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Smooth and fast upgrade to WordPress 2.5

by Khaled on March 30th, 2008

Upgrading to the new version of WordPress (2.5) was easy and smooth and without hassles or problems of any kind. I’m also loving the new administration interface and all in all I’m very pleased with it. WordPress is now more flexible customizable and extensible and yet easier to use. The design of the new customizable dashboard is just lovely… In fact this new version was designed by Jeffry Zeldman’s Happy Cog (and of course built by Automattic). Definitely a milestone is reached with this version. Everyday I’m more and more convinced that WordPress is the best blogging option around! At least this is true for me and for many others (did you know that WordPress powers around 0.8% of the whole web?).

More info here.

Adobe Photoshop Express Beta: now Online for free!

by Khaled on March 28th, 2008

Adobe Photoshop Express Beta is now officially launched. It is free but only available for the US users at least for now. I believe some other countries should follow up soon. Photoshop Express is a light version of Photoshop that’s based on Flash 9 web application. You won’t be able to use layers, make heavy changes and manipulations or even use text and text options but it is pretty simple to use Photoshop Express to crop, resize, sketch, saturate or change the colors of your Image (Hue).

With your Free online Photoshop Version you will have 2GB of free disk space storage  and a Flickr-like admin to go with it. Moreover you can  and it synchronize it with your Facebook, MySpace or Picasa accounts to change any of your photos and when you save those tweaks via the Photoshop interface they show up directly in your Facebook or Myspace. As for the synchronization with Flickr it is being devoloped and will be happening soon. Same for adding other languages and of course countries as I’ve mentioned it before. So now soon we will see everyone having his own light Photoshop reachable online! and probably soon Photoshop Express will be a lot more powerful than what it is now…. Only time will tell. If you are based in the US go get your Adobe Photoshop Express Beta! all you need is to sign up for a free account! For the other just wait for your country to be listed!

Continue to the Adobe Press release:

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40 months of web hosting with HostGator with no Problems!!

by Khaled on March 26th, 2008

Well this is not just another web hosting review about a good host or a bad host company! It is just that I’m really satisfied with the services and the quality hosting I’m having with HostGator since a few years now! So It’s been 40 months that I’m using them and no down-times except once that lasted for something like 5 min, no hidden fees, an excellent and comprehensive tech support available 24/7…
And everything they announce is correct, the reasonably low prices, the Up-time, the huge Disk space and bandwidth, the unilimited web sites and domains! Everything is true…
And today I’ve just realized that I’m using their services since a little bit more than 40 months! and you know what? I’ve been having a presence on the web since 1999 and I’ve never stayed with a host for longer than a year… Because I’m usually quite picky! So may be I should throw a party or something to celebrate this event :).
Try it and you will be really amazed! Whether you need a Shared Web Hosting Plan ( for less than $10/mo) or a Reseller Hosting Plan (starting from less than $25) or even a Dedicated Server you won’t be disappointed! Trust me! This is not a web hosting review for HostGator as much as it is a Primal Scream of satisfaction and joy! and yeah I’m just noticing that I’m using the figure 40 consecutively in my two last blog posts (the other one was about 1on40 “miracleous” SEO services)… Is this a sign or something?

Unlimited Domain Hosting Only $9.95 a Month

1on40: does it really get you to be number 1 in google?

by Khaled on March 25th, 2008

A new Search Engine Optimization miracle? or another SEO service scam? 1on40.com pretends it get you to 1st position in the search engine results on 40 search engines including Google and Yahoo! and this not only for one keyword but for 5 keywords in only 120 days. All this for… FREE! And you won’t have to pay a dime until your site reaches the 1st place for the 5 Keywords! How nice! 1on40 guys seem to have a lot of self confidence! And no black Hat SEO is used at all!
I’m by no mean an expert in matters of SEO but I am just wondering, What if two or three guys submit different sites for 1on40 with the same keyword? who’s going to be ranked number One? Does it work for new domains too? I thought that new domains take longer than a year to perform quite well in matters of ranking especially for competitive keywords… I also thought that in SEO it is not possible to conclude or exactly predict the rank? so how can they confirm you will be number one? They are not improving and optimizing the content or the code of the sites that are submitted… so they’re just “submitting” the sites to Search engines?
May be they are just trying with some “special magic top secret” technique to get you to be #1, and then they will succeed with some and fail with some and that the rate of success is enough to profit them??? who knows how this 1on40 works? or is it just a new service from google that is yet in beta and google doesn’t want people to know about its affiliation with this project?

Anyway this seems quite nebulous… I’ve submitted and old site of mine that I no longer update and that is sinking in the bottom of most the search engines where it is listed! and in 120 days we will see if 1on40 really works!! Well something is sure, 1on40 brought a new and an original concept… Will it really work? I don’t really know! It seems that it worked “partially” for some of its users… but was that really the effect of 1on40 SEO services? may be you will have another review about 1on40 here soon…

You can also check out these posts, reviews and discussions about 1on40 on some other blogs to make your own mind about this SEO service:

http://hubpages.com/hub/1non40-A-review
http://seodude.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/1on400/
http://philmir.com/wordpress/?p=147

I am not a fan of EPS files!

by Khaled on March 24th, 2008

Again during these last weeks I had to deal with clients having or wanting EPS files. I generally don’t deliver EPS files because I don’t really like them…But sometimes the client insists on having an EPS or only has an EPS and as you always know the client is always right! Today, and while I was just thinking about a similar issue, I stumbled upon a thread on the SitePoint forums where the Original Poster was struggling with “compatibility” problems that prevented him from opening an EPS saved on a Mac OS in a Windows environment! This pushed me to blog about this especially that I was quite inactive here during the last six months or so. EPS stands for Encapsulated Post Script and it is, then, totally independent of any OS/Platform. The only difference that will cause those “incompatibility” problems is probably the choice of the data format of the preview raster graphic.

I usually work on both Mac OS and Windows but sometimes when I’m on the move I frequently take my windows laptop with me and if a client hands me a Flash USB key containing an .EPS file saved on a Mac OS and that has a preview embedded in it, I’ll be unable to open/see it right then unless we have a Mac nearby! And this really wastes a lot of time … and time is money. This is due to the fact that EPS saved on a MAC OS contains data format for the preview which is not compatible with Windows…
The EPS format was originally developed by Adobe. It was intended to be used as a vector format, and not raster. It is, again, platform independent and can’t be displayed on a screen if you don’t have “Display PostScript”. EPS can be opened with Vector programs (i.e. Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand, InkScape…) and most of the times it can be also opened with Photoshop but the latter will rasterize your vectors.

On the contrary to the common belief, EPS files are not meant to be rendered by a PostScript printer on paper. They were developed to be encapsulated/embedded in another file. So EPS files aren’t PS files!

So and because of all the waste of time and headaches that I witnessed while dealing with EPS I’m not a big fan of EPS!

I’ve had cases where an embedded EPS file shows up when I open it in the Illustrator but it won’t print and that was due to the fact that the EPS file had a high-resolution TIF embedded in it!
So I just want to ask, if you’re not going to encapsulate the graphic you’re saving as an EPS in another file why not save it as a native AI files? Or a PDF? Or if you don’t need it to be in a vector format why not just save as a PSD?

Anyway if you’re just in love with EPS format just save your graphics if you’re on a Mac with a cross-platform 8bit TIFF preview… So that the EPS can be graphically interpreted by Illustrator or Photoshop on your windows machine!

Unleashing the power of real TrueType fonts with CSS!

by Khaled on September 6th, 2007

CSS is 10 years old now, Håkon Wium Lie, the guy who proposed the CSS concept, is introducing something new! and it is about text display that is suffering nowadays from the lack of fonts you can use.
a similar concept was first described back in 1998 (CSS 2) but wasn’t a success!
but it is back for good now!

Thank Mr. Prince!

and we will probably see this kind of code

@font-face {
font-family: “FONT_NAME”;
url(http://…) format(”truetype”);
}
body{ font-family: “FONT_NAME”, sans-serif }

There are still problems like convincing browsers companies to support these web fonts and to fix a final format of the code and validate everything in there…

Just imagine how much control will you have on the look of your pages! and you will not use graphics just because you can’t use a given font on your web site!!!  So let’s  just wait and see.

Principles of Beautiful Web Design

by Khaled on March 9th, 2007

Yes! yet another contest by SitePoint, after the Photo manipulation one, here’s a CSS contest. I will be a judge in this one too!

Josh Catone (the Community team leader @ SPF) posted :

The Challenge:

Announcing the SitePoint “Principles of Beautiful Web Design” CSS Competition. If you would like to win a copy of SitePoint’s acclaimed new book “The Principles of Beautiful Web design” then all you have to do is to take this html and turn it into a beautiful web page that is an advert for the book.

You are not allowed to change the html and can only use css and background images to create your masterpiece. Unlike the “Zen Garden” examples the html has very few extra “hooks” in the code and you will need to be very creative to turn this into a viable web page.

Advanced css’ers will therefore be able to use advanced selectors to create styling opportunities while those of medium skill levels can concentrate on the graphic side of things.

You must also use the SitePoint logo and the book cover image which can be downloaded from those links and the html for the images is already in place.

General Rules:

  • The html must remain untouched.
  • All html content must be used and not replaced with image replacement techniques.
  • Background images can of course be attached to any available element.
  • Valid CSS at whatever level you wish so advanced selectors can be used to good effect in browsers that support them.
  • Browsers to support are: IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+. The design must display well in all the browsers listed with ie6 as the minimum requirement. However you may get more points if you can utilise advanced css to make the display even better in Ie7 firefox and opera.
  • No CSS hacks to be used.
  • No Javascript or any other kind of scripting.

The competition will be judged by:
Sarah
Josh
Jelena
Sara
Paul
DT
Dave
(and possibly other SitePoint Forums staff members)

Entries will be judged on technical merit, creativity, aesthetics, and compliance with the rules.

All entries must be received by 1 month from today: 6th April, 2007 at 11:59 (23:59) GMT. The winner notified shortly thereafter.

You are allowed to enter as many entries as you like but the judges decision will be final and will be based on not only the look of the page but also how clever and effective the use of css has been. (Also, you can only win once.)

You can download the html and images from Paul’s basic example but we are expecting much better from you. Remember the CSS is to be completely supplied by you but we have left Paul’s demo there so you can get some ideas on how the page can be manipulated.

When you have completed your design you can post in the competition entry thread and add a link to the layout or attach a screenshot and zip file which we can upload for viewing.

If you have any questions then post below in this thread as the entry thread will be just for entries only.

Good Luck!

So join SitePoint right now and have a chance to win this competition held by the biggest Web designers and developers community on the entire web!!