In my journey in life as a freelancer web designer/developer, I have had a need to have an easy way to punch in and punch out to calculate my duration of work time. What better device to do this than the iPhone with its simplicity and mobility.

A new app in the App Store called Hour Tracker has met my needs and then some. The most important feature of the app that I use is the fundamental function of time tracking. It allows me to accurately track the hours I spend on a particular project.

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I have been using Panic’s Transmit as my FTP software of choice for several years now. It hasn’t let me down in all that time. There was one issue I had with some permissions, but those were few and far between, especially in recent years.

As with all of my programs, I like to have the newest version available. So when I was alerted that there was a Transmit update available, I jumped at the opportunity to keep my software up-to-date.

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Looking for some inspiration for your new website? Creating a stunningly killer design takes time and a well-devised plan of attack.  When setting up a new site, you should take into consideration what is working and what is NOT working for other sites.

Inspiring sites like these can be your tool in developing your new site.  Gain some perspective on the design and development methods of tomorrow.

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As social media comes forth as a key player in the ever-imporant online industy, there are a few Goliaths that take front row in the social media wave.

Each of these sites get MILLIONS of hits per day, and there are many reasons why. Aside from the almost addictive nature of the interaction, these sites are designed with great care and based on feedback from the users themselves. Custom applications, pages, and other ways to personalize the experience keeps visitors coming back for more.
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Among the many options out there for video hosting, very few stand the test of time and can deliver consistent streaming speeds and loading times. YouTube has become one of the most popular and useful video platforms on the Internet, and there are serveral reasons why.

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1. Server File Loss

There are two elements in a standard WordPress site, as well as many other CMS platforms, that need to be backed up on a regular basis – the website’s files and the website’s database.

No one server is completely reliable. Data can easily be lost by corruption, mistakes, or hacking. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you should have your website’s files backed up either locally or on some server in a cloud, but the point is somewhere different than where the files sit.

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When installing WordPress to create your new site, there are a few settings and plugins that you should take into consideration. These settings and plugins are generic ways to enhance your website, so using them by default on every WordPress site you create is the wise decision.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) to expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

Provisions included the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would have expanded existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyright material, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

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Whether you are looking for a theme for your business website or your personal portfolio, ThemeForest from Envato is here to make your life a little easier.

As with all ThemeForest templates, these offer cross-browser compatability and support within ThemeForest’s forums. Authors are very conscious of their reputation on the site, so almost always the will give you assistance when using their product.

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1. Beyond Blogging

Aside from being the world’s largest self-hosted blogging tools, WordPress has grown dramatically since its first appearance in 2003. It now serves a variety of complex purposes including social media sites with BuddyPress, creative portfolios, news and review sites, as well as being used for Intranet purposes internally within an organization.

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When choosing a solid JavaScript framework for a website, there are really two that stand out and take the cake – jQuery, which we talked about in a previous post, and MooTools. MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API.

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1. Measure Your Website’s Speed

Show Slow is an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace AJAX rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance.

2. Use Any URL To Monitor Its Progress

On the Show Slow website, just clock on “Add URL” in the main navigation bar to add your website to the list of sites to be monitored. You even have the option to keep the testing private, or have the tests archived so that you can compare changes as you work on your loading speed.

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Finding the right theme to start your new WordPress site or revamp your current one is crucial and can be a difficult decision. When picking a template, you want to make sure that it has the functionality and layout that you like, and more importantly, the design and usability that will keep your visitors’ attention.

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1. Pages Load Faster

Dynamic Drive‘s ImageOptimizer compresses your JPGs, GIFs, and PNGs so that they are crunched efficiently in size allowing your website’s pages to load faster. This can be done without losing the quality of your image and doing so will allow for a wider range of visitors with less bandwidth usage

2. Compression Options

ImageOptimizer gives you 10 choices of image output quality ranging from 10% to 100%. It displays them in a convenient list so you can compare them side by side to see what your best option is without losing your image’s appearance. This ensures that your images retain the quality you want, without their bulky page-slowing size.

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Slowly but surely, HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are becoming more and more common-place on the Internet. With Apple’s big push towards an HTML5-centric web and its refusal to support Flash elements and pages on its mobile devices, the modern browser is transforming faster than ever before.

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