Here is a list of job boards where web designers can actually get paid a reasonable amount for the work they are expected to do. The most important thing to remember is to know what you are worth and don’t compromise yourself.
Elance
http://www.elance.com/ – You will find that there are many opportunities for freelance web designers here as well as other types of multimedia designers. There really is an impressive selection of jobs available on this website. If you know what you are looking for then you should be able to pick up some high quality freelancing work. Most of those listing jobs know exactly what they are looking for and this makes everything a lot easier.
Krop for designers
http://www.krop.com/ – The great thing about this website is that it has such an easy to use interface. You will find a lot of information about the clients and the jobs available. It also has a search function so that you can locate the jobs you are after more easily. You should easily be able to find well paying freelancing jobs to meet your specifications.
Odesk
http://odesk.com/ – This really is a great resource that seems to always have tons of good quality work available. You will find that some jobs aren’t offering too much money so you need to be careful about what you are applying for. Many of these jobs could be completed in a short time period and appear quite easy to complete. Another great thing about this website is that there are thousands of different tests that allow you to test your capability and knowledge for different subjects. This is useful because it allows clients to be better able to judge what you have to offer them.
Guru
http://guru.com/ – This job board provides opportunities for many different professionals involved in web work. Many of the jobs are related to marketing, but there are plenty of other jobs on offer as well.
Number 5 FreelanceSwitch jobs for designers
http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/ – This is another great place for picking up work and you will find plenty of opportunities here. Most jobs come with complete descriptions and this will give you a good idea about their suitability. This website does involve a fee of $7 every month, but the standard of the opportunities available makes this worthwhile.
Get a Coder
http://www.getacoder.com/ – You will find good opportunities for web designers and programmers on this job board. The interface is not as user-friendly as some of the other sites. On the plus side, there does seem to be some good jobs on offer.
Authentic jobs
http://authenticjobs.com/ – This job board offers full time and part time work as well as freelance contract work. You will find a lot of opportunities for programmers, designers, and developers.
Fresh web jobs
http://www.freshwebjobs.com/ – This web site is also easy to navigate. The only drawback with this job board is that sometimes there doesn’t seem to be much work on offer. It does often have high quality work for programmers and designers though.
Finding work on all of these job boards can take a bit of effort; this is especially true if you are looking for high quality and well-paying work. You really need to be careful of what you are applying for and just because a job is offering low reward don’t imagine that it will mean less work. The fact is that many of the employers hiring on these sites have no real idea about the value of the work they are trying to hire.
The Google AdSense blog announced they have updated the layout of some AdSense units. The main changes were to make the ads “more space-efficient and visually pleasing,” said Google.
Specifically:
Leaderboard (728×90): the title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except in the case when only one ad is showing)
Medium and large rectangles (300×250, 336×280): the URL is now in the same line as the title
Microsoft will unveil the Internet Explorer 9 beta next month at an event in San Francisco titled "Beauty of the Web."
Microsoft has built IE9 with the expectation that HTML5 will blur the line between Websites and native applications, and the company has built numerous enhancements in the forthcoming release.
"Developers are already working hard on some amazing new web experiences enabled by Internet Explorer 9," said James Pratt, product manager on the IE9 team, in a Thursday blog post.
Microsoft has been trumpeting IE9's speedy, hardware-accelerated HTML 5 rendering for the past several months, often by pitting IE9 against Firefox and Google's Chrome browser in handling graphically intensive Websites. However, critics have pointed out the selective nature of Microsoft's testing and noted that all of its competitors are also working on hardware fueled HTML5 rendering.
So far Microsoft has dished up over 2.5 million downloads of the four IE9 platform previews, the most recent of which was released in early August.
IE9 comes with a new JavaScript engine called Chakra that boosts the speed and performance of IE9 by compiling Javascript in a separate background thread while Windows runs in parallel on separate CPU core. Microsoft has also integrated the JavaScript engine natively in IE9, something it sees as crucial to being able to deliver superior performance.
"How a JavaScript engine is integrated into the browser is as important as the engine itself for real-world HTML5," Microsoft said in a blog post earlier this month.
At an event in June heralding the arrival of the third IE9 platform preview, Microsoft showed SunSpider Javascript benchmark testing results in which IE9 handily beat Chrome 4 and the current shipping version of Firefox, completing a data crunching test in 347 milliseconds.
Microsoft has also confirmed HTML Canvas tag support in IE9 as well the availability of HTML audio and video tags, and showed its growing adherence to Web standards by noting that IE9's Acid3 score jumped from 68 to 83 since the previous developer preview.
Google has revamped its email service Gmail. The company has overhauled the contact management tool found inside Gmail.
In a blog post Benjamin Grol, Gmail product manager said "An improved Contacts interface has been the number one requested feature from user feedback." While the core Gmail experience has been changed significantly since its 2004 launch, the Contacts interface has not seen too many changes. The new version of Gmail's contact manager, which Google says is already in the process of going out to users, brings with it a number of changes and addons.
* Mail, Contacts, and Tasks links have moved to the top left of Gmail.
* Compose mail is now a button rather than a link.
* A smaller header area puts the first message in users' inbox.
* The Select All, None, Read, Unread, and Starred links that used to be above your messages are now options in a drop-down menu, next to the Archive button.
* Keyboard shortcuts now work in Contacts too, and Google has made selecting and grouping contacts more like selecting and labeling email.
* Users can now sort contacts by last name. Look under More actions for this option.
* Use custom labels for phone numbers and other fields.
* Now, when users have the option to undo their recent changes.
* Automatic saving: This means users no longer need to worry about 'edit' mode or `view' mode — just edit away and Gmail will save your changes.
* Structured name fields: Users can now set name components (i.e. Title, First, Middle, Last and Suffix) explicitly or continue to use the name field as a free form area if they prefer a less structured approach.
* Manual and bulk contact merge: Users can now merge contacts from the More actions menu. All they need to do is select the contacts they would like to merge and select Merge contacts from under the More actions menu.
If there are still doubts about the Android juggernaut, the latest numbers from Google should help settle it. Some 200,000 new Android devices are being sold each day, up from about 100,000 just two months ago, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt told attendees at the Techonomy conference, “Android is not just phenomenal but incredibly phenomenal in its growth rate.”
Google’s comment comes on the heels of data from Nielsen earlier this week that showed, for the first time, that people in the U.S. bought more Android phones than iPhones.
Research firm iSuppli predicts Android’s market share will surpass that of the iPhone’s iOS in 2012.
By 2012, Android will be used in 75 million smartphones, up from 5 million in 2009, says iSuppli. IOS will be in 62 million phones in 2012, up from 25 million in 2009.
That means in two years, Android will have a 19.4 percent market share worldwide among smartphone operating systems, up from 2.7 percent in 2009. Apple’s iOS for the iPhone will see its share go up to 15.9 percent in 2012 from 13.8 percent in 2009, says iSuppli.
Android’s rapid growth should come as no surprise to industry watchers. Since Google worked with HTC and T-Mobile to launch the first Android-based smartphone in 2008, the open-source operating system has been adopted by major handset manufacturers including Samsung, Motorola and HTC.
“The OS started with entry-level models in 2008, but the flexibility Android offers for hardware designs and its appealing business model in terms of revenue sharing have attracted vigorous support,” says Tina Teng, senior analyst, wireless communications for iSuppli.
Mobical is a service that stores your essential personal phone data in a secure place – for free. If your phone is stolen or damaged, you will be able to restore all information to a new phone.
The micro-blogging service began rolling out a new feature Friday called "Suggestions for You" which directs users to other Twitter accounts they may find interesting.
"With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests," Twitter said on its official blog.
"The trouble is finding all of them," it said. "Today we're beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that."
Twitter said the "Suggestions for You" algorithms find other accounts of potential interest using various factors, including "people you follow and the people they follow."
A Twitter user who clicks on the "Who to Follow" link on the Twitter homepage sees a list of suggested accounts to follow.
Twitter, which combines the strengths of blogs and instant messaging services, enables users to send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters on personal computers and mobile devices.
Twitter said it planned to make the suggestions feature available to developers of desktop and mobile applications for Twitter.
Social network Facebook already offers a similar feature called "People You May Know" which suggests possible new friends to members.
Just a couple of days back, PayPal had shocked a lot of Indian users by announcing that starting August 1, PayPal would not allow electronic withdrawal of funds from any PayPal account in India. The only option would be to request for a withdrawal of funds by cheque. According to PayPal, this decision had to be taken in accordance with "regulatory instructions".
However, what comes as a relief is that PayPal has restored electronic withdrawals for its India-based users. On the company's official blog, corporate communication spokesperson Dickson Seow apologized for the inconvenience caused and thanked users for their support.
Also, PayPal said it will continue to provide the $5 processing fee refund for any cheque withdrawals made from July 29 until further notice.
Usually plugin allows you to set the order in which categories will appear in the sidebar. But some code tweaks and My Category Order Plugin installation helps you in reordering categories in wordpress menu navigation through the drag and drop interface
1. Install My Category Order Plugin 2. In header.php find the catgory listing code
The internet protocol used by the majority of web users, IPv4, provides for about four billion IP addresses -- the unique 32-digit number used to identify each computer, website or internet-connected device.
There are currently only 232 million IP addresses left -- enough for about 340 days -- thanks to the explosion in smartphones and other web-enabled devices.
"When the IPv4 protocol was developed 30 years ago, it seemed to be a reasonable attempt at providing enough addresses," carrier relations manager at Australian internet service provider (ISP) Internode John Lindsay told the Herald.
"Bearing in mind that at that point personal computers didn't really exist, the idea that mobile phones might want an IP address hadn't occurred to anybody because mobile phones hadn't been invented [and] the idea that air-conditioners and refrigerators might want them was utterly ludicrous."
The solution to the problem is IPv6, which uses a 128-digit address. It would give everyone in the world more than four billion addresses each, but most of the internet industry has so far been reluctant to introduce it.
It would require each device that connects to the internet to be reconfigured or upgraded, with some users even being forced to buy new hardware, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
In the meantime ISPs may force multiple customers to share IP addresses, which may lead to common applications, such as Gmail and iTunes, ceasing to work.
There are also fears a black market of IP addresses may spring up.
The Indian government has unveiled the prototype of an iPad-like touch-screen laptop, with a price tag of $35 (£23), which it hopes to roll out next year.
Aimed at students, the tablet supports web browsing, video conferencing and word processing, say developers.
Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said a manufacturer was being sought for the gadget, which was developed by India's top IT colleges.
An earlier cheap laptop plan by the same ministry came to nothing.
The device unveiled on Thursday has no hard disk, using a memory card instead, like a mobile phone, and can run on solar power, according to reports.
It would cost a fraction of the price of California-based technology giant Apple's hugely popular iPad, which retails from $499.Mr Sibal said the Indian tablet, said to run the Linux operating system, was expected to be introduced to higher education institutions next year.
The plan was to drop the price eventually to $20 and ultimately to $10, he added.
Unveiling the gadget, the human resource development minister told the Economic Times newspaper it was India's answer to the "$100 laptops" developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
"The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India," Mr Sibal said, reports news agency AFP.
Last year, one of the ministry's officials announced it was about to unveil a $10 laptop, triggering worldwide media interest.
But there was disappointment after the "Sakshat" turned out to be a prototype of a handheld device, with an unspecified price tag, that never materialised.
To develop its latest gadget, the ministry said it had turned to the elite Indian Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Science, after a lacklustre response from the private sector.
Mamta Varma, a ministry spokeswoman, said the device was feasible because of falling hardware costs.
Several global manufacturers, including at least one from Taiwan, had expressed interest in making the device, she said, although no deals had been agreed, and she declined to name any of the companies.
The project is part of a government initiative which also aims to extend broadband to all of India's 25,000 colleges and 500 universities.
In 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled the prototype of a $100 laptop for children in the developing world, although it ended up costing about double that price.
In May, Nicholas Negroponte - of the MIT's Media Lab - announced plans to develop a basic tablet computer for $99 through his non-profit association, One Laptop per Child.
Socialgrid Homepage → SocialGrid is a simple widget that makes it easy to add and organize links to your various profiles on the internet. It currently supports the following services: Brightkite, Delicious, deviantART, Digg, Dopplr, Ember, Facebook, Flickr, Friendfeed, Google Profile, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Picasa Web, Posterous, Qik, Readernaut, Reddit, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Technorati, Viddler, Vimeo, Virb, and YouTube! Requires WP Version: 2.8 or higher.
GetSocial Homepage → GetSocial adds an intelligent, lightweight, quick to setup floating social media sharing box on your blog posts that is always visible and accessible even if the user scrolls down the page. Its out-of-the-box functionality includes the Tweetmeme Retweet button, Facebook Share button, Google Buzz button and the Stumbleupon Submit button. You can quite easily add any number of additional social media sharing buttons. Requires WP Version: 2.7 or higher.
Drag to Share eXtended Homepage → WP Drag to Share eXtended is a plugin that allow to your readers to share one of your blog’s pages (through your article’s images) on the social networks sites such as Twitter and Facebook but also on Delicious. Requires WP Version: 2.8 or higher
AddToAny Homepage → AddToAny allows you to share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites. The button comes with AddToAny's customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor's browsing and usage history. Requires WP Version: 2.0 or higher.
Sociable Homepage → Sociable automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites. (Sociable is what we are currently using on Speckyboy). Requires WP Version: 2.6 or higher
SexyBookmarks Homepage → Though the name may be a little "edgy" for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites. Requires WP Version: 2.7 or higher.
Digg Digg Plugin Homepage → The Digg Digg plugin is an all-in-One social vote buttons including the following services: Digg, Reddit, dDone, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme(twitter), facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, WebBlend and BlogEngage. Requires WP Version: 2.0 or higher.
Socialize Homepage → Socialize is an easy way to selectively add actionable social bookmarks to your posts. You can add bookmarks in two places: Inside the content (aligned left or right) or in a box below the content. Instead of adding new meta keys like other plugins require, there is an additional panel in your posts admin that allows you to select which bookmarks you want to display. This is to encourage people to choose more relevant bookmarks for their posts. You are also provided with a box at the bottom of your posts that asks readers to subscribe and comment. Requires WP Version: 2.7 or higher.
Light Social Homepage → This is a super lightweight plugin that inserts a set of social share links at the bottom of each post. With this plugin you have simple options to configure – Simply enable or disable to show or not the bookmark social links. Very simple. It is all is implemented using the most simplistic html code to ensure fast load and minimal impact on your blog. Requires WP Version: 2.9 or higher.
Share and Follow Homepage → Share and Follow has been designed for the average users to use and is ideal for developers who want to save time. It gives links to the most prominent Social Networking sites for sharing and following, presented in many different formats (widgets/shortcode/template tag/auto added). Requires WP Version: 2.9.0 or higher.
Social Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin, with an AJAX front-end interface, that adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of different social bookmarking sites. The plugin supports more than fifty sites and that is without including the sites of the available Site Packs. Requires WP Version: 2.5.1 or higher. Social Bookmarks Homepage →
users are threatening to quit the social network after Islamic pages were removed.
The 2.5 million protesters have threatened to switch to an Islamic social network 'Medina' if Facebook does not restore the pages by midnight on 21 July.
Among the pages removed by the social networking giant are 'I love Mohammed' and 'Quran Lovers', which Facebook says were used to spam users.
A letter posted by the protesters on the website states: “Although you have attended the world's best communication skills courses you have been most successful in growing great hatred and hostility between you and Muslims around the world, but seriously this time you have caused an almost unrepairable [sic] damage.”
The protesters have also asked the company to introduce new rules that make posting anti-Islamic comments a violation of Facebook terms of use.
The letter also condemned the 'Everybody draw Muhammad Day' pages that urged users to draw caricatures of the Prophet and led to the site being temporarily banned in Pakistan.
If you lost your wordpress administrator username/password accidentally , here is the stpe-by-step process on how to to remake a user with administrative powers.
The fact that India has always been obsessed with fair skin is well known. Thanks to this obsession, popularity of creams that promise a lighter shade of skin in a matter of few weeks have always been high. While until now, these promotions were restricted to print and Television advertisements, a new fairness cream has broken traditional grounds by giving itself a social media platform and even has an app of its own.
Vaseline has made a new application for users on Facebook to promote its fairness cream for men. What is more interesting is what the application actually does. Using the app, users can make the skin tone on their profile pics a few shades lighter so that they can "preview" their look should they become fairer after using the cream. The page already has 500 plus fans and it is likely that the number would go up pretty fast - mostly with members from our Fairness obsessed country.
The people behind the ad have claimed that the campaign has been a roaring success, as told to the AFP. However, questions are already being raised over the "racist" nature of the app. Vaseline has roped in popular Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor to promote the cream. We wonder why Shahid, who is a far cry from being dark complexioned, would require a fairer complexion to become more attractive? Same is the case with Shahrukh khan who promotes a rival brand.
Picture a scenario of a similar application or an advertisement appearing in U.S. Will a product that is named "Healthy White Body Milk" ever sell in U.S.? Do you think the U.S. authorities would ever approve of a racist name like that? We don't think so.
We wonder whatever happened to the concept of the tall, dark and handsome man. Or is it that this concept has a conditions apply asterisk that says "excludes India"?
Would you change the color of your Facebook profile pic a few shades lighter? Leave us a comment and let us know.
Android phones are quite complicated. The different versions (Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo) denote what kind of dessert you’re being treated to at the Android app buffet.
Each version brings more features, but the upgrade involves more complications. The end user may have to wait for months to get updates after purchase. The HTC Hero got the 2.1 firmware update in India only last week. For its users, it was like an extra dollop of cream with a cherry on top. However, of the dozen Android phones available in India, a majority of them are still riding on version 1.5 or 1.6, and might never see version 2.1 or 2.2 before the end of their mobiles’ lifecycle.
Most manufacturers using the Android OS regard it as the vanilla ice cream layer, and insist on serving it with nuts and chocolate to demand a hefty premium over affordable feature phones. Probably, the best example of this is HTC’s Sense UI (user interface) overlay. Other manufacturers including Samsung, LG, and Acer, have made their own UI skins (overlays).
Sony, of course, with all its design and lifestyle aspirations associated with the brand has added plenty of chique to the geek on the Sony Ericsson Xperia series.
While most geeks take to Androids like ducks to water, I’m not sure if most people care about running an open standards OS on their handsets. Statistics on Androids show that males have a higher preference for this. In contrast, the X10 Mini, aka E10i, is preferred by the ladies.
Specs wise, the Xperia X10 is similar to the HTC Tattoo. It runs on Android 1.6 (Donut), and is priced at around the same range. It betters the former with a capacitive screen which has dual-touch capability. This allows two-finger interaction and gestures like pinch, pivot and rotate. Also notable is its 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, and the ability to record VGA resolution video at 30 FPS.
The Xperia X10 Mini has a proprietary UI implementation called Timescape, that brings data from all your communication nodes -- SMS, email, missed calls, Facebook and Twitter updates chronologically on the homescreen. So, you don’t have to open each app to see what’s going on. I experienced little or no lag on this phone and found the battery life tolerable, thanks to its smaller screen.
Tplugin gives every widget an extra control field called "Widget logic" that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on.
The text field lets you use WP's Conditional Tags, or any general PHP code.
There is also an option to add a wordpress 'widget_content' filter -- this lets you tweak standard widgets to suit your theme without editing plugins and core code.
Opera Mini 5 was a significant update to the world’s most popular mobile browser, which made it a whole lot more awesome. Unfortunately for some users, Opera Mini 5 didn’t work on the absolute low-end handsets that Opera Mini 4 handled with aplomb.
Opera Mini 5.1, the first significant update to Opera Mini 5, is optimized to run on phones with low memory. The updated build features a refined skin with improved tab handling and introduces overall performance improvements.
While this update is not critical for smartphone users, it is a highly recommended update for everyone using Opera Mini on low-end handsets (especially those who have been encountering out of memory issues).
“The goal with Opera Mini is to make the Web available to anyone, anywhere, regardless of where they come from or the handset they have,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “More than 61 million people on over 3000 devices have chosen to surf the Web with Opera Mini for fast and easy Internet access at a considerably lower cost.”
