I can still remember the day I discovered the <li> tag. It's not that I had never used list items before—I had built plenty of bulleted lists. What I discovered that day was that with a little CSS, the <li> becomes one of the most powerful and versatile tags in a web designer's arsenal. So versatile is the list item, in fact, that you could build and entire website layout out of just <ul> <li> tag pairs. Of course, that wouldn't be semantically correct, but you could do it. This article is a tutorial and a tribute to the amazing <li>.

Your Mac is capable of producing sound as well as playing sound channeled from outside sources—devices plugged into the Mac’s USB- and sound input ports as well as audio streamed from the Internet. Wouldn’t it be great if you could captures some of those sounds for later listening? You can. And you can for free with Soundflower. Here’s how it works.

This simple automator script adds a right-click option to count words, paragraphs, and characters to any Mac program:

This document defines formatting and style rules for HTML and CSS. It aims at improving collaboration, code quality, and enabling supporting infrastructure. It applies to raw, working files that use HTML and CSS, including GSS files. Tools are free to obfuscate, minify, and compile as long as the general code quality is maintained.

Gmail is amazing. It's chock full of more shortcuts, settings, and features than you could shake a stick at. Even if you consider yourself a Gmail ninja, though, there are quite a few tricks you might not know about (and some that Google didn't even intend). Here are our top 10 clever tricks built right into Gmail.

Safari has a hidden “Debug” menu that offers some additional features for debugging the browser, including stress and load tests, sampling, javascript error logging, the ability to intentionally crash a page, and more. Intended for Safari developers, the Debug menu is different from the Developer menu, which is geared more at web developers, although there are a few options in the Debug menu that general web developers would find useful as well, notably advanced cache choices and CSS animation controls. If this sounds confusing, just enable both of them and poke around and you’ll quickly see the differences.

Finding the cheapest airfare is a matter of timing. First, determine how flexible your plans are, and then keep your eyes peeled.

We send a lot of mail for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire (and some for Sortfolio, the Jobs Board, Writeboard, and Tadalist). One of the most frequently asked questions we get is about how we handle mail delivery and ensure that emails are making it to people’s inboxes.

Do you want to know how to photograph fireworks? With New Years Eve just days away I thought I’d refresh this article in which I give 10 Fireworks Photography tips to help you get started.

That's the trouble with browsers these days-everyone argues over a few seconds of startup and rendering time, but eventually everyone winds up complaining about how slow they get with regular use. Everyone has their favorite, but since we're not talking about any specific browser, here are a few suggestions to speed up any browser that's gotten bogged down over time.

A pivot table report is a dynamic table that lets you interpret data in different ways without ever having to enter a formula. Pivot table reports are particularly useful when you want to narrow down a large data set or analyze relationships between data points.

In just a few clicks, you can summarize and analyze a large set of data through different categorizations and calculations. For example, from a list of students in a college class, you can get a quick understanding of the the age distribution of and number of science majors in the class.

Writing a resume is such a nebulous activity these days. You have to figure out which type of online resume format is best for you, whether to include a cover letter, how to incorporate social media into your resume, if a video resume is a good idea and what you should include on your LinkedIn profile. Above all that, to get the job, you need to beat out all the other creative digital peeps who are producing dynamic digital resumes. Phew — that’s a lot of work!

We’re always finding new resources to help you on your journey to perfecting your digital resume, and we happened across this nifty infographic by the team at Colorado Technical University, which includes tips on creating a digital resume, as well as tips for sprucing up your traditional resume, for potential employers who still like the smell of top-linen paper. Enjoy.

Whether you’re using WordPress as a CMS, a blog or somewhere between the two, as a portfolio site, making sure your site runs quickly is absolutely paramount in this day and age. This article and screencast combo takes you through how to use a variety of tips, tricks and techniques in order to make your WordPress powered site load faster.

YouTube’s javascript player API makes it possible to create a custom player using javascript controls with a chromeless version of its embedded Flash player

With the new year quickly approaching, now might be a good time to archive all of your tweets for 2010. You wouldn’t want to lose any of your tweets, or have something happen to your account in 2011 that would cause you to lose a year (or more) worth of tweets, replies, DMs and favorites. Anything could happen and with Twitter accounts being hacked on a daily basis, it’s a smart and safe idea to backup and archive your tweets as often as possible. In case of any emergency, I’m sure that one of the services below is bound to come in handy!

These photos and repair tips describe how to access the 3 flexible printed circuit (fpc) connectors under the FT-1 top cover. Deteriorated foam compression strips and corrosion between the connector contacts themselves are often are the cause of partial or no operation for this model. These photos are for the more commonly seen first version pc and fpc boards; improved materials and a revised circuit configuration were used in a later version of the electronics, but similar repair procedures would be used.

If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry. This guide will help you communicate with conscious skill. It will show you how to create designs that are easy to understand and attractive.


Beyond giving you practical tools, I hope this guide inspires you. One of my favorite quotes is, "I open my eyes and I see paradise." What a great gift vision is! What an incredible way to connect to the world around us and to each other. My hope is that this guide will allow you to communicate with more creativity and more control – and that you'll want to learn more.

I’m a Lightroom guy, I have been since the initial public beta way back when, and I love that the crop tool has a built in Rule of Thirds overlay to help fine tune your framing. But it doesn’t stop there. Built into the crop tool is a series of six overlay options to help guide your decisions in post but also serve as inspiration for alternatives for your in-camera framing.

For the last 6 years or so, my backup setup consisted of one unreliable 120 GB drive that I would manually update whenever I remember to do so. That’s pretty much a pathetic way to go about it and I’ve been extremely lucky to not have had a catastrophic drive failure.

I’ve been meaning to get serious about my file management, but I never did anything about it. That’s until I read Frank Chimero’s insightful article about his setup and how he deals with file management. It motivated me to finally put a system together to protect my important files, and to write this article detailing my current setup. I figured that it can’t hurt to have more information available on the subject for those who are interested.

PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and P2P file sharing device. Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movment, PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless file sharing networks where users can anonymously share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content.

Wired's How-To Wiki points to a piece of software called NoteBurner M4V Converter Plus (direct download), which will let you convert your iTunes video rentals and purchases to another DRM-free format. By default, NoteBurner simply creates an MP4, but it's also capable of conforming the file to new specifications so you can play it back on a non-Apple device (like a Blackberry, PSP, and several other options).

The Northeast is about to get 14-20″ of the white fluffy stuff and 60mph winds. As I race home south on the Merrit Parkway in Connecticut, preparing to hop on a train to New York City I’ve put together a lovely guide for you to turn your iPhone into your best blizzard buddy.

I recently spent many hours — most of it Googling and staring at error pages — trying to get the new WordPress Multisite functionality working on a Windows server. I thought I would share how I finally ended up succeeding.
This tutorial is primarily for people who have control over the Windows server they are working on OR a flexible sysadmin who can make a few changes to the server should you run into problems. I’m assuming you’ve already successfully installed WordPress 3.0 and the basic functionality is working. That’s another tutorial for another time and another blogger.

Twitter is a social network that allows users to share brief, 140 character messages. Each time another user shares your message it is considered a ReTweet. ReTweets expand you reach as an individual or company and can contribute additional website traffic, subscribers and customers.

However, when you make the mistakes outlined in this post it can cause your content to be ignored and not get ReTweeted.

One of the things that I love to do most with WordPress is to show absolute beginners how to use it. Recently I taught a group of writers how to get to grips with it. The aim was for them all to produce their own author’s portfolios. They ranged in age from around 25 – 60 so it was a pretty diverse group. Their technical ability ranged from someone who had been blogging for years to people who were horrified by the idea of having a blog. During a discussion of Twitter it was mentioned by a few that Twitter is only used by people who wanted to talk about what they had for breakfast. That should give you an idea of what I was up against!

The latest Firefox 4 beta comes with an easy hack to help tab addicts cover the high cost of memory-devouring tabs. Watch how to enable this key function of the BarTab add-on, without installing the add-on itself.

I recently upgraded my main external monitor to a new 27″ Dell display. All set to enjoy the high resolution glory of 2560×1140, I was perplexed. Why couldn’t I push the screen this high, using my MacBook Pro? The answer eventually turned out to be that the Mini DiplayPort to DVI adapter that Apple sells is limited to 1920×1200 resolution. The solution? A cheap Mini DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort adapter.

Last week I mentioned that, following Steven Frank’s lead, I’d completely disabled Flash Player on my Mac. But I have a cheat, for web pages with Flash content with no non-Flash workaround. I’m really happy with this setup, so I thought I’d document it here.

The book begins with the basics of CSS with a special emphasis on common causes of problems, and then covers methods for giving your code the third degree - isolating issues to find the roots of the problems. You'll also get a look at the line-up of usual suspects: the common problems and persistent bugs that are often encountered in CSS.

Finally, you'll put the tools to the test with hands-on cases designed to teach you how to solve CSS problems of your own.

Several users who are dissatisfied with the new iTunes interface or other enhancements, or are experiencing problems with third-party add-ons or other issues may seek to downgrade to iTunes 9.2.1. Here’s the procedure:

Does your MacBook burn your legs? Does the every running fan give you a headache? Take control of the fans using smcFanControl, an amazing free little utility.

The other day, Klint Finley wrote a very good walkthrough of using the new Multisite functionality of WordPress 3.0. In the comments, a lot of people wanted to know how to use your own domain names. Since I’m doing that now, here’s a quick walkthrough/how-to guide.

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

Are you a Communications Director or Campaign Manager who has just been asked to take care of getting your organization a new website? Never done this before and not sure why it's part of your job? You're not alone! At least once each week I talk to someone in your position who seems lost and not sure where to start. So here's your guide, glossary and reading list to get started.

The web development world is a big place with lots of terms not used in other areas of the advocacy world. (And then there are words like "development," which has nothing to do with fundraising here in the Advomatic office.)

Headed cross-country and worried about a new law that might get you stopped by the police in Arizona because you look like an illegal immigrant? Not to fear! Google has now added an “Avoid Arizona” option for those generating directions.

Thanks to a tip by Ianiv awhile ago, I’ve discovered a great way to post iPhone photos online very quickly and without a lot of effort. Sure you can simply email your photos to Flickr or post them to Twitter via Twitpic, but why not do both at the same time and with more control over the process and not have to double post photos to different services?

This requires a couple of apps to get working. First of all, you’ll need Mobile Fotos which is a great Flickr management app that has a number of features we’ll take advantage of. The app lets you view and manage your Flickr account from your iPhone much more so than the mobile Flickr web version. Unlike emailing your photos to Flickr, Mobile Fotos can upload your photos at the full resolution they were taken at.

You’ll also need a Twitter client for your iPhone…I use Tweetie but Mobile Fotos supports most of them. You’ll also need to setup both applications with their host APIs which is a painless process and only takes a couple of clicks to setup. The apps will walk you through the authentication process.

A lot of people ask me, “Where’s a good place to start” with film photography, which is a really broad question. Personally, my first experience was in the class I took when I was 10 years old, so I started off having a teacher explaining things to me… and continued that for many many years… I would recommend taking a class first and foremost, but I get that a lot of people can’t afford darkroom expenses, in which case I recommend reading. Lots of reading. In fact, I’ll give you a portion of what was my required reading list in the BFA Photography program at the School of Visual Arts:

Google has recently released a version of Gmail optimized for iPad, Apple's lightweight computer. Gmail for iPad is similar to the iPhone version, but the main difference is that Gmail has a reading pane.

"We're launching an experimental two-pane user interface to take advantage of its large touchscreen and tablet form factor. Building upon the Gmail for mobile web app, this new interface displays your conversations on the left and your messages on the right hand side."

I have created this web site to aid amateur photographers who would like to produce their own Black and White photographic prints from film. The addition of darkroom experience to your talents as a photographer should increase your overall photographic enjoyment and aid in the maturity and excellence of your final prints.

My solution to this problem has been to use my own wp-signup.php page within my sign-up theme. Here’s how it’s done:

Today, however, booking a flight is a total mess. Travelocity and Expedia have been joined by Bing and Orbitz and Dohop and Vayama and CheapTickets and CheapOair and Kayak and SideStep and Mobissimo and and and … I could go on and list every single Web site out there, but I won’t. There are just too many. Instead, I’ll lead you through the steps I make when I’m booking a flight myself.

I’ve covered this territory a bit before — here and here — but today I’ll try to go into more detail. For this experiment, let’s imagine a simple domestic trip: a weekend of snowboarding in Jackson Hole in Wyoming at the beginning of March.

The web is still buzzing about Google Buzz, sorry I just had to say it and everyone has their opinions about it. Personally I thank google buzz is great and I have my reasons to think that way but I’ll share those in another blog post. I did leave a comment on a webworkerdaily.com blog post called: Google Buzz: Already Better than Wave (and Maybe Facebook, Too) Saying: Yes, I think buzz is better than Wave at the moment for conversations but not for private collaborations. For that I’ll stick to Google Wave. Buzz is more like friendfeed than anything else. As for using it more than Twitter or Facebook in the future, I’m not sure but the possibility is there because it’s linked to google reader and my gmail.

@karma_musings Look, you're famous! Scroll down to point 7.

The Whys and Hows of a Nonprofit Facebook Page. Everyone's talking about it. But you don't understand. Why should your nonprofit be on Facebook and how should you go about doing it. This discussion and presentation will get you up to speed. Part 1 of 3 part series.

Facebook is the world's leading social network, with over 300 million users and more than 900 employees. But how do you get the most out of it? To answer this question and more, Mashable has created The Facebook Guide Book, a complete collection of resources to help you master Facebook.

Twitter is good for a great many things, from sharing music to building your brand, from finding friends to playing games. But while we know all about what Twitter is good for, is it possible to actually do good on Twitter? How do you do it? As it turns out, there are many ways to help out others just by tweeting.

We’ve collected some of our favorites in the round up below. If you know of any other ways to do good on Twitter, please share them in the comments!

About a month ago I was reading the New York Times online and they had an article which showed a road in Brooklyn that had been reconstructed to make it safer and more pleasing to the eye. To show the difference in the reconstruction project, they showed a before and after picture using Flash that let the visitor drag a slider over the images, which were sandwiched with one on top of the other, so that you could easily see how dramatic the changes were. I immediately thought that this could be done in JavaScript using jQuery, so I set out to do it. Here’s the result:

Now that you can export and import email filters with Gmail, we've decided to compile some of our favorite filters for organizing your inbox into a single, handy download. Come and get it!

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are an info junkie's dream - they automatically deliver selected online news, photos, and even videos straight to your Mac. But that convenience quickly leads to overload. With Yahoo Pipes, you can reduce your RSS signal chain noise by creating smart feeds that filter stuff according to your tastes. The idea behind Pipes is so liberating, we're surprised Apple didn't think of it first. Here, we show you how to mash up your favorite RSS feeds into a single stream that returns results from a simple keyword search.

People often ask me how I’ve managed to have such incredible luck with creating and distributing political Youtube videos. With quite a few viral hits under my belt I’ve had plenty of time to experiment. When I find something that works I add it to a checklist. Now when I’m producing new Youtube content each clip has to go through a 200+ item checklist to make sure it is able to get the highest number of views possible. Here are 10 of my favorite Youtube tips from my checklist:

When we talk about balancing light around here, it usually means balancing ambient with flash. But getting a good photo of holiday lights involves a different kind of light balancing: Continuous ambient with fading ambient.

Compiled here is another top 10 countdown. This time we count down the top 10 PSD to HTML conversion tutorials. These top tutorials teach you how to take many different designs in Photoshop, and code them out into HTML and CSS.

An effective Facebook Page not only attracts fans, but is sticky so that fans keep coming back and may even share the content on the Page. To do that, you need a well thought out Page that has some great applications supported by good, relevant content. Here are eight essential apps for your brand’s Facebook page:

Some of the newest digital cameras have built in levels to help you ace your straight-on shots, but if your camera or tripod isn't equipped with a level, this simple led DIY will help you make your own lighted camera level.

I installed Snow Leopard over the weekend and decided afterwards to reset my Time Machine backup, which I was surprised to find went back more than a year and had grown to 1.5TB. If you ever find yourself in this position, do everything you can to just reformat the whole disk. Because I share my Time Machine drive with other stuff I tried to just delete the “Backups.backupdb” folder normally, but emptying the trash wound up taking two full days. Untold millions of files! While I was waiting I figured out a cool command line trick, which I share with you here so we can both avoid repeating my fate. All on one line, substituting your own variables:

RT @nonprofitorgs: Facebook Pages Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations: #nptech

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

I just set up an automatic backup of all 3000 of my friends' Twitter messages and became able to search through their Twitter history two years into the past with just five minutes of easy clicking. Only two things are required: Dave Winer's new Twitter OPML tool and a Google Reader account.

"Twitter is a social network used by millions of people, and thousands more are signing up every day to send short messages to groups of friends. But where's the user manual for Twitter? Where do new Twitter users go to learn about Tweeting, retweets, hashtags and customizing your Twitter profile? Where do you go if you want to know all about building a community on Twitter, or using Twitter for business? How can you find advanced tools for using Twitter on your phone or your desktop? To answer all these questions and more, we've assembled The Twitter Guide Book, a complete collection of resources for mastering Twitter. Happy Tweeting!"

But what many users don’t know is that the wp-config.php file may be used to specify a wide variety of configurational settings, enabling you to improve the functionality, performance, and security of your WordPress-powered site. In this article, I share as many of these configurational tricks as I have been able to collect over the years. This guide covers everything in the WordPress Codex, as well some additional tricks that you probably haven’t seen before. If you know of any other WordPress configuration tricks, share them in the comments and I will add them to the post.

Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

This video will teach you two methods for adding an artificial sky to a photograph where they sky has been accidentally blown out. Of course getting this right in camera is better and more preferable. But sometimes if you do not have fill flash or a reflector, skies will be sacrificed so that people in the photo are properly exposed. You have to decide if the photo looks fine with the white sky. If not, here are a few ways you can fix it in photoshop.

Goal: To make a simple, elegant, highly-flexible, drop-in twitter search widget that anyone can use on their website/blog/profile/whatever.

I presented on A4UExpo Europe yesterday on WordPress Optimisation, doing 40 tips in 40 minutes. Here are the slides:

So how can you attract more RSS subscribers to your blog feed? Well the beauty of WordPress and its community of plug in developers come into play then and give us some great tools to highlight an RSS feed on our sites to get those subscribers.

We’ll look at what can be done to style forms in WordPress– which style attributes applied to which form elements will actually give you some sort of customization in almost all OS/browser combinations (with the possible exception of Safari/Camino, and, in one case, Opera.) Results will vary, but with a bit of care you can have your forms looking spiff, if not quite identical, crossplatform. There are also some “caution” signs along the way, areas where, though they can be styled, you will want to watch the results carefully in as many browsers as possible.

Here are 3 awesome ways to use Wordpress’s custom fields.