Webmasters Gallery

It is great to feel the good vibes at Mozilla HQ today as we launch Firefox 3.5! It is always an interesting ride to see a browser develop, and realize how complex and large the work is.

Congrats to the browser developers out there who are working hard to make the Web better. With final versions of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome 2 out in the wild…. things are picking up nicely.

The Firefox 3.5 release is exciting for me because it really benefits the developers. We get Open Video, @font-face, cross site XHR, Geo Location APIs, CSS Media Queries, Native JSON, Offline support, Web Workers, and so much more.

And, the world keeps moving. I have seen some very cool things in the nightly tree, and look forward to beign around as the team works on the next great Firefox.

Updates

Steve Souders has posted on Firefox 3.5 getting 10 out of 11 in his UA Profiler tests.

Watch the downloads come in with this cool download tracker that uses Canvas and SVG, all thanks to Justin Scott. The stats so far show that if the current rate trends hold we will beat the Firefox 3.0 download day, which is a surprise to all.

Content Management System, or CMS is an application used to manage news easily so that users can publish, edit and delete articles from the back-end admin system. HTML and other scripting language are not necessary to operate a CMS, though having them will add more advantages.

Since we had looked into 22 open source PHP frameworks, i decided to do a roundup of 20 Open Source PHP Content Management Systems so that readers who don’t have strong PHP knowledge can easily create their website using free and open source CMS.

1. WordPress

WordPress is a powerful yet easy to use content management system. Initially it was designed as a blogging platform. However, it slowly become popular and can be customized into a powerful CMS with some tricks and plugins. I had wrote an article about WordPress SEO plugins and also talked about things that you should know about WordPress 2.8.

2. Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites.

3. Joomla

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

4. Frog CMS

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

5. SilverStripe

SilverStripe is a PHP CMS built with Sapphire framework, and it uses MVC design pattern. you can view example sites that built with SilverStripe from the official webpage.

6. Mambo

Mambo is a full-featured, award-winning content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Although some Mambo sites had already migrated to Joomla, but i think i should include Mambo as it is still a great CMS.

7. TYPOlight

TYPOlight is a PHP 5 CMS and it has a lot of features such as live update, cross-browser CSS framework generator(IE7 compatible), templated based front end output, use Ajax and Web 2.0 technologies. You should check out the main page for more info.

8. Concrete5

Concrete5 is an open source content management system with simple administaror interface. You can edit a web page live by using the editing toolbar provided after you log in as administrator.

9. Textpattern

Textpattern is yet another very popular content management system. It requires PHP 4 to run and has a lot of plugins that you can use for various customizations.

10. Symphony

Symphony is a CMS that uses XML/XSLT as its templating language. Symphony lets you customize anything you like, from the website’s URL structure to your publishing environment. For a non programmer, this CMS might be complicated to learn.

11. MODx

MODx is both a PHP application framework and content management system. MODx is the first free PHP CMS to offer an API that fully supports Web 2.0 Ajax technology. It is SEO friendly CMS, and allows you to configure the meta content for each page.

12. Habari Project

Habari is a highly recommended open source blogging platform. It is being written specifically for modern web hosting environment, and uses modern object oriented programming techniques.

13. CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple is highly customizable and there are a lot of Modules for you to download. The Documentation is pretty complete and easy to follow.

14. ImpressCMS

ImpressCMS is a community developed Content Management System. It is highly scalable and is extremely useful for managing online communities.

15. Exponent CMS

Exponent uses an intuitive and flexible content editing system that allows website pages to be edited on the page as it is displayed. You can download modules and themes from the official website too!

16. MiaCMS

MiaCMS is a fork of the Mambo CMS. It has a powerful and extensible third party entension system, and also a flexible site theming capabilities. MiaCMS supports OpenID and can consider to be a stable and mature CMS.

17. Jojo CMS

Jojo is a search engine friendly CMS. You will have SEO friendly URL to your article, and Jojo will handle www/non-www domains for you. Beside SEO friendly, Jojo also lets you extend the functionality by adding product databases, blogs, image galleries or whatever takes your fancy.

18. TYPO3

TYPO3 is a free Open Source content management system for enterprise purposes on the web and in intranets. It offers full flexibility and extendability while featuring an accomplished set of ready-made interfaces, functions and modules.

19. Elxis CMS

Elxis CMS comes with a lot of features such as Search Engine Friendly URL, strong security, adjustable member list and complete user profiles. Its automated tasks, modern design, AJAX technology and multi-lingual interface helps you be more productive.

20. Chyrp

Chyrp is a lightweight blogging platform and it uses Twig as the templating engine. The documentation is quite complete and you can download a lot of useful modules from the main site.

Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies, they believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Google Ventures is broadly interested in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others.

They invest anywhere from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance. They’re looking for entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways. Are you one of them?

WebKreation has showed us how to create a Sliding Login Panel using Mootools. Recently, he has improved both the design and functionalities of the script and released a Nice and Clean Sliding Login Panel in jQuery this time. The panel overlaps content instead of pushing the content down. Although the script is really simple with the basic jQuery “SlideUp” and “SlideDown” effect, the design of the panel looks really neat and pretty. You may find it useful on some of your projects.

 

Where did March go? I feel like I’ve been short changed on time this last month. 31 days just seems to disappear in the blink of an eye! Thankfully though, I got a huge amount done, so once again it’s time to take a look back at the things I set out to achieve and whether or not I got there.

The Business

Since last month when I wrote about my progress in February, it feels like I’ve done almost double the amount of work again. I blogged this month about the hours which I’m currently working, well that hasn’t changed much yet – I’m still up early, and in bed very late.

Here’s some of the stuff I managed to get done in March:

• Totally cleaned out my office, hopefully this’ll be a guest post on FreelanceFolder soon
• Got invited to do a guest post on Darren Rowse’s TwiTip (I need to write this up)
• Opened my business bank account (which took a LONG TIME to do)
• Fully reviewed the SitePoint Web Design Business Kit (as pomised)
• Networked with a lot [MORE] really great people!
• Didn’t take on any new projects, but got lots of enquiries. See my post on Dry Patches
• Designed/coded/released the intial version of WPress’d
• Put together some new sets of documents including my new-client needs-assessment form
• Totally coded up and released a brand new Lyrical Media site (big accomplishment!)
• Managed to get Lyrical Media bumped up to PR6 with the latest pagerank update
• Got my credit rating sorted out! Natwest finally came through and fixed their mistake!

Reviewing Goals From March

In my first month review I set myself some goals to achieve for the month of March, let’s have a quick look back and see what I did (and didn’t) manage to get done.

• Grow my twitter account to 700 followers – Sucess! I smashed this one, over 1,000 now!
• Grow my rss subscribers to 60 – Success! Feedburner is currently showing 65!
• Look into an advertising budget with BuySellAds – Fail, simply haven’t got the budget yet
  
• Set up a monthly newsletter with Campaign Monitor – Half success, opened an account and started using it, but I haven’t actually set a newsletter up yet.
  
• Complete and release the Neophyte wordpress theme – Total Fail, this one is on the backburner for the time being
• Learn some more PHP, Javascript, and Ruby – Success! I did all three!

Goals For April

I set 6 goals last month, this month I’m bumping that up to 8 – and they’re slightly more ambitious goals too, because what would be the point of succeeding at the same rate?

• Set up Newsletter – back from last month, really want to get this done
• Review the SitePoint Email Marketing Kit on this blog (fits in with the above)
• Review the Rockstar Freelancer Book on this blog
• Win (at least) two new client projects
• Complete the first sample of my top secret Lyrical Media project (watch this space)
• Grow my twitter account to 1,500 followers
• Grow my rss subscribers to 100 people
• Sell EggRage.co.uk (leave a comment if interested)

Other Stuff Coming in April

• An interview with Brendon Sinclaire (author of the Web Design Business Kit)
• Some more free applications for freelancers
• A couple of guest posts by me on other freelance / web design blogs
• More ‘personal’ style posts from me about the trials and tribulations of self employment
• New and improved business cards!

What Are You Up To?

I love hearing from everyone who comments on this blog, so please tell me what you’re up to and if there’s anything that I can do to help out. If you’re doing anything related to web design business, drop me a line and maybe we can get you a guest post slot! This site received 24,000 page views in March compared to 18,000 in February, so it’s on the up!

How do you prefer to socialize and converse with people (and the occasional inhuman entity) on the Web in real or near-real time? Instant messaging? Services like Twitter and powncee? If you’re anything like us here at Mashable , you dabble in each somewhat.

But what if you happen to like doing things old-school? No, no, not email. That stuff’s way too slow and banal. Rather, what if you’re into that popular medium of old called IRC? Yes, IRC. Internet Relay Chat. Our own Stan Schroederr admits to whiling away a few moments here and there on such discussions. Some of you might toast the technology yourselves. If so, here’s something that you may find quite appealing. It’s called Mibbitt .

Highlighted by Josh Lowensohnn over at CNET’s Webware channel today, Mibbit looks to put a fresh(er) face on the aged chat platform of IRC, which hit its stride back in the Web 1.0 era when kilobits were still the measurement of choice for most Internet users. Mibbit provides an entirely Web-based solution for maintaining connections to multiple servers, easily manage favorites, and generally just enjoy IRC again. Or at least enjoy it more than you do already. (You know who you are, diehards.)

The magic behind Mibbit, which seems to have first shown its face in public sometime back in January, is Ajax, which ensures that things move steady and smooth. No need to click your browser’s refresh. Discussions flow automatically down the page. Also, if you want to embed an interesting talk on an external webpage, you may do so without having to really work too hard at it. Embed code can be provided.

There isn’t very much else to explain. After all, this is still IRC we’re talking about. But all in all, Mibbit is an attractive option for veterans users of the technology, and perhaps even those who’ve long wished to join the fold, but always considered it too difficult to get a good start with. Mibbit certainly helps to make things easy. And lets not forget. IRC still has its uses. It’s by no means the most popular social conversation engine of the times. But if we ever have to revert back to simpler methods to get our messages across to one another, IRC just so happens to be a very reliant safety. Particularly in cases where high concentrations of Internet users are found.

Not too long ago I held a giveaway on this website sponsored byF-Stop to give away a free courier bag.  I’ve always loved giving things away on this website and I was very excited to be giving away such a great item.  In the past, I’ve found contests or giveaways to be great ways to increase traffic and exposure for my site as well as the item that is being given away.  The problem with contests or giveaways is that it can be hard to spread the word about them.  In the world of social networking, it can be tough to ask others to help spread the word because after all, why would anyone want to hurt their own chances of winning a particular item by telling their friends about it?
This is the major impediment to any "comment-to-win" contests or giveaways that one might find on the web.  Unless your site has a huge following, the traffic and exposure as a result from the contest is likely to be minimal because people simply won’t want to help you promote it.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve this problem.  The solution came to me while thinking about the terms for the F-Stop contest.  Why not allow people to enter the contest by Tweeting about it via Twitter?

I immediately saw the advantages a Twitter-based contest or giveaway would have over a standard "comment-to-win" giveaway.  By asking a person to simply Tweet a message containing some basic text and a specific shortened URL with a link back to my contest, my contest could literally become viral.  Every person who entered would send the link out to all their followers, those people would in turn visit my website and then send the link out to all their followers, and so on and so on.  I could then track the entries using Search.Twitter.com. The only drawback I could see from this sort of contest was the potential irritation that it could cause from people realizing that I was asking them to essentially sign up their competitors.

To off-set this irritation I decided to allow the entrant to enter more than once.  This would have a dual benefit.  The more they Tweeted, the better their chance to win and the more potential entrants my contest would receive.  I wasn’t exactly sure how well this contest would work but my gut was saying that it was going to do really well.
After about 2 hours, I knew I was right.  I published the contest about 5 a.m., by 7 a.m. the contest already had 200 entrants and by the end of the day my contest had received nearly 1,000 entries and the contest page had received about 3,500 page views.  On day 2 the contest page had received over 1,100 page views and the number of entries was still increasing.  At this point I knew that this contest method was a winner.
The response I received regarding this contest was very positive although I did receive some negative feedback from some of my readers who felt that it was irresponsible to allow people to enter as many times as they wanted, that spamming their friends with the contest details was annoying, and that the potential ramifications for Twitter were very bad if this method caught on.  For the most part, I do agree with some of the detractors of this method.  That’s why I believe that contests run in this matter should be done using some common sense and with some responsibility.  If you decide to run a contest like this on your site, here are a few suggestions:

1. Limit the number of times people can enter and tell them that if they violate the rules, their entries will not be counted.  
2. Don’t hold contests like this very often.  If you do this too much, people will catch on and stop participating.
3. Only give away big ticket items.  Do not try to sell your eBook this way.  If you do, you’re likely to face a lot of negative feedback.
4. Only run the contest for 1-3 days. After that, interest seems to run out.

Anyhow, I thought that I would share my thoughts regarding this very effective contest method with you guys and see what you think.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

The advent of spring got me in the mood for some spring inspired web designs. The sun is out… was out and now gone back in again but at least the temperature has improved, just!

The blue skies and blossom led me to putting together this little list of stunning web designs that caught my eye.

The list contains Boompa and Getting Crazy, my favourites for their use of water colour paintings which really make them stand out form the crowd.

Hopefully it will give you some inspiration for future designs.

9 Spring Web Designs