Top Articles On The Web Design Billboard In November’09

A per­fect lay­out, A Good Design and Nice Resource can pro­duce a cre­ative out­put. Lay­out, tex­tures, typog­ra­phy and pat­terns are used more often than one may think but the out­come of dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tion can result ver­ity of excel­lent designs. Pro­fes­sion­al­ism is built upon knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence. How­ever, When it comes to selec­tion of right resources you need to be very care­ful and spe­cific about needs.

In this round-​​up, you’ll find num­ber of top resources, tuto­ri­als, free­bies which left deep impres­sion on web design com­mu­nity, as the month of Novem­ber had a lot of inter­est­ing arti­cles pro­duces by dif­fer­ent sources.

The more time and effort you ded­i­cate for use­ful and cre­ative resources, the higher are your chances for get­ting bet­ter results.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing related arti­cles as well.

• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In October’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In September’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In August’09
• Top Arti­cles On The Web Design Bill­board In July’09
• Cor­po­rate Web­site Designs For Design Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part II

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

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Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

See­ing as we are all human (well, pre­sum­ably who­ever is read­ing this post any­way), we should rec­og­nize that mis­takes hap­pen. They even have that say­ing, “To err is human…,” which goes to show that it is not only com­mon­place for us to err once or twice: it is expected. But a method is behind this mad­ness, because mak­ing mis­takes is one of the major ways we learn. This is no dif­fer­ent for freelancers.

Find­ing our way over these bumps in the road often gives us valu­able insight to take away. It helps us develop tech­niques and meth­ods that we can incor­po­rate into our cre­ative process. As free­lancers, we have the ben­e­fit of access to an entire online com­mu­nity that is will­ing to share its expe­ri­ences so that we can learn with­out hav­ing to make the same mistakes.

So in this post, we look at 10 crit­i­cal mis­takes free­lancers make. Hope­fully, if you haven’t already made one of these mis­takes your­self, you can learn the les­son behind it.

Also con­sider our pre­vi­ous articles:

• Get­ting Clients: Approach­ing The Company
• Invoice Like A Pro: Exam­ples And Best Practices
• How To Iden­tify And Deal With Dif­fer­ent Types Of Clients
• Free­lance Con­tracts: Do’s And Don’ts
• Mar­ket­ing Rules And Prin­ci­ples For Freelancers

They Don’t Use A Contract

One of the first things free­lancers learn when con­tract­ing out their ser­vices to oth­ers is… to use a con­tract! Unfor­tu­nately, we often learn this les­son the hard way. For what­ever rea­son, we think that a par­tic­u­lar client of ours is some­one we can work for with­out the aid and pro­tec­tion of a con­tract. This tends to end in one way: by bit­ing us in the back end.

With­out this safe­guard in place, you open your­self up to so many poten­tial prob­lems, and you may inad­ver­tently end up com­mit­ting to more than you had intended or even imag­ined. Free­lancers only make this mis­take once, if at all. This les­son is not a secret in the free­lance com­mu­nity. The advice comes up often: always use a con­tract. And many heed the warn­ing once they hear it.

They Mis­use Social Media (Or Don’t Use It At All)

Another com­mon, but crit­i­cal, pit­fall that free­lancers tum­ble into is mis­us­ing social media, if they even use it at all. Social media is a major tool that offers all free­lancers an invalu­able resource at their fin­ger­tips. An entire com­mu­nity of pro­fes­sion­als con­nected via modems, ready and will­ing to offer each other what­ever assis­tance they can. Neglect­ing this stream of indus­try insight, or not using it prop­erly, can hin­der the growth of your business.

Social media is about inter­act­ing with peo­ple and fos­ter­ing rela­tion­ships, which, if done with con­sid­er­a­tion and atten­tion, can cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties you would have oth­er­wise missed out on (not to men­tion friend­ships that can out­last jobs). Espe­cially at the begin­ning of your free­lanc­ing career, if you make the mis­take of mis­us­ing the media, you could be seen as an anti-​​social pariah in your cor­ner of the Web.

They Put Quan­tity Over Qual­ity In Their Portfolio

When putting their port­fo­lio together, some free­lancers mis­tak­enly believe that the more they add to their port­fo­lio, the bet­ter. Then it becomes about quan­tity and not qual­ity of work. They for­get the value of the port­fo­lio in open­ing doors and cre­at­ing opportunities.

The phrase “Put your best foot for­ward” applies in this sit­u­a­tion. Your port­fo­lio speaks vol­umes about your skills, free­ing you from hav­ing to say too much and risk com­ing off as more arro­gant than con­fi­dent. Let your port­fo­lio do the talk­ing, and don’t make the mis­take of pri­or­i­tiz­ing quan­tity and send­ing the wrong mes­sage. Qual­ity makes the best first impres­sion, so make the most of it.

They Stop Learning

This one has to be said. It can do so much harm to free­lancers, no mat­ter what their field: that is, they stop learn­ing. But espe­cially for free­lancers who work in a field as dynamic and ever-​​expanding as design and devel­op­ment, stay­ing ahead of the curve is absolutely cru­cial to meet­ing your clients’ needs.

This field is con­tin­u­ally evolv­ing with new tech­niques and appli­ca­tions. Throw­ing in the towel on edu­ca­tion is vir­tual sui­cide. You, your work and your career would stag­nate. Thank­fully, with this online cul­ture we have today, cul­ti­vat­ing an envi­ron­ment in which we can sus­tain our edu­ca­tion is easy. Not tak­ing advan­tage of these learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties is a mis­take that could poten­tially cost you your business.

They Don’t Know How To Deal With Clients

Another com­mon mis­take is that free­lancers for­get their peo­ple skills when deal­ing with clients. For what­ever rea­son, we let slip in our minds that clients hire us because they don’t know how to do the work them­selves. They are in unknown ter­ri­tory, and as free­lancers we should always be sen­si­tive to that and bridge as many gaps in knowl­edge as we can. This will only improve your future deal­ings with the client and earn you more respect and trust in the business.

Obvi­ously, with­out clients, you are a free­lancer in title alone, so make sure you know not only how to engage clients but how to entice them back. Being able to assess needs that they aren’t even able to artic­u­late and then com­mu­ni­cat­ing it all back to them is an invalu­able skill. Neglect­ing it can be costly.

They Fail To Pre­pare For Dry Spells

This mis­take is def­i­nitely bet­ter learned second-​​hand, and that is not prepar­ing for occa­sions when no work is com­ing in. Droughts hit even the best of them, espe­cially in these tough eco­nomic times. Free­lancers often for­get to account for that in their pric­ing struc­ture and to save up in good times for when things go south.

There is a logic behind the rates we charge, and part of it is to sus­tain us after we have com­pleted work for one client and eagerly await the next. Of course, we can always find work to do, but pay­ing work is what sus­tains us as free­lancers. Call­ing this mis­take costly is too close to pun­ning for com­fort, but its impact is def­i­nitely felt and could force you to sus­pend free­lanc­ing and seek out sup­ple­men­tal employ­ment, thus mak­ing it even harder for you to cre­ate your own opportunities.

They Over­load Their Plate

This next mis­take some­times results from a fear of the afore­men­tioned dry spell. Of course, greed might also play a role. What­ever the rea­son, some free­lancers don’t know when enough is enough, and they con­tinue to take on new projects as their plate over­loads. Overex­tend­ing your­self and your busi­ness like this can desta­bi­lize your workflow.

Free­lancers need a cer­tain degree of self-​​awareness to know when they have reached their limit. Reputation—that is, a good one—is impor­tant to your busi­ness’ devel­op­ment. Spread­ing your­self too thin is never good, and the dis­trac­tion could ham­per your cre­ativ­ity. This is another of those mis­takes that are dif­fi­cult to recover from.

They Miss A Dead­line (And Think It’s No Big Deal)

This, too, is often a con­se­quence of the pre­vi­ous mis­take in our list. Falling behind when you are over­loaded is all too easy, but miss­ing a dead­line can have a debil­i­tat­ing effect on your busi­ness. And if you think miss­ing a dead­line is no big deal, your career may be over before it begins. Dead­lines keep you on track and help you mul­ti­task, as well as keep your client on track with the devel­op­ment of their project.

Once again, rep­u­ta­tion is crit­i­cal to build­ing your brand and mak­ing your mark in the free­lanc­ing mar­ket. And a great way to ruin that rep­u­ta­tion is by prov­ing your­self unre­li­able. Stay pro­duc­tive and ahead of your tasks to avoid dis­rupt­ing your client’s timetable. If you end up mak­ing this mis­take, own up to it. Don’t offer excuses, sim­ply pro­pose a new timetable and con­tinue work­ing hard to meet it. But clearly acknowl­edge the prob­lem you have cre­ated for your client. If you make this mis­take once, you may not have an oppor­tu­nity to make it again.

They Lack Confidence

Lack­ing con­fi­dence in them­selves or in their work is another mis­take that can plague free­lancers, even beyond their busi­ness. Being your own worst critic and hold­ing your work to a higher stan­dard than that of oth­ers is nat­ural (right?). But at a cer­tain point, you are no longer cri­tiquing so much as tear­ing down your work. Dis­miss­ing the tal­ent and abil­i­ties that have car­ried you this far is mis­guided and will do noth­ing for your productivity.

With­out con­fi­dence, mak­ing it as a free­lancer will be extremely dif­fi­cult. You’ll start tak­ing use­ful and well-​​intended crit­i­cism bit­terly, miss­ing the person’s point and spi­ral­ing fur­ther into a pool of doubt and self-​​pity. Lack of con­fi­dence hin­ders your skills and the growth of your busi­ness. Clients will pick up on it quickly, because the free­lancer is sup­posed to have a com­mand­ing role. Our respon­si­bil­ity is to guide the client to make effec­tive deci­sions and win them over to our point of view; with­out con­fi­dence, this becomes unlikely. You’ll under­value both your­self and your work. So have faith in your abil­i­ties, and know that your unique voice is needed in the ranks of the free­lanc­ing arena.

They Go To Work For Some­one Else

Another blun­der free­lancers make is to work tire­lessly to build their busi­ness, only to accept the first offer for a cushy job that comes along. No longer being your own boss would seem easy to adjust to, but it can be like mov­ing back under your par­ents’ roof after you’ve tasted the free­dom of liv­ing on your own. It sim­ply doesn’t fit as com­fort­ably as it once did. Sim­ply read­just­ing is not so easy because free­lanc­ing is more than a job: it is a way of life.

Some peo­ple tell them­selves that free­lanc­ing was all along a stop­gap to some greater dream, but true free­lancers find that pill hard to swal­low. For some, that might be true, but then those peo­ple were not free­lancers so much as tem­po­rary inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors. Free­lancers crave the freedom that comes with the ’lanc­ing. Still oth­ers believe they can work for some­one else and main­tain their free­lanc­ing on the side. In the­ory, this might appear viable. The real­ity is harsher: free­lanc­ing is full-​​time. It is a way of life, and turn­ing it into a part-​​time job spells trouble.

Fur­ther Resources

Have a look at these related arti­cles and resources:

• Three Big Mis­takes That Can Make or Break Your Design Career
  A dis­cus­sion on Fuel Your Inter­face of three major mis­takes that could poten­tially end a designer’s career.
• Mar­ket­ing Rules and Prin­ci­ples for Free­lancers
  Free­lance Folder offers some fan­tas­tic mar­ket­ing insight that can help guide you in your free­lance career.
• To Err Is Human: How to Han­dle Free­lance Mis­takes
  Free­lance Sprout looks at how to han­dle mis­takes as a freelancer.
• Top Ten Mis­takes That Aspir­ing Pro­fes­sional Free­lance Pho­tog­ra­phers Make
  Paul Bur­well offers some help­ful advice for pho­tog­ra­phers who long to branch into the free­lanc­ing market.
• Free­lanc­ing FUBARs: 8 Com­mon Mis­takes
  Free­lance Adviser looks at com­mon mis­takes made by free­lancers when they are just start­ing out.

(al)

© Robert Bowen for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | 44 com­ments | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: free­lanc­ing

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No Need to Build A Custom Billing Application: Chargify Made Easy

Chargify is a recur­ring billing sys­tem that han­dles every aspect of recur­ring billing for any Web 2.0 or SaaS com­pany so there’s no need to build a cus­tom billing appli­ca­tion. In addi­tion to pro­cess­ing one-​​time and recur­ring trans­ac­tions, Chargify han­dles free trial peri­ods, one-​​time fees, pro­mo­tions, refunds, email receipts and even dun­ning (reminders for failed credit card pay­ments). Pow­er­ful report­ing tools pro­vide infor­ma­tion to help you make sound deci­sions about your company’s future. PCI com­pli­ant secu­rity mea­sures ensure your cus­tomers’ billing infor­ma­tion is always secure.

Recur­ring Billing System

Sub­scrip­tion Management

This is best for start-​​up small busi­ness own­ers like web free­lancers, con­sul­tants, devel­op­ers, IT ser­vices, host­ing provider etc. that are look­ing for tools that will make it eas­ier for you to bill invoices, track pay­ments, and col­lect your accounts receivable.

Recur­ring Billing API

Branded Pay­ment Website

In addi­tion tons of great fea­tures include:

• Recur­ring Billing API: Makes it easy for your busi­ness to inte­grate with Chargify seamlessly.
• Sub­scrip­tion Man­age­ment Tools: Set any billing inter­val you wish, offer free trial peri­ods, intro­duc­tory pric­ing, and charge one-​​time fees.
• Dun­ning Man­age­ment: For­get the com­pli­ca­tions of pro­cess­ing credit card payments.
• Branded Pay­ment Web­site: Col­lect pay­ments with­out sync­ing your site with Chargify’s API.
• Cus­tomer Man­age­ment: We store a record for every sub­scrip­tion and transaction.
• Easy-​​to-​​use Inter­face: You’ll actu­ally enjoy man­ag­ing billing.

With Chargify, you can get started for FREE, with no set-​​up or trans­ac­tion fees, and no con­tracts to sign. Chargify is cur­rently in pri­vate beta. The first 50 cus­tomers are free and range up to $1,500 for 15,000 cus­tomers or $2,500 for an unlim­ited num­ber of cus­tomers. Chargify does not charge indi­vid­ual trans­ac­tion fees. Their sim­ple pric­ing model is designed to help your busi­ness grow.

Enjoy this Post? Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Our blog is updated reg­u­larly with con­tent related to web design, inspi­ra­tion, tuto­ri­als, word­press, free­bies and much more. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can sub­scribe by RSS or Email

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66 Excellent Photoshop Web Design Layout Tutorials

When it comes to Image edit­ing or photo enhance­ment, Adobe Pho­to­shop is usu­ally the pri­mary option to con­sider. How­ever, the soft­ware pack­age itself is a quite hard to learn — and extremely hard to master.

Dis­play beau­ti­ful images is a potent ele­ment in web and graphic design, where there is less con­cern for read­abil­ity and more poten­tial for using images in an artis­tic man­ner. Pho­to­shop is use­ful for both cre­at­ing and edit­ing images to be used in print or online. Not too easy to use, but full of high-​​quality fea­tures, Pho­to­shop is the best choice for any image manip­u­la­tion job.

Below, you’ll find some of the Best Adobe Pho­to­shop Web Design Lay­out Tuto­ri­als which might help you to get inspired and learned a tip or two by the end of this pre­sen­ta­tion.

For those, who don’t know what is Adobe Pho­to­shop? And what it can do? Then fol­low the link below for detail introduction.

• Adobe Pho­to­shop | Adobe​.com
• Adobe Pho­to­shop | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The next gen­er­a­tion, rep­re­sent­ing two decades of excel­lence. This appli­ca­tion con­tains every­thing you need to cre­ate high-​​end images and graph­ics. For those artists whose work demands more than the basic appli­ca­tion, There is a Pho­to­shop to sat­isfy their every needs that uti­lizes Image edit­ing & photo manipulation.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing tuto­ri­als related arti­cles as well.

• Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of 60 Excel­lent Gimp Tutorials
• 77 Excel­lent Pho­to­shop Tuto­ri­als For Design­ing Posters
• 145 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up Of Pho­to­shop Tuto­ri­als and Resources
• 65+ Smok­ing Pho­to­shop Text Effect Tutorials
• 125+ Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Illus­tra­tor Tutorials
• 77 Ulti­mate Round-​​Up of Adobe After Effects Tutorials

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to more tuto­ri­als that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

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300+ High Quality And Most Popular Fonts For Designers To Discover In 2009

We are always in search of great free resources for our val­ued read­ers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspi­ra­tion for design­ers. Today, we list down 300+ High Qual­ity and Most Pop­u­lar Fonts for Design­ers to Dis­cover In 2009, We obvi­ously can­not cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

If you don’t want to miss out our next posts, you can Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

30 high-​​quality free fonts for great designs

22 Most Used Free Fonts By Pro­fes­sional Designers

40 Free High Qual­ity Hand-​​drawn Fonts

The Top 100 Best Fonts Of All Time

45 Out­stand­ing Free Vin­tage Fonts

45+ Most Wanted Beau­ti­ful Free Hand Drawn Fonts

15 Fresh High-​​Quality Free Fonts

30 Extremely Ele­gant Serif Fonts

20 Cre­ative and Unique Typefaces

Beau­ti­ful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

40 Free Unique Car­toon and Comic Fonts

32 Trashy And Dis­torted Fonts For Your Next Grungy Design

Enjoy this Post? Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Our blog is updated reg­u­larly with con­tent related to web design, inspi­ra­tion, tuto­ri­als, word­press, free­bies and much more. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can sub­scribe by RSS or Email

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20 Simple and Creative Business Cards

Always when you intro­duce your com­pany it is fact the use of your busi­ness card. You want the pri­mary feel­ing that is left with your client to con­vey the image and per­son­al­ity of your busi­ness to be a pos­i­tive one. Here is the list of col­lec­tion 20 Sim­ple and Cre­ative Busi­ness Cards to inspire you.

If you don’t want to miss out our next posts, you can Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Enjoy this Post? Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

Our blog is updated reg­u­larly with con­tent related to web design, inspi­ra­tion, tuto­ri­als, word­press, free­bies and much more. If you don’t want to miss out on future posts, you can sub­scribe by RSS or Email

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10 Useful jQuery WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog

jQuery can help design­ers and devel­op­ers cre­ate impres­sive ani­ma­tions and inter­ac­tive web­sites that are appeal­ing and acces­si­ble to the widest range of browsers.

Here are 10 use­ful jQuery Word­Press plguins focus­ing on gallery and slideshows, nav­i­ga­tions and fur­ther resources to reduce time and effort while increas­ing your audience.

If you don’t want to miss out our next posts, you can Sub­scribe to the 2Experts Design Blog or fol­low us on twitter

1 Snazzy Archives

Snazzy Archives is a visu­al­iza­tion plu­gin for your Word­Press site fea­tur­ing an unique way to dis­play all your posts. Your archive page will never be bor­ing again!

Down­load Snazzy Archives Plugin

2 Accor­dion Image Menu

This is a dif­fer­ent menu plu­gin that uses your post images as a back­ground. You can insert the menu wher­ever you want: con­tent, php files or wid­get if your theme allows it.

Down­load Accor­dion Image Menu Plugin

3 Tweet Blender

Sim­i­lar in func­tion­al­ity to Twitter’s own wid­get but has sup­port for mul­ti­ple authors, hash­tags, and key­words all blended together. The plu­gin can show tweets from just one user (as all other Twit­ter plu­g­ins do); how­ever, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twit­ter hash­tag or key­word. But there is more! It can also show tweets for mul­ti­ple authors and mul­ti­ple key­words and mul­ti­ple hash­tags all blended together into a sin­gle stream.

Down­load Tweet Blender Plugin

4 Light­box Gallery

The Light­box Gallery plu­gin changes the view of gal­leries to the light­box. Main fea­tures is dis­play of gallery, tooltip view of cap­tion of images, desplays the asso­ci­ated meta­data with images, divides gallery into sev­eral pages, extends the default gallery options and much more.

Down­load Light­box Gallery Plugin

5 Image Archive

With this plu­gin dis­play blog posts as gallery style archive, and the images are linked to the perma­link to posts.

Down­load Image Archive Plugin

6 His­tory Manager

With His­tory Man­ager, your recent posts, recent com­ments, archives by month, tags, and cat­e­gories are dis­played in one wid­get that allows vis­i­tors to unfold what­ever they want to see and hide what they don’t care about.

Down­load His­tory Man­ager Plugin

7 WP Pretty Photo

Pretty Photo is a jQuery based light­box clone by Stéphane Caron. Not only does it sup­port images, it also add sup­port for videos, flash, YouTube, iFrame. It’s a full blown media modal box. WP-​​prettyPhoto embeds these func­tion­al­i­ties in WordPress.

Down­load WP Pretty Photo Plugin

8 Clean Post Archives Reloaded

Clean Archives Reloaded gen­er­ates a list of all of your posts, sorted by month. It’s enhanced with Javascript to allow col­laps­ing and expand­ing of months. It’s highly effi­cient and won’t kill your server with tons of MySQL queries.

Down­load Clean Archive Reloaded Plugin

9 jQuery Light­box For Native Galleries

Makes the native Word­Press gal­leries use a light­box script called Col­or­Box to dis­play the full­size images right there in the page.

Down­load jQuery Light­box for Native Gal­leries Plugin

10 Carousel Gallery

This plu­gin tweaks the gallery tag (

) in Word­Press 2.6 thusly by replac­ing it with a javascript carousel.

Down­load Carousel Gallery Plugin

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70+ Creative and Inspirational Website Designs

The web indus­try nowa­days is very pro­duc­tive. Dur­ing these years there have been many trends fol­lowed and every day the design­ers exper­i­ment new tech­niques cre­at­ing new ten­den­cies in the art of mak­ing website.

Recently is evi­dent the neces­sity of a direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with cus­tomers and a web­site is the first place where a com­pany can make know their cool stuff and ser­vices. A well-​​designed web­site is impor­tant for the growth of a busi­ness and often to cre­ate a “fresh” and clear image for a com­pany (or a prod­uct, or a free­lancer) we need the help of the art of cre­ativ­ity. For these rea­sons a cre­ative lay­out and proper selec­tion of typog­ra­phy can be the per­fect solu­tion for an attrac­tive website.

In this post, you’ll see some of the fresh and inspi­ra­tional exam­ples of cre­ative web­site designs.

The more time and effort you ded­i­cate for a usable, eye-​​catching design and hit­ting your objec­tives, the higher are your chances for get­ting bet­ter results in the end of the day.

You may be inter­ested in the fol­low­ing design inspi­ra­tion related arti­cles as well.

• Show­case Of Pro­fes­sional Look­ing Web­site Designs
• Super-​​Clean and Min­i­mal Web Designs: 70+ Stun­ning Exam­ples and Resources
• 77 Inspi­ra­tional Exam­ple of Pric­ing Page Designs
• Cor­po­rate Web­site Designs For Design Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part II
• Sin­gle Page Web­site Designs For Design Inspi­ra­tion – Part I, Part – II
• 70 Fresh and Inspi­ra­tional Blog Designs

Please feel free to join us and you are always wel­come to share your thoughts even if you have more ref­er­ence links related to design inspi­ra­tion that our read­ers may like.

Don’t for­get to sub­scribe to our RSS-​​feed and fol­low us on Twit­ter — for recent updates.

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10 Free Image Hosting and Photo Sharing Websites

Today, we are list­ing 10 free best image host­ing and photo shar­ing online web­sites, allow­ing you to eas­ily upload and share pho­tos on forums, chat rooms, blogs, twit­ter and face­book. No account or reg­is­tra­tion required. Just start upload and share today!

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1 ImageCheese

Free Image host­ing with the fea­ture to upload your image in another size.

2 Pix­avid

Pix­avid is a free image host­ing and shar­ing ser­vice. There are no com­pli­cated login or sign-​​up requirements.

3 Image Exchange

Image Exchange is a free image host­ing ser­vice, allow­ing you to eas­ily upload and share pho­tos on forums, chat rooms, blogs, etc. No account or reg­is­tra­tion required.

4 ImjTweet

Imj​.Tw is a free ser­vice for Twit­ter and Face­book users pro­vid­ing free host­ing and shar­ing for images.

5 ImageDash

Fast, free image host­ing geared towards the min­i­mal­is­tic user. It easy to upload high res­o­lu­tion images with­out resiz­ing, pop­ups, or other annoyances.

6 Free Image Hosting

At Free Image Host­ing you can Upload Images for MySpace, Blogs, and Galleries.

7 TinyPic

Tinypic is a photo and video shar­ing ser­vice that allows you to eas­ily upload, link and share your images and videos on MySpace, eBay, Blogs and Forums. No account required, just upload and share!

8 Supload

With Supload you can upload and share Images, Ring­tones, Music, Video Clips with­out any limitations.

9 Ultra XS

UltraXs is a ultra fast image host­ing and shar­ing ser­vice that allows you to eas­ily upload 5 images in sin­gle click also with the great enhanced fea­tures like pro­tect image from pub­lic eye, flip images, rotate images, resize images and much more.

10 Imagevat

Sim­ple Free Image Host­ing and Photo Sharing!

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Zen Coding: A Speedy Way To Write HTML/​CSS Code

In this post we present a new speedy way of writ­ing HTML code using CSS-​​like selec­tor syn­tax — a handy set of tools for high-​​speed HTML and CSS cod­ing. It was devel­oped by our author Sergey Chikuy­onok and released for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine and its readers.

How much time do you spend writ­ing HTML code: all of those tags, attrib­utes, quotes, braces, etc. You have it eas­ier if your edi­tor of choice has code-​​completion capa­bil­i­ties, but you still do a lot of typing.

We had the same prob­lem in JavaScript world when we wanted to access a spe­cific ele­ment on a Web page. We had to write a lot of code, which became really hard to sup­port and reuse. And then JavaScript frame­works came along, which intro­duced CSS selec­tor engines. Now, you can use sim­ple CSS expres­sions to access DOM ele­ments, which is pretty cool.

But what if you could use CSS selec­tors not just to style and access ele­ments, but to gen­er­ate code? For exam­ple, what if you could write this…

div#content>h1+p

…and see this as the output?

<div id="content">
<h1></h1>
<p></p>
</div>

Today, we’ll intro­duce you to Zen Cod­ing, a set of tools for high-​​speed HTML and CSS cod­ing. Orig­i­nally pro­posed by Vadim Makeev (arti­cle in Russ­ian) back in April 2009, it has been devel­oped by yours truly (i.e. me) for the last few months and has finally reached a mature state. Zen Cod­ing con­sists of two core com­po­nents: an abbre­vi­a­tion expander (abbre­vi­a­tions are CSS-​​like selec­tors) and context-​​independent HTML-​​pair tag matcher. Watch this demo video to see what they can do for you.

If you’d like to skip the detailed instruc­tions and usage guide, please take a look at the demo and down­load your plu­gin right away:

Demo

• Demo (use Ctrl + , to expand an abbre­vi­a­tion, requires JavaScript)

Down­loads (Full Support)

• Aptana (cross-​​platform);
• Coda, via TEA for Coda (Mac);
• Espresso, via TEA for Espresso (Mac);

Down­loads (Par­tial Sup­port, “Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” Only)

• Text­Mate (Mac, and can be used with E-​​text edi­tor for Windows);
• Top­Style;
• Sub­lime Text;
• GEdit;
• editArea online edi­tor;

Now, let’s see how these tools work.

Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion

The Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion func­tion trans­forms CSS-​​like selec­tors into XHTML code. The term “abbre­vi­a­tion” might be a lit­tle con­fus­ing. Why not just call it a “CSS selec­tor”? Well, the first rea­son is seman­tic: “selec­tor” means to select some­thing, but here we’re actu­ally gen­er­at­ing some­thing, writ­ing a shorter rep­re­sen­ta­tion of longer code. Sec­ondly, it sup­ports only a small sub­set of real CSS selec­tor syn­tax, in addi­tion to intro­duc­ing some new operators.

Here is a list of sup­ported prop­er­ties and operators:

• E
  Ele­ment name (div, p);
• E#id
  Ele­ment with iden­ti­fier (div#content, p#intro, span#error);
• E.class
  Ele­ment with classes (div.header, p.error.critial). You can com­bine classes and IDs, too: div#content.column.width;
• E>N
  Child ele­ment (div>p, div#footer>p>span);
• E+N
  Sib­ling ele­ment (h1+p, div#header+div#content+div#footer);
• E*N
  Ele­ment mul­ti­pli­ca­tion (ul#nav>li*5>a);
• E$*N
  Item num­ber­ing (ul#nav>li.item-$*5);

As you can see, you already know how to use Zen Cod­ing: just write a sim­ple CSS-​​like selec­tor (oh, “abbreviation”—sorry), like so…

div#header>img.logo+ul#nav>li*4>a

…and then call the Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion action.

There are two cus­tom oper­a­tors: ele­ment mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and item num­ber­ing. If you want to gen­er­ate, for exam­ple, five <li> ele­ments, you would sim­ply write li*5. It would repeat all descen­dant ele­ments as well. If you wanted four <li> ele­ments, with an <a> in each, you would sim­ply write li*4>a, which would gen­er­ate the fol­low­ing output:

<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>
<li><a href=""></a></li>

The last one–item num­ber­ing is used when you want to mark a repeated ele­ment with its index. Sup­pose you want to gen­er­ate three <div> ele­ments with item1, item2 and item3 classes. You would write this abbre­vi­a­tion, div.item$*3:

<div class="item1"></div>
<div class="item2"></div>
<div class="item3"></div>

Just add a dol­lar sign wher­ever in the class or ID prop­erty that you want the index to appear, and as many an you want. So, this…

div#i$-test.class$$$*5

would be trans­formed into:

<div id="i1-test" class="class111"></div>
<div id="i2-test" class="class222"></div>
<div id="i3-test" class="class333"></div>
<div id="i4-test" class="class444"></div>
<div id="i5-test" class="class555"></div>

You’ll see that when you write the a abbre­vi­a­tion, the out­put is <a href=""></a>. Or, if you write img, the out­put is <img src="" alt="" />.

How does Zen Cod­ing know when it should add default attrib­utes to the gen­er­ated tag or skip the clos­ing tag? A spe­cial file, called zen_settings.js describes the out­putted ele­ments. It’s a sim­ple JSON file that describes the abbre­vi­a­tions for each lan­guage (yes, you can define abbre­vi­a­tions for dif­fer­ent syn­taxes, such as HTML, XSL, CSS, etc.). The com­mon lan­guage abbre­vi­a­tions def­i­n­i­tion looks like this:

'html': {
'snippets': {
'cc:ie6': '<!--[if lte IE 6]>\n\t${child}|\n<![endif]-->',
...
}, 

'abbreviations': {
'a': '<a href=""></a>',
'img': '<img src="" alt="" />',
...
}
}

Ele­ment Types

Zen Cod­ing has two major ele­ment types: “snip­pets” and “abbre­vi­a­tions.” Snip­pets are arbi­trary code frag­ments, while abbre­vi­a­tions are tag def­i­n­i­tions. With snip­pets, you can write any­thing you want, and it will be out­putted as is; but you have to man­u­ally for­mat it (using \n and \t for new lines and inden­ta­tion) and put the ${child} vari­able where you want to out­put the child ele­ments, like so: cc:ie6>style. If you don’t include the ${child} vari­able, the child ele­ments are out­putted after the snippet.

With abbre­vi­a­tions, you have to write tag def­i­n­i­tions, and the syn­tax is very impor­tant. Nor­mally, you have to write a sim­ple tag with all default attrib­utes in it, like so: <a href=""></a>. When Zen Cod­ing is loaded, it parses a tag def­i­n­i­tion into a spe­cial object that describes the tag’s name, attrib­utes (includ­ing their order) and whether the tag is empty. So, if you wrote <img src="" alt="" />, you would be telling Zen Cod­ing that this tag must be empty, and the “Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” action would apply spe­cial rules to it before outputting.

For both snip­pets and abbre­vi­a­tions, you can ad a pipe char­ac­ter (|), which tells Zen Cod­ing where it should place the cur­sor when the abbre­vi­a­tion is expanded. By default, Zen Cod­ing puts the cur­sor between quotes in empty attrib­utes and between the open­ing and clos­ing tag.

Exam­ple

So, here’s what hap­pens when you write an abbre­vi­a­tion and call the “Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” action. First, it splits a whole abbre­vi­a­tion into sep­a­rate ele­ments: so, div>a would be split into div and a ele­ments, with their rela­tion­ship pre­served. Then, for each ele­ment, the parser looks for a def­i­n­i­tion inside the snip­pets and then inside the abbre­vi­a­tions. If it doesn’t find one, it uses the element’s name as the name for the new tag, apply­ing ID and class attrib­utes to it. For exam­ple, if you write mytag#example, and the parser can­not find the mytag def­i­n­i­tion among the snip­pets or abbre­vi­a­tion, it will out­put <mytag id="example"><mytag>.

We have made a lot of default CSS and HTML abbre­vi­a­tions and snip­pets. You may find that learn­ing them increases your pro­duc­tiv­ity with Zen Coding.

HTML Pair Matcher

Another very com­mon task for the HTML coder is to find the tag pair of an ele­ment (also known as “bal­anc­ing”). Let’s say you want to select the entire <div id="content"> tag and move it else­where or just delete it. Or per­haps you’re look­ing at a clos­ing tag and want to known which open­ing tag it belongs to.

Unfor­tu­nately, many mod­ern devel­op­ment tools lack sup­port for this fea­ture. So, I decided to write my own tag matcher as part of Zen Cod­ing. It is still in beta and has some issues, but it works quite well and is fast. Instead of scan­ning the full doc­u­ment (as reg­u­lar HTML pair match­ers do), it finds the rel­e­vant tag from the cursor’s cur­rent posi­tion. This makes it very fast and context-​​independent: it works even with this JavaScript code snip­pet:

var table = '<table>';
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
table += '<tr>';
for (var j = 0; j < 5; j++) {
table += '<td>' + j + '</td>';
}
table += '</tr>';
}
table += '</table>';

Wrap­ping With Abbreviation

This is a really cool fea­ture that com­bines the power of the abbre­vi­a­tion expander with the pair tag matcher. How many times have you found that you have to add a wrap­ping ele­ment to fix a browser bug? Or per­haps you have had to add dec­o­ra­tion, such as a back­ground image or bor­der, to a block’s con­tent? You have to write the open­ing tag, tem­porar­ily break your code, find the appro­pri­ate spot and then close the tag. Here’s where “Wrap with Abbre­vi­a­tion” helps.

This func­tion is pretty sim­ple: it asks you to enter the abbre­vi­a­tion, then it per­forms the reg­u­lar “Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” action and puts your desired text inside the last ele­ment of your abbre­vi­a­tion. If you haven’t selected any text, it fires up the pair matcher and use the result. It also makes sense of where your cur­sor is: inside the tag’s con­tent or within the open­ing and clos­ing tag. Depend­ing on where it is, it wraps the tag’s con­tent or the tag itself.

Abbre­vi­a­tion wrap­ping intro­duces a spe­cial abbre­vi­a­tion syn­tax for wrap­ping indi­vid­ual lines. Sim­ply skip the num­ber after the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion oper­a­tor, like so: ul#nav>li*>a. When Zen Cod­ing finds an ele­ment with an unde­fined mul­ti­pli­ca­tion num­ber, it uses it as a repeat­ing ele­ment: it is out­putted as many times as there are lines in your selec­tion, putting the con­tent of each line inside the deep­est child of the repeat­ing element.

If you’ll wrap this abbre­vi­a­tion div#header>ul#navigation>li.item$*>a>span around this text…

About Us
Products
News
Blog
Contact Up

You’ll get the fol­low­ing result:

<div id="header">
<ul id="navigation">
<li class="item1"><a href=""><span>About Us</span></a></li>
<li class="item2"><a href=""><span>Products</span></a></li>
<li class="item3"><a href=""><span>News</span></a></li>
<li class="item4"><a href=""><span>Blog</span></a></li>
<li class="item5"><a href=""><span>Contact Up</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>

You can see that Zen Cod­ing is quite a pow­er­ful text-​​processing tool.

Online Demo

You’ve learned a lot about how Zen Cod­ing works and how it can make your cod­ing eas­ier. Why not try it your­self now, right here? Because Zen Cod­ing is writ­ten in pure JavaScript and ported to Python, it can even work inside the browser, which makes it a prime can­di­date for includ­ing in a CMS.

• Demo (use Ctrl + , to expand an abbre­vi­a­tion, requires JavaScript)

Sup­ported Editors

Zen Cod­ing doesn’t depend on any par­tic­u­lar edi­tor. It’s a stand-​​alone com­po­nent that works with text only: it takes text, does some­thing to it and then returns new text (or indexes, for tag match­ing). Zen Cod­ing is writ­ten in JavaScript and Python, so it can run on vir­tu­ally any plat­form out of the box. On Win­dows, you can run the JavaScript ver­sion of Win­dows Script­ing Host. And mod­ern Macs and Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions are bun­dled with Python.

To make your edi­tor sup­port Zen Cod­ing, you need to write a spe­cial plug-​​in that can trans­fer data between your edi­tor and Zen Cod­ing. The prob­lem is that an edi­tor may not have full Zen Cod­ing sup­port because of its plug-​​in sys­tem. For exam­ple, Text­Mate eas­ily sup­ports the “Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” action by replac­ing the cur­rent line with the script out­put, but it can’t han­dle pair-​​tag match­ing because there’s no stan­dard way to ask Text­Mate to select something.

Full Sup­port

• Aptana (cross-​​platform);
• Coda, via TEA for Coda (Mac);
• Espresso, via TEA for Espresso (Mac);

Par­tial Sup­port (”Expand Abbre­vi­a­tion” Only)

• Text­Mate (Mac, and can be used with E-​​text edi­tor for Windows);
• Top­Style;
• Sub­lime Text;
• GEdit;
• editArea online edi­tor;

Aptana is my pri­mary devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, and it uses a JavaScript ver­sion of Zen Cod­ing. It also con­tains many more tools that I use for rou­tine work. Every new ver­sion of Zen Cod­ing will be avail­able for Aptana first, then ported to Python and made avail­able to other editors.

The Coda and Espresso plug-​​ins are pow­ered by the excel­lent Text Edi­tor Actions (TEA) plat­form, devel­oped by Ian Beck. The orig­i­nal source code is avail­able at GitHub, but I made my own fork to inte­grate Zen Coding’s features.

Con­clu­sion

Many peo­ple who have tried Zen Cod­ing have said that it has changed their way of cre­at­ing Web pages. There’s still a lot of work to do, many edi­tors to sup­port and much doc­u­men­ta­tion to write. Feel free to browse the exist­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion and source code to find answers to your ques­tions. Hope you enjoy Zen Coding!

(al)

© Smash­ing Edi­to­r­ial for Smash­ing Mag­a­zine, 2009. | Perma­link | Be the first to com­ment | Add to del​.icio​.us | Digg this | Stum­ble on Stum­ble­Upon! | Tweet it! | Sub­mit to Red­dit | Forum Smash­ing Mag­a­zine
Post tags: CSS, Free­bies, tools, Work­flow

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