LeVoltz

How Yahoo! Got Its Groove Back

LeVoltz — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:18:50 +0000

I’ve never quite understood Yahoo! as a company —and believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve been excited by the possibilities (Google Adsense competitor YPN) and disheartened by the long lists of services that have simply not kept pace with the competition (Yahoo! Site Explorer) or have been shuttered altogether (so long, MyBlogLog).

Yahoo’s acquisition of Associated Content makes the destination site now poised to dominate in the production and consumption of information — not just sorting or sharing, as is the case with search and social powerhouses Google and Facebook.

The failures and shortcomings of this technology or that one are not the fault of Yahoo! in every case — the promise of video streaming service Yahoo! Live, like its competitors, really never met its potential. But it is that much more painful to watch failures from a company with such a long history of excellence. The problem? Yahoo! lost its groove.

Over the years, Yahoo! has been there for Web professionals in nearly every capacity — from search marketing and webmaster programs to analytics solutions and development platforms. I have used them all and you most likely have had some interaction with them too. You’ll agree that the products have been exceptional in some cases but lackluster in others. While the follow-through may not be there each and every time and they certainly don’t always receive the same recognition as their competitors, they’ve done their part. And for that, they deserve our praise and continued attention.

For a company that was number one for so very long, the distant view from second must be aggravating — watching a younger, more nimble and smarter company can do that to a technology stalwart. Yet, they seemingly have not given up. And for that, they deserve our most honest critique. Perhaps it’s the exclamation mark (which drives editors crazy) or maybe the corporate color of purple that makes me doubt the serious nature of the business. More reasonable, however, is my objection to the long-maintained Terry Semel-style big media and entertainment culture which puts itself first, and needs of its community of users and Web professionals second.

However, even as Yahoo! fumbled around searching for its identity and alienated users along the way, fortunately, (some would say amazingly) they never lost sight of the value in its consumer community. Perhaps they took a long look at the most successful Yahoo! product of all time — e-mail.

Users have relied on Yahoo! for years as a place to go for the critical communication and information they need. Years ago, users came to Yahoo! as a destination — a place to connect with other users and consume information. It worked then, so why not now?

Yahoo’s acquisition of Associated Content makes the destination site now poised to dominate in the production and consumption of information — not just sorting or sharing, as is the case with search and social powerhouses Google and Facebook. But it doesn’t stop there. Yahoo’s recent partnership with Zillow will create an Internet real-estate content and advertising network with an opportunity to monetize (some might say commoditize) an entire industry vertical. But with a full transition to destination site comes an immense responsibility. Fortunately, the energy required is something Yahoo! seems flush with and has arguably never lacked.

I’ve been through Jerry Yang, Terry Semel, Sue Decker, Jerry Yang (again) and now I’m watching the Carol Bartz era unfold. In 10 years as a faithful Yahoo watcher (and part-time user) I believe there are reasons to get excited again. It seems as though for the first time in years, Yahoo! “gets it”. They may even deserve that exclamation mark.

Best 10 Web Hosting Sites For 2010

LeVoltz — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:15:44 +0000

Below you’ll find the most up-to-date “Top 10″ list on the internet. LeVoltz.com has hand selected each host below based on the credibility and the reputation of people who stand behind these hosting companies. Bringing webmasters the most “Trusted Top 10 hosting list” on the net.

The web hosting sites listed below are rated by Price, Server Up-Time, Reliability, Eaze-of-Use, Control Panel and Customer Support

We recommend BlueHost, they have been getting better in their service since my last review. They are now one of the best service providers in the Internet.
	Price	Domain	Disk Space	Money Back	Uptime
BlueHost	$3.95	Free	Unlimited	60 Days	99.99%
HostGator	$4.95	$15	Unlimited	30 Days	99.97%
HostMonster	$3.95	Free	Unlimited	30 Days	99.95%
InMotion	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	90 Days	99.90%
HostClear	$5.95	Free	Unlimited	30 Days	99.89%
GreenGeeks	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	30 Days	99.88%
JustHost	$4.95	Free	Unlimited	Anytime	99.87%
SuperGreen	$6.95	Free	Unlimited	30 Days	99.85%
Godaddy	$6.29	$10	50 Gb	30 Days	99.85%
Yahoo Web Hosting	$9.95	Free	Unlimited	30 Days	99.80%

VPS Web Hosting – What You Need To Know

LeVoltz — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:26:55 +0000

There are three types of hosting – Shared, VPS and Dedicated. A shared hosting space is one where all the resources are shared with various clients. The RAM, Diskspace and CPU are all shared. In a VPS web hosting, the RAM and Disk Space are dedicated to you. And you share only the CPU with other users. In a Dedicated hosting, you share no resources and have your own machine.

With the current web scenario having a Dedicated hosting and maintaining it can not only be a tough task, but also a costly one. Shared hosting will come cheap but it has a lot of drawbacks. VPS web hosting is the way to go forward. VPS web hosting offers the best of both, Dedicated (flexibility) and Shared (cost effectiveness) web hosting models. VPS has many advantages over Shared hosting.

Having a Shared hosting space would limit your configurations to only your application/website. You can not perform a server level configuration, as other users might not want the same change. With VPS you get the benefit of being able to configure the server, just as you would in a Dedicated hosting. This is because you have your own disk space and only share the CPU power with other users.

Also VPS hosting offers Burstable memory. In Shared hosting all the users share the memory. During sudden unexpected traffic spikes, caused by sudden popularity in digg and other such websites, the hosting won’t adjust to your needs and this may lead to your site being down, just when it has got popular. This can be a very frustrating experience, which all of us have been through at least at some point in our lives. With reserve resourses readily available, VPS web hosting offers a cloud computing setup. When you don’t require the resources it is used by another user and when you have the traffic spike, the memory is allocated for you.

With VPS web hosting, you can easily scale your website from just one basic website to high end multiple websites with large databases and other complicated applications involving e-commerce etc. Unlike Shared hosting, you don’t have to change or upgrade the server every time you expand your business and websites and applications.

VPS web hosting is ideal for sites which get high traffic and have multiple sites with dynamic content, large databases (like product catalogues) and e-commerce. Also websites which have rapid growth and require flexible scalability would require VPS or Dedicated hosting.

VPS web hosting is the perfect solution for projects which fall between Shared and Dedicated webhosting.

Installing WordPress Locally Using MAMP

LeVoltz — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:34:26 +0000

Installing MAMP and running WordPress locally on your Mac is a simple task, however I was unable to find any good documentation while I was attempting to do it for the first time which made it seem really difficult. My goal with this tutorial is to help you download MAMP and WordPress and have them up and running in 15 minutes. Let’s get started…

First of all if you have no idea what I’m even talking about. MAMP is an application that installs Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Mac. This turns your computer into a server capable of running scripts locally. Macs actually come with most of this pre-installed, but the setup for it is a bit more complicated and using MAMP is far easier. Secondly this tutorial assumes you are using OS 10.4 Tiger, because we rely on a widget to get things rolling. If you are using OS 10.3 Panther you should still be able to follow along.

To start we need to go download the MAMP installer. It’s just like installing any other program on a Mac.

After installation go to your Applications folder and locate MAMP. In the MAMP folder you should see a black icon for installing the widget. Click the widget installer and OS X will ask you if you want to keep it, click keep. Then activate your dashboard by hitting the f12 key and find the widget.

Edit: For those of you not using OS 10.4, you can click on the MAMP application icon in the MAMP folder to get access to the start page and server on/off buttons.

You are going to do two things here. First click the i button on the bottom of the widget to flip it over (this button isn’t visible until you mouse over) and select php 4 on the back. Click done, which takes you back to the front and then click stop servers. When the progress wheel stops click start servers. Once they start, click Open Start Page. The page that pops up can cause your eyes to glass over if you don’t know what you are looking at, but this page contains the info we need to install WordPress.

Write down the host, user, and password which should be localhost, root, and root. However look at the example they provide and you will notice they enter localhost:8889 which will be important later when we install WordPress. Click on the phpMyAdmin link. You need to add a new database for WordPress to connect to. To make things easier we will create a new database named wordpress, however you can call it anything you want. Then click create. That’s it. Now we need to get WordPress.

Go and download WordPress. Once it’s done move the wordpress folder to the htdocs folder which is in the MAMP folder where we found the widget earlier. Now if you open the readme.html file in the wordpress folder you will get some instructions that I’m about to run you through.

Since I know all of you have the program TextEdit that’s what we are going to use for this next step (Edit: If you do use TextEdit make sure it’s set to plain text and not rich text under preferences>format). Locate the wp-config-sample.php file in the WordPress folder and open with TextEdit. We need to modify this file. You need to change the info in this file to the same as what we found on the MAMP start page. Make sure the DB_NAME is wordpress (or whatever you named your DB in the phpMyAdmin panel), Change the DB_USER to ‘root’, DB_PASSWORD to ‘root’, and the DB_HOST to localhost:8889. Save this file as wp-config.php.

Next you need to open http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php. Once it’s done you will be given a username and password. Write these down because you will need them to get in to the admin account. Now if you navigate to http://localhost:8888/wordpress/ you should see your default installation of WordPress.

Now you can work on your blog or develop templates on your local machine without changing your online blog. This also allows you to work on your blog development without an internet connection. For some other tips on how to use MAMP check out How do you use MAMP?.

I hope this got you up and running in 15 minutes like I promised when we started. Now that you are up and running, you will want to select a great looking theme for your blog. Have a look at these 100+ beautiful WordPress themes. Good Luck!

FAQ

1. Can I use MAMP to host my web site for other people to see?
-Yes, but not really. MAMP is more like a testing ground to run server scripts on your local computer. This allows you to develop themes, learn more about web based applications and test before you go live. However, if you are looking for a host to biuld a site online I recommend using Bluehost or signing up for a free WordPress blog at WordPress.com.

2. I can’t open the start page from the widget.
-This is a known problem and I contacted the developers about it. You can open the start page from the MAMP application, then bookmark it so you can return to it. The start page address is http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English

3. When you say I need to “open http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php” do you mean open it in a browser?
-Everything you run in MAMP should start http://localhost:8888/ this is sort of like www, then you’ll add the name of the folder you are trying to access in the htdocs folder. So it will be http://localhost:8888/wordpress. Everything you add after that will take you to a different file in the wordpress folder. By opening the http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php you set the connection between the database (mysql) and the WordPress site (php). /wp-admin/install.php is just shorthand.

4. I used to be able to use MAMP, but now I get an unable to connect or failed to open page error when I go to my MAMP sites.
-Check the widget or the MAMP application and make sure the servers are running. There should be green lights to indicate that they are on.

30+ Twitter Tools For Managing Followers

LeVoltz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:30:09 +0000

To manage your followers or friends on twitter is not an easy task. To be successful on twitter you have to analyze different things. You should know how active your followers are, do they retweet your tweets, do they update regularly and you should know those whom you are following are following you.

To manage all above things there are some helpful web based applications. Good news is you don’t have to search for them i have already compiled 30 twitter tools for you to manage followers.

FlashTweet

FlashTweet is a mass follow tool that simplifies the process of adding your twitter friends. You can see who you are following that is following you back, mass follow users based on search terms and even unfollow multiple friends at once.

Refollow

Refollow helps you discover, manage, and protect your Twitter social circle.

Doesfollow

Find out who follows whom on Twitter.

Twittangle

TwitTangle is a free service that helps you untangle the mess of having too many friends on twitter.

Tweeter Tags

Tweeter Tags makes it easy to declare your interests and find new, like-minded friends.

MrTweet

Helping you find great people and followers relevant to your interests.

Twalala

Using twalala, you can filter tweets out of your stream by keywords and phrases or mute individuals who get a bit too chatty.

Twitnest

Interesting visualization of your followers and their followers.

Twittersnooze

It’s a good tool to avoid a blast of tweets from a conference you are not attending… just snooze the conference goers for a few days.

Twimailer

Tired of shallow e-mails from Twitter when someone follows you? Want to know more about the people who are following you? Twimailer is a free service that delivers that information right to your inbox!

My Cleaner

MyCleenr is a unique way to sort your friends by their last tweets.

Twitter Karma

Bulk management of followers and those you are following.

Tweepler

Tweepler Is an easy, more enjoyable way of processing your New Twitter Followers.

TweetSum

TweetSum does one thing and does it well: we show you at a glance who’s following you, give you the tools you need to decide whether you should follow them back or not.

Twitoria

Twitoria finds your friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time so you can give them the boot!

Mutuality

Mutuality is a simple service which allow you to make bulk operations with your account.

TweetEffect

Find out which of your Twitter updates made people follow or leave you. Simply enter your Twitter ID in the following form.

TweepMe

TweepMe is the 100% opt-in group of Twitter users who all chose to follow each other on Twitter.

TwitterLess

Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.

TwitterRatio

Your Twitter Ratio is the ratio of your followers to friends (or people who you follow). It is measured with the TFF Ratio (Twitter Follower-Friend Ratio).

FriendOrFollow

Who are you following that’s not following you back? Who’s following you that you’re not following back? Find out!

TweepDiff

Compare Twitter friends and followers.

Twollo

Find and Follow Twitterers with similar interests to you.

Twitter100

With Twitter100, you can see your followers at a glance (up to 100).

iFollowBack

Follow back people.

Twtrfrnd

A new follower? Should you follow back? Find out if you have common followings with them, and which people you follow that follow them.

FriendMePlease

Everyone wants more friends. We just make it easy.

TwitHive

Monitor and Interact with the Twitter Hive Mind.

Foller.Me

Before you follow.

FollowLists

Create and share lists of your Twitter friends.

40+ Amazing Iphone Application Websites

LeVoltz — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 14:33:49 +0000

This week, Apple passed Microsoft as World’s largest Tech Company for the first time.We must admit that Iphone has been an important factor in the company`s development.

Iphone Apps were introduced in 2008 and today are more than 200 000 approved and available at Apple.I`m bringing my contribution to design community showcasing some of the best Iphone Application Website Designs!

One thing that many of the iPhone application websites have ‘in common’ is the beautiful and unique design. They simply look amazing.

Foobi

Snow Reports

Billings Touch

Tapmates

HQUEUE

Deaxon

Eight

OverCommited

Kodu

Bills – On your table

Here File File

PanelFly

Key Point

Barista

Cellar

Get Concentrating

Tea Round

Thermometer

Source Bits

Future Tap

Tap Bots

Robocat

Spoon Juice

Mock Draft

Wheel of Tea

Ecoki

Buzz App

Bible Verse

Amble

Joypad

What`s on TV?

Mee Templates

Task This

Track Debt

Motionoto

Diet to Go

Confess App

Goinnutty

Apps Templates

Whisper

Sundance Twenty Ten

BroaderSheet

Iphone Apps

40+ New Premium WordPress Themes of July 2010

LeVoltz — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 05:17:04 +0000

WordPress 3.0 is launched and came with some amazing new features,some better navigation menus, specific templates, custom post types and an amazing merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.org. WordPress designers successfully implemented the new features and created some out of the box themes just to make your like easier.

Take a look at this 40+ great themes and don`t hesitate to update your WordPress version to 3.0 and to change your theme with a new one.

Must Read: 100+ Best WordPress Premium Themes of 2009

Modern Realtor

Modern Realtor wordpress theme is designed for real estate type websites. It may also be suitable for showcasing your work or products.

Real Estate Gold

Real Estate Gold wordpress theme is designed for real estate type websites. It may also be suitable for showcasing your work or products. It comes with built in basic real estate listing filtering, featured slider banner and admin options to customize the theme.

The Designer

The Designer is a great looking portfolio/blog wordpress template packed full of features and options.

Designitia

Designtia WordPress theme is built to fit all your needs, either you want a portfolio, corporate or ezine website.

New Agensi

New Agensi WP, is the WordPress version of Agensi HTML /CSS Template. Comes with lots of improvements from the original version and by utilizing the dynamic aspects of WordPress make New Agensi is even more customizable and generally suitable for your portfolio, blog, or corporate website.

Alpha

Alpha WordPress theme is a clean, beautiful and easy customizable theme. It’s perfect for clean looking websites. This theme comes with massive and functional theme option page which gives you entire website under your control. It comes with 4 page templates, Portfolio, gallery , blog and contact.

Meezio

Meezio is a simple and clean one page portfolio theme. It uses the JQuery library and scrolls horizontally, vertically or both. The content is built using the 960 Grid system and is easy to customize.

Colosseum

Colosseum is the ultimate fusion of wordpress, creativity and great futures. This premium theme can be used for just about anything, from corporate websites to personal portfolios. It uses a lot of advanced css3 and jQuery effects, yet it still works on browsers that don’t support it.

HypeWp

Hype gets it all together. Whatever you need its in it. Full width slider, fully formatted elements, portfolio, blog working AJAX contact form, column template a whole lot more.

VooSky

VooSky comes with awesome featured post slider, Two home page layouts, 8 colors, fully working contact form, Advance theme /post and page option panels, portfolio page(multi page or single page) , Dropdown navigation with infinite dropdown levels and many other…

Quickstart

Quickstart Real Estate wordpress theme is designed for real estate type websites. It may also be suitable for showcasing your work or products. It comes with built in basic real estate listing filtering, featured slider banner and admin options to customize the theme.

Elegance

Elegance is a elegant, simple, clean and minimalist WordPress Theme suitable for portfolio, business, blogs and personal sites.

Modern Business

Modern Business 3 LIGHT WordPress is a custom written premium theme with a total new design, images and layout from the HTML (the html version is all fully included in the download with lots of PSD extras!). Designed for photographers, designers or application sellers it’s very easily create gallery pages of your work and display perfectly against a light background – the theme comes with 8 gorgeous color schemes that not only change the background images but link colors and button rollover colors to perfectly match.

The Wall

The Wall is one of the most flexible, customizable, and easy-to-use WordPress themes on the market. With The Wall, you will be able to run your blog, portfolio, and business in a way that is professional, elegant, and aesthetically pleasing.

Parabiz

Take advantage of WordPress 3.0 great new features with this powerful theme. With it’s five post types, publishing content has never been easier in WordPress. The theme has a video insertion panel, that makes video-insertion fast and easy. You can insert Vimeo video, Youtube video and Flash video(swf). The theme has unlimited colors and backgrounds, alle configurable through the theme options panel.

Pathfinder

PathFinder is a one page and a keyboard navigation driven wordpress theme. This theme is unique from other because it has a life stream section that displays all the recent social activities like (Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Facebook, LastFM, Flickr and Tumblr) and it is easy to add user account from the social sites mentioned above on the Life stream settings from the admin custom panel.

Buffalo

Professional looking, clean designed WordPress Theme with powerful features and custimizable layout. Great for blogs or business websites.

Transparency

TRANSPARENCY theme was created to offer to anybody the chance to create a wonderful website, using the wordpress platform. The main feature offers the possibility to change the opacity level for each element of the theme and the option to add different backgrounds for any category post or page, using the admin panel.

Clean Cut

CleanCut is a WordPress Theme that takes advantage with all the amazing new wordpress 3 features and is best suited for Portfolio and Business Websites. It comes with 5 fantastic Image and News slideshows that also support video, has multiple Page templates, a very unique portfolio sorting option and of course gives you the possibility to choose from 5 Fantastic skins.

Review It

ReviewIt provides you with a powerful review and community theme utilizing the latest WordPress 3.0 features including custom post types, the brand new navigation and background systems, plus the ability to play Youtube and Flash videos in the excellent Nivo Slider and jQuery lightbox. It’s also 100% BuddyPress compatible!

Europa

Europa is an excellent compromise among the conflicting requirements of novelty, simplicity, elegance and function; designed to promote anything from a corporate business to a portfolio site.

Aspire

This is a premium web theme that’s designed specifically for photographers, designers, motion artists, businesses, corporate events, and all creatives to display their work in a slick site layout. Aspire has been designed with more than just a basic website template in mind.

@studio

@studio is a premium WordPress theme designed to help you tell your story. Multiple homepage layout options and slider variants complement four colour schemes and an intelligent javascript implementation. The result? A powerful platform for your message.

Robust

Robust is a premium wordpress theme that will suite any project you can think off thanks to the fresh look and clean design. The theme comes with 5 color skins that are sure to impress any of your site visitors and will suite to your company’s needs.

My Portfolio Blog

BlinkWP features a personal portfolio and (not so) personal blog. Built-in with an unique design and functions, blinkWP is easy to edit and to make it your own.

Squared3

SQUARED3 is an WordPress Theme best suited for business and portfolio sites. This theme is highly flexible and equipped with an extremely powerful SQUARED3 Customization Panel. Not just another WordPress theme, but a complete CMS Solution.

Bon Apetit

The same beautiful theme with a complex and customizable WP framework on top of it. Taking aside the unique, massive back end CMS , that gives you almost unending possibilities of making changes for your needs we’ve added something that no one on Theme Forest has so far: One click auto install.

Tesigner

Warm wooden style of this theme are sure to impress your clients and friends. Don’t think twice, if you are owner of design studio or freelancer, then this wordpress theme is perfect for you. Slideshow on the main page show the best examples of your work, and convenient portfolio enables easy to post images and video. Many cool features such as drop-down menu, twitter counter, flickr gallery and full widget ready make you love this theme!

Awesome

Awesome is a Powerful Professional WordPress theme. It comes with an impressive fully customizable jQuery homepage slider with 2 different effects through admin interface. Whether your are a wordpress pro or Just a beginner, this theme fully has been covered. Awesome has a huge and powerful backend area you have complete SYSPANEL control over the look and style of your theme. Display number blog post at homepage , Adjust homepage slider setting speed and effects, Enable/Disable function available for navigation and much much more, all without having to touch a single line of code!

Simplicity

Simplicity is a very clean and modern WordPress template that is highly customizable to fit any brand or business.

Vivi Theme

Vivi Interactive it’s a clean and elegant theme, developed for a wide range of businesses. It has a aggressive, unique, high visual impact layout, based on large elements suplemented by large shadows. Comes with 5 different styles, most of them composed of strong colors and 18 different pages.

Echoes

Echoes Premium theme for WordPress is designed for rapid development of portfolio or business websites. 3 Featured Mainpage styles, 5 Portfolio Page Styles, 19 Shortcodes, working Contact Page Ajax Validated Template and more.

Genova

Genova is a content centered design template. It hides all the secondary information (widgets) but shows them on demand (mouse over or tab at a touch screen using jQuery). Less is more is the design principle on which the template is based on. With that idea it became one of the most minimalistic but at the same time well equipped WordPress themes in this store. It can be used for both, a photo, video or just a design focused blog as well as a showcase for products or a corporate design page for a company.

Horizontal Brand Box

When we say one-page website, we mean one-page blog too. You will not get a single redirect anywhere. The theme has a fully functional deep linking system for that matter. A complex floating, jquery driven layout is on. Resize your browser window to test it. Its goal is to keep the xx% header, xx% content proportion. Plus part of the next page visible to the right.

Photo Art Gallery

The same beautiful theme with a complex and customizable WP framework on top of it. As you know by now we’ve added our popular One click auto install feature. Sit back, relax, drink your coffee, and watch how our work frame does its magic and auto installs the Art Gallery WP theme to the version that you see on the live preview. This theme requires php 5.0.

My App Theme

With the popularity of mobile appliations increasing, more and more people are looking for an easy way to create an online home for their software. MyApp was created to make it easy to publish and promote your app, and has been tailored specifically for the mobile market.

Coda

Coda is an elegant and feature-rich magazine template with a neat home page js scroller, and an otherwise completely widget based home page design. With a custom styled Twitter module, a “Share this” module and a “Like this” popularity-based post feature this theme will surely woo you.

Emporium

Emporium,best e-commerce theme so far with balanced features! Create your own online store easily in wordpress. It transforms your WordPress install into a fully functional Ecommerce store complete with backend administration. Use wordpress to easily manage your store that sells Tangible or intangible/digital goods.

Gudeg

Gudeg theme, is a clean WordPress theme best suitable for portfolio or business site. Come with 4 background schemes, 5 unique page layout, 4 custom widget, and more customization option in theme option page, make your website more unique.

FolioStudio

FolioStudio built for WordPress 3.0. This WordPress Theme utilizes the new custom post types, making it a cinch to update your specific sections on your site! FolioStudio is the perfect blend of WordPress goodness. Experience everything with FolioStudio, from a sophisticated portfolio, professional business layout all wrapped up with a fresh design.

Top 20 Features Of Firefox 4 (Beta) That Make It Stand Out

LeVoltz — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 03:17:43 +0000

The beta for Firefox version 4 was recently released and it has already created a buzz on the web. While many of its features will already demonstrated in its nightly builds, the beta more widely showcases these new features.

Release notes for Firefox v4 outline all the features which web developers and ordinary internet users will find helpful. To know what exactly these features are, read on:

Tabs are now on top by default on Windows only – OSX and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.

On Windows Vista and Windows 7 the menu bar has been replaced with the Firefox button.
You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar

New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.

The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
CSS Transitions are partially supported.
Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
New HTML5 parser.
Support for more HTML5 form controls.

As you can see, many interface changes have been made to make usage a lot more user friendly. At the same time, great web development features have been added with a special focus on HTML 5. For a full list of features for developers, you can click here.

Firefox enthusiasts, who are interested in what else Firefox has to offer, can get the unofficial beta 2 of Firefox v4; this beta is available from FTP server and is a follow-up to the current publicly available beta. Beta 2 offers even more features however has addons disabled by default, to prevent addon-related browser crashes. To enable addons support in Firefox v4 beta 2, install the “Add-on Compatibility Eeporter” addon, then restart Firefox twice. Type in “about:addons” in the URL bar which will open up the Addon Manager and let you use addons.

WordPress 3.0 Real Estate Theme Update – OpenHouse V3

LeVoltz — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:27:17 +0000

I’m very proud to introduce the latest version of one of the most popular themes in the store, OpenHouse V3 Real Estate theme with full WordPress 3.0 compatibility, Google Street View for your listings, language localization (PO files) and 8 color styles.

Streetview

Open House is fully compatible with WordPress 3.0+ and a highly customizable Real Estate WordPress theme with Google Maps Integration (and Street View), the theme offer a professional look for Agents and Realtors that want to build a website around the WordPress platform Compatible with all markets and countries with theme localization, translation and internationalization.

English, Spanish and Portuguese language files are provided in the Developer Package. (You still can translate your own with hte basic license).

Open House features custom scripts that make add/delete/modify listings an easy task with the included photo gallery with a lightbox effect, gorgeous photo fade animations and automatic Google Maps integration as soon as the address is entered on each individual listing.

The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator.

Multisite feature of WordPress 3.0 allow agents to have their individual sites with a different look than the main website with their own listings.

Multi Category search is provided for potential customers to locate the dream house they’ve always imagined.

Theme Features:

WordPress 3.0+ Compatible
8 Color Styles
Google Maps Integration
Compatible with all markets
Single or Multiple Agents
Individual Agents page with listings and bio
Carousel Property Slider
Dynamic Menu
Add your own logo or background
Unlimited dropdowns for category search
Contact agent from property page
Easy Listings Management (Custom Script)
Widget Ready
Photo Gallery
Agent Photo Uploader
IE, Firefox and Safari compatible
Unlimited Forum Support
Extensive manual and tutorial included
Advertisement Banner Management
Ad your Adsense or Image Link Code
Turn all-or-individual banners on/off
Image Auto Resizer (for thumbnails)
Gravatar Support
Financing Calculator
Threaded comments
Logo PSD and Font included *
Demo-Content.xml file included *
English, Spanish and Portuguese languages *