A lot of users told me to make my latest wordpress theme, TypographyWP, with only one sidebar. It wasn’t that hard to modify the layout and css style, so now you can download it and use it on your blog. You can see a live demo on this blog!

XHTML/CSS TEMPLATE

I made a simple xhtml/css template for a friend’s computer science exam and I thought I should share it with you. You can use it for a portfolio or something like that.

They added digg style buttons, one that lets you promote a search result, one to remove a listing and the last one which helps you leave a note/comment. At the same time Google made a smart move, all your votes show up only when you are logged in and also to Google users who take a look in “See all notes for this SearchWiki” section.

Bellow you have a small presentation for Google’s new Search interface.

At the same time I don’t know what measures they’ll take to prevent users from gaming this voting system, because at the moment if you have enemies they can very easy leave a bad note attached to your website. We’ll have to wait and see!

UPDATE: Will Yahoo implement the same voting system for their search system? After all they are in heavy crisis right now.

1. Microsoft puts in danger Google Adsense.
Yes that’s true. If you didn’t know, Microsoft plans to release some new features for its browsers (Internet Explorer 8 ) that will automatically block ads and when I say ads I think that adsense is their main priority. Just imagine that Microsoft, who has approximately 70% of the internet users, blocks Google’s main source of money Adsense.

It’s business and Google is smart enough to have a second plan, in this situation a browser 100% made and marketed by them.

The fact that Google’s search engine is so popular (for good reasons) gives me an idea of how many users will use Chrome as their main browser and how big G will for sure beat Firefox’s download record with about 100-500% more downloads in a single day (let’s hope they have enough bandwidth ).

2. A browser is like a gold mine when it comes to user information.
You all know that Google collects information from users easy enough to know how dumb or smart we are. A good example in this case is the Google Toolbar with a few options that grabs info, sends it to different google apps or bookmarks it. Now imagine how much user data they could collect with their own browser. G is smart? YES !

Any ideas when Yahoo releases a browser? Also you can download Google Chrome from here, it looks great .

Cuil.com thinks that it has 100 billion pages indexed but their own page doesn’t seem to appear when I search for the keyword Cuil. Isn’t this stupid or is it a strategy? I think it is the first option.

Even funnier is that their domain name is registered to Tom Costello, CEO at Cuil.com. I think that when we are talking about big projects like this one, you should register the domain with the companies name or make all the information private.

Besides all of this Cuil.com has a few things/futures which Google doesn’t have like:

• A better design, simple and clean. I like anything on black background.
• A great thing is that they use tabs, usability is great.
• Displaying the search results in a grid view with two or three columns is something new and nice.
• Privacy is one of their main objectives. So your ip address or other info is safe and not saved into their database.

Now let’s wait and see how they grow and update their product! If not it’s just another fancy search engine with no future!

What do you think about this search engine?

Another great thing with this new pagerank update is that for the first time Google informed webmasters through Matt Cutts’s blog that they would update the PageRank Toolbar in a few days. For sure this stopped the chaos in the webmasters world and on forums like digitalpoint and sitepoint, where noobies were starting threads every 5 minutes asking if pr updated.

So from my experience I can tell you a few ways (except submitting to web and article directories) to improve your pagerank.

1. Create your own blog network. If you have a few blogs which you update frequently, you have the opportunity to link them and pagerank will for sure increase for them. I’ve made this with an article directory which is constantly pagerank 5 after two updates. How I did this? Well I added a link to it on all my blogs and I made sure that it doesn’t link to other websites (I think it has only one link).

2. Create your own keywords. Although it has never been confirmed (like the rumor that the older your blog is the higher your pagerank will be) I think that branding some keywords, creating some new ones gives your website/blog an identity which might influence the pagerank algorithm. For example I have a few keywords like: AcosminMAG, AcosminTYPO, Acosmin etc which are not used on other blogs. Also some bloggers link to me with the an anchor text that contains those keywords.

3. Try Internal Linking. This will for sure increase the authority of certain pages on your website/blog or even on your index. From what I’ve tested some pages on this blog like the “wordpress themes” page has a few links from some of my posts and so it is one of the most visited pages on this blog and has it’s own pagerank (I am talking about organic traffic).

Here are a few things you shouldn’t do:

1. Links from Social Bookmarking websites are strange! I know they help you get your posts indexed faster, but how many of you seen that those SB websites rank higher than you in searchengines. If you only want to get traffic from SB websites and get indexed faster then use them, but if you want to be on the first position for something try to get links for your articles from somewhere else. In the same time I think that links from social bookmarking websites are equal to 0 when it comes to pagerank .

2. Don’t use link farms. I’ve seen a lot of bloggers using this method to increase their pagerank and in the same time they were panelized by Google with a pagerank decrease or a ban in the search engine. It is not worth it, because links from link farms are equal to 0 and it is considered a spam method.

3. Obviously don’t sell links. You know that Google started a war with link sellers and you should not add things like “sponsored links” on your blog. Instead try to add links only in your blog roll and don’t exceed more than 10 links.

I hope you are happy with your new pagerank.

Most of you don’t know but in the late 90’s there was an intense war between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, a fight for dominance which ended with Netscape’s victory because Bill Gates was a lame copycat. Too bad for him because even now his product, IE, is a piece of …, a result of Microsoft’s incompetency to create an original browser. Also this war was constructive because Netscape struggled to bring something new with every new update and that is why the war between Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 is interesting. If Opera brings something new, Firefox should too and vice versa. For example Opera isn’t using as much resources as Firefox and it opens websites 50% faster.

Here are a few things which you should know about:

Opera 9.5

• A nice change is the new skin. Opera’s usability has increased because the new buttons/tabs are easy to see/understand and the color scheme is great (I like grey things in design, metallic stuff).
• You can add widgets which make your life easier and fun. For example here is a widget that shows you webcams around the world, it is nice to see how the weather or traffic is in a specific city. You can see a list of widgets at widgets.opera.com.
• If you want to upgrade from a previous version, you should know that it is 100% possible that you’ll lose all your saved mail, RSS feeds and bookmarks.
• The Zoom option – I think Opera was the first browser to add this option, that allows you to zoom in a specific zone and enlarge the text and images in the same time, but now comes Firefox 3 with the same feature. Nice
• It is two times faster than Opera 9.2 and from what I’ve tested on different websites it’s much faster than Firefox 3.
• “Superior support for Web standards” quite true but it is frustrating with text fields, forms etc because Opera doesn’t render them as it should.
• More info here about Opera 9.5

Mozilla Firefox 3

• Well the new skin is simple to use, everything is where it should be and if I compare it with the older ones I must say that the new one is better improved.
• Memory resource are the same, like up to 1GB for nothing – I think this is the only problem with Firefox
• Associating tags with your bookmarks to sort them by topic is something new and nice. You should try this out.
• Add-ons are still a problem for Firefox 3 because they are not updated. It is quite hard to work with two different versions of FF just to use some addons.
• Full page zoom exactly like Opera 9.5’s option. As I said, the war is on, so everyone is copying everyone…
• More info here about Mozilla Firefox 3

The future looks bright for both browsers, because they complete each other. Also I think you should wait a few months until both browsers release a few updates for the new versions, at least that is how I do. Until then I’ll use Firefox 2 and Flock. Happy browsing!

PS

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO_KILnJdHw]

By the way Happy Valentine’s Day to you to!

The nineties is the period of time when maybe all the magic started. There was no web2.0, no bandwidth to surf the web like nowadays, but there was hope, especially in web design. I don’t know about you, but I remember that in the period 1996-2000 every person had the idea that they should start a webdesign company and many did so and succeed. Because that period of time was important for the evolution of web design I would like to show you a few websites, five to be more exactly, that I think you are still using nowdays.

1. First of all is Yahoo, because it’s a bit older than Google. How many of you remember it? Well here is a little print screen from 1996 to freshen your memory. If you compare it with the actual yahoo design you’ll see the differences (edgy corners, woeful gardinets). Even the 468×60 ad from The New York Times can make you a good impression of those times.

2. My favorite is Adobe’s website, which in my opinion looks better than some websites nowadays. Both menus from the header look great and are still used today with the same positioning. As you can see in the print screen bellow Photoshop was at version 4.0 in ‘96 and the top webdesigners of the year were two ladies Mignon Khargie and Elizabeth Kayrys.

3. I am sure that some of you use the portal Donwload.com to find new software and download it. And I am sure that you don’t know how this website was in 96. Well here it is! I like the use of color, forms and very important you should note, they were advertising Internet Explorer as you can see in that little banner, free download > infecting our brains . To bad there was no firefox!

4. America online or AOL.com is maybe one of the most visited websites in USA after Yahoo. Interesting is the fact that nowadays the logo is a bit different (rotated) and the design looks almost identically to Yahoo. Anyways it is nice to see how they had evolved since then.

5. Now the last website is Google because its design is unchangeable. The logo on top and under it, the forms and buttons. Because it has new services like analytics, gmail, maps and other ones, AJAX comes in handy to make things look better; web2.0 . As for how Google was at the beginning, in 98, well it was kinda ugly, just look at the print screen bellow. Who uses bevel and shadows nowadays for logo design . Damn! Also it is the best search engine, no doubts !

Nobody wants to be robbed, especially on holidays! Yesterday on digg.com I found out that one of the most appreciated logo designers was robbed of his domain name and probably of some personal information, because Google Mail can be hacked by anybody with a little e-mail hijack technique. Now the cow (John Cow not John Chow) has been robbed too, not of her tits but of her premium wordpress theme which in my opinion doesn’t looks that great, but it is his propriety and he can do what he wants with it.

The thing is that John Cows wp theme was released on warez forums for free and the man who posted it is a so called entrepreneur who is trying to make money out of others work! Ironically he is searching for new staff for his warez forum on digital point forums and I don’t understand how he is allowed to post such an offer; now I see how many people can be idiots for only 3$!

Anyways something should be done with all those warez websites even if there is no law against them unless they are actually storing illegal files on their server. Some reporting websites should be released!

As many of you know, last month Ed Dale presented some new ways of internet marketing in the Thirty day challenge. Now, this man is already rich, he made a lot of money online and sharing all those marketing tips for free makes him a fantastic man, an idol for some of us. Thank you Ed, but what I want to point out is that in one of their tutorials, they introduced Socialposter.com as a reference for social bookmarking websites. From here one of my mates enters the scene, his name is Sorin (soso) and after he saw that tutorial, he came with the idea of creating a new, better improved social bookmarking service. As I know him, he is very passionate in everything he does and so he created and released SocialMarker.COM, the best tool in present for sbookmarking (You can imagine this because the one and only Ed Dale said that the other tools, similar to this one, are good for the trashcan.
Here is the brief description for socialmarker (from the site): “Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness! That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.”
The above description is from the actual website and I totally agree with it because I’ve tested it. Everything they say is true, the time for submitting articles has been reduced to half, they have new futures like a special button for blogs and one for your firefox bookmarks toolbar, drag and drop and more things that you can find out on Sorins webdevelopment blog

PS: Thank you Sorin for this wonderful tool !!!