Even though it has been quite a while, but the first time I noticed it was when the little Digg buttons on the floating share too bar that we see on almost every blog these days, did not work. I thought it was temporary, but it just did not work, it still does not. I thought I will investigate this a little and when I went to the Digg site, I couldn’t believe there was no Digg. I mean not the one I knew. I couldn’t log in, as must have been the case with others too. I also learnt, all your past activity and data was also gone. I did not like the idea that I was being forced to login with Facebook. What if I did not have a Facebook id? I know almost everyone has a Facebook id today. But still, it just did not feel right.

I have heard many people praise Digg’s new look. But frankly, I wasn’t very impressed. It just looks like a simple ordinary blog to me. Earlier it had an abundance of Blue, Yellow, and Green which has been replaced by lots of white. Now you have the important stories as displaying prominently on the homepage with larger images. But does it make it better? All the stories look alien to me as they are all preselected and you cannot choose what to see there. That may change in the future, as of now you are stuck with what they show you.

It has changed so much that it is like relearning to use it all over again. I wonder if people have the time and patience for it in the first place. I used Digg because it had the potential to send a lot of visitors to my site. I will wait and watch to see how it shapes up in the near future and decide if it is well worth the time to learn the intricacies of the new Digg.

Another thing you will notice is that the old content is gone without a notification from the Digg team; so many years of data just gone like that. Digg says that they are working on retrieving the data and that there is an option to submit your email id if you are interested in getting your content back. However, I did not expect such an unprofessional approach from such a well know site.

I know I have not said anything positive about the new Digg at all. But I just cannot see why it was redesigned in the first place. I want to see the innovation that was lacking in the old site. Perhaps, the innovative stuff is yet to be put into the new Digg.

The post So What Is New In The New Digg? appeared first on Ray Creations.

Keeping the creative juice flowing is the hardest part of any creative profession. But the sad thing is that if you fail to stay creative, you may get fired or superseded by a person who seems to be more creative than you. So, to get things going for you and to ease your pain in the creative circle, here we are going to share a cool list of super cool creative tools that you would certainly love to have in your kitty to power up your performance like anything else. Just get some free time on your hands and have a close look at them and you will be in for a surprise for sure.

1. Viscosity:

This is a crazy tool that lets you do crazy things like distorting things like anything and thereby pushing the limit of creativity to the point of infinite. Believers and admirers of distorted art should believe in Velocity. Just try your hands on it and you will be admiring the result. This is the best tool out there to fine tune the result even more to achieve a unique level of sophistication and refined outcome.

2. PhotoCopa:

Do not bang your head against the desk to find the color combination that can make your next design project piping hot. This is not going to help you in one way or the other. With PhotoCopa, you can extract color information from any image super quick and save a lot of your hard work. A quick time saver that can make your life a hell lot easier.

3. CloudCanvas:

A no-nonsense tool lets vector graphic designers go wild with their creativity caring a fig for the complexity of codes. The greatness of this vector based tool lies in the fact that it converts every creative stroke of yours in objects rather than just simple pixel. Scaling object in CloudCavas is a breeze and there is plenty of space available to play around. Besides giving you the opportunity to animate your drawing and adding a seductive dose of creativity, flexibility and effects in them, there are options to get things like ClipArts and similar graphics right into it to enhance the outcome to a great extent.

4. LunaPic:

It is another insane HTMl based online image editing tool that will leave you asking for more and the greatness is that you would not have to pay a penny for this. However, there is a chink in its armor. It is naïve at differentiating layers of images and there is another restriction. You cannot upload images of more than 4 MB and it runs on flash but this is certainly not a disadvantage this is the case with all online image editing tools.

5. Flame:

As the name suggests, this awesome application is built to give creative space for true artists to breath in. This freakishly awesome tool was developed and designed by Peter Blaskovic and gives a wonderful opportunity to do something different. Now, it is hard to explain what Flame is in words, so, if you wish to experience something that is delightfully unique, just give this tool a go and you will have a better world to live.

6. Odosketch:

This nice and little application is the cutest of all the applications, I have ever come across. This application gives you ample opportunity to do something different by giving your old sketching skill a shot in the arm. However, this is not just about sketching and all that, you can try your hands at replaying the art work. However, if you do not feel like doing the design work anymore, you can always try to get some fresh inspirations by browsing the artworks of others.

7.Picture2Life:

If you are looking for a smart online image editor, Picture2Life is the platform to be. There are zillions of features, both good and bad to hook your attention. Doing basic tasks like resizing, changing the color tone and other things is a breeze with this tool. There are options to add some special effects in the images and the outcome will not be less than impressive, I can dare say.

8. FotoFlexer:

It is a tool for both power users and newbies. It comes with some premium features that were previously available only with highly priced software. However, this tool has got a chink in its armor. It is using Flash and that means, if you do not have flash on your machine, you are done with. You can start with uploading a photo to this web based application and begin editing right away.

9. YouTube Editor:

This is my favorite web based application that lets you create web-based application even if you do not have any idea of what the animation is all about. You can use it to add videos to your YouTube channel and there are options to add sound tracks. Since majority of options are drag and drop, you would not have to be the rocket scientist to be able to manage it.

The post 9 Cool Creative Tools that You Cannot Do Away With appeared first on Ray Creations.

This has lead to the demand for solutions that are functional as well as cost effective at the same time. Open source Content Management Systems have done an excellent job to bridge this gap of demand and supply. Open source being Free helps keep the cost down of a website built using the CMS; the cost is usually for the time the designer puts in for customizing the design. It is amazing to see the features a CMS website offers at such little cost. It puts so much power at the hands of the website owner.

There are quite a number of CMS systems available that do a very good job of managing content online. However, today I am going to mention only 5 of the most popular ones around and a brief description of what they offer.

1. WordPress

This is no doubt one of the most used and preferred CMS system around the world. It is a web publishing tool that one can use to create a beautiful website or a blog. As WordPress puts it, “WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” The best thing about WordPress is its ease of use and the availability of thousands of plugins to extend its functionality. There are many free themes available with WordPress that one can use to instantly get started with the new website or blog. It is very user friendly and no technical knowledge is required to maintain a WordPress site.

2. Joomla

Joomla is a preferred CMS for many. It is an award winning CMS that lets you build websites and powerful online applications. It is used by many web designers to build websites for their clients; once the site is ready the client is capable of managing the site on his own. It does not require advanced computer knowledge to set it up and many hosts provide once click install of the software. It is not surprising to see so many sites using Joomla.

3. Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS and has its fair share of fans throughout the world. The Drupal core files are very light on features and depend a lot on modules to extend its functionality. Drupal may not be for everyone as there is a learning curve that one must overcome to be able to fully utilize its features. After installation, there will be numerous plugins that need tweaking to get started with the design of the site. It is overall a very good CMS if you have time to play around with it. Certain degree of technical knowledge is required.

4. DotNetNuke

DNN is the leading open source CMS built on Microsoft’s .Net platform. Its Community Edition is free to download and use. Its other versions are paid and come with better features and support. Installation is fairly easy but it does have a learning curve associated with it and it is better if installation and setup is done by a professional. There are plenty of modules, both free and paid, that can be used to extend its functionality, but again it is difficult for a non technical person to maintain the site. The site does have a rigid structure that is difficult to play around with in terms of design. Overall, it is a very good CMS to maintain a complex site.

5. nopCommerce

NopCommerce is an open source free ecommerce solution that is based on the Microsoft’s .Net Platform. Installation is very simple and is absolutely free to use. It is relatively newer than other already existing open source ecommerce platforms. The CMS comes with plenty of features that one may wish to have in their ecommerce site. Though development and updates to the software is being made quite frequently by the nopCommerce team, however, more attention will need to be paid to the templating engine which is still quite difficult to work with. Quite a bit of technical knowledge of the .net platform is required to give it a custom design. Overall, it is an excellent product to build ecommerce sites with.

The post 5 Popular Open Source Content Management Systems appeared first on Ray Creations.

Okay, you have heard so much about cloud computing and its benefits. But, what is cloud computing and how does it differ from traditional computing methods? Cloud computing refers to the delivery of hosted services over the internet. Cloud computing can broadly be classified into three categories:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

This is one of the most basic type of setups where service providers offer physical or virtual computers or machines which can be used for many purposes like storage, running applications, testing and whatever one can think of. These machines are usually provided on demand by the IaaS service providers from a number of computers or servers installed at their data centres.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

As the name suggests, with this type of cloud models, the PaaS providers typically include an operating system, programming language, database etc as per the requirement of its clients. This saves the company cost of buying application, hardware, and the cost of maintenance of such a system. These are on demand so resources can be increased or decreased as and when needed. This is great for companies looking to test and develop applications, host websites etc.

3. Software as a service (SaaS)

In this model, service providers run applications or programs on the cloud machines which are directly accessed by end users. These end users do not own or operate the cloud in any way, but rather just use the application through their computers or hand held devices. No separate application or program needs to be installed on client machine and thus makes the whole process very simple and flexible. Some example of this model would include Google Apps, Quickbooks Online and Salesforce.com.

Some of the inherent benefit of cloud computing includes reduced cost for companies as infrastructure is maintained by third party and therefore do not have to buy or invest in computing hardware and software needed one time or infrequently. The end user can access the services hosted on the cloud from anywhere anytime irrespective of where the user is located. The end user can also use any computing device like mobile phones or web browsers to access the cloud applications anywhere, anytime. Maintenance becomes simplified as no application needs to be installed on end user computers or devices to access these hosted applications.

Information or application is stored in a centralized location on a computing device which would ideally be placed in a data centre, which could be anywhere in the world. This information is then accessed by end users from anywhere in the world over the internet using mobile or web browsers. This gives you the power to store all your photos, videos, applications on the cloud and then accessing them from anywhere in the world anytime you want. You just need a device to connect to the cloud instance to retrieve them.

The post Cloud Computing And Its Benefits appeared first on Ray Creations.

The new Google algorithm came after few months of speculation by the industry sources. It states that the company will penalize the over optimization methods and technique, thereby raising some serious concerns for people related to the SEO sector.

Many websites that were massively established on the web as a news source or any other and has been running successful for over a few years or so and picking ten thousand of followers from Twitter, Facebook have been punished by the new Google Penguin update that took place last April.

It is considered that most of these established news sources were punished just for distributing the WordPress themes. It might be that the website was specifically for creating themes which people want to use. Moreover, they were punished because the spammers also used them to link to the website.

If you are not hit by the Penguin Update, then you must also take certain preventive measures so that you don’t get caught in this fray the next time round when something like this takes place once again.

According to most industry analysts and experts, the new Penguin Update was not for penalty purposes. It was mainly for eliminating the web spam which literally affects the search results. This is the primary reason why it is highly suggested that companies must try to comply with the rules and regulations of the new algorithm as much as possible.

In fact, in words of Mat Cutts who is the head of the Web Spam Team in Google, the new algorithm range is basically aimed at trying to level and try the playing ground a bit. Therefore, all those people who have been sort of been doing this, for the lack of the better word excessively can be under the radar. Over optimization and overly optimizing their search engine optimization compared to the people who are making some great content and trying to prepare a fantastic website can be a major problem.

The new algorithm of Google desires the use of the white hat SEO methods and techniques and not those that include keyword stuffing, black hat strategies, doorway pages and other over optimization techniques. Therefore, in order to make use of this update to one’s own advantage, one should be able to make use of the effective SEO strategies that are ethical and effective as well.

The post Template & Theme Creators Being Punished By Google Penguin Update appeared first on Ray Creations.

There have been recent reports about the search results pages of Google. Most reports indicate to the fact that search results pages of Google are getting more and more cluttered. With the total number of advertisements that one gets to see when searching on Google is actually considered as the main point of disparagement.

As a matter of fact, when you search on Google, you will come across a lot of advertisement placed either on the top of the search results page and then on the right side as well. In addition to this, you can even find Google products which are cross promoted and also hard coded into the search results pages. All of which makes the results pages much more cluttered.

When you search for something on Google, you will find the ads on the left side bar and also on the top of the Google bar too. If you are seriously looking for information or services or products or any solution then you would really find the search result pages of Google to be more cluttered than before. Now it can be a bit annoying for most people who are regular on Google and are in search of something on the search results.

Not only a frequent searcher, a webmaster can also feel that the search result pages of Google are becoming more cluttered than before. A webmaster has to get most of the organic traffic from the search engines, thus he would find this a bit disturbing as well. On the other hand, Bing has recently launched its search interface.

The newly redesigned interface of Bing is aimed at filtering the search results for the searchers or rather cleaning up the results listing. The new search interface of Bing is now available only on Bing United States and not on the other international versions of the search engine.

Due to this recent development, you can expect certain changes on the search results listings of Bing. For instance, you would be able to notice that that the search results pages of Bing looks completely different than ever before. This certainly is good news for people who like to search on Bing no matter where they may be located. Keeping in mind the search interface, Bing has certainly improved the search results page. No doubt it’s a major step which would definitely help searchers around the world.

The post Google Search Results Pages Getting More Cluttered appeared first on Ray Creations.

If you have always thought that Google was the only search engine helpful when it’s about finding educational resources, then you now try Noodle. Yes, named Noodle, it is a new search engine for students, teachers and education administrators alike to find out new education resources on the web.

Noodle was initially launched in beta last year. However, it was officially launched in its full scale on just last week on May 2, 2012. It is expected that Noodle will prove to be advantageous for more than 120000 education providers within the many different categories of education.

What is Noodle?

Noodle is a new search engine. It assists prospective and current students to figure out the best educational resources based on what is significant and useful to them. For instance, you can make related searches. If you search for “Oxford” you can find information about Oxford and schools related to Oxford. Moreover, you can come across companies associated or related to Oxford. And you also get counseling, guidance, study abroad opportunities, test prep companies, people and a lot more.

Right now Noodle is aimed at helping and assisting prospective students who need to find out more information on the potential schools. In near future, Noodle can grow into a larger search engine service which will be helpful to administrators, teachers and a lot others.

Functions:

It is primarily like Google except for the fact that some additional steps are required. Now in order to personalize your search results, you need to answer quite a few simple questions. Once you create an account and get your search on, you can essentially save, organize and then share your results with one another.

The new Noodle is even like the social network. You can even connect with fellow students and friends. For instance, you can essentially share your list of top schools with others and then compare it to all your friends. Then you can each see where the other person or your friends are applying.

On the whole, Noodle has been designed to provide power in the hands of the students. It is aimed at students to take full charge of the process. Noodle would be one effective tool which would help students to find schools they may be interested in and to start conversation with the school.

The post Noodle – The Ultimate Search Engine For Prospective Students appeared first on Ray Creations.

Google acquired Picnik a few years ago and ultimately decided to cease support to the program. As a lot of users had already been using Picnik and were in love with its easy to create and edit awesome looking images, the original Picnik engineers decided to leverage on their knowledge and expertise and start up afresh with new image editing program which is called PicMonkey.

The UI of PicMonkey and most of its features are found similar to this predecessor. This means that you will be at ease while using PicMonkey from the very beginning. To try out this new image editing service, you can simply click to Edit Image button while you insert an image. PicMoney will open up and you would be able to make all kinds of required edits to your image, including adding text, cropping or adding in a wide number of cool border options as well.

When you are done with editing, all you need to do is to click on the option “Save” placed in the bottom left section of the window. This way you can save a copy of the image into your image library. You don’t require worrying about overwriting an image that you already have used in an email. Yes, it is really very simple.

One of the most positive aspects that everyone will love about PicMonkey is its ease of use. Just like Picnik, the new image editing service provides you the ability to add text to your image.

1. Once you open the PicMonkey window with your image, click on the icon “P” which is placed in the left hand margin.
2. Now add your text in the text box above and then hit “ADD”.
3. Now you can easily position, resize, change colors and fonts and a host of other cool options, like “Blend Modes”.
4. Once you are comfortable with the changes, just hit on “Save” and the image will be saved back to your account.

If you want to make your images stand out then you can consider adding a border. It seems like a square with border all around it so it is quite easy to spot. You can find the border option positioned in left hand navigation. You can choose from one of their many border options like Drop Shadow and Museum Matte.

PicMonkey add to your ability to customize a lot of things like border thickness, color. Moreover on certain borders like Simple Edge, you may also leave a spot to add in a caption using the text tool. Once done, you can save in the image back.

The post Introducing “PicMonkey” – A Free Way to Edit Your Images Online appeared first on Ray Creations.

I went through all the typography print advertisements many times over to choose a favorite but couldn’t choose one. Let me know which one you think is the best.

1. Turk Telekom: 444

Official Website

2. Nike Italy

3. HP: Packaging

Official Website

4. Discovery Channel – Life

Official Website

5. Vividha: Lights

Official Website

6. Mountain Dew

Official Website

7. IMAGINE R: Places, 3

Official Website

8. Complot Creativity School – Typography Course: H

Official Website

9. Comedy Central: Make laugh, not war

Official Website

10. Burger King: Wrap

Official Website

11. CBC Radio 2: It’s a new 2

Official Website

12. MTV: Happy End

Official Website

13. Vinaphone: E-Load, 1

Official Website

14. MTV Base: Smell

Official Website

15. Hahn Nitzsche Recording Studios: Jeans

Official Website

16. Chevrolet Tuning Show: Incredible cars

Official Website

17. Australia Day: Surf

Official Website

18. Ben & Jerry’s: Caterpillar

Official Website

19. Estrella Levante Beer: Scale models, 3

Official Website

20. Estrella Levante Beer: Scale models, 1

Official Website

21. Fondation Abbé Pierre: Rock on, 1

Official Website

22. Burger King: Fries

Official Website

23. Atlas MTB: Dentures

Official Website

24. Lipodox: Snake

Official Website

25. MTV Base: Blood

Official Website

26. Burger King: Burger

Official Website

27. PS2: Girlfriend, 2

Official Website

28. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers: England

Official Website

29. Globus Supermarket: Our most beautiful prices, 4

Official Website

30. Vinaphone: E-Load, 3

Official Website

The post 30 Creative Examples of Typography in Print Advertising appeared first on Ray Creations.

Today the aim of every business or website is to Optimize their websites for the major search engines so that their website features higher on natural organic search results. If this is going over your head, let me explain this for you. Everyone today knows that over 90% of the web users search for products and services they want using major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista etc. Now to appear on the first or second page of the search results you can either use paid listing or optimize your website so that your website features on natural organic search results. What natural organic search result means is the search engines find your website relevant enough and useful enough to show your website on the first page of their search results.

Paid listing is no more a good option as the price you pay per clicks you receive on your listing would usually be higher than a dollar or so. And there is not guarantee that it will bring results.

There are several SEO techniques that can be used to make your website higher in search results which could include Directory submissions, posting in Blogs and Forums, Article submissions, Press Releases, link exchanges etc. However, you will notice that the ultimate aim of each of those techniques is to get quality link backs to your own website. When any website links back to your website, in a way it counts as a vote for your website in search engine’s eyes. Therefore the more votes or link backs to your website the better your website will feature on search results.

Of course the keywords for which your website shows up will depend on the keywords used or the content of your website. To control the content aspect of a website is called On Page optimization. Using the techniques mentioned above for getting link backs to your website is known as Off Page optimization. Off Page optimization is the most important as that is what tells Google and other search engines that your website is worth displaying in its results.

Link exchange can be a good method to kick start your SEO campaign as this can quickly get you quality links from other relevant websites and get your website noticed and indexed in the major search engines like Google. Results can be seen within a few months only. Some of the significant advantages are higher Google PR, improved Alexa Rank, more visitors to your websites, website featuring higher in search results for many of the keywords etc. In general higher earnings from your website. How well your website does will depend on the number of link backs to your website. So if your website is not performing according to your expectations, get more back links. Its as simple as that.

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