A few weeks ago, I started playing around with Picasa to create a photo album. I let it import all of the photos on my computer (approximately 10,000 photos taken over a six or seven year period) and then started looking through all of them. While messing around, I decided to turn on the facial recognition feature and was absolutely amazed at how well Picasa was able to detect faces. …  Read More →

The dates for this year’s edUi Conference have been officially announced. The conference will be held on Nov. 8 and 9, 2010 at the Omni Hotel and Conference Center in Charlottesville, VA. I attended and enjoyed the first edUi Conference last year and decided to get involved this year. The headline speakers for this year’s conference include Paul Boag, David Berman, Stephanie Sullivan, Nick Denardis, Greg Rewis and Alistair MacDonald.... 

jQuery offers some really powerful functions and methods to utilize AJAX. One that I’ve discovered recently is the .find() method. The .find() method allows you to search for a specific HTML ID within some HTML and then returns only the content found within that ID. For instance, if you have the following code: This is a header This is my main content. …  Read More →

A few weeks ago, FiXT Music, the record label founded by Klayton of Celldweller, announced a new concept for the music released on the label. Much of the music released was now considered “ Podsafe ,” meaning that purchasing the music from the Fixt Store grants you a license to use the music in non-commercial audio and video podcasts and…  Read More →

The other day, a client of mine received an e-mail message from GoDaddy informing them that the cost of .com and .net domain names would be increasing on July 1, 2010. Following is the text of the e-mail message: On July 1, 2010, VeriSign®, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices – .COM will go up 7%, and .NET by 10%. The increase will be passed to …  Read More →

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a position where I needed a nice, simple, easy-to-use lightbox plugin for jQuery. After some searching, I found that there are quite a few different plugins for this purpose, and they all have their pros and cons. After trying a few different plugins, I finally settled on nyroModal. During my search, I found Thickbox, but that, while being powerful and easily usable, is no longer under development (and hasn’t... 

Every once in a while, you may find yourself in a position where you need to create a hanging indent on a paragraph or set of paragraphs on one of your pages. There isn’t really an out-of-the-box way to do so with CSS, but you can accomplish it pretty easily by combining two CSS properties. In case…  Read More →

Here’s a simple way to use Photoshop to erase unnecessary content from your photos and images. Step 1 : Place the img (image) on top of a blank, white layer (comes in handy when erasing content).  Duplicate the img, and add a vector mask to the top-layered img. Step 2 : Hide the first-layered img, and start drawing on the vector mask with a black brush – that will hide the content when you brush over it.  If your item is a square... 

When working with PHP object-oriented programming, the concept of creating copies of objects you’ve created can be a little confusing. The main thing you need to understand is that PHP objects are passed byref rather than the standard variable behavior of passing elements byval. In case you have never heard those terms before, byref means “by reference,” which means that you are essentially assigning an additional name to your... 

A few days ago, I opened the mobile version of Google Voice on my iPhone so I could send an SMS message. While I was there, I noticed that Buzz was available from the list of mobile apps I could utilize while logged in. I popped on over and checked it out. I posted a status message, checked some of the posts that had been made within my geographical area and found a couple of people to follow. Later, I logged into my Google account on my home computer... 

Recently, I discovered that while hosting your e-mail services on Google has its advantages, it also brings with it some minor inconveniences. When you use a script on most Web servers to send e-mail messages, if your e-mail is not hosted locally on that server, your e-mail messages will never arrive in your inbox. Instead, the mail gets delivered to an e-mail account on your Web server if there is one; if there isn’t, the message gets rejected... 

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work with Wordpress themes. On one particular site, the navigation menu is built dynamically, combining pages and categories in the navigation scheme. I needed to find a way to determine which page or category was currently being viewed so I could apply a special class to the item in the navigation menu, indicating that the link is active. After a bit of research, I found a couple of useful Wordpress functions... 

A few weeks ago, I bought Windows 7 and installed it on my computer at home. After installing, I started trying to organize things the way I want them. On all of my computers, one of the first things I do is to move the taskbar to the top of the screen and create a quicklaunch toolbar docked at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, after a lot of playing around and a lot of research online, I found there was no way to do that; until I …  Read More →

Today, I found a nice little script called Tipsy. Tipsy, by default, pulls the text from the “title” attribute of any HTML element and turns it into a nicely styled tooltip. The script is easy to configure and offers some nice customization options. If you would prefer to display an attribute other than the title, you can actually choose any attribute or even indicate custom text …  Read More →

A few days ago, the OpenSUSE team released the first milestone of OpenSUSE 11.3. One of the biggest changes in this new version of SUSE is the inclusion of the LXDE desktop environment. LXDE is supposed to be fast, lightweight desktop environment. I’ve not heard of LXDE previously, but I have to admit that the screenshots I’ve seen make me very curious about it. Milestone 1 …  Read More →