ilovecolors

Your Website is More Valuable Than Facebook

Elio — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:30:41 +0000

Absolutely right. Your website is your mother ship, your identity. Well thought article about keeping the control and the value on your website.

How to display hidden buttons in TinyMCE for WordPress

Elio — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:08:10 +0000

Ever wished you could mark a number as a subscript or simply add an hr ruler in WordPress TinyMCE? With this trick you will learn how to display additional hidden buttons for this rich text editor.

Remember we’re running a contest until tomorrow Monday to win 2 accounts from DepositPhotos.com with $30 each! Enter the contest just by commenting the post.

Add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file:


function ilc_mce_buttons($buttons){
  array_push($buttons, "backcolor");
  return $buttons;
}
add_filter("mce_buttons", "ilc_mce_buttons");

Log in into WordPress and go to your post writing section and you will see the new buttons available. Here’s a list of the useful buttons that you can display:

anchor
backcolor
cleanup
code
copy
cut
fontselect
fontsizeselect
hr
paste
redo
styleselect
sub
sup
undo

To add them just replace the “backcolor” string in the code above or add them like this:

function ilc_mce_buttons($buttons){
  array_push($buttons, "backcolor", "anchor", "hr", "fontselect", "sub", "sup");
  return $buttons;
}
add_filter("mce_buttons", "ilc_mce_buttons");

That would add the background color select, an anchor builder, a button to add an hr ruler, a drop down to select the font family, and two buttons to mark text or numbers as subscripts or superscripts.

The artwork of Pino Lamanna

Elio — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:57:27 +0000

Pino Lammana is a graphic designer based in Wuppertal, Germany. He might be only 27, but he already has an incredible portfolio covering logos, lettering, clothing and toy art.

Remember we’re running a contest until Monday to win 2 accounts from DepositPhotos.com with $30 each! Enter the contest just by commenting the post.

His illustration work, as well as his lettering, possess a duality between that cute touch commonly known as toy art, along with a strict geometric construction. An excellent color handling complete the magic imbued in each work.

For more awesomeness, visit Pino Lammana’s profile at Behance or his portfolio at Cargo Collective. You can also follow schakalwal on Twitter.

10 tools to improve SEO + 5 WordPress SEO plugins

Elio — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:46:46 +0000

SEO is one of those we’ve come to love and hate at the same time. Many agencies boast about their SEO services and they don’t even swap columns to put the main content at the top, one of the most easiest and simplest SEO techniques. However, the SEO war gets tougher every time with more attention paid to things like canonical URLs, microformats, geolocation, sitemaps, domain age, and a long etcetera. In this post we will check 10 tools that will help you to analyze your blog and get some feedback about how you can optimize it. We will also explore 5 WordPress plugins that will improve the SEO friendliness of your site.

By the way, we’re running a contest to win 2 accounts from DepositPhotos.com, each one with $30 cash! Enter the contest just by commenting the post.

Online tools for SEO Analysis

pearanalytics

http://www.pearanalytics.com/

Another site analysis tool which offers complete information about page loading times, inclusion of Flash, redirections, sitemap, PR/Alexa ranking, domain age, checks for duplicate content, etc. pearanalytics maintains a blog with useful information covering a wide range SEO issues with tips and tricks to enhance your site’s SEO.

KeywordDensity

http://www.keyworddensity.com/

With this tool you will be able to analyze the ratio between specific keywords and other content on your site according to some keywords that you can enter before the analysis starts. In addition to usual Description and Keyword meta, it will explore your visible text, alt tags, comment tags, domain, images, and others looking for keywords relevant to those that you want to measure.

WebsiteGrader

http://websitegrader.com/

Although basic, the information presented is clear and easy to understand. Collects information regarding content, internal optimization, social networks buzz and Alexa ranking.

dnfame

http://www.dnfame.com/

Provides information about how well your domain performs on social bookmarking sites, search engines and its positioning on several rankings, such as PR, Alexa and Compete.

OpenSiteExplorer

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Offers complete and extensive information about your internal link structure, inbound links segmented by post, page or site root, redirections, etc.

Spider Viewer

http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/spider-test/index.php

The Spider Viewer will show you how robots assimilate your site’s content, including the visible text, any link found and the markup.

The Reaction Engine

http://www.reactionengine.com/

Analyses how well a certain URI performs for a given keyword or keyphrase. Analysis includes content, search engines positioning, XMHTL validation, page size. One issue found on this tool is that it will return the results for the first URI, redirected or not as it is found. So yourdomain.com might seem to perform poorly but in fact might be due to the redirection to www.yourdomain.com. Make sure you enter your correct base domain.

WooRank

http://www.woorank.com/

Maybe the best tool in this round-up, WooRank not only provides comprehensive analysis but also gives tips about how to fix it including links to relevant articles. The design is very clear and easy to read. This tool will analyze your site’s visits, content, the internal optimization (such as title, keywords), the external optimization (popularity, social network mentioning), usability, and even your downtimes, server location, whois, etc. In addition, this nifty tool is localized so you will get the report written on english, spanish and french, with information links pointing to resources written in those languages as well.

Social Mention

http://socialmention.com/

Although not strictly an analysis tool, gives a wide view of how is your domain appreciated in social networks, showing statistics for emotional feelings (I’m guessing through keywords) towards your site (or your product), top users mentioning it, top hashtags referring links and top keywords.

SEO Workers

http://www.seoworkers.com/

The analysis in this tool might be good, but it’s not clear and issues, whether good or bad are not easily spotted by the user. Still, it’s included here due to the comprehensive information next to each issue along with interesting videos from Matt Cutts.

Extra tool: Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

This last tool offers an interface to create a Google snippet by entering your page title, meta description and URL, and preview it as it would look on Google’s search results.

WordPress Plugins for SEO enhancement

As a WordPress user, you might be wondering what are your options when it comes to enhance your website or your blog. Fortunately, there’s a myriad of plugins to enhance your website’s SEO performance, just browse the repository by the proper tags, like search engine optimization, or seo and you will find a ton. Here you have 5 plugins that will do the job perfectly

All in One SEO Pack

By default, WordPress doesn’t provides you with an easy way to set your description and keywords for each page or post. Providing a proper description about the post content and include targeted keywords is key for your site’s SEO strength. This plugin enhances your post/page writing area with a panel to enter a different title, description and keywords for each post. It also prevents duplicate content and sets canonical URLs. Works also with custom post types.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

SEO Friendly Images

Alt attributes on images are crucial for image search optimization, not to mention that they are crucial for a page to be considered XHTML-valid. This plugin generates tags for the alt and title attributes for all your images using the post title and the image filename.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

Search Engine query in WordPress

Most visitors arriving from search engines leave the site after consuming the content they were looking for. This plugin helps mitigating this user behaviour by suggesting related posts or pages based on the terms of their search query.

http://wordpress.org/…/search-engine-query-in-wordpress-related-contents/

Google XML Sitemaps

Generates the XML sitemap for better indexing of your blog by search engines, allowing them to know the structure of your site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

SEO Smart Links

Aims to increase the internal link density of your website by suggesting links on specific words on your content and comments targeting other posts or pages of your site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Extra: Simple Google Sitemap

A lighter version of Google XML Sitemaps which requires less resources like RAM memory on your servers.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-sitemap/

One last thing before closing: efficient SEO is not about cheating a search engine. Google’s algorithms are very smart and you won’t cheat them just by completely stuffing your posts with keywords. Good SEO is simply about being easy on search engines and expose all the content on your site in the most structured and clean way.

Free font: Rue Display by Type Together

Elio — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:44:44 +0000

The team at Type Together, creators of the extremely popular Bree font, is offering Rue Display, designed by Winnie Tan, as a free download.

By the way, we’re running a contest to win 2 accounts from DepositPhotos.com with $30 each! Enter the contest just by commenting the post.

Rue Display has a nice intro on its page:

Rue is an organic, casually ornamental, narrow-faced sans serif. It is a display type structured with random traces of calligraphic tendencies. It does not begin with any noble ideals, other than to mediate between the muse of imagination and the act of realization.

5 Dark Themes for Aptana

Elio — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:22:55 +0000

If Aptana is your IDE of choice and you love every single feature forgiving any weakness, but your eyes after 8 hours coding just can’t tolerate the default bright theme, this is your post. These dark color themes for Aptana will bring some rest to your eyes.

By the way, we’re running a contest to win 2 accounts from DepositPhotos.com with $30 each! Enter the contest just by commenting the post.

NightLion

Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, jSON, PHP, PHP Doc, PHP Smarty, PHP Smarty Config, ScriptDoc and XML.

Download NightLion

Autumna

Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, PHP, PHP Doc and ScriptDoc.

Download Autumna

Green Chaud

Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, Javascript, PHP, and XML.

Download Green Chaud

Sunburst

Includes color themes for CSS, ERB, HTML, Javascript, PHP, XML and YML.

Download Sunburst

LPent Shades

This last theme is the one I use (but got replaced after writing this article by Autumna). It’s only published on the Aptana forum with no name (LPent is his username at Aptana forums) and its author gives this explanation regarding the colors:

I like to use different color-schemes for each file type. That way you can easilly distingiush between different types of code when they are used in the same file (for example CSS inside html-file or HTML inside php-file).

And it really works, the different shades help you to quickly distinguish the codes when you work in Aptana with three panes side by side. Includes color themes for CSS, HTML, JS and PHP. In addition to the shades shown on the image above, the shades for PHP are red and the shades for JS are green.

Download LPent Shades

Do you know of any other dark theme for Aptana that we might be missing here?

DepositPhotos.com Give Away: win 2 accounts with $30 credit

Elio — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:50:43 +0000

DepositPhotos.com is a stock photos and illustrations marketplace and started its activities just last November. However, they’ve been doing their homework and gathered an incredible amount of high quality photographs at incredible low prices as well. Today we’re going to start a contest to give away 2 accounts, each one with $30 credit!!

So what does DepositPhotos offer to the designer? bitmap photos and vector illustrations of any trend and topic you can imagine, and in top of that, the ability to pay in many different ways. That’s the real interest of DepositPhotos, because they do not only have hip-hop dancing and glam shots or beautiful abstract backgrounds suitable to spice up that website, or even wild animals for that wildlife report you’re designing…

what sets DepositPhotos apart from other stock sellers are their low prices and the smooth, polished interface and the different payment ways.

Prices and Payment

As many other stock marketplaces, you can buy credits to spend on your images, with each credint amounting to almost $1. Now, the XS image size is 0.5, meaning that you pay way less than $1 for one of these quality images.

However, you can also enroll on a subscription plan which makes buying each image even cheaper. For instance, you can subscribe for one month and pay approximately $0.33 for each image! and if you subscribe for one year, forget it, each image is only $0.1! Really cheap, uh? the best thing is that the quality of the images is far from being cheap, as you might have witnessed in these samples.

Pay by SMS

For the two options above, you can pay using a credit card, PayPal or Moneybookers. But what if you don’t have neither a credit card or a PayPal account? or simply don’t feel like using you credit card? DepositPhotos have the answer and it’s images by SMS. Just by texting your desired image to a certain number from DepositPhotos, the amount you spend is credit straight into your account.

Bonus Images

One more reason to choose DepositPhotos is the Bonus point you earn each time you buy an image (XS sizes do not apply). For instance, if you buy an XXXL image you’re automatically credited with a free bonus for another image in the range of XXL sizes to XS sizes.

Searching for images

I’m personally loving the Advanced Search. To display it, click on the Advanced Search link below the Best match drop down. It’s really clear, takes little screen real state, and you have a lot of options to refine your search. I specially like the Search by color function:

Free Trial

Now, the cherry in the pie is the free trial subscriptions they are offering for a limited time. During the 14 days of the trial period, you will be able to download up to 10 JPEG photos or vectorial illustrations of any sizes. You can’t get any better than this, 140 images for free with the high quality of DepositPhotos stock.

DepositPhotos is quickly marking a difference on the stock market world driven by the high quality of their images and how easy it is to purchase an image, even without an account or a credit card.

The contest: comment to win

DepositPhotos is kindly offering 2 accounts with $30 each one to spend on images. To enter the contest, just leave a comment below stating why you want to win or where you will be using these images and you’re in. That gives you one entry into the draw. To get another entry, spread the word about the contest by tweeting this post and adding the #ilcdp hashtag. The contest will be open for one week until next Monday, August 30, when the lucky winners will be randomly picked.

Deminify JavaScript

Elio — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:45:24 +0000

Ever needed to decode obfuscated JavaScript packed with Dean Edwards’ packer? Now you can.

Sort text lists alphabetically

Elio — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:23:11 +0000

Neat and clean tool to sort text lines alphabetically or list of numbers. Might come in handy next time you need to sort the shopping list.

Everyday Fantasy book

Elio — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:39:56 +0000

Patipat Asavasena is an artist from Thailand showcasing his incredible artwork on DeviantArt. He recently published his first artbook, Everyday Fantasy.

His work contains some resemblance to anime style (the second image featured here is a fan art about Black Rock Shooter anime), although Patipat has already digested it and added his own personal touch. The book, Everyday Fantasy, encompasses over 10 years of work and also contains some insights about the workflow for each pieces. Delight your eyes with the work of *asuka111.

this last one is currently my favorite…