Blueprint CSS Framework and Drupal

Building website templates and themes can be a real pain. Not only do you need to layout your site, setup your columns, and get everything just how you want it you have to check it out in a half dozen different browsers to get it working for everyone out there. That's where the Blueprint CSS Framework comes in. It's designed to take a lot of the legwork out of taking a design and making it work for the web. Now, Ted Serbinski has released a Blueprint CSS starter theme for drupal.

This theme combines a bunch of slick drupal theming techniques along with the Blueprint CSS Framework providing for what looks like a great tool to use in theme building.

Some of the drupal highlights:

• Automatically adds META description to many pages.
• Automatically adds META keywords if taxonomy exists on that node.
• SEO optimization without the need for heavy modules and additional queries per page.
• Improve forum display and performance.
• Prevents duplicate form submissions with jQuery.

If you are someone who wants to learn a bunch of great tricks for theming drupal check out the template.php file for this theme.

Some CSS Highlights:

• Normalizes Drupal’s CSS to be consistent.
• Flexible layout, from 1 to 3 columns, based on where you configure your blocks to show (left, center, right).
• Highlight any comments by the author of the node.

There is a lot more CSS magic than just these.

If you want to see some of this work in the wild check out Teds blog, MothersClick, and MomBlogNetwork. This looks like a powerful tool.

source: http://www.innovatingtomorrow.net/2008/06/05/blueprint-css-framework-and-drupal

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8 specific ways to avoid some common web design mistakes:

Effective web design goes beyond simple aesthetic appeal. In fact, there are many factors which can contribute to the overall success or failure of a website. Therefore, it is important to have a solid understanding of the common pitfalls you will want to avoid before starting this process.

Here are 8 specific ways to avoid some common web design mistakes:

   1. Avoid fancy, flashing or too-small fonts. Less is often more in the world of web design and this concept definitely applies to making font selections for your site. Remember to keep your human visitors in mind while making your selections and stick to those that are clear and easy to read.

    2.Break content blocks into bite-sized pieces. Internet readers tend to prefer material that is easy to scan over novel-length dissertations. Try to break up long paragraphs by incorporating bullets or numbered lists whenever possible.

   3. Clearly communicate what the site is about - fast. Your visitors should be able to understand what your site is about right away. You have a brief window of opportunity to convert a first-time visitor into a repeat customer - so the more clearly and quickly you can communicate your message, the better.

   4.Skip the fancy introductions. This applies to anything that makes it harder to visitors to get to what they want. The fewer steps between landing on your site and finding what they are looking for, the better. As always, make decisions based on what is best and easiest for your human visitors.

   5. Avoid auto-playing music. You may absolutely love the Red Hot Chili Peppers - but there is no way to guarantee that every single visitor to your site will. Even if they do, odds are they don't want everyone at work to know they are surfing the Internet during the day - and a sudden blast of loud music coming from their computer is a definite give-away.

   6. Incorporate value-added audio (or video). Audio and video presentations can be a great way to enhance the user's online experience. Just make sure they don't significantly increase your page load times and enable your visitors to start and stop each presentation at will.

   7. Avoid clutter. Too many badges, banners, association labels or other items can take away from or confuse your ultimate message. Again, good web design is usually simple and straightforward - so try to stay focused on only those elements which enhance your primary message.

    8.Limit scrolling. Some amount of vertical scrolling may be necessary, but try to limit it as much as possible as web surfers have notoriously short attention spans. On the other hand, horizontal scrolling should be avoided at all costs - you want the width of your entire web page to display upon opening (vs. needing to scroll across to see the whole thing).

Clearly, there are many factors to consider when deciding on the right web design options for your business. This list and the recommendations of a reputable web design firm can help you avoid the most common mistakes as you establish a successful online presence.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?8-Specific-Ways-to-Avoid-Common-Web-Design-Mistakes&id=3499367

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Importance of Colors in Web Site Design

While I was browsing the webpages about "colors on webpages" I was redirected to the website named webdesign.org.I found really a useful article by Vinay Kumar on that page.Heres the article just Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on the page of WebsiteSupport hoping useful for you.

Importance of Colors in Web Site Design

Auther:Vinaykumar

While designing a web site, importance of color is always overlooked by many web designers. But, keep it in mind that you depend on your company and your company depends on your website and your website truly depends on its color. So, color must be one of your very first concerns at the time of web site design. It's harder to read text on monitor as compare to paper and you will have to choose colors that are going to work best. Through color you can make your visitor feel comfortable, relaxed, trusting and also tempestuous.

Alas! Web browsers can only view 256 colors and even some browsers can see only 216 colors. If you want the color you chose for your website, should appear to everyone, exactly as designed by you then go ahead with 216 colors pallet. Always use web browser safe color.

Color combination is also very important aspect. Some color combinations are very unimpressive such as Yellow text on Blue Background. That's why black text on white background is the easiest color combination to read. What can be the intention of any web designer? Obviously, to make an interactive web page and interactivity comes with the colors you choose for web page. Color affects our feelings, our perceptions and our interactions.

What do colors say?

white : White is the best background color on a web page. White color shows truthfulness, Purity, devotion etc. It's the most refreshing and superlative color.

red : Red is the most emotionally vivid color and may cause a faster breathing. It symbolizes energy, action, confidence and passion.

orange: Orange is very hot color to the human eye. Orange demonstrates warmth, cheer, strength and ambition.

black: Black is the favorite color of web designers to display text but it effects very bad when used as background. It suggests excitement, speed and demands attraction.

blue: Blue is the second most popular color between web designers. It is associated with stability and depth. It represents wisdom, confidence and loyalty.

green: Green is the most compatible color with eyes and has a great healing power. It shows growth, harmony and fertility.

yellow: Yellow is the color which enhances concentration. It shows wisdom, joy and happiness.

pink: Pink is a quiet color and symbolizes sweetness, softness and innocence.

brown: Brown color provides you the feeling to mix up with the background. It represents politeness and richness.

Think about your primary audience like if you are designing a website for selling toys, then using pink and blue will be productive. Don't use more than two or three colors on a single page. Use the same background color on each page. It should not be like that 'Home Page' has a White Background and 'Contact Us' has a Yellow Background. Avoid making larger parts of web site with very bright colors. If the company for which you are designing website has already an established Logo, then make it sure that the color of Logo on website must match with the real color. Maintain the consistency because it really works. Your visitor may be irritated with your stupid color choice.

Try to be color wise and color safe, you will be able to feel the color of success.

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Formatting Tips To Speed up Your Website

While more and more people are getting access to high speed internet, there are many left on dial up. Be kind to those visitors and do a few, simple things to speed up your webpages. Not only will these tips give you a faster load time, most will also help keep your bandwidth fees low as well!

Use CSS For Faster Pages

Even if you decide to use tables, CSS can greatly improve your web sites load time! With your styles in an external .css file, the browser can cache all the formatting and stylizing for your pages instead of having to read each and every single tag all over again. Also it cuts down on long drawn out tags and replaces them with smaller class styles instead.

Use External Scripts

Use the same script on multiple pages? Switch to an external script. I'm not talking about remotely hosted, I mean loading javascript files from one source instead of adding all that code to each of your pages like this:

That way the browser already has it in it's cache and won't have to read it each time another page loads. This one saves a ton of load time, specially for larger scripts!

Remove Anything You Don't Really Need

OK, while this might sound obvious sometimes the hardest thing about creating a website is not using every fancy trick that you know. Images, flash and sometimes even sound files are very impressive.. but do you really need to showcase all your talents on one page?

Embedded sound files are something many people just find annoying anyway. You'd be surprised how many are surfing at work ;-). The last thing anyone wants is a loud music or sounds announcing to their boss that they're surfing. Also many people have their own music playing... hearing a song over top of what we're listening to is less than pleasant. As for Java applets, try to ditch them or if you want those effects, JavaScript unusually loads faster and can do just as much or more. Stand back and take a critical look at your website, you may see a few special effects that can be let go of for the sake of faster load time.

Avoid Nested Tables

OK, I'm not a big fan of using tables for layout anyway (I'm one of those people that believes content and presentation should be separate.. but thats another tip page). With that said, if in your templates tables seem necessary (or the easier way to do it), try to avoid nesting. Why? When you place a table inside another table, it takes a lot longer for the browser to work out the spacing since it has to wait to read the entire html and then work out the layout. If at all possible, try using CSS to create the columns on your page.

Avoid Full Page Tables for Faster Rendering

If you use tables, try avoiding the whole page being one big table. The browser won't show anything until it's read the whole thing that way. For a faster loading webpage, either try multiple tables (not nested) or having stuff above the main table to make your content in the first table show up faster. That way your visitors will have something to read while the rest of your page loads. It may not really make you page faster, but it will feel like it to your visitors.

Split Up Long Pages - Multiple Short Pages Load Faster

By splitting up long pages into multiple pages you not only make the content show up faster but many people that see a very long scroll bar give up. Remember, people's attention spans are often shorter than a grasshoppers (OK, not literally, but you get my point) since so much information is available at our fingertips. Try breaking it up into more readable lengths.

Remove Excess "Whitespace"

Whitespace is the spaces between your coding, removing the unneeded tabs and spaces can help a lot! Doing this will take a lot of extra bytes off the total size of your page and will speed up load time quite a bit. (Careful using automatic squishers, I find they often squish too much and makes it rather hard to edit later.)

Keep Your Code Clean

If you do use a wysiwyg editor, most times the will add useless code to your pages for example, many will leave empty tags (ie. ). Removing any of those excess tags will not only speed up your load time, but make you pages validate a lot cleaner.

Speed up Images Load Time

Don't Go Overboard On Images

While images can greatly enhance the look of a site they can really slow it down if there are too many. Try to decide if all your images are really needed (quite a few nice effects can be done with css, so sometimes images are unneeded.)

Height And Width Tags

When the page loads and the image size is already defined (ie. you've used the height and width tags), the browser knows where everything will be before the images are loaded. Otherwise the page has to wait and load the images before the text. Same goes for tables, so try to use width tags when possible on those as well for a speedier page.

Faster Images? Reduce Their File Size

There are many totally free, online image optimizers so you don't even have to install anything and it's extremely easy! Online Image Optimizer will greatly reduce the file size of your gif, jpg, or pngs and neither you or your visitors will be able to see the difference other than a page that loads a heck of a lot faster. They also keep the transparency and animations in gifs! For another JPEG reduction, try JPEG Wizard, also free, this one will only work with pictures in your hard drive not ones from the net. You can also choose some simple effects to be done (flip, mirror and rotate).

GIF vs JPG vs PNG

Personally on new sites I design I tend to go for optimized pngs. They have lossless compression (unlike jpgs and can be used without worry (gifs have the potential to have copyright issues) and load fast! With all that said, if you still want to use gifs and jpgs, here's a bit of fast info... If you don't need sharp resolution, choose GIFs over JPEGs, as GIFs generally load quicker. JPGs are generally best for photos, GIFs for anything else.

(I'd add a rant here about how Microsoft had held up the web's development with not making IE6 support png transparency... but *sigh* I've ranted about this already to anyone who will listen. Firefox, Opera and other modern browsers however have been able to show alpha transparency in png for years... oops, sorry, that was a mini rant after all!)

Source:http://www.webweaver.nu

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Install Program(apps) in Linux

Here is the simple way to install the apps and run it in UBUNTU.
1.copy the tar.gz apps on desktop.
2.go to terminal of the ubuntu.for this goto application->accessories->terminal
3. type the command as->sudo -s hit enter
4.if it prompt for password type password and hit enter.
5.then type ->cd Desktop and hit enter
6.then type-> tar xvfz filename.tar.gz -C /opt and hit enter.Here filename is your apps name.
7.now apps will install.
Hope this will works

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Top 10 Drupal Modules

1. Administration menu

" Administration menu module provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end) for Drupal. It's a helper for novice Drupal users coming from other CMS, a real time-saver..."


2. Content Construction Kit (CCK)

"The Content Construction Kit allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser. Drupal 7 and Fields in Core Most of CCK has moved to core in the Drupal 7 version. The D7 version of CCK contains..."


3. FCKeditor - WYSIWYG HTML editor

" WYSIWYG editor This module allows Drupal to replace textarea fields with the FCKeditor - a visual HTML editor, sometimes called WYSIWYG editor. This HTML text editor brings many of the powerful WYSIWYG..."


4. Views

"The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented. Traditionally, Drupal has..."


5. Pathauto

" Description: The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows..."


6. Backup and Migrate

"#D7CX: I pledge that Backup and Migrate will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released. Backup and Migrate simplifies the task of backing up and restoring your Drupal database or..."


7. Token

" Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and..."


8. Lightbox2

"The Lightbox2 module is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It's a snap to setup and works on most modern browsers. The module places images above your current page,..."


9. Webform

"This module adds a webform nodetype to your Drupal site. Typical uses for Webform are questionnaires, contact or request/register forms, surveys, polls or a front end to issues tracking systems. Submissions..."


10. CAPTCHA

" A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block form submissions by spambots, which are automated scripts..."

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Drupal Flash Node Module (flashnode) and SWF Tools (swftools)

ite configuration > Flash node settings

Creating Flash Content

To create Flash content simply go to Create content > Flash
In the flash file click on browse, select your video and click on save.

You might receive a warning telling us that we don’t have a working player right now, this is because embed media field module allows you to upload the file but it doesn’t have a player, so we need to download  a module called SWFTools(http://drupal.org/project/swftools), after we copy it to the the modules directory, go to Administer > Site configuration and select SWF Tools and save configuration.

Now you are ready to post flash video content

Original Post: http://www.oshyn.com/_blog/Web_Content_Management/post/Drupal-Flash-Node-Module/

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Top IT skills that can get you a better job

With the job markets opening up, it is time for all the aspiring techies to be equipped with the right skills that can land them in a job now. Recently, several reports have indicated that the job market is booming again after the slump due to the economic slowdown. Based on inputs from some industry watchers, Siliconindia has come out with the list of the Top IT Skills currently in demand.
SAP
The surging demand in the ERP market is expected to increase the adoption of SAP in organizations around the globe. "The demand for SAP market is currently booming and with many companies adopting ERP these days, SAP continues to dominate this space," says Harry CD, Executive Director-Operations at 3G Labs India. Currently, SAP and Oracle are the two major ERP players, however the former is having an advantage over the latter when it comes to the demand in the market. The reason behind this dominance of SAP in the ERP market is because of the customer satisfaction, according a study conducted by Panorama Consulting Group. Analysts have also predicted that SAP's Business ByDesign offering will do well this year, which will drive the demand for more SAP professionals.

Some of the applications developed by SAP that are seeing major demand are:

SAP Web Dynpro: It is a proprietary web application user interface technology developed by SAP. The increasing number of web applications around the globe needs professionals having this skill.

SAP Plant Maintenance: It deals with the preventive maintenance of manufacturing equipment that accompanies a streamlined production process. SAP PM also monitors downtime of equipment, workforce production hour as well as the time, materials and labor necessary for such maintenance.

SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer: With the boom in the retail segment this is one tool that is bound to see growth in the coming days. Advanced Planner and Optimizer is designed to help a company improve production planning, pricing, scheduling, and product shipping. It works by getting real-time updates from retailers about customer demand.

SAP Governance, Risk management and Compliance: Today, every organization must chart its own course to embrace governance, risk management and compliance framework, weighing critical business requirements with organizational maturity and top-level commitment. Companies may choose to start by identifying one or two high-priority risk areas and initiate a business-specific or initiative-driven deployment of the applications.

Java
Today, Java is being used in more than 4.5 billion devices around the world and the usage is expected to rise further because of the growth in the number of mobile phones, personal computers and smart cards. Java applets help to have an improved functionality while browsing the internet also making it more attractive. "Java is in demand because there are more companies developing user interface and web applications for their clients. The rise in popularity of software as a service (SAAS) model is also giving the edge to Java professionals," says Rishi Das, Co-founder and CEO of CareerNet Consulting.

C++
Many believe that the demand for C++ has always been there and there are not many signs that show the fall of this computer language in the near future. Satish Kumar, a HR executive with an IT firm believes that the demand for programmers like C++ remains constant because these are used in segments such as automobile, healthcare and communication systems, which are always in the growth trajectory.

PHP
PHP, which facilitates the production of dymanic web pages, was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and its growth has been phenomenal. Last year, PHP was estimated to have been installed on more than 20 million websites and over one million web servers, the number would have multiplied today considering the current surge in the online world. Today, there are several companies that are getting into this space that is driving the demand for professionals with knowledge about PHP.

Oracle
Though there seems to be more demand for SAP professionals compared to Oracle, the demand for professionals in the overall ERP software market is on the rise. Forrester Research predicts that ERP software revenue from new licenses would have fallen 24 percent in 2009. However, 2010 looks good for ERP for several reasons such as the growth in open-source market and players like Microsoft broadening its ERP offerings. Anuj Agrawal, Director of Zyoin believes that the acquisitions that Oracle has been making in the recent past, especially the Sun Microsystems deal, may alter the ERP market and give some advantage to Oracle over SAP. In the financial services space Oracle applications still holds a high position with Oracle Financials, Oracle HRMS, Oracle Projects, Oracle CRM and Oracle PO considered as the most widely used applications and demand for them is moving upwards.

.NET
Since the birth of multi-core computing, there has been a requirement for parallel-programming architecture. Incidentally, almost every programmer considers .NET Framework 3.5 as getting distant and out of the way. To prevent its programming market fiasco, recently, Microsoft released the beta version of .NET Framework 4. Primarily, the MSDN site shows that the parallel extensions in the .NET 4, has been improvised to support analogous programming, targeting multi-core computing or distributed computing. Thus, making it the right time to be equipped with the .NET skills.

Embedded C++
The increasing demand for embedded systems is driving the growth for Embedded C++, which was defined by an industry group to address the shortcomings of C++ for embedded applications. The official website states the goal of Embedded C++ as to provide embedded systems programmers with a subset of C++ that is easy for the average C programmer to understand and use. "If your interest lies in embedded systems, having the knowledge of Embedded C++ will surely get you a job," says Kumar.

C
C is still one of the most popular programming languages though it was developed nearly three decades ago and there are very few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist. C has greatly influenced many other popular programming languages, most notably C++, which originally began as an extension to C. "For all those who have been working on C, the demand still exists in the market because their application is wide," says Prem.

Source:http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Top_IT_skills_that_can_get_you_a_better_job-nid-66320.html

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How to make joomla site load fast?

Compressing Web pages with GZIP

Compression is a quick and efficient way to save your server bandwidth and speed up your website load time. By adding a piece of PHP code to the top of your Joomla generated Web pages, you can instruct the Web server to compress files for transit to your visitors' Web browser. This is especially useful for text-heavy Web pages that are over 100K in size.

To Optimize Your Joomla Site with GZIP Compression

Go to Extension >>Templates Manager
Open your default template and click on Edit Html button

Add the following code to the very top and above the DOCTYPE:



Done.

Note: make sure you have GZIP Page Compression turned on in Joomla Global Configuration>>Server

This will decrease website load time significantly for sites that are larger than 100k. For sites that are less than 100k in size, it may not have too much affect on page load time.

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