutes are enough for homevideos and it’s more than Youtube offers but the 15 minutes-limit counts for all files together.

The Duel:

Quality:

1. Stage6 – 10/10
2. videocummunity – 9/10
3. dailymotion – 7/10
   

Biggest community:

1. Youtube – 10/10
2. Yahoo! Video – 8/10
3. Dailymotion – 7/10

So you see/read that there are a lot of good and popular videoportals you just need to decide which platform is the best for hosting/presenting your homevideos!