Let’s pretend that this is a broken link. Can you imagine that when your users click this link, instead of them being redirected to a 404 error on your site, a friendly modal message pops up on your current page saying that it’s not available?. In that same message box you can then give them a sense of direction so that they’re not lost – you could ask them to click on a contact link to report the link’s broken, offer an alternative mirror, recommend they do a site search for the file or just say that you’re experiencing hosting issues and the file will be back up soon.

• Creating an Exit Modal Box using the jQuery library
• How to Implement a jQuery AJAX Login Form into a Modal Box
• Flexible and Expandable Form Validator: Ketchup jQuery Plugin
• Lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip: TipTip jQuery Plugin
• Cute Confirmation Boxes: jConfirmAction jQuery Plugin

HowtoMakeaWebsite.net offers a free 26 pages e-book titled “50 Mistakes to Avoid When Making Your Website.”. This is for beginners, but I am sure even the experienced web developer will pick some good points by reading it. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

16. Using The Wrong Font Color / Background
Apart from using a large font, you should also makesure that the font and background colors are producing a good contrast.
For example, it is very hard to read a yellow font on a white background. If possible stick with the basic color palletes: dark font on white background or white font on dark background.
17. Not Testing On Different Browsers
Different browsers interpret HTML code differently, so it is important to check how your website is loading at least on the major browsers (e.g., IE 8, IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera).
You can use a tool called BrowserShots.org for this purpose. It is free and easy to use.
18. Making Links Look Like Normal Text
Your visitors must must be able to identify what is clickable and what is not on your website.
The standard is to underline links. Alternatively you can change the color of the links.
19. Not Changing Color of Visited Links
It is also important to change the color of visited links. This is a common practice around the web, as it allows visitors to know what pages they have been to in the past.

• Submit your Website to the Most Popular CSS galleries: MeeCSS
• How to Choose a Color Palette When Designing a Brand New Website
• Make Money Blogging: Free eBook to help you monetize your blog
• Free Flash Gallery – Add a Slideslow on your website
• Boost your online income: MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

Features include:

• Handles overlay resize when the window is resized
• Handles overlay size in cases where the document is smaller than the window
• Handles position: fixed in all browsers
• Position: fixed automatically swaps to position: absolute when the window size is smaller than the modal, so the user can scroll to see the contents
• Tiny footprint (just over 1000 bytes gzipped & compressed)
• Small DOM overhead (adds 1 DOM element for the overlay)
• Dynamic iFrame shim is created and destroyed for the IE 6 select box peek issue (tested and working on HTTPS pages)

• Powerful, Flexible, Simple to use Upload Tool: Plupload
• Bumpbox – An Awesome Lightbox Clone with Support for PDF Files
• Facebook-style Lightbox/Modalbox powered by jQuery and MooTools
• TopUp: A Free, Unobtrusive, Easy to use JavaScript PopUp/Lightbox
• IxEdit: A JavaScript-based On-the-Fly Interaction Tool for the Web

After much procrastination, affiliate blogger Zac Johnson released Six Figure Affiliate Blogging (‘How you can be the next $100,000 blogger’), a 97 page free guide where you’re guided through the process of building a blog, creating a brand, and replicate the same process Zac’s using to generate over 6 figures a year with his blogs and affiliate marketing. Since he started his own blog a few years ago, it’s opened up a whole new world of revenue generation, branding and much more.

This book is a must have if you want to discover how to find a blog niche and use affiliate marketing to generate revenue from that blog.

Through this guide, you will learn everything from how to setup your own blog, to putting your established blog on autopilot and creating a new revenue stream that brings in money month after month.

The 97 page guide is structured as follows:

1. Introduction to Six Figure Affiliate Blogging
2. Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
3. Blogging Game Plan
4. Going Live With Your Blog
5. Making Your Blog Profitable
6. Blog Monetization Tips
7. Taking Your Blog to the Next Level
8. BONUS: Six Figure Blogging Interviews
9. BONUS: Resource Directory

Zac has also setup a Joint Venture Opportunity & Affiliate Program where the top 10 revering affiliates will earn over $3,000 in bonus prizes. Everyone who joins the Six Figure Affiliate Blogging program will earn an immediate $5 for signing up and $0.10 for each confirmed sign up you send their way.

• Make Money Blogging: Free eBook to help you monetize your blog
• Download ‘Affiliate Marketing 101′: Free Guide
• Boost your online income: MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate
• PHP and script.aculo.us Web 2.0 Application Interfaces: Review

Jeff Star, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, has sent me a copy of Digging into WordPress v2 for review. He has written this book with co-author and master designer Chris Coyer of CSS-Tricks. The eleven chapter book, packed with 400+ pages of WordPress tutorials, techniques, tips and tricks was released after a year of production, design, planning and writing.

WordPress is currently the most popular publishing platform. It focuses on aesthetics, web standard and usability. It’s famous for its 5-minutes installation and comes with a complete user-contributed documentation. This is one of the reasons I like working with WordPress. Starting as just a blogging system, it has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more to the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination (and tech chops).

Beautiful Custom Design

The first thing I noticed at “Digging into WordPress” is its beautiful custom design. Every page of the book is printed with stunning digital-color precision on gloss-finish paper, with each of its eight chapters color-coded to provide quick and easy navigation. Having a large and clear typography, each page is easy on the eyes and easy to read.

Easy to read

Secondly, this book is written in a clear and easy-to-read language. Thanks for the use of fun and helpful illustrations, the information is easier to understand even for those who are brand new to WordPress.

400 Pages of practical information

With over 400 pages of practical information, Digging into WordPress covers everything you need from setting up your site, navigating the admin panel, optimizing your site for search engines to even more advanced topics like plugin development, website security and performance optimization in considerable detail.

Written with the perfect balance of theory, explanation and code, each chapter focuses on teaching you how to improve your site using many different techniques, tips, and tricks. Each technique is fully self-contained, providing complete instructions and clear explanations to make implementation a breeze.

The book is structured as follows:

1. Welcome to WordPress – offers an introduction to the blogging platform, how to setup and configure it, how to optimize and maintain a WordPress site, and some key components of a WordPress site (core files, database, the back end, the front end). This chapter is ideal for absolute beginners.
2. Setting Up WordPress – shows in detail how you can setup WordPress: installing, publishing, using the permalinks, categories, and tags. It’s also an introduction to using themes and plugins
3. Anatomy of a WordPress Theme – this chapter covers in detail how WordPress works: the common files that are used in a theme, the header, the WordPress Loop, the comments, the sidebar and the theme functions.
4. Theme Design and Development – this chapter covers in depth theme design and development, making it interesting for both designers and developers. It includes loop customization, custom display for sidebar, footer and menu items, styling themes, using multiple themes and widgetizing.
5. Extending Functionality – covers in depth WordPress Plugins (usage and maintenance). Focuses more in finding the right plugins, rather than writing your own plugins from scratch. Further on it shows you ways of using WP as a CMS offering information on page templates, custom fields, custom taxonomies, categorizing, tagging, dynamic menus, users (roles and permissions). It also shows you ways of extending the CMS functionality.
6. Working with RSS Feeds – a very comprehensive guide – consisting in 50 pages – that covers all sorts of things including: working with RSS feeds, types of WordPress Feeds, Feed Configuration and Formats, usage of Feedburner for Feed Delivery and its benefits, track and Display Feed Statistics, Feed Customization, and Feed Validation.
7. Working with Comments – consists in 60 pages of information that shows you how to: optimize the WordPress comment area, syndicate WordPress comments, format the comments area, customize how comments are displayed, optimize the comment form, control the comment Spam and other consideration and techniques about the enhancements and the encouragement of comments, the “nofollow” links and the Twitter integration.
8. Search Engine Optimization – starts with the SEO strengths and weaknesses in this area and further on it shows you ways of controlling your duplicate content, optimizing both the Permalink Structure and the WP Site using well-known techniques including: detecting Duplicate Content, optimizing Heading and Title Tags, fixing Broken Links and using a Sitemap. It also gives you a list of some of the most useful and beneficial SEO-Related plugins currently available to the thriving WordPress community.
9. Maintaining a Healthy Site – this chapter is a must read because it covers basics like security (in order to protect the WordPress blog from getting hacked and to stop comment Spam), monitoring and fixing errors, updates and optimization as well as general maintenance of plugins and database.
10. Bonus Tricks! – includes 2 tutorials – adding author bios to single posts and adding a theme options panel – and 2 free WP themes
11. WordPress Updates – this chapter covers the new feature that came with WordPress 2.9 including Image Editor, Trash Can, Embedding Videos with oEmbed, Database Maintenance Tools, Canonical Meta Tags, Post Thumbnails, Metadata API, Widgetized Sidebar Descriptions, Custom Post Types, New Theme Templates, Register Feature Support and Custom Theme Directories.

Lots of code samples

“We go into depth about the anatomy of a WordPress theme. How they work, and how to write the code you need to do the things you want. This means real code that you can sink your teeth into, as well as copy and paste. Beyond theme building, we introduce many tricks your functions.php file can pull off and show you ways to increase performance and security through HTAccess.”

A Lifetime Subscription

“When you buy this book, you will instantly get the most current version. But also, you are getting a lifetime subscription to all updated (PDF) copies of the book. Updates will automatically be emailed to you as they are released.”

The Book

The book is an excellent resource for beginner to intermediate users but it contains plenty of great information for the advanced user as well. It takes you step by step into the WordPress blogging platform – which is great for those who are just starting with WP – by presenting you the information using fun and helpful illustrations. Even if you have experience working with WordPress or web design, this book is written to help you take WordPress to the next level.

Digging into WordPress is available in both print and PDF formats. The print version has a spiral bound, that makes the book easy to lay flat next to your keyboard. It retails for $67 and you don’t miss a thing by buying it because it automatically comes with the PDF and it’s bundled themes as well. The PDF comes at a price of $27 and it’s like a “living, breathing document” because it will grow with WordPress, and will be updated and improved periodically well into the future.

» Get this book

Have you read this book? What are your thoughts on it? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below!

• How to Separate WordPress Trackbacks and Comments
• WordPress Login Modal Box: SimpleModal Login
• PHP and script.aculo.us Web 2.0 Application Interfaces: Review
• Changelogger: Find out why you should Update WordPress Plugins
• Easily Integrate your ‘Buy Sell Ads’ Zones in your WordPress Blog

Features include:

• Dynamic HTML5 content delivery.
• Audio and Video support with the most popular media formats.
• Automatic Flash fallback for non-standard media.
• Easily themable using the incredible ThemeRoller system.
• Seamless Vimeo and YouTube integration.
• Playlist support
• Player to Player communication.
• Powered by jQuery.

OSM player is 100% open source and 100% free.

• 50 Free Vector Social Media Scalable Icons
• Introduction to HTML5: The New Hypertext Markup Language Format
• 27 Free Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes
• Beautiful Set of Free Social Media Icons: WeFunction
• Free Flash MP3 Players for Websites

Front-End Web Developer Seamus Leahy has created Pure CSS Stack Menus and decided to take the same concept and created a jQuery UI widget for it. With the new jStackmenu, you can can take any element and turn its children into the items of a stack menu.

The effect is really cool and this script can help you reduce space on your web page. You can control when it opens and closes, the direction it opens, the size of the arc and even the time it takes to open. It even has events for those who really want to get clever.

The catch is that it does the arcing in browsers that support CSS transform (that’s an advantage for this browser because the JavaScript load is reduced). For browsers that do not support this property, the script degrades gracefully into a popup of the stack items in a line.

• Create, Customize and Send Newsletters: MeeNews
• Stylish your “Featured Items” using an interactive jQuery Widget
• Enhance Website Navigation Menus: jQuery Multi Level Popup Menu
• Display Fixed Top/Bottom Popups with Meerkat jQuery Plugin
• Integrate Your Buzz Stream Into Your Webpage: Google Buzz Widget

This jQuery-powered Script takes a different approach: it allows for browsing all thumbnails as well as the large images in a single image space and respects the page flow, staying anchored and rooted in the web page at all times. This way it gives a less disruptive user experience than modal windows.

• Display Fixed Top/Bottom Popups with Meerkat jQuery Plugin
• Creating an Exit Modal Box using the jQuery library
• Facebook-style Lightbox/Modalbox powered by jQuery and MooTools
• Catch404: Modal Plugin for Handling Broken Links: jQuery | CSS
• Easily add Captions to your Images with jQuery and MooTools

The set can be used in all your projects, for free without any restrictions. You can freely used in both personal and commercial projects including software, online services, templates and themes. However, it may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use.

Quoting Roman Khramov, the designer of these icons:

Icons were made in design of Russian imperial porcelain. We wished to perform this work with humour and in Russian traditions. The icon “partners” is especially distinguished. We tried to pay huge attention to difficult pictures and small details. The icons set is freely available for commercial and non-commercial use, without any restrictions. The set consists of 5 custom-made icons in the resolution 160×160 .png.

• 60 Beautiful Free Premium Icons: Nixus Icon Pack
• Beautiful Set of Free Social Media Icons: WeFunction
• Free Basic Weather Icons made in Web 2.0 Style
• A Set of 6 Free & Transparent Furry Cushions Social Icons
• 10 Free High Quality Application Icons in PNG format: Web Icon Set

Sponsor Flip Wall With jQuery & CSS is a tutorial shared by Tutorialzine, that intends to fit a lot of information and organize it clearly, so that the emphasis is put on your sponsors, and not on other elements of your design. They are using PHP, CSS and jQuery with the jQuery Flip plug-in, to do just that. You can use the resulting code to showcase your sponsors, clients or portfolio projects.

For this script you need: the jQuery and the jQuery UI files, the jQuery Flip plug-in, the Flip Wall JavaScript code and the CSS code. The data for the wall is read from an array. Therefore, you can easily modify it to work with any kind of database or storage.

Bring interactivity to your site’s pages!

• Flash Portfolio Gallery with Multilevel Filters
• Professional Photography Portfolio Template from Flabell: Review
• Flip HTML Elements like Cards: QuickFlip 2.0 jQuery Plugin
• Arrange HTML Elements according to the Grid: jQuery Masonry
• jQuery Lint: Stay notified of the incorrect usages of jQuery’s API