FontShop.com recently launched its new web 2.0 service called FontStruct. FontStruct is a free font-building tool.
FontStruct allows you to quickly construct fonts by using geometrical identities arranged in a grid base.

FontStruct's custom font making feature is powered by its inline graphic tool which helps adding geometrical figures, shapes etc. to lower and upper case of the font you are making. While drawing font figures, in FontStruct referred as 'FontStructions', the tool lets the user see adjacent figures and relating shapes to make the font creation easy.

FontStruct also allows the user to refer to some pre-made fonts for shape or mods suggestion. The drawback here is that the pre-made fonts are not listed in categories, making it hard for the user to check the correct pre-made font.
When its done, your 'fontstruction' created by the so called 'fontstructor' tool is saved and a high quality True-Type font is generated ready to be used.

FontStruct

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One really really really really painful browser is the infamous Internet Explorer 6. I have a strong feeling it is also one of the reason why IE has gained such a bad name among developers.

According to StatCounter Global Stats, IE6 is still being used by about 25% of the users, which is a sizable number and cannot be ignored.

Jason Clarke suggests that Microsoft release an update for IE6 for Windows 2000. I don't think that will ever happen.

Hence, for web developers this still continues to be a painful experience in trying to ensure that their sites work in IE6. You can also check it for other versions of Internet Explorer if you are interested.

Or, you can prompt out a message to your users suggesting that it is high time they upgraded their Internet Explorer 6 to IE7 or even IE8.

This is where sevenup comes into play. SevenUp is a tiny JavaScript that you can embed in your page / site. Whenever a visitor using IE6 lands up on your site he / she will see a window like this.

This is much better message that the really irritating buttons you see all over telling users to stop using Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox. (rant begins) I don't see why I should stop using Internet Explorer 7 or IE8, just because you can't code a site properly for the browser! (rant ends).

Another benefit of sevenup is that it is so tiny that users won't even feel the impact while browsing through your site. Anyone who is not using IE6 will never see a message.

To implement this, download sevenup from the link below or from the Google Code page and add the following lines to any webpage you design. You'll need to specify the source for the .js file correctly.

This is still very much in its infancy so expect a few bugs here and there. You may need to update at regular intervals as the author releases updates. But, it is a good start

- Download sevenup.0.2.js
- Download sevenup.0.2.min.js

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Whenever you have multiple CSS and JavaScript files, to download each file, your browser makes a separate request to the web server for each of these files. This entire process increases the time to load your file. Hence, by converting all the CSS files to a single file and all the JS files to a single file, you cut down the number of requests.

This is where Scriptalizer.com comes in.

What does it do?

Turn this…

Into this…

Using Scriptalizer.com is really simple. All you need to do is upload your JS and CSS files to Scriptalizer and it will combine these into a single JS and a single CSS file respectively.

As an additional feature, it even minifies the resultant JS and CSS file to further reduce the total file size. Thus, the resultant is an extra speed boost to your site.

Sadly, the problem is that you need to upload your files, which is a manual process. So, it won't work automatically with all the files on your site. However, on the plus side is that you need to do this only once.

Via: Andy Jarrett

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The initial version of Top 10 used PHP to record the page views as well as display them and so using WP Super Cache ensured that both of these would never increment.

This is where JavaScript with PHP comes in. I ended up using AJAX to record the page views. However, for displaying the count I chose to do so by serving the PHP file as a JavaScript file.

Here's how you go about it.

Normal JavaScript Usage

The normal method of including a JavaScript file is:

JavaScript with PHP

The good part about JavaScript is that you don't need to include a file that ends in the .js extension. Which means you can even include a PHP file. e.g.

Note how I added the extension .php to the original file name. You don't need to keep the .js part. However, I like to do so to indicate that my PHP file will be served as JavaScript.

Here's the contents of a sample PHP file used as JavaScript

The most important part of the file is:

This bit of code tells the server that this PHP file needs to be processed as a JavaScript file.

The file does nothing other than print the date on the screen. You don't even need the function for this. However, it serves as a basic structure we can build upon.

Using Parameters

Now, why would you use PHP if you couldn't pass parameters. e.g. take a look at this code:

We've passed a parameter id=1302 to our PHP file. Within the PHP file we will need to capture the parameter. Let's take a look at the modified PHP file.

We use $_GET to retrieve the parameter id. You can pass multiple parameters to the PHP file.

If you're interested in live code then download Top 10 and take a look at the source code.

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There are plenty of articles out there written by great CSS masters that will tell you about what’s, why's and who’s of CSS. So if you want an in-depth analysis of CSS you'd better off reading an article by Eric Meyer or by some of the other CSS greats out there.

This article is about bringing you up to speed with CSS 3 and how it makes the life of an average graphic designer who has to deal with css on a daily basis, easier.

In truth, I'm no CSS wizard. My CSS programming skills are just a little better than average, at best. I have no problems with converting a design into basic html and CSS and can even hack it for IE6, but that's about it.

However, CSS 3 has made life a lot easier for most of us designers. And hopefully with the introduction of IE 8, IE 6 will gracefully go to its resting place and the internet will become a better place.

Here are some of the features of CSS 3, for more information you can always check out w3schools or css3.info.

• You can now have rounded corners without having to use images. This is by far the most exciting feature of css 3, for me. You now don't have to worry about creating images for all the rounded corners in your design. You can just program it in.
• You can now have multiple background images for a single element. You no longer require multiple divs just for your backgrounds; you can have different images separated just by commas.
• You can now have an image as a border. That's right; you can now use an image as a border style. This should definitely make for some interesting designs.
• You can now adjust the transparency of your images or elements using CSS. You no longer have to create transparent gifs or pngs to place in your design. Not to mention, soon enough you won't have to write a separate style sheet for IE6 to fix your transparent pngs.
• You can now use a drop shadow effect using CSS. This has to be one of the coolest features of CSS 3. Being able to use a drop shadow effect just using a couple of extra lines of code is so much easier than rendering your images, slicing them up and then worrying about how your pngs will display in different browsers.

And finally,

• You can use custom fonts in your design and have css call the font in from an online font directory using @Font-Face. This will make for some new an interesting designs and sites. You're no longer restricted to that handful of fonts that are used all over the internet.

Some downsides: Not to spoil everyone's fun, but as things stand right now, not all of the new CSS 3 features are supported by all the browsers. For the IE users, most of these features will work only with IE 8. Even for the others, there's still a short wait until all browsers are CSS 3 compliant.

Not to mention, with all these new features there's a chance that people will overuse the preset effects.

To quote Chris Spooner from the popular BlogSpoonGraphics,

Just as is done with traditional Photoshop filters, the use of these new styling features could result in some eye-wrenching designs. Drop shadows in particular ring warning bells for us; we’re not looking forward to seeing the Marketing Department’s choices with that one!

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Christina explains the change:

So why the change? Adding the try and catch to the snippet removes the possibility that your visitor sees a JavaScript message that doesn't apply to her. It's a fairly rare occurrence because messages like these (frequently in the form of an alert box) can only appear if JavaScript messaging has been enabled on the browser. Most browsers have JavaScript messaging turned off by default, but sometimes people unintentionally turn it on. For those visitors who have enabled messaging, the try and catch will have the effect of halting any messages from the Google Analytics tracking code snippet.

The updated code is:

Have you updated the code?

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It was an extremely frustrating situation, until I stumbled upon net2ftp.

net2ftp is a web based FTP client with features that rival several desktop based FTP clients.

• Navigate the FTP server
• Upload files
• Download files individually or via ZIP files
• Zip/Unzip files
• Install software
• Copy, move and delete
• Copy or move to a 2nd FTP server
• Rename and chmod
• View code with syntax highlighting
• Plain text editor
• HTML editors
• Code editor
• Search for words or phrases
• Calculate size

And, the best part about net2ftp is that you can download and install it on your own servers. Installing this on your own servers ensures that you can change the upload / download limits, the execution time of the php scripts.

This is something I have done personally. I have net2ftp installed on my own VPS and pushed the limits of the files to a high level allowing me to upload big files and unzip them.

Have you tried net2ftp? Do you have it installed on your own server or do you use net2ftp.com?

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She's covered the following problems:

• Clicking on your own ads
• Creative attractions around your ads
• Asking users to click on your ads
• Using code to modify the size of the ads
• Drop down navigation covering your ads?
• Pre-filling the search box Adsense for Search
• Not putting a privacy policy. Check out the privacy policy at Techtites.
• Buying traffic for your site
• Mentioning your Google Adsense stats, payments etc.
• Using illegal content and content that goes against Google Adsense terms
• Not adhering to both the Webmaster Guidelines and the "spirit" of the Landing Page Quality Guidelines

Read the complete article »

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I was able to add both the blogs properly and made my first blog post. Uploaded the post to my website and noticed gibberish. On closer observation, I realized that the < and > were stripped out completely. As a result, code like <p><a href="http://techtites.com/">Techtites</a></p> became pa href="http://techtites.com/"Techtites/a/p. I manually had to edit the post to correct this post. I noticed the problem at both the blogs which are running WordPress 2.7. I initially suspected this to be the reason, and so decided to search.

Came across this article by Joseph Scott. Joseph is one of the developers of WordPress. He writes:

A gradually growing list of people have run into a very odd problem using XML-RPC methods in WordPress, where the left angle bracket ( < ) gets stripped. There's been a fair bit of discussion about this on ticket #7771. The bottom line: the behavior of the PHP XML extension when built against newer versions of libxml2 changed, such that left angle brackets get stripped when parsing XML.

There’s been some back and forth between libxml2 folks (email list) and the PHP folks (bug 45996), with no real solution for those using the tainted versions of libxml2. So what are your options if you’ve got this problem?

There are currently two solutions to this problem.

1. Downgrade to a lower version of libxml2. v2.6.30 has been known to work.
2. Build PHP with expat parser instead of libxml2

Unfortunately, both solutions require you to have root access to your server. If you don't you can write to your host and point them to this solution.

I decided to go ahead with option 1. Codehead has a good tutorial on downgrading to libxml v2.6.30 for users running cPanel. Non-cPanel users can check out the tutorial by Pete.

The procedure is rather simple. All I had to do was copy-paste the code into the Linux command prompt, edit two files and I was good to go. It's been running fine for nearly a week now.

If you don't have root access, you'll have to just wait it out before the libxml2 and PHP folks sort their differences out!

Update: HooFoo.net has published a possible fix by editing three WordPress files. I haven't tested this out myself. If any of you try it let me know. The following code has been added to the files:

I've modified the files myself and made them available for you. Download the zip and extract the files in your WordPress 2.7 root directory. The zip file maintains the necessary directory structure, so zipping in the root directory is sufficient. The files should work with only WordPress 2.7 and are not meant to be installed on any other version.

Update: Users have reported mixed results with the attached fix. It works for some and doesn't for others. If it's not working for you check if the files have been uploaded in the right place. Alternatively, try making the changes manually as listed in the tutorial by Hoofoo.

Download WordPress 2.7 XML Strip-tag Fix.zip from DivShare [25KB]

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GuiTidy is a simple software that uses Tidy to generate optimized code via a GUI.

Download Optimize HTML (444.46KB)
Download GUI for Tidy for Windows (633.67KB)
Download GUI for Tidy for Linux (739.36KB)

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Color Archiver is one such utility. Developed by Priya Ranjan, Color Archiver allows you to pick and save colors and thereby create a color palette. You can then quickly browse and select these colors for your future usage.

Color Archiver becomes a perfect tool when you are designing your website and / or working with CSS files.

It also includes a search feature to help you find colors by name thus finding those already existing ones.

Download Color Archiver

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SketchUp 7 was released today with the following changes:

• New class of "smart" objects called Dynamic Components, which are simpler to work with for new modelers
• Now "sign" your models
• SketchUp Pro users now use LayOut 2, which is faster, more reliable and includes vector rendering, improved text handling and more

Read more of what's new with SketchUp 7.

Download Google SketchUp 7

Via: Google Blog

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SP1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customer and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. These service packs offer customers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 delivers:

• Improved WPF designers
• SQL Server 2008 support
• ADO.NET Entity Designer
• Visual Basic and Visual C++ components and tools (including an MFC-based Office 2007 style ‘Ribbon’)
• Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server (TFS) addresses customer feedback on version control usability and performance, email integration with work item tracking and full support for hosting on SQL Server 2008
• Richer JavaScript support, enhanced AJAX and data tools, and Web site deployment improvements

The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 delivers:

• Performance increases between 20-45% for WPF-based applications – without having to change any code
• WCF improvements that give developers more control over the way they access data and services
• Streamlined installation experience for client applications
• Improvements in the area of data platform, such as the ADO.NET Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services and support for SQL Server 2008’s new features

- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)
- .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
- Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1

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The speed of your site also depends on your CSS, the complex the code, the slower is the site. Using repeated tagsTo make your site without loosing any CSS juice, you will need to optimize your CSS, make it simple and clean.

margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 20px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
margin-left: 20px;

This is sometimes the default code style generated by softwares and even written by coders. But isn't it too much heavy? How about trying this which is a optimized code instead of the above code:

margin: 10px 20px 10px 20px;

But on a part it is impossible to find all the silly errors in a CSS file of any theme. So for that there is a website / tool called CleanCSS.

CleanCSS optimizes the code, merge similar selectors, remove whitespace, remove useless properties etc. The interface of the website is also very easy, just paste your CSS in the box given, select the properties you want to clean, click the Process CSS button and bingo! It will find all errors and unnecessary things from your CSS and will remove it and will give you a error-free optimized CSS. You can even check that is your CSS valid or not ( I'm sure your CSS will be valid after being processed by CleanCSS ).

Note : Hi, My name is Rishi and I am thankful to Ajay for giving me the opportunity to blog @ Techtites. I maintain a tech blog and call it Rishiraj. I hope that you will like my posts over here and the once already @ Rishiraj.

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem Ipsum or Lipsum, as it is more popularly known as, is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. The text can crossed over from the print world and has landed into the electronic world and is now used by several designers for layout purposes.

The purpose of Lipsum is to distract the reader from the text and focus on the layout. It also helps to fill the layout with content instead of generating your content from scratch.

There are several lipsum generators available, but the most popular of this is the one at Lipsum.org

The generator uses over 200 Latin words to generate content. It can generate paragraphs, words, bytes or lists of content to save you from doing the manual labor.

And if you do use the generator often, do consider a donation to the Webmaster.

Are you creating any widgets?

Almost everyone who has SSH access to their accounts will be well aware of PuTTY which is a free Telnet and SSH Client.

PuTTY has saved tonnes of time because using shell is a definite time saver over most other methods.

If you have just one site to manage, then it isn't a problem. However, if you have several sites to manage, then over a period of time you would have a lot of sites stored in PuTTY. This is all perfect until you decide to reinstall your Operating System.

PuTTY stores the data in the registry, precisely at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY. You can always backup this registry key before reinstalling and simply restore it. Or you can use portaPutty.

portaPuTTY is a hacked version of PuTTY that stores all its information in files, not in the registry.

The ability to store information in files instead of the registry ensures you do not lose data even when you reinstall the operating system. I've dumped the contents of the zip into a folder on my second partition, so it isn't touched.

portaPuTTY can also work as a version of PuTTY you can lug around in a USB drive. It ensures that you can access your sites from any public terminal without having to worry about the passwords being stored.

– Download PortaPuTTY [~0.99 MB]
- Download PuTTY

cPanel (most control panels actually) provides you with phpMyAdmin which is what we will use to backup our mySQL database.

Though you can backup your complete database at one go, I recommend making two backup files, one containing the Structure and the other containing the Data.

Why? Simply because your structure will usually remains same (unless you create / delete tables), while your data keeps changing.

By making a seperate file for Structure, you ensure that in the future only the Data needs to be backed up.

Here's how you go about it:

1. Login to cPanel by going to yourdomain:2082
2. Click mySQL Databases
3. Click on Click here to access phpMyAdmin at the bottom of the page. A new window will open and load phpMyAdmin.
4. If you have more than one database select the one you want to backup from the drop-down box in the left frame, or click on the name of the database if you have just one. A new page listing the tables will load in the right frame.
5. Before we backup the database we shall optimize it. Click Check All and then from the drop-down box select Optimize Table.
6. After the new page loads click on Export in the horizontal menu at the top.
7. Now uncheck Data. Check Save as file. In File Name Template enter __DB___Structure. Select "gzipped" and then hit the Go button. You will be prompted to save a file. Save it. This file is your mySQL backup in gz format containing the Table Structure only
8. Now check Data and uncheck Structure and change File Name Template to __DB___Data, while retaining all the other settings of step
9. Click Go and save the file. This file is your mySQL backup in gz format containing the Table Data only.

In the future you can skip step 8 and only backup your Table Data.