I'm not referring to real life, I'm talking about the ways in which different Social Networking sites use the "friend" term. On MySpace for instance, a "friend" usually is someone you really know - at least that's the intention of their design. At least out of the people in your top friends you're more likely to actually know and be close friends with them than on any other social ...

Holy shit it must be my lucky month. First a positive encounter with Dell, now Verizon? Anyways, I had to write about it because that's how it should work - if a company goes above expectations and does something that you didn't even ask because they actually seem to care, you should tell someone else about it. How touching. So yesterday I almost started bleeding from my ears ...

This technique has been around for a long time apparently I just didn't know about it. But now I know and I'm going to tell you about it. That's just how it works folks. So, I've been using Gmail since way back when you could buy an invite on eBay in exchange for an interesting story and I've NEVER heard about this spam-finder technique. If you use Gmail to ...

Visual Twitter is an app which integrates Twitter's own microblogging service with your Twitter user account with a accent on the photosharing aspect. Mashable reported this story this afternoon and I haven't seen any other news about it since so I don't have any more information or other reviews on it. The most interesting thing to me is that they're using Twitter's logo. They're definitely located in Nova ...

This CSS technique is generally used to replace a piece of text with a graphical representation of that same text. The desired outcome is the effect that the text contained in the graphic image gets indexed by a search engine AS TEXT. It's sort of a not so white-hattish thing to do because it's usage is deceptive even though when used correctly it really serves a good purpose. My ...

...Or "How I Almost Just Had a Heart Attack because I Just Realized My Entire Blog Was in Google's Supplemental Index." Apparently in Wordpress, if you go to Options > General, you can set the "WordPress address (URL)" & the "Blog address (URL)" and this determines how the links are made to your posts throughout your site. Unfortunately, mine was set to this: http://dennisplucinik.com/blog This was causing my website to get ...

We're all familiar with captchas. Just in case you're not - they're basically web page modules used to verify if information is being submitted by a human and not a computer or a bot. There is an "official" captcha but there are also many variations of it (of which I think Google's is the best) but they basically aim to do the same thing. Honestly they have become ...

These are advanced techniques that require more than just technical knowledge of Photoshop, they require talent, Photoshop training, knowledge of design, layout, balance, color theory, etc. I hope you find these techniques inspiring and helpful. UPDATE: If you like these tutorials, you might love this:60+ (more) Advanced Photoshop & GIMP Tutorials Text-effects: Movie techniques: Vector effects: ...

Strange I've never seen this happen before. Digg.com went down right after I opened the story about the Starbucks nipple vandal. I'll try and remember to post a link once Digg comes back up. And I was just about to dig the full collection of every Calvin & Hobbes comic. weak. Update: Digg has a new design! (Read about it here)

If you're getting started with a PPC account (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Adcenter, etc.) you'll want to make sure you're buying the right keywords. For instance, if you buy generic keywords, you'll likely pay a high CPC (cost per click) and you'll likely get a lot of impressions. Whereas if you buy a more specific keyword, you're more likely to pay less (due to less competition) ...

Good lord, why are all my services going down? I have been trying to create a sandbox account with a fake buyer and seller account for a particular project I am working on so as to test the PayPal Payments Pro API integration. I have been trying to create this sandbox account for several days now and it's basically not working. Here's what happens: 1) From within the PayPal Sandbox ...

Being that this is something that I just had to figure out today, I thought I'd post up my notes which I found helpful on this topic. Let me know if you think anything else should be added. .htaccess files are/have/etc: created in notepad have no file name or different extension - just .htaccess (not file.htaccess) chmod to 644 (makes it usable by the server but prevents browser use) .htaccess is for Apache ...

I wrote something this morning about Wordpress having problems with "unexpected maintenance" all night on and off. It eventually seemed like it went away but I just tried to check my blog stats again and I got this: "As mentioned earlier we are currently doing some maintenance. Your dashboard is going to be unavailable for 5 hours." Good lord. I need my blog stats. Anyone have any clue what's going on ...

Here's some professional grade features that the top Social Networking sites use to stay on top: 1.) Ajax based tag suggestions - Fluther.com This is where when you start typing something into an input box, a little drop down window immediately appears which basically shows some suggested tags which it pulls from it's database of existing tags as you type each letter. The more you type, the more accurate the ...

SES (Search Engine Strategies) is the industry leading conference for the field of Search Engine Optimization. They do a world tour every year - I've gone to SES Toronto for the last two years and it's awesome though sometimes difficult to choose which of the three sessions you want to go to. You basically can only experience a third of what the conference has to offer though they ...

Maybe I just don't get out of the house much, maybe I spend too much time reading and not socializing (in the real world at least) but it has become apparent to me that there are still a LOT of people who believe anyone can "make a website". Someone recently said to my girlfriend, "...your boyfriend makes websites?? Pfff... I could make a website, big deal." Thanks man. First of all, ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/Coolest_Features_of_Social_Networking_Sites'; "What do you think is the coolest thing about social networking sites?" I recently asked this question to some social networking site users, and these are their responses... -- you go to a singles dance or a networking event and everyone is different but the sponsor 's pull makes it not totally random. Similarly, each social networking site has its own population drawn to its uniqueness. -- Some are good, but ...

Need to manage projects? Cashboard gets you: - Multiple active projects - Set your hourly rate - Build estimates by breaking a project into tasks - Use an integrated on-screen time clock Here's my initial thoughts on this service... 1) I like the overall look of the site. It's easy to understand immediately what the site does and what you can and should be doing next. The graphic details of the interface are a little ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/How_to_Combine_Social_Networking_and_E_Commerce'; In my opinion, there are two ways to combine social networking and e-commerce: 1) Create a social network around your products (Social commerce) 2) Market products to your social network (Modified traditional social networking) - #1 Social Commerce - In this first case, what you have is essentially a supercharged e-commerce store. You build your store as the focus of the site, and tightly integrate community features into it. For ...

I was having a conversation a while ago about blogging and coming up with ideas for articles/posts/etc. and my friend mentioned that he was trying to convince his father how effective it could be for their business. His father wasn't familiar with writing for the web but had been running a successful business for years and had tons of experience and insight that they could be writing about. ...

As of August 14th apparently traditional slide shows will be a thing of the past. Animoto combines your photos and music and creates a pretty nasty trailer-like video. Their competitive edge comes from their super secret AI technology which somehow determines how to display your photos according to the music.

Like many others I run a development version of a local Apache webhosting server called WAMP. Up until today I had a normal file structure built for clients and specific client work. Usually I build a large majority of the site locally before uploading it to a production server. This has caused me a lot of problems with using absolute paths because I basically couldn't. Before moving to ...

I wanted to share this quick story about my experience with Dell's customer service. I was visiting with my parents recently and notices their relatively new Dell 17" Inspiron laptop computer had pink and yellow lines running down the screen. I knew they had just gotten the laptop within the last two years and considering that I've had multiple laptops for years and never a problem with their ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/20_Free_Adobe_Photoshop_buttons'; Here are some simple web buttons which you may download and use however you like. I created them all using Adobe Photoshop. Just click whichever button to download the .psd file for that button and enjoy! More downloadable buttons: http://www.dezinerfolio.com/2007/07/12/gloss-orbs-psd-download/ Additional website button related resources: http://www.gamexe.net/view_tutorial.php?id=31 http://www.gosquared.com/images/help_sheets/Button_Set_1.jpg http://www.axialis.com/objects/preview_icon_02.jpg http://photoshoplovr.com/text-effects/fancy-20-text/ http://photoshoplovr.com/web-20/clean-and-dark-navigation-bar/ http://www.photoshopstar.com/text/cartoon-text/ http://www.photoshopstar.com/text/cheesy-text-effect/ http://matthias-schlich.de//include/images/usergallery/img_253.jpg If you like this article - link it!

I love CSS but I have spent countless hours swearing at my computer because of CSS... It's a love/hate relationship really. Although web standards have been around for a while now, people still use tables and improper code to create websites. For the most part I'm not talking about professional websites, but for a lot of people, it's easier/quicker to just write using traditional methods despite it's obvious ...