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Dynamic HTML Editor v.5.0 is a graphical WYSIWYG website design editor for Windows. Unlike web editors that require you to learn the technology behind web pages, Dynamic HTML Editor lets you create yo…

You have decided that you want to learn how to List Build. You even have a product that you are going to offer free in exchange for email addresses. Trouble is, you can’t afford to pay for a website. Well, I’m going to leave you without excuse! Did you know that you can make your own website for free - today?

I was recently asked by a reader to recommend a helpful content slider plugin. No doubt, there are a bunch of excellent options available — some which are, perhaps, too excellent! With so much flexibility comes extra weight; especially when sometimes you only need a simple slide or fade transition.

So I figured, why not build a simple custom plugin that will get the job done?

P.S. Speed Up

Don’t forget to take advantage of bundles when working in Textmate. If you need a helpful snippet to jump-start every new jQuery plugin, create a new snippet in Textmate, paste the following code in, and then assign a short-cut – like “jqueryplugin.”

(function(\$) {

	\$.fn.$1 = function(options) {

		var defaults = {
			$2
		},

		options = \$.extend(defaults, options);

		this.each(function() {

			var \$this = \$(this);		

			$3

            return this;

		}); // end each

	}

})(jQuery);

Conclusion

This is the only the first step. In the next screencast, we’ll continue refining this plugin, and adding more options/conveniences.

Thank you, Screencast.com!

…for providing the hosting for these video tutorials.

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Web application development has now reached such a matured stage from where you can only think of accomplishing all your website requirements in the easiest as well as most advanced manner possible. W…

Service professionals who want to get clients online often summarize their experiences in one succinct sentence: “My website has become a disaster scene.” Here’s what two kinds of disasters look like and how you can recover.

When most people think about WordPress, they think about blogs. If you look at the front page of WordPress.org they talk a lot about blogging as well. What they don’t tell you is that WordPress can also double as a very powerful CMS; you just have to set it up properly. It can be a bit tricky to get setup and working the way that you want; but this is where I come in.

In this 3-part tutorial + screencast series, I’m going to take you through the three steps of using WordPress as a CMS. Become a PLUS member.

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The wonderful thing about the internet is how it shrinks the world in some ways and simply blows it apart in others. There are so many opportunities to make a decent and honest living online nowadays,…

You can take several different approaches to create pages that make your web site: You can hand code the site from scratch using a text editor, or you can use a point-and-click editor that generates HTML code for you. Any approach works very well. You can always choose an approach, working with it for awhile, and then switch to another approach later if you change your mind.

Geocities is finally, after nearly fifteen years, bowing its head and closing its doors. While the first reactions of many, like myself, was, “it’s about time;” others embraced the nostalgia of their first websites in the nineties – full of animated gifs, enormous counters, midi tunes, frames, tables, … the list goes on and on. With that said, we can all agree on one thing if we’re truly honest with ourselves: this closure is long overdue!

1. Homesteading

One of the first things that everyone thinks about when they hear “Geocities” is the long and memorable (albeit annoying) site paths, known as homesteading. When Geocities first started, there were a mere 6 neighborhoods, which included “Colosseum,” “Hollywood,” “RodeoDrive,” “SunsetStrip,” “WallStreet,” and “WestHollywood”. They were great, allowing newcomers of personal homepages to fantasize about the new cyber world they were about to enter. Within a year, 23 more neighborhoods popped up along with the terrible headache of explaining what neighborhood, suburb, and 4-digit number your webpage was located at. Luckily by 1999, Yahoo had taken over and switched the homestead URL scheme to the more modernly used vanity URLs. But even though the lengthy URLs have been long gone for 10 years, their association with Geocities remains remnant enough to be the first reason why the closing of Geocities is long overdue.

2. 15 Megabytes

Back in the 90’s, 15 megabytes was more than enough to store your 5 page website; not to mention the ten 640*480 JPEG pictures from your digital camera. It was even enough to host MP3s for your friends to check out before deciding to download this thing called Napster for themselves. It was a much simpler time back then, when data exchange would still often occur on 3.5″ floppy disks. But in this day and age of broadband and Hi-Def streaming, running a website off of 15 megabytes of webspace is barely enough to host a decent Wordpress blog for a month. I mean, let’s face it, even emails have had larger space limits for years now. 15 megabytes just doesn’t cut it anymore.

3. SPAM

I haven’t actually experienced much Geocities spam sites personally, as Gmail filters my spam mail pretty robustly. But many users have complained about a large number of Geocities webpages hosted purely to bypass spam mail filters which block out dangerous links. These Geocities pages would redirect users to a target URL, by using cleverly encrypted javascript. (source: Spamtrackers.eu)

4. Color Choice

While nobody really got the hang of webpage design in the 90’s, Geocities site owners seemed to master the art of amateur design. One of the requirements for starting a page that I must have missed was having no sense of color coordination. For some reason the use of multicolored neon text on busy tiled background images were a popular choice. This usually turned out to be better, letting you know that the content wasn’t worth reading anyway.

5. Abandoned Webpages

I’ll admit that I was part of the cause for this reason, but Geocities became infamous for abandoned webpages in the early 00’s. People such as myself, would create accounts and build webpages just to host pictures and MP3s for friends to download (as mentioned in Reason 2: 15 Megabytes). This type of abuse led to thousands of empty webpages and parked sites that lead to much wasted google indexing and disappointing clickthroughs.

6. Under Construction

This one sort of relates to Reason 5: Abandoned Webpages. Chances were, if you didn’t stumble upon an abandoned webpage, you probably came across a webpage forever under construction. Many users new to website building only made it far enough to make a new site with the obligatory “This is my site.” text. Soon after, that website would be long forgotten while the owner moved on to LiveJournal or Xanga.

7. Splash Pages

Sometime toward the end of the century, people discovered the ease of Flash, allowing simple animations of images and text. Then *BOOM*, you suddently could no longer visit a webpage without having to sit through 15 seconds of bouncing images and scrolling text. Fortunately, this trend only stuck around for a few years.

8. Homepage Banners

Webpages of the 90’s really only had two main layouts: navigation on the top, and navigation on the left. But the one thing that both layouts would share was a big rectangular homepage banner placed at the top.

9. MIDIs

Though this is probably more of a Xanga “thing” these days, Geocities was one of the first to start the use of using MIDIs as background music for homepages. Before the popularity and accessibility of MP3s, MIDIs were the popular file format for music due to their small file sizes. However the tones of synthesized horns and keyboards got old and annoying very quickly. There’s nothing that opitomizes Web 1.0 for me than a happy birthday midi playing.

10. Animated GIFs

If there was only one reason the closing of Geocities is long overdue, it’d definitely have to be the animated GIFs most associated with the Geocities name. Love them or hate them, you can’t help but remember the once trendy craze of pixelated animations. They’d slow down your browsing to a crawl, and really test your patience. From the rotating 3D text to the dancing clipart images, Geocities was flooded beyond belief with these lagging monstrocities.

Farewell

Without further ado, we bid you farewell, Geocities. As we push your cardboard box into the sea, let’s take a look at some especially awful Geocities sites. (Be sure to leave a comment with yours, and I’ll update the posting!) – Jeffrey

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Ruby On Rails is considered to be one of the fastest growing technologies in the web that is ideally suited for highly interactive database backed web applications. This technology in the IT industry …