Sweet Ubuntu 10.04 finally came out a few days ago. And you would not believe the wonders I have experience since trying it out! You HAVE to try it out for yourself, I’m sure you’ll love it just as much I do.

That said, I have already downloaded the 64 bit edition and I am currently running it under virtualization. I encourage all of you to try this out. I have been rather busy the last few days and will be even more busy in the next few days but the earliest chance I get, I will write a series of reviews and tutorials on how to take advantage of the newest features of Ubuntu 10.04 as well as its brother Kubuntu 10.04 (which FINALLY came out at as a long term support edition!).

Well, here is a few things I am excited about:

• the new software/application center! It’s really easy to browse through, really comprehensive, and well organized. I found software for Ubuntu I did not know existed. And I’m not talking about office and developmental tools. I found Point of Sale software, multi-dimensional graphic calculator (up to 6th dimension), TONS of open source games including Train Tycoon, a clone of SimCity, open sourced version of Unreal Tournament (several of those actually), and many other games, even MMOs! I also found education software I did not know was available for Ubuntu that teaches BASIC (I’ve been considering learning new programming languages so there we go!). The list goes on. I’ll definitely write an article on how to browse the “app store” equivalent (everything is free!) and show you my favorites!
• new theme! A completely new theme that takes you out of that “ugly brown” era. Don’t get me wrong, Ubuntu “human” theme always made me feel right at home but this…this is something else.
• Ubuntu One, I’ve already made an account, so I’ll go over how it works, what it can be used for and how to best manage. It’s exciting to have such a feature implemented directly into the OS for free.

I’ll tell you about all the other features too. Check out the Ubuntu Homepage for support and other stuff.

One last thing, I’ll write up a guide to teach about virtualization. It’s going to be awesome, just to let you know:

Have you ever wondered about that pretty subscriber counter most blogs have on their pages? How do they know exactly how many people are following them?

It’s called FeedBurner.  I’ve been using it for a while now and it never occurred to me how much POWER such a service can have! Not only are you provided with statistics, but you can add ads to the feed, get a counter, update twitter automatically, and a whole spectrum of other features.

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this short tutorial:

• getting a FeedBurner Feed
• Setting it up
• incorporating the feed into your website.

Getting a Feed

This is actually the easiest part. All you need is a google account and go here. Once you’re at the dashboard, look over here:

Okay, now go to your blog site. I’m using one of my newer blogs so just type in the URL.

• In my case, I typed in http://www.livingsmartgreen.com/ Click next.
• If you have several RSS feeds available, such as RSS, RSS2, or Atom. Pick one of them. Click next.
• The feed title and address should be already filled in, if not, just type those in. 
• Click next. It should tell you that everything’s done! Click next anyways.
• Check off all the boxes there for extra statistics. Next.

Yay, now you’ve got your feed!

Setting up that feed!

You should be at the main feed page (not the dashboard). Here’s what mine looks like:

Looks good so far. The “analyze” part will not work just yet. You’ll have to wait for that so let’s skip to “publicize” the most important part. Here is the deal, FeedBurner offers A LOT of services, most of which you will never use. Some of them are truly just annoying services so don’t bother. Try them out, and have fun. Here are the essentials:

Go to “PingShot” first and activate it. There are some services that like to get notified whenever your RSS feed changes. This will boost your traffic, hopefully.

Next, go to “socialize” and add your twitter account if you want. Your feed will be reposted on twitter (thus you don’t have to use the WP>twitter WordPress Plugin). Under “hash tags” choose the “Create hashtags….” option. That’s all you need, activate the service and be on your way.

Go to “creative commons” and choose the appropriate license. This makes sure you retain the rights to your content. It’s a smart thing, trust me on this one.

As for the rest:

• Headline Animator creates a banner that shows off your latest feeds as well as a link to your site.
• BuzzBoost does something similar, except it creates a gadget. If you have been following my blog for the past few months, I always had it in the left sidebar under the meta.
• Email subscription. Another nice gadget that lets users subscribe via e-mail rather than RSS. Try it out if you want to.
• FeedCount. Okay, this is everyone’s favorite. This is that little counter thing that tells everyone on your blog how many people are subscribe. If you want it to look fancier, I suggest you use this tutorial to create your own little piece of PHP code and get an actual text value for the number of subscribers. You will probably have to enable the awareness API for this to work.
• Chicklet Chooser. Another nice gadget. This one is used for the actual Feed. If you don’t already have an RSS icon or want to use one of Feedburner’s pre-made icons, go ahead and activate this and customize your own icon. Copy the code, and paste it to your site where you want it.
• Password Protector and NoIndex. Password protector is used if you want to protect your feed from other people. ie. make it private. NoIndex makes sure your feed is not submitted to any search engine (I suggest against it.

That’s pretty much it. If you go to optimize, you will be able to add some new functionality to your feed such as e-mail replies, images, and shortened URL’s. I don’t see the point in that so let’s move on. If you go to monetize, you will be asked to go to google’s AdSense. Log into there if you have an account set up. Go to AdSense Setup and add a Feed. Straightforward setup.

WordPress/Blog Integration

It’s easy to integrate your FeedBurner Feed into WordPress.  Go to Plugins > Add New and serach for “FeedBurner”. Install and activate the plugin called: FD Feedburner Plugin. Moving on, under Plugins, you should find Feedburner Configuration. Go there. Here’s my setup:

I checked off two of those options, you don’t need to. It’s up to you. If you cannot remember the Feed URL, go back to that main page and click on the RSS button. Use that link:

Save the options and you’re done!

What’s the next step?

The next step is optimizing your feed, analyzing the data, and doing whatever. There are a lot of choices to make and a lot of features you can take advantage of. Just have fun and see what you can accomplish!

Sorry about the recent absence of new articles at our site. We have been very busy with numerous new projects. DavePCGuy is shifting into a new world of Web Design. We’re finally moving forward.
I’ve started coding WordPress Themes, and custom websites. It keeps me busy, along with school.

We will be opening up a portfolio site soon, and for that, we’ll have to build up a portfolio (thus the busy-ness).

Well here are some of our projects:

• LivingSMARTgreen Theme
• Student Loans Theme
• iPad News
• And many others

We’ll publish about each once it’s launched!

RainyMood.com.

Rainy Mood is a great, and relaxing website. What does it do? It plays a fifteen minute loop of rain OVER and OVER again. That’s it! How simple.

Why am I even bringing this page up? DESIGN!

Let’s look at this page. It has a great background that fits into the 500kb category, a simple image header that tells you exactly what the site is about, and then a BIG play button with sharing capabilities on the left and right.

If you scroll down, you’ll find a single add and some other stuff.

What I see

The beauty of the design here is simplicity. Just the background of a wet window gives the user the feel of really being there when it rains. The simple interface is amazing, because you know what? It doesn’t give you a million extra options that you wouldn’t use anyways, plus it auto-plays so that whenever you get on the sight, it’ll start up automatically.

It has a facebook fanpage on the left, great for PR, advertising, and all around marketing of the site. Facebook allowed the website to get 6000+ fans that visit the site regularly plus more as people try the site out. On the right is the “tweet” button, that will tell all your followers what a great site it is. I did that.

The big button has only one problem, its hover effect. It has an annoying greenish glow, I wish they would have soften that up and created more stylish buttons. It takes away from the all around “blue” experience.

Under the Hood

I took a look at the source code, the music is played through a javascript player made by voormedia.com and it has been hash encoded so that the ordinary users can’t just look through the code (it looks so illegible!). Of course, you can easily decode it but that’s not the point.

Next, the site uses no DIVs at all, nor a stylesheet. It’s all built into one file (except for the images) and uses tables. Now, people warn against using tables in webdesign but it does not matter too much here, it works well.

PROBLEMS: It’s not XHTML compliant. It has no true <html> header that specifies the usual stuff. It is also not SEO optimized, it has a couple of keywords, no description (other than “rainymood.com”) and it does not have really descriptive alt tags.

The Point

It’s an easily navigatable website that has one simple feature that makes me go back to it over and over again. It has simple coding, though non-compliant, and it seems to work out quite well.

Visit it!

kuler

Kuler is a great tool for all designers. It’s really similar to the Color Scheme Designer in the aspect that it composes several colors for you to use in your design.

It has several other features that make it even BETTER than CSD but there are tons of features missing too. Let’s start with the good stuff

What’s good

• pre-made themes including “random”, “newest”, “most popular”, and “highest rated” categories
• RSS feed for the “highest rated”
• Ability to create theme from an image (upload an image, or choose an image from flickr and select colors)
• community
• Presets for uploading an image (called “moods”)
• Ability to register and sign in to save and share themes

What’s not so good

• there are some reservations about the interface
• rather confusing color picking interface

What’s missing

• export features (you can’t export to PSD, CSS, or HTML as you can in CSD)
• no example sites (CSD allows you to look at example coloring)
• VERY limited color options
• no permalink

“What’s missing” seems not to be such a big deal, but it actually is. The “example site” feature on CSD is amazing and very useful. It can kick-start your imagination and it’s just really cool.

I don’t use the export features but it’s nice to know they’re available. Also, the color options in CSD are virtually LIMITLESS. There are TONS of presets while Kuler does not really have any of those great presets.

Kuler is great if you’re looking for pre-made color schemes and themes but it’s nothing compared to the Color Scheme Designer.

One feature though, that could win me over, is the “Create From An Image” ability that lets you use an image for the scheme. I will definitely try that out and report on it.

So, let’s say you’re working on a project. It’s filled with your blood, sweat, and tears. You’ve been working on it through nights, barely sleeping at night, drinking large amounts of coffee during the day to stay up. Putting all into it. But then everything goes wrong.

Well, we’ve all been there, many times. If you’re a web-developer, it’s a natural part of your life. It’s a natural part of mine too. Let me tell you my story.

What happened?

Well, recently, I was working on two project. The first was a bust, the second was scrapped. The first was Only A Quote and the second was an independent blogging system.

How was Only A Quote a bust? Well, it was not ENTIRELY a bust. It receives good traffic, there’s great Ad Sense yields. The design is wonderful and the PHP is amazing It gets good ratings Google-wise but it’s nothing to be REALLY excited over. It was an important project to me because I spent COUNTLESS hours perfecting the script, learning PHP, CSS, and HTML. Basically, I spent my holiday break sweating over this project. I expected to sell the website for close to a thousand dollars but after a month of auctioning, it all ended with a hundred dollar bid.

Terrible.

The next project was a blogging system for a customer. I created a custom design, interface. Really intuitive too! Let’s just say, it was a jewel to me. It wasn’t perfect, but let’s just say I spent A TON of time figuring it out. There were no directions as to what the project should look like but that’s okay. I made an administration secure from any threats. Well, the whole deal. Imagine a simple wordpress-like blogging system. But, the client didn’t like it so I scrapped it and created a wordpress theme instead.

There is one more “failure”. Well, this one was not so bad because I was never counting on it in the first place, but it was damn annoying that nothing came out of it.

My “Age Tester”. My first PHP application. Well, the problem was that I had no way to advertise it well, I had no good domain name. And let’s just say, I suck at designing stuff like this haha. It’s still fun or whatever, and I send a link to my friends once in a while when they ask me if their partner is too old or too young for them. But that’s it.

How to deal with it?

It’s always hard to deal with failure, especially when you’re failing and you think it’s entirely unfair. I can admit that the only project -I- relied on was OnlyAQuote but I’m sure you have had your own experiences where you had to rely on multiple projects that went bust.

So, there is no easy way to say this other than, Just SCAVENGE the project. Strip it clean! It sounds silly, but think of every website you work on as a beautiful creation full of priceless parts. When that beautiful creation becomes a horrendous ugly thing, take it apart.

Let me use my Bodyshop project as an example:

The website has 57 files and 18 folders. Most of which is code and pictures. Well, all of it. There must be something worth it in there.

First of all, I took apart the whole admin area of the site and salvaged the scripts for my own script library. I have an authentication script there, add to database scripts, blogging scripts, well, a bunch of stuff. I even have an upload form (and those come in handy) as well as a mailing script. All of this work, better not go to waste. I can use ALL of these for my next projects.

Streamlined, secure authentication takes time to create, and here I have it, already done. I have a login form as well, so that’s done. Admin scripts and the blog script are the most important parts to me but there is more.

I can also use some of the images for the future. I created my own texture (as seen in the snapshot way above) that I can use for other project (involving metal and such). I also have a pretty decent car cut-out silhouette which I won’t have to work on next time I do something involving cars.Oh, and I have a pretty button to use

I couldn’t do the same for Only A Quote since I was selling the script, but I did bookmark all the scripts that were used from other programmers. (ie. web redirection)

All this takes is a bit of time, and tears that come along with stripping your project of its meat.

Did you learn something?

Making mistakes, and failure, it’s a process of learning! Did you learn something while making this project? I’m sure you have!

Now go write about it!

I’ve gotten some good traffic from the posts I based on the scripts I’ve written. Just check out this list:

• Blogging system part 1
• Blogging system part 2
• Mobile Site tips
• Shortlink API

So, you’ve a lot of material you can write about. Plus, It’s rather nice if you share your secrets! Haha, I know I did. Some of this stuff took me a while to figure out, but, I got it down and now you can reap from my benefits, too.

Also, it sent a lot of traffic my way when I submitted these tutorials online. Double win!

Conclusion

Failures will teach you important lessons and can be salvagable, perhaps not to the original intent of goal, but good enough. Just, learn from your mistakes, okay? I know I did, and I’m sure you will too, over and over and over and over…again.

WP to Twitter | Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design.

I’ve just discovered the craziest, awesomest plugin for WordPress. This little fella allows your WP blog to automatically update your Twitter with the the blog title, a shortlink URL (cli.gs or bit.ly), and even an excerpt!

It has a lot of customizable options, so you can do a ton of things with it. You can use the custom fields in your blog (they’re under the posting options when you’re writing your post) and add them there. One great thing is that there’s an option which lets this plugin add all of the tags you add to the post, as hashtags.

For those of you not literate with twitter a hashtag is a sort of tag that you’d normally use on your blog posts, deviantart submissions (for you crazy art people), and other places. It is preceded by a hash (#) and followed by the tag word. Look at the trends, most of them are hashtags. It makes searching twitter much easier.

Anyways, here’s what’s happening. The sample twitter update should read something like this:

New Post: WP to Twitter Plugin (http://bit.ly/whatever) #twitter #web #social #etc

I think that’s reasonable, no? You can, of course customize this! EVEN FOR SEPARATE AUTHORS AND THEIR RESPECTIVE TWITTER ACCOUNTS!

Anyways Enjoy!

P.S. It also notifies you if the tweet could not be update and saves all options just in case you want to re-tweet

Share and Enjoy:

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Adobe Photoshop Tutorials – HV-Designs.co.uk – Tutorials, Resources and Photoshop Freebies.

This article here is a great intro to all you blogger beginners with WordPress. It talks about all the different options you can use while posting on your blog. Including, how to manage your categories, how to use “post slugs”, the “Press This” feature (which I am now using!), and many other features.

Look the site over, they have great tutorials and they are very thorough. I recommend you subscribe to them via RSS because every day, they have great and powerful articles to read.

Anyways, look forward to more short articles on other websites and short recommendations!

So you are reading this article wondering what its gonna be about? Well I am cheap, its January and everybody is broke. Oh yeah and the economy sucks. Supposibly the companies thought that people would stop buying computer parts so they slowed down production, which made some parts prices skyrocket. Example: I have bought 2x2gigs 667MHz laptop ram for 35 bucks shipped, regular price about 2 years ago. Now, it is insanely twice the price, seriously OMG???? Talk about custom built computer getting more expensive by a gig.

Even though the ram is expensive, it is still the easiest hardware and most efficient upgrade out there. You have no idea what ram you have in your PC or Laptop, do you? Well, sometimes neither do I, and it is annoying to open case or laptop to not be sure afterwards anyway. Wouldn’t you like some software/tool that would find that out for you? Yes, there is one! Thanks to crucial, ram manufacturer, you do not have to worry about it anymore. Go to their website, surprise it is crucial.com and then click on the crucial system scanner tool, it will take you to another site. Make sure that you click on the box to agree with stuff and then download the scanner tool or just click run. Either way it will scan your system and tell you what you need and of course try to sell you their ram. You can buy their ram, great company, I have used their ram numerous times myself. Or….. you can check to see the specs of the ram ie. Pc2 5300 etc. to see what you need exactly. They will also tell you what is the maxium amount of ram your motherboard will accept. Since ram is expensive I suggest upgrading as follows: If you have 256 or 512 get a stick of 1GB which should be around 40 bucks tops. FYI the performance boost it will give will be like a night and day (promised). If you have 1Gb and you have Vista or Win7 get a pair of 2x1GB sticks of ram or if wallet permits and motherboard too, get 2x2GB. You ask where at, right? Well I have been very happy customer of newegg.com for years. However, I don’t stick to one name, for me the price is the final verdict, and if you live in NJ, CA and I think TN you will have to pay tax and it might make your deal worse than going to a local shop (doubt it though). There is another website that tracks prices of ram, here is their link http://dealnews.com/memory/

So I hope that this has helped you, BUT BE CAREFUL WITH STATIC ELECTRICITY because it can kill your ram in split second.

Njoy

I’ve recently gotten my hands on oh so many Google Wave and Google Voice invites so we here at DavePcGuy thought we should share!

So what are we going to do?

I’m going to write a simple PHP script that will pick a number from 1 to whatever number of subscribers, on feedburner, we have. I’ll roll twice, and I’ll e-mail the people corresponding to the numbers. If the person accepts the invite, we’ll make a post about it and everything and everyone will be happy

I’ll pick two winners. The first one will receive a Google Wave invite and the second on will receive a Google Voice invite. So more prizes for everyone!

The rules of this giveaway are simple:

RULES:

1. You have to subscribe through feedburner. If you subscribe through RSS, that’s alright but we won’t be able to see your e-mail address then. Use the subscribe form on the right (pic below)
   

   subscribe

2. You have to comment back to claim your prize after we send you the announcement e-mai, otherwise we won’t know if the e-mail was fake, or if the winner wants the invite.
3. You have to agree to let us pick on you in one of our articles haha (okay, that’s not a rule, but we’ll write an article about you anyways)
4. We will not start this giveaway until we have at least twenty subscribers. It makes sense, trust me.

The GiveAway 1st Prize:

1. The first prize is that of a Google Wave invite!
2. We are no in no way responsible as to what you do with that invite (such as selling it, renting it, or whatever crazy idea you get)

The GiveAway 2nd Prize:

1. The give away features a single unactivated Google Voice invite
2. We are in no way responsible as to what you do with that invite
3. If Google Voice doesn’t work in your country, sorry, but there is nothing we can do about that.

Calendar

Follow our calendar to know when we’ll pick our winners

I’ll make another post when we get those twenty subscribers!
Share and Enjoy:

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