Samsung TL500 Impressions

You see, the first hands-on impressions and reviews are already starting to trickle in on this camera, and they, are, in a word, promising. Promising with a standard definition video caveat, says the folks at Digital Camera Info, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, this point-and-shoot is decidedly beefy—a worthy camera bag addition for those who don’t want an SLR, but do want a solid feature set and precise manual setting controls. In the case of the TL500, the manual mode benefits from the camera’s dual controls on both the front and rear of the body. The lens, too, while not removable, gets high marks from DCI, mainly because what you’re getting is an f/1.8 on a shooter—that’s pretty rare, but pretty good if you’re the kind of casual photographer who likes low light images and depth of field control.

As for the caveat, it’s this: The TL500 is limited to standard def video. Cheaper cameras have HD, but the $US450 TL500 does not. Now, the S90 is in a similar boat, but this really seems like a missed opportunity, especially for a high end “flagship” styled point-and-shoot like the TL500. Time will tell if the omission has a negative impact, as this camera does not go on sale until the spring. [Digital Camera Info] ]]> http://www.thetechnologyreports.com/samsung-tl500-impressions/feed/ 3 http://www.thetechnologyreports.com/5-simple-ways-to-take-your-blog-from-zero-to-hero/ http://www.thetechnologyreports.com/5-simple-ways-to-take-your-blog-from-zero-to-hero/#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:47:23 +0000 Adil http://www.thetechnologyreports.com/?p=92 Blogging is hard work. It can easily take up to a year or two before your blog starts taking off, if it ever does. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, just realistic, because there are a lot of people out there that believe they can jump in, start writing and the money will start pouring in.

But when you mix passion with blogging savvy, the results can be amazing. Before I started my blog, I decided to join a blogging course. I have always been big on finding a mentor, someone who has done what I want to do and then learning everything I can from them.

If you are passionate about what you’re doing and have the determination to work hard, the internet is full of excellent blogging courses that will help take your blog from zero to hero. With all that said, let’s look at how you can find your passion:

1. The Elimination Method

The elimination method is extremely simple. You start by writing down every topic you’re interested in, you then compare each topic to each other one by one and eliminate anything that you do not like.

Say you like cats, dogs and parrots, just to keep it simple. Let’s start with cats. Compare cats to dogs, do you think you’re more passionate about dogs? If yes, then you discard cats and compare dogs to the rest. We only have dogs and parrots left, so whichever one you’re more passionate about, wins.

2. The Money Question

What would you do if money didn’t exist? Would you write about dogs? If you never had to worry about food, clothing and a place to live, you would have no choice but to do things you enjoy, because there would be no reason to do anything else.

This is a simple, yet powerful question. Really think about what you would want to do if money didn’t exist on the planet. There are no 9-5 jobs. Everyone is doing what they love. What would you be doing in this scenario?

3. Your Feelings

Most of us have been taught to ignore our feelings from a very early age, but the truth is that feelings act as signposts for if you’re heading in the right direction. If you’re working a 9-5 job that you hate, you will feel bad and it will only get worse with time.

Whenever you’re doing something you love, you’ll feel happy, content and at peace. Time just seems to fly by. This is how feelings were meant to be used. It takes some practice. It is easy to misinterpret your feelings, which is why many people think they are passionate about making money, which is basically a feeling rooted in fear.

4. Taking Action

If you’re not quite sure what you’re passion is, the best way to find out is to just start somewhere. You can sit there and analyze what it might be, but you will never get anywhere. It’s okay if you start a blog and find out that it isn’t what you like.

Mistakes are there to teach you. If you want things to be perfect before you start, you will never start. Believe me, I’ve been there and when I started feeling okay about making mistakes, my life became so much easier.

5. Feedback

Once you’ve been blogging for a few months, you’ll start to find your voice and start getting some traffic (if you chose a good niche). You will have a bunch of data that will tell you if you’re heading in the right direction.

Comments, e-mails, bounce rates and the average time people spend on your website. All of these factors vary from blog to blog, which is why it can get difficult and why a mentor can be so helpful. The main point I want to get across in this article is that without your passion, you will not have the fuel to keep going for the months or even years when nothing seems to be happening.

How Do I Get Backlinks to My Posts, Making Sure They Will Get a Good PageRank?

2. Networking with fellow bloggers. Building a relationship with bloggers inside your niche is essential. This means that I would link to them often, and many times they would return the favor. I am not talking about link exchanges but rather about natural links to quality content that your fellow bloggers post.

3. Guest blogging. As you probably know I am a big fan of guest blogging. Back in the day I used to do it a lot, which sent both new readers and backlinks my way. Sometimes instead of using the byline link to my homepage I would point it to a related post I had published on my blog, and that can help a lot with search rankings.

Over time, however, I started to spend less and less time trying to get backlinks, because as my audience increased so did the organic backlinks. That is, every time I publish a normal post these days I get 5-10 backlinks on it. When I post a killer article I get 50-100 backlinks. So I just focus on producing content these days, because the promotion side pretty much walks alone.

There are two other things you can do to maximize the link juice of your single posts, however. They are:

1. Having an HTML sitemap. This is basically a page within your blog that you’ll link to all posts you have ever published. You could make this by having an “Archives” section, as I do. This is a very efficient way to distribute your link equity because all pages of your blog will link there, and it will link back to all pages of your blog.

2. Cross linking between your posts. Linking to older and relevant posts is another practice that can increase your PageRank and search rankings, apart from adding more value to your readers. Whenever you are writing a new post, therefore, think about what you have published in the past and trying to find something relevant to link to.

Finally, notice that having lots of backlinks pointing to each of your single posts is not necessary to make sure they will have a good PageRank. If you have a good amount of backlinks pointing to your homepage, and use the two methods I mentioned above, your link equity will naturally spread all over your website, and even single posts will no backlinks at all will gain some PageRank.

We have focused on finding articles based on the following areas of web development:

CSS 3

Wordpress

Jquery

Whether you have just started in web development or if you’re a pro, or if you want to just improve your skills, then these tutorials are for you. We, at Pelfusion, believe that 2010 is the year for all of us to go beyond our boundaries and really focus on working on our skills. CSS 3 and Jquery are the tools you need to take your web design skills and really boost them to the next level. For wordpress, we’ve included all of the tricks of the trade you need to give your blog that cutting edge that is demanded in this new year.

This article focuses on the BEST tutorials for each field, so we hope you enjoy it and if you have any other tutorials to suggest, please feel free to let us know.

CSS 3 Tutorials

1. The New Hotness: Using CSS3 Visual Effects

Not everything in this article is practical, or even bug-free, but it’s a fun primer on what’s in the pipeline for Web design. To get the most from these examples, you’ll have to use Safari 4 or Chrome.

2. Stronger, Better, Faster Design with CSS3

Why bother with CSS that has such limited support? It won’t always have limited support, and these articles are all about preparing for the future of web design (and just doing some really cool stuff).

3. Liquid Columns with Background Size

Until the Advanced Layout and Grid Layout modules are implemented, we have to get by with the existing tricks of the trade. One of those is the use of faux columns, a background image which simulates equal-height columns.

4. Pushing your buttons with practical CSS3

In this article, the first of the articles that explore practical (and even far-fetched) implementation of CSS3, we start by applying CSS3 to something we all have to create: buttons.

5. Push your web design into the future with CSS3

There are exciting new features in the pipeline for Cascading Style Sheets that will allow for an explosion of creativity in Web design.

6. CSS Trick Hidden Messages

Here’s a cool little CSS 3 trick for hiding messages within your text. We’re going to be using the ::selection declaration to change the colour of the text on selection.

7. A look at some of the new selectors introduced in CSS3

Everyone who has been using CSS is immediately familiar with selectors as they are what is used to target elements on a page and style them. CSS3 brings even more options as far as selecting elements goes.

8. Rounded Corner Boxes

If you’ve been doing CSS for a while you’ll know that there are approximately 3,762 ways to create a rounded corner box. The simplest techniques rely on the addition of extra mark-up directly to your page, while the more complicated ones add the mark-up though DOM manipulation.

9. A mock up interface using CSS3 colour

“I’ve included quite a lot of other CSS3 into the mix. There is liberal use of box-shadow to give the allusion of depth on the windows and title bar. Rounded corners have been added to windows.”

10. Creating a Polaroid Photo Viewer with CSS3 & Jquery

By combining the CSS3 Box Shadow and Rotate properties, this effect is relatively easy to create.

11. Styling Forms with attribute selectors

In this article, the first of a two-part series, we will look at attribute selectors and how do they allow us to better style portions of a Web documents.

12. Old School Clock with CSS3

Transform:rotate is a new feature of CSS 3 which lets you… well, rotate stuff. Transform will also allow you to scale, skew and translate (move) objects in your web page.

13. The CSS3 Border Radius Property

One of the CSS3 properties designers have been longing the most for is undoubtedly the border-radius property. With CSS3 border-radius property it’s possible to create the so popular rectangles with rounded corners exclusively via CSS – no images needed.

14. How to create a sexy vertical sliding panel using jquery and css3

First we’ll create the markup, then the CSS and then we’ll use jQuery to open and close our vertical sliding panel.

15. 11 Classic CSS techniques made simple with CSS3

We’ve all had to achieve some effect that required an extra handful of divs or PNGs. We shouldn’t be limited to these old techniques when there’s a new age coming.

16. 3 Easy and fast CSS techniques for faux images

This article is a summary of a 3 fast and easy CSS techniques you can use to display only a portion of an image in your content. All techniques explained here actually need only couple of lines of CSS.

17. Create a letterpress effect with css text shadow

The letterpress effect is becoming hugely popular in web design, and with a couple of modern browsers now showing support for the text-shadow CSS3 property it’s now simple and easy to create the effect with pure CSS.

18. Text Embossing techniques with CSS

I give you the rules around how to correctly add an embossed effect to any text depending on the colors used.

19. CSS Text Gradients

Text Gradient is a simple css trick that allows you to improve your site’s appearance by putting gradients on system font titles using nothing but css and a png image.

Wordpress Tutorials

20. Wordpress hack creating a dynamic sticky

For our blog, MaxPower, we needed to have certain articles ’stay at the top’ longer than others.

21. How to make a wordpress plugin

A short video tutorial on how to make a wordpress plugin.

22. How to make a random post button

Ever wanted to have a “Random Post” link or button in your sidebar but you don’t know where to start? Well, today I’m going to show you how to do it.

23. Create an auto stats page for advertisers

I’m going to show you how to sell more ad spaces by adding stats to your WordPress blog’s Advertise page.

24. Multiple Wordpress Page Layouts in one single template

Multiple layouts can always be achieved with custom page templates, but to keep things clean and economical, it’s much better to rely on one global template (”page.php”) if you can get away with it. So how will it work?

25. Wordpress Hack: Create a custom error 404 page

In this “Wordpress Hack” you’ll learn how to create a custom 404 Error page for your blog. It’s helps your visitors find what they need, and also helps you not lose visitors!

26. Translating your blog

Your blog is online accessible to anyone in the world. Translating blog posts and pages increases your audience and monetization capabilities by at least ten-fold!

27. Styling Wordpress Comments

A fun part of customizing Wordpress themes is designing a comments format which complements the rest of the site.

28. Wordpress Hack: How to setup a post series in wordpress

Organize your wordpress blog by setting up a post series people can follow for specific topics.

29. How to: List scheduled posts

Here’s a good idea to make your readers visit your blog more often, or suscribe to your rss feed: What about listing the title of your scheduled posts? If you’re interested to do so, just read this recipe.

30. Create a peel away effect on your blog or website

If you are wondering how some webmasters or bloggers create this little peel away effect on the top right corner of their website.

31. Custom Login Page

It’s cool to have the WordPress login page customized to fit your own website branding.

32. Highlight wordpress category when on a single post tutorial

While making the redesign for this blog I wanted to highlight the category in the navigation when browsing the specified category as well as keeping it highlighted when on the a single post added to that category.

33. How to add gravatars to wordpress themes

Add Gravatars to your WordPress theme. Gravatars are a quick way to add a personal touch to your blog comments by displaying the avatar of the commenter alongside their comment.

34. How to hack together a user contrributed link feed with wordpress comments

Although WordPress has a *very* extensive plug-in collection, now and again things come up for which there are no suitable plug-ins available (yet).

35. Blog Posts in different columns

Recently I had my blog posts divided into three columns with different blog posts appearing in each one. I’ve now switched back to two columns, putting my blog design/tech posts in one and my personal/life posts in the other.

36. Highlight author comments in wordpress

If a commenter knows the email address of the blog author, she could use the blog owner’s email address in her comment and get her own comment highlighted.

37. How to add adsense between your blog posts

To display Google AdSense ads (image ads or text ads) between your posts, log into your Wordpress dashboard, go into your theme editor screen (see the red circle on the left in the image above to find your editor screen).

Jquery Tutorials

37. How to load in and animate content with jquery

In this tutorial we will be taking your average everyday website and enhancing it with jQuery.

38. Create a cool animated navigation with CSS & Jquery

Animation and visual feedback are great ways to assist a user in navigating and interacting with a website.

39. Creating a dynamic poll qith jquery and php

In this tutorial we’ll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.

40. Face-book style Lightbox

Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages.

41. Creating a filterable portfolio with jquery

In this tutorial, I will show you how to make “filtering by category” a little more interesting with just a little bit of jQuery.

42. Building a jquery powered tag cloud

Tag-clouds are easy to do badly; whether from a design perspective or from a code perspective. Thanks to jQuery, it’s also easy to do well.

43. Jquery Hover Subtag Cloud

Here is a new approach: Using jQuery to reduce the size of the tag cloud that you have on your sites, so our demo will introduce “Hover Sub Tags” under each main Tag.

44. Fading Menu – Replacing Content

The more I learn about jQuery, the more natural it feels. Probably because of how closely tied to CSS it is.

45. Create a photo admin site using php & jquery

I’m pleased to present you with part one of a two part series on creating a photo site using PHP, jQuery, and AJAX. Originally, I intended to fit the entire tutorial into one screencast, but that quickly became a pipe dream as I realized that there was simply too much to cover

46. Create an amazon.com books widget with jquery and xml

With some custom JavaScript and jQuery magic you can create some interesting widgets. A good way to demonstrate this functionality is by building a browsable Amazon.com books widget.

47. jQuery Style Switcher

In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create a style switcher using jQuery and PHP.

48. Build a top panel login with jquery

One struggle that still remains today in web design is displaying all of the redundant information on every page. For example, a login form. What if there was a way to easily make the content accessible on every page.

49. Adding form validation to wordpress comments using jquery

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use jQuery to do some instant checking on an example comment form.

50. Improved Current Field Highlighting in forms

As a matter of usability and aesthetics, it is a good thing to add some kind of visual feedback on web forms to indicate the currently active (or “focused“) field.

51. Developing a Jquery Plugin

First of all, you might ask yourself why you’d want to develop a plugin. The first and best reason is the ability to maintain chainability.

52. Build a better tooltip with jquery awesomeness

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to quickly write a jQuery plugin that will replace the typical browser tooltip with something a little flashier.

53. Crafting an animated postcard with Jquery

In this tutorial we will learn the basics of setting up a continuous animation which can be applied pretty much anywhere.

54. 60. How to build an animated header in jquery

We are going to build a header that animates it’s background. We will also encase the header in shadow for the little extra dramatic effect.

Nintendo wins battle against pirates

IT Solutions Pty Ltd – which trades as GadgetGear – was selling the cards online in Australia.

The company will now have to pay Nintendo $620,000 in damages.

GadgetGear has also agreed to stop importing the devices into Australia.

Nintendo said that orders had been made against the company and directors Patrick Li and James Li.

“GadgetGear and its directors have now acknowledged that game copying devices infringe both Nintendo’s copyright and Nintendo’s trademarks and that they are illegal circumvention devices,” it said.

“As a result, GadgetGear and the directors have agreed to permanently refrain from importing, offering for sale and/or selling game copier devices.”

GadgetGear has also been ordered to deliver to Nintendo all its stock of game copiers for destruction.

The settlement comes after a 24-year-old Queensland man was ordered to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its new games to the internet ahead of its release.

James Burt will pay Nintendo $1.5 million after an out-of-court settlement was struck to compensate the company for the loss of sales revenue caused when Burt made New Super Mario Bros for the Wii gaming console a week ahead of its official Australian release in November last year.

“Three out of four experts said our use of the internet enhances and augments human intelligence, and two-thirds said use of the internet has improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge,” said study co-author Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center.

But 21 per cent said the internet would have the opposite effect and could even lower the IQs of some who use it a lot.

“There are still many people… who are critics of the impact of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools,” she said.

The web-based survey gathered opinions from scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers, along with internet users screened by the authors. Of the 895 people surveyed, 371 were considered experts.

It was prompted in part by an August 2008 cover story in the //Atlantic Monthly by technology writer Nicholas Carr headlined: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Carr suggested in the article that heavy use of the web was chipping away at users’ capacity for concentration and deep thinking. Carr, who participated in the survey, told the authors he still agreed with the piece.

“What the ‘net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence,” Carr said.

“The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

But Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said, “People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory.”

“For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support and Google comes through for me,” he said.

The survey also found that 42 per cent of experts believed that anonymous online activity would be “sharply curtailed” by 2020, thanks to tighter security and identification systems, while 55 per cent thought it would still be relatively easy to browse the internet anonymously in 10 years.

“If we find these apps contain inappropriate material, we remove them and request the developer make any necessary changes in order to be distributed by Apple,” the company said in a statement to the Journal.

The Journal said the move appeared to be part of an effort by Apple to clean up the App Store ahead of the shipping its new iPad tablet computer late next month.

The newspaper said the App Store, which offers more than 140,000 programs, will be an important part of the marketing of the iPad, which Apple intends to promote as a device for families and schools.

Blogging Tip #2: Use Plugins. Plugins like “relevant posts”, “most popular posts” and “recent posts” make your blog more sticky because they encourage readers to hang around longer. The longer a visitor is on your blog, the better chance you have of converting them into a customer. And that, remember, is the goal when you’re in business.

Blogging Tip #3: Post from Experience. I like first-hand information. In fact, many web surfers are looking for this type of info. It’s no coincidence that “how to” information is the number one selling product on the web. Most of it comes from first-hand information.

So use case studies, write in the first person (eg, use “I”), tell your readers how you solved a particular problem, etc. I sell a lot of ebooks by doing just this. It lets readers know that you know what you’re talking about; hence, you become an authority voice in your niche.

Blogging Tip #4: Niche It. Speaking of niche – clearly define who your audience is and speak to them – and only them – directly. You will get ancillary customers/clients/readers as a matter of course. BUT, you should always blog with your core audience in mind.

Blogging Tip #5: Comment on Other Popular Blogs in Your Niche. Make relevant posts on other authority blogs in your niche. The key word here is r-e-l-e-v-a-n-t.

Blogging Tip #6: Write Well. Make your post long, make it short, make it mid-length, but by all means, write well. This cannot be taken for granted. I don’t care how salient your post is, if it’s poorly written, you will not be taken seriously. In fact, you can even damage your online reputation.

It’s probably no coincidence that the alphabet and sentence construction are among the first things we learn in school. It’s the foundation of communication — so don’t waste it; use it.

Blogging Tip #7: Market Your Blog. Don’t post it and forget it. This is your chance to use sexy marketing like social networking. Market your posts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

Remember, once you start with social networking though, you have to engage with those communities. So when you start to incorporate social networking into your blog marketing, do it with this in mind.

Blogging Tip #8: Use a Clean Design. A blog doesn’t have to have all the latest gadgets to be effective. A simple, clean design – with good content – will compete with the flashiest design every time. Simplicity rocks!

Blogging Tip #9: Personalize Your Blog. Inject some personality. Let YOU come through!

Blogging Tip #10: Don’t Give Up. Blogging is tedious, boring, monotonous and downright draining at times. Once you’ve blogged for a while, there will be days when you just want to chuck it in favor of something more exciting.

But keep this in mind: in many cases success is not gained by the most talented, the most brilliant, or the most beautiful. All of these things help. But, success comes to those who simply “stick with it!”

Artist's impression of what a new Apple touch-screen device may look like.

Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs yesterday seemed to confirm the rumours, saying Apple would release a significant product.

“The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about,” he said.

Rumours indicate Apple’s new “i-gadget” will feature a 10-inch touchscreen with finger-sensitive controls like the iPhone and wireless internet access.

The product will be called either iSlate, iPad or iTablet and will be larger than an iPhone but smaller than a laptop.

The device could be used to view the web on the run, to run iPhone apps such as games and social networking programs, and would feature an on-screen keyboard rather than physical keys.

Apple is reportedly already in talks with publishers to deliver newspapers, magazines and books to the tablet computer when it is made available to the public, which could be in mid-2010.

Earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, major manufacturers like Sony and Samsung also unveiled their own version of eReaders.

Online footprints

Tests on the rumoured Apple tablet computer have apparently been detected by a company which tracks mobile data use.

Flurry, based in the Bay Area, has detected up to fifty devices – many near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino – running an advanced version of the iPhone operating system.

“The company identified approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple’s rumored tablet device,” wrote Flurry vice president of marketing in his blog.

“We have a fair level of confidence that we are observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing.

“Testing of this device increased dramatically in January, with observed signs of life as early as October of last year.”

While technology pundits are betting on a March release, they remain divided on the device’s price.

Mr Jobs has previously said Apple did not know how to “build a $US500 ($550) computer that’s not a piece of junk”, but analysts predict any tablet computer over $US700 would struggle to find an audience.

Top Apple tablet rumours

- It will be named the iSlate, iPad or iTablet
- It will look like a supersized iPod Touch with an on-screen keyboard
- It will have a 10-inch screen with multi-touch features like the iPhone
- It will run iPhone apps such as games and web programs
- It will work as an e-book reader so users can read newspapers, magazines
and books
- It will connect to the mobile phone network for internet on the go