When you spend most of your day to designing and coding, you don't have a lot of extra time to mess with server configuration. But neglecting this aspect of web design can cost you big time in the end. Your server shouldn't be bending you to its will—it should be the other way around. .htaccess is the key. You probably

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This article discusses the current mass exodus of our local information into the so-called data cloud. Many of us don't even realize it's happening. With all the enticing benefits of the tools in the cloud, the move seems inevitible. But who should we trust? Should we even make the move into the cloud or keep our data to ours

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This article takes a critical look at the new BloggingZoom redesign. If you were here for the transition, you probably know why—the new design is quite shocking. BloggingZoom recently claimed that it's a major contender in the social news arena, poised to overtake Digg in fact. They have a long way to go but if that's g

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For a clean, impressive looking button set that doesn't take up a bunch of design time, glass buttons are the way to go. And slapping together cool glass buttons like the ones on apple.com is extremely simple in Photoshop. I've been using this process for several years now and I know web designers will find it helpful. It's

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I admit I've committed just about every crime against web design on this list. That's probably why it flowed so smoothly from my mind. They are all easily avoidable sins that, if transgressed, will cost a web designer big. So if you want to avoid humiliating yourself in front of clients and burning unnecessary midnight oil, take heed. It wi

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With YFDirect/NetBlue's shady marketing tactics so easily discoverable, why did Digg, and especially Yahoo, allow these ads to run? Even if yourgiftpro wasn't so notorious, the claim of the banner that you are the 999,999th visitor is so obviously fraudulent, it's laughable. It's Yahoo! and Digg's responsibility to protect visitors from

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I'm limiting the 2008 prediction articles this week to one (a humorous bit from Dot Sauce). The daily influx of these articles is waning so I had to throw one more in before they disappear altogether. I have to point to Web Worker Daily for the most interesting article this week. Their "6 Secrets to Running a Virtual Company" is a fascinat

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Back in July I wrote an article called The "MyStickies" Firefox Extension is an Excellent Collaboration Tool. MyStickies allows you to paste virtual sticky notes on websites and then share them with others. It's a simple concept but in the proceeding months I ditched Basecamp (no offense Jason Fried—I love your stuff) and began using MySti

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After happening upon Rollyo.com last week, I was inspired to build a blog search engine for web designers. Rollyo is short for "roll your own" search engine. It's a simpler Yahoo powered version of Google's Custom Search. I knew as embarked on this mission that I wasn't the first to attempt it. But the wheel can always be made rounder wi

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In the spring 2005 I decided that having a talk worthy website is a critical advantage for an independent web designer. That realization prompted me to build the latest iteration of Liquid Design Media—the web site for my design studio. All the top search engine marketing and usability experts would disagree with almost every decision I made

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We've all seen it before and we've all rolled our eyes. We get a suspicious looking letter in the mail—it could be junk or it might be real. We decide it's better to be safe than sorry so we rip open the envelope for a quick look. It's junk alright, but there at the top it reads, "You've been chosen, MATTHEW, to receive a special 0% int

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2007 is almost over. Time to start thinking about the future. If you've been designing web sites for more than five years or so, the tools and processes your are using today are completely different than the the ones you used when you started. Gone are the days of and tags, CSS and Javascript finally started working, and my nose goes up ex

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This week's list features quite a diverse set of articles, ranging from practical code snippets to online social networking trends. I thought Logic+Emotion's post about "infinite touch points" was especially insightful. It raises some interesting questions about the future of company/client communication. Also, Small Farm Design makes it

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This tutorial is for the designer who wants to get acquainted with the basics of CSS layout. There are a lot of articles floating around with advanced CSS tips and tricks but there seems to be a gaping hole where the basic tutorials should be. An article like this would have been tremendously helpful to me when I first started into CSS layout

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I've been a fan of the Flock browser for quite awhile now. But when version 1.0 was release on November 5th, I put off the upgrade. I've never been good about paying attention to upgrade dialog boxes. Last week I finally dove in. I have to say that my expectations have been exceeded. In case you've never used Flock, it's a fairly new brow

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