If you are a web designer or web developer , you must always be on the lookout for photoshop brushes , vector elements, high resolution textures, vector icons, stock photos and web graphics for your web design or graphic design projects. Who would not be ? For all most all new web design projects involve different topics or category of clients. A proper stock photograph makes the design look complete . The same way , nowadays using icons on web pages and applications is quite the obvious choice .
As I was searching for free stock photographs and free vector icons, I came across this new website which was offering an amazing collection of web designer stuff for an extremely low price . Over 60,000 items priced at just $39 USD , which made me stunned. Not only I bought it for myself , I suggested to almost 5-6 friends of mine who were almost overjoyed. I am still unable to download all the stock photograph and icons from their website as there are so many , but I thought it would be a good idea to blog about it , so that more designers or bloggers like me are able to take advantage of this amazing deal.

I think I may have touched this subject before , but lately one of my friends was raving about being able to setup his own blog on Blogger.com . I have used Blogger.com , Wordpress.com , Weebly.com and many of the free blog websites and never got really satisfied .
I agree that I am a techie , a webmaster , a web savy person , and hence it is easy for me to tinker with Wordpress or Joomla or any of the open source CMS systems and blogging engines . But I prefer to have my own blog set up on my own hosting account . I prefer to have my own rules – be it for the space allowed, or the advantage of using any template i own and create , taking backups and many more of those things. But with deciding to host my blog myself , comes the time to choose a proper hosting provider . Since I prefer Wordpress ( the software) as my blogging platform , and so does millions of other medium to large sites , I would only give recommendations for it . Be sure to compare the top wordpress hosting providers to find the best solution for your new site. All of these providers not only include wordpress as auto install , but also give help and support for it .

Free web hosting is nothing new , but over the years quite a few Free web hosting providers have shut down , Geocities, Fortunecities , Lycos to name a few. Several new and small players have come in , but most of them disappear after a few months / year or so.

A friend of mine had referred me to Doteasy once and I have seen their plans, especially their free web hosting plan – which is quite promising. With the new year coming up, they seem to have a very special promotion. If you buy a .COM .NET .ORG domain at $4.95 USD, and you can also get a multi-domain cPanel web hosting service completely free for 1 year. No setup fee. Their free cPanel hosting includes all the inbuilt features such as website builder, blog, forum and other web tools like stats, hit counters and email forms. Use coupon code 0910FWH for this special offer, Click here to sign up a free hosting account, or click the banner below.

What are Blogs good for if not comments and discussion . Yes , that is a thought … I have blogged about personal musings , php scripts, open source and commercial applications such as Wordpress, vBulletin, Magento , my life as a Dmoz editor, my web development company and it’s clients and sometimes even SEO. All this time, I have not written just for making sure i get pageviews, even though I do like to get client queries. But I typically don’t have time to write for every damn thing on the internet .

But sometimes, it does make you feel that talking to yourself alone does not justify writing – I wont deny that. Battling with that frame of mind against being stuck moderating thousands of junk posts every day – i used to keep all comments in the typical Wordpress scenario . But I want to give this DoFollow idea a try.  I don’t know wether this will incite more people to initiate a discussion or dialogue , wether my musings are more boring or wether this will bring only incerasing amount of viagra and casino commenters.

But it is fixed that I have made this Blog a DoFollow blog as long as it makes sense.

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MailChimp is a amazing Email Marketing Tool / website that you must use if you are a webmaster servicing clients, Internet Marketer or Affiliate guru.  I have not come across just a fantastic offer from such a useful service before. Previously I have used iContact , Constant Contact and aWebber but this offer beats the socks out of them.

Yes, it is a new player compared with some of the other Autoresponders, but would you really care , if you are allowed to :

• Store upto 500 subscribers
• Send mailers 3000 times a month
• Avail beautiful templates and learn the tricks of trade from helpful videos
• Track your campaigns
• Integrate with Wordpress, Magento, PayPal, Drupal, MoveableType, Joomla , osCommerce and Salesforce
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Just a few days back I had mentioned that I am in love with Magento . While surfing through the website, I noticed that they have maintained their record from last year by winning the ‘Best of Open Source Enterprise Applications (E-Commerce) from Infoworld.

The awards “recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done.” Find more about the Open Source Awards on their website .

PhpLinkdirectory script has come out with version 4 , which they are currently releasing as a “Beta” offering, ala Google . The script does come out with very many new additions , but to tweak it for bugs and client reports and feedbacks, the official / final release will come in few weeks.

The current version offers the new “widgets” , which professes to make many custom modifications and plugins easily add-able with the existing software. Some of the mentioned widgets are for displaying the latest articles, latest links, popular links etc on the left right column Or displaying streams of Twitter tweets, and Alexa graph and Compete score. As per the last post on the site, there exist 17 readymade widgets available for download.

Find more details of the upcoming features on the website. To stay tuned for other updates subscribe to our feed.

I am again getting laid back. It was almost in early August , Invisionpower announced the release of their Community Content System 1.0.0, which is more or less a Content management system / CMS built upon the backend of the base forum software.

With the sad state of the discusstv website, it has been many days since i have actively worked upon a Invisionboard forum, besides installing or updating for clients. A full feature description can be found here .

From what I have read, it basically uses the forum /community users db to decide how to handle the permissions for new pages that can now be created based on the existing structure. It also to come extend allows you to design the pages , controlled by the Css and uses a block / allows blocks to be created, for displaying some external content or ads etc. The blocks also allows you to now type in php code or display rss feeds, and also possibly use any external plugin.

As I am yet to use this, i believe it is a nice addition but it would probably make many of the old modifications defunct . The pricing is currently just 35 USD but thats probably just a starting price.

I have been involved with the ODP for quite some time now.  But lately I have been spending substantially more time with my web development business as not only it pays the bills but also was my passion all the time. ODP is and will remain to be another passion, but somewhere down the line I feel ideologically stumped . In my tenure I have seen many people arrive at this scenario for varying reasons and probably this is just another of those.  I don’t feel urged to quit , but i don’t at the same time feel motivated to go back and edit right now either.

Ever since I started editing I have been vocal about my reasonings and intentions .  I have edited , maybe not hugely in numbers some random 2500 or so edits , but I believe i also have participated in various discussions and verbal to and fro’s. In all this time, I have felt the need for quality editing as opposed to quantity – part of which is due to my involvement in my business and also my laziness , but a major part also to adhere to the Guidelines we always speak about. I like reading through old forum discussions, newsletters and instructions and formed some ideas of my own  from those.

But seemingly not all of them are to be followed – as determined by the current powers that be . With the modernization trend going on , the ODP is slanting towards a more “customer centric entity” which will supposedly need to look and cater to the vocal traffic on the web . Quality Check , although bookwise is the good thing to do , is less of a concern . In my time period I have seen the rise of need for grooming up smaller editors to larger zones without proper checking , from Metas ,  Editalls, Admins even when notified about it .  And in the recent past , I have also come across incidents where we are told that in written communications, we should think of catering more towards the vocal population on the web as opposed to the Editor community and layman visitors – which we used to be told as our Primary Interest Group .

I know what I am speaking off can easily be considered as blasphemous . But hey , this is MY blog .

We do custom scripting, development of shopping carts. Something I have noticed many times that requirements of shopping carts and ecommerce websites for different clients vary . While some may like a feature rich website along with a feature full admin panel, there are some clients who are more at ease with a simplistic approach and do not always very high end web store necessities. For clients who have a fixed idea on what they want, and even know of ready made shopping cart software such as osCommerce and Zencart or xCart etc, we do not usually offer a custom php mysql shopping cart solution. We rather suggest that we customize their open source application to match their look and feel or make it work as they want with maybe even some plugins and modifications / contributions.  But that was yeaterday , or last year .

With the advent of Magento , with its amazing look and feel , frontend , backend and readymade featuresets, I am totally blown off – have very little thing to say – why someone should not have it . Whatever I can say or something you may hear elsewhere , I can say is less ; It’s features speak volumes of its amazingness. With allready 500,000 downloads completed in January, and being mentioned in various developer blogs worldwide, over 115K registered community users, support forums in over 10 languages it would be foolishness not to follow it more closely and actively participate in its growth and build up one’s portfolio on the platform. And thats exactly what I have taken up to do .

Magento Ecommerce