Web Development
Experts Exchange is a great service where you can post your programming issue and you will more likely get a quick and professional response. You can either earn points by answering other questions or you can pay a monthly fee.
This is the best service I’ve seen by far and I have been using it for years. It has paid for itself many times over by saving me time when I’ve been stumped.
They also have a new look and feel. Check it out by clicking on the pic at the top.
Gravity forms is a plugin for WordPress to build forms for surveys and mailings. It isn’t free, but well worth the price as a very well designed product. If you are in the business of building websites, you inevitably will be needing to have at least a contact form on each of your sites, and having a consistent plugin on all your sites is invaluable.
Gravity will create a couple tables and allows you to easily view all form submissions and export to Excel. You can very quickly build forms with pull down menus, radio buttons, CAPTCHA, auto responders and many other advanced features.
The developer’s version will cost you $199, which is a bit pricey, but allows you to use it on unlimited sites.
Although WordPress is the undisputed leader as a website CMS (yes, it is a CMS), “real” developers snub their noses at WordPress because it is just a “blog” and doesn’t have all the power of Drupal or Joomla.
Enter the Genesis Framework and the StudioPress suite of child themes. I have built dozens of sites with StudioPress, and am incredibly impressed. It is JUST what I needed to add power and consistency to my sites.
By using Genesis/StudioPress for WordPress, I get the best of both worlds, the ease of use of the most popular platform (and there is a good reason it is), and the power and scalability of more “advanced” CMS platforms.
It isn’t free, but if you are in the business of building websites, then the nominal life-time fee for support from solid programmers, dozens of super high quality child themes, and the powerful framework and suite of plugins is well worth the price.
There are other frameworks, but Genesis has the advantage of being late in the game and building from the ground up a extremely powerful set of hooks and functions that is tightly integrated in the WordPress 3.0+ way of doing things. The fact that it uses child themes in itself makes it far superior to frameworks such as Thesis.
Non-programmers will find the modularized structure hard to understand, but if you get over the learning curve, you’ll see the incredible power it provides. I now build ALL my websites in Genesis, even custom sites, and am even converting my old projects to the framework so all my sites have a consistent grounding.
Transparent PNG files don’t always work in IE6. A nice solution is outlined at http://bjorkoy.com/past/2007/4/8/the_easiest_way_to_png/ . It has a nice solution using CSS and JS.
I implemented it at NYBoatcharter.com.
last time, used online tool on http://www.html-kit.com/favicon.
A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the file name should be favicon.ico. IconEdit32 is a good freeware program that allows you to create favicons as well as icons of other sizes and color depths. IrfanView is an excellent freeware image viewer that supports the icon (.ico) image format. You can use it to shrink one of your regular images to a 16 X 16 size, then decrease the colors to 16 and save as a “.ico” file. I like to use IrfanView to get an image down to specifications, then edit it with IconEdit32. Remember, if you don’t save it as “favicon.ico,” it won’t work. Also, don’t just shrink an image to icon size and rename it with a “.ico” file extension. That won’t work either because it’s not a real icon file.
Installing a favicon on your website
Simply upload the file, favicon.ico to the root web directory of your hosted website with your favorite FTP program, Microsoft FrontPage, Dreamweaver MX or whatever. Make sure your favicon file is named “favicon.ico.” When someone bookmarks your site with a browser that supports favicons, your favicon will appear. Alternatively, you can use this code between the <head></head> (x)HTML tags:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.thenameofyoursitehere.com/favicon.ico” mce_href=”http://www.thenameofyoursitehere.com/favicon.ico”/>
Where can I get favicons?
You can feast upon Clickfire’s collection of over 100 quality free favicons and download them for use on your website. To find out more about favicons, visit the definitive favicon site, Favicon.com.
Favicons with Photoshop
For a good tutorial on how to create favicons with Photoshop, check out the link below. You need to download a plugin.
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/jennifer/favicon.html
Captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. Captcha images tend to be used on web forms to prevent automated submission by computers. More information on Captchas can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha.
Below is a posting from StumbleUpon: http://subesh.com.np/2008/07/mapping-the-ip-address-to-latitude-and-longitude-in-google-maps/
At last I found hostip.info provides a service for getting the latitude and longitude of a place on the basis of the user’s ip address. Its light weight and free, rather than downloading bulky database and getting paid services, for getting latitude and longitude on the basis of IP.
Here is the simplest way to do it. Requested to http://api.hostip.info/?ip=$ip&position=true it responds XML formatted output. So we need to parse XML code using DOM class of PHP.(#19-#23). Remember, the position=true should be set to get the latitude and longitude otherwise it will not show on default.