Happy Halloween!

Download Vista SP2 Beta via Windows Update

If you like to stay on the bleeding edge of technology (and you’re running Vista) you may want to consider modifying two registry keys on your system so that you can participate in the Vista SP2 Beta program. To join the program all you have to do is...

Link:
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/...

Followup: Convert Excel and PowerPoint to webpage

The Google trick for converting a Word document to clean HTML also works pretty well for Excel documents and PowerPoint presentations.

Much better than anything provided by Microsoft for saving Office documents as a webpage (HTML).

Two important SEO videos

Whiteboard Friday - Has Pagerank Changed?
"This week, Rand discusses good ol' Pagerank. How has it evolved, and is it still the same fickle curmudgeon we all know and loathe love? PR has certainly seen its share of tweaks and updates over the years, but how much does it even resemble what we saw in the patent apps of yore? Let's explore, shall we? Feel free to chime in with your thoughts and concerns about the topic and how you feel it could impact SEO in the future."

Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/...


Whiteboard Friday-Solving Indexation Problems
"So what's the topic? Indexation issues. What do you do when you have a large (or ginormous) site and thousands of your pages simply aren't getting indexed? Well, a lot of times it means you lose clicks and lose business, but there are ways to solve this problem...watch and learn."

Link:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/...

Check if your username is available

UserNameCheck.com allows you to easily check if your desired username is available on many of the popular social websites.

After testing some of the sites aren't reporting back properly and say a name is available when its not. Try it for yourself and see what results you get. It did tell me my username was available on a site that it was recently not and I was able to grab it.

Link:
http://www.usernamecheck.com/

Cfont Pro on LifeHacker

For typography junkies with large font collections, Cfont Pro will help you manage your addiction. With support for all the major font file types, including Postscript and TrueType, this free application will let you preview fonts from disk before installing...

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/5069461/...

Cfont Pro:
http://www.cfontpro.com/

Turn your handwriting into a font

YourFonts.com is a FREE online font generation service that allows you to create your own fonts within a couple of minutes.

Professional designed wizard interface walks your through the entire process. At the end you will have a font of your handwriting. Give it a try and post a comment on your results.

Link:
http://www.yourfonts.com/

How to Buy an HDTV Like a Pro

You can't exactly load up a bunch of test signals and spectrum analyzers to carry into Best Buy to check out their TVs (though Gary has been known to do this). Still, there are some basic things you can look for beyond the specs, which are at times intentionally misleading. Once you've swept the reviews from the likes of HD Guru, CNet and Home Entertainment, giving you an approximate idea of the best performers in your price range, find out where they are and visit them in person. Obviously, the sets on the shelf aren't always properly tuned, but if the store is committed to making a sale—and they are more now than ever before—they should produce a remote and let you mess around to properly vet it for your living situation.

Link:
http://gizmodo.com/5067130/...

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Patch quickly!

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...

Direct link to the download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

or just use Windows Update

How to easily monitor your Adsense account

AdSenseLog will help you improve your AdSense ad performance, using several monitoring, tracking and analyzing tools, all built into one easy to use software.

I have AdsenseLog running all the time and minimized to my system tray. It lets me monitor the performance of my Adsense campaigns that span many domains. This tool makes it dead easy to watch the performance.

Link:
http://www.metalgrass.com/adsenselog/

Google Analytics Gets a Major Upgrade

Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/...

GMail gets auto-replies and canned responses

Gmail already lets you create filters based on a combination of keywords, sender, recipients, and more in your incoming messages. Turn on Canned Responses in Labs, and you can set a filter to grab one of your saved responses, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you.

You can set up different automated messages for different keywords, just like you said you wanted. (We're friends, so I trust you to use this power responsibly.)

How to Enable it:

1. Click on Settings in the top right corner of Gmail
2. Click on the Labs setting
3. Enable Canned Responses
4. When you are composing an email a Canned Response option will appear. This lets you save the email as a canned response.
5. For auto-replies you would setup a filter (under the account settings) using the saved canned response.
   

Link:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/

OpenOffice 3 officially released

Following three years of continuous improvement, OpenOffice.org has now reached the landmark version 3.0, with a host of new features including native support for Mac OS X users.

I have been pointing clients to OpenOffice for a long time now as its a great replacement for the bloated, and expensive, Office from Microsoft.

New Features:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.0/

Download:
http://download.openoffice.org/

Send a Free Fax with FaxZero

FaxZero lets you send a fax to any fax machine in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada for free. You don't need a fax machine yourself, but you do need a valid e-mail address. The service is supported by advertising on the web site and on the cover pages of the free faxes you send.

For those times when you need to send a quick fax and don't mind an ad being sent on the fax you are sending.

Link:
http://faxzero.com

Rotating 3D Cube in JavaScript

Link:
http://maettig.com/code/javascript/3d_dots.html

Also, check out the ASCII fire in JavaScript:
http://maettig.com/code/javascript/asciifire.html

Videos that make you say WTF

Did you watch both all the way through?

Roundup of JavaScript Techniques

50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials
This post serves as a collection of useful tutorials on working with AJAX in a wide variety of ways. You’ll find tutorials on working with forms, building shopping carts, creating chat features, working with log-ins and usernames and much more.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...


The Top 40 Free Ajax & Javascript Code for Web Designers
The list below is made up of the best FREE scripts available, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure.

Link:
http://speckyboy.com/2008/...


75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques
Here are 75 more handy JavaScript techniques that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...


jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
The article will explore what constitutes best practices with regard to Javascript and, furthermore, why jQuery is a good choice of a framework to implement best practices.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/...

iMask

iMask is an open source (free) javascript tool for creating input and textarea masking.

Link:
http://zendold.lojcomm.com.br/imask/

Book: Predictably Irrational:

Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money.

A very interesting book to learn about how and why we behave in certain situations. If you like reading to learn then this is a book for your library.

Link:
http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational...

Next Windows version to be called Windows 7

Microsoft announced last night that they’ve come up with with a name for Windows 7. You might be expecting something along the lines of “XP” or “Vista,” but they aren’t going that route this time around. They’ve actually decided to go back to their roots and call the next major release “Windows 7.” This is just like the old days when Microsoft named milestones based on version (3.11, etc…) or year (95, 98, etc…).

Link:
http://cybernetnews.com/2008/10/14/...

Software: SyncToy v2.0

SyncToy 2.0 for Windows is available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center. The easy to use, customizable application helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers.

Features:

• Dynamic Drive Letter Assignment: Drive letter reassignment will now be detected and updated in the folder pair definition.
• True Folder Sync: Folder creates, renames, and deletes are now synchronized for all SyncToy actions.
• Exclusion Filtering Based on Name: File exclusion based on name with exact or fuzzy matching.
• Filtering Based on File Attributes: The ability to exclude files based on one or more file attributes (Read-Only, System, Hidden).
• Unattended Folder Pair Execution: Addressed issues related to running scheduled folder pairs while logged off.
• Folder Pairs With Shared Endpoints: Ability for folder pairs associated with the same or different instances of SyncToy to share end-points.
• Command line enhancements: Added the ability to manage folder pairs via the command line interface.
• Re-Architect Sync Engine: The SyncToy engine has been rearchitected to provide scalability and the ability to add significant enhancements in future releases.
• Sync engine is also more robust insomuch that many single, file level errors are skipped without affecting the entire sync operation.
• Sync Encrypted Files: Sync of Encrypted files works when local folder and files are encrypted, which addresses the common scenario involving sync between local, encrypted laptop PC folder and remote, unencrypted desktop PC folder.
• 64-Bit Support: SyncToy now has a native 64-bit build (x64 only) for 64-bit versions of Windows.
• Folder pair rename
• Sub-folder Exclusion Enhancements: Descendents created under excluded sub-folders are automatically excluded. Usability improvements for the sub-folder exclusion dialog.
• Folder Pair Metadata Moved: Folder pair metadata removed from MyDocuments to resolve any issues with server-based folder pair re-direction setup.
• Setup Improvements: Integrated setup with single self-extracting archive file and no extra downloads if you already have .NET Framework 2.0 installed. Enabled silent install for the SyncToy Installer file (see readme.txt file for more information). Removed combine and subscribe actions.
• Removed combine and subscribe actions.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/...

How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch Part 1

I’m going to show you how to create a wordpress theme from scratch in these 3 parts of tutorial series. I will cover from Structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully css based html, and finally wordpress implementation.

Link:
http://themetation.com/2008/07/14/...

How Many HTML Elements Can You Name in 5 Minutes?

Link:
http://www.oneplusyou.com/bb/html_quiz

Convert a Word document to HTML (easy and free)

HowTo: Convert a Word document to clean HTML

Ever have a need to convert a Word document to HTML knowing that Word itself produces some of the worst HTML code ever? There is a simple, easy trick to get this done.

1. Make sure you have a Gmail account
2. Send the Word document, as an attachment, to your Gmail account
3. Sign in to Gmail and view the email with the attachment
4. Click the 'View as HTML' link at the bottom of the email
5. With the page opened, 'View source' from your browser
6. Copy the code

That's all there is to it. Google produces some pretty clean HTML from a Word document. It may have to be updated to XHTML 1.0 specifications (Google uses some deprecated tags)

I had a pretty complex tabled document with lots of text styles and it did a very good job.

WinZip 12 can compress Jpeg files by 20 - 25%

WinZip will now compress your JPEG files (digital photos or graphic images) by 20 to 25% and still without any loss of photo quality or data integrity. Now you can send photos faster or fit more on your hard drive and removable media than ever before.

About time someone came up with a method to compress Jpeg images without any additional loss in quality.

Link:
http://www.winzip.com/whatsnew120.htm

Search Google like its 2001

Not sure why anyone would want to but Google has made their 2001 Google index available for searching. Its another thing for honoring their 10th anniversary - basically bringing back the oldest index they have available.

Link:
http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Winners of the Camtasia Studio software selected

Congratulations to the winners:

• Sebastian
• Curt
• Cheryl
  

Emails will be coming.