City Journalist Directory is my latest project, this time not as a freelancer but as part of Forplex company located in Bangkok, Thailand. While I had hard time to resist all temptations this city(read capital of Mars) has to offer, I managed to end up with finished project I am proud of. Ofcourse, I wouldn’t be able to do much without huge support and professionalism of guys here and I want to say thank you to everybody-Pete, Dieter and David for helping me and teaching me things I didn’t know.

City Journalist Directory allows people to submit photos and videos of local news events and get paid by when content is purchased by news companies. Before City Journalist Directory people didn’t have a chance to make money for being on right place on right time, but now things are changed.

City Journalist Directory is currently at beta stage and we are testing functionality and cross browser compatibility on all platforms. Beta stage will be finished by Tuesday, 25th September 2007 when site will be officially launched. If you want to help in testing and get free membership upgrade worth $10, please visit this tread on Digital Point.

After few days only in beta stage, CJD already received some exclusive and never published photos of Luciano Pavarotti, Robin Williams, Chris Columbus and Perry Como. I am very curious to see what else are people going to submit and if you are too, you can track latest and popular photos and videos.

I could say a lot more about CJD, but I am going to allow you to check it out yourself. And don’t forget to bookmark-you never know when you might need it

I was bored today and I ended up in creating clean, simple wallpaper as part of promotion and brand building for Active Web Directory(site is owned by one of my previous clients, Antonio). In same time this is part of promoting your directory trough wallpapers experiment.

Wallpapers comes in two versions and many screen sizes:

800 x 600

1024 x 768

1280 x 1024

1400 x 1050

1600 x 1200

800 x 600

1024 x 768

1280 x 1024

1400 x 1050

1600 x 1200

Directory owners are always in need of new methods of promoting their web directories. Everybody is obsessed with links, but mouth to mouth or any other offline promotion results in traffic and eventually in sales. This method should result in gaining both.

My expectations from wallpaper advertising:

1. Wallpapers are something that is always on the screen. That should result in entering minds and that is what we want-to be remembered.

2. It must result in traffic-direct type in’s or search on Google for your brand name if url is not included on wallpaper. That kind of traffic will not be targeted one,but webmasters and SEO’s download wallpapers too. They will be surprised to see your directory on a wallpaper. Other than that non paying visitors traffic will boost your Alexa rating and result in sending more visitors to your listings-which will again result in repeated sales from your previous clients.

3. There is a bunch of sites where you can submit wallpaper-simply ask uncle Google. First results is wallpaperbase.com and they claim to have 20k unique visitors per day. Nice number of people who can download your wallpaper and it is from one site only! So you might even get few links as author of wallpapers.

Other than wallpapers websites there are few more ways to spread your wallpaper and promote your directory. Inserting wallpaper in some of big wallpapers pack should result in spreading your wallpaper like wildfire. Put all wallpapers in one folder and your wallpaper in new folder called “bonus”. There are several effective ways to spread this pack:

a. Offer it for free on freebies forums and sites(example: Freebies on DP). Just make sure you have rights to do this with other wallpapers.

b. Buy some wallpapers pack with resell rights on ebay, add your wallpaper in “bonus” folder and resell it for $0.25.

c. Burn a cd with wallpapers and give it to your friends. They can burn it for other people too!

My web searches has released big list of php link directory mods on Digital Point forums.

Check list of mods and read complete tread here. Definetely something to feed bookmark with if you are directory owner or plan to be one.

More resources related to phpld mods: PHPLD Owners , Directory Trials , My Web Searches.

Splench is one of latest web design inspiration galleries. Extra clean layout, large screenshots of featured sites, nice logo and no ads is what makes this website stand out form the rest.

Also, special thanks to owner for picking my work for listing in Splench.

Readable text is one of most important aspects of good website design. After all, visitors are here to read website content, aren’t they?

High contrast of your text and background is very important for readability-for example black text on white background is much easier to read than yellow text on orange background.

Another big factor that will impact this is choosing right font. Usually webdesigner/coder chooses font family of standard fonts present on every computer. Some fonts are standard for Windows and some are standard for Mac. That is the reason why you specify more than one font. To see how each font will look like you can use some online tools to test before you choose:

1. Type Tester

Allows you to test 3 types in same time. You can adjust font family, size, font and background colors, aligment etc.

2. Css Type

Only one type at a time, but this one gives you preview of normal, bold, italic, bold italic, uppercase and lowercase text in same time. Also, you can set line height and take a look of paragraphs.

In case you didn’t know, Matt Mullenweg, one of Wordpress creators, posted his opinion on sponsored themes and suggested to remove them from Wordpress.org. There were some other opinions like this one by Headsetoptions and lots of others. I think both sides are right and wrong in some aspects and something correct is in between.

I released around 10 sponsored themes in the past(not really for WP but there is no difference). I am not doing it now, but have no problems with doing it in future. I have also used some sponsored themes and actually using one right now at www.ingeniousdirectory.com

As a person being on both sides, I took some time to think about all this-both as a creator and user of sponsored themes. I came up with some ethical rules and decided to write them here. Please, feel free to disagree or point to some other aspects that will lead to improvement of those “rules”.

Rules of ethics for sponsored themes designers

1. Max 2 footer links-one for designer and one for sponsor(or 2 sponsors)

I saw one guy released a free theme and he placed 5 links in footer - “designed by Link1 and Link2″ and “sponsored by Link3, Link 4 and Link5″. Yeah, right. He sold 3 sponsors spots, placed 2 links to his sites and as a result got paid almost double of price for custom theme with no footer links . Plus, two links to his sites. Nice move for him, but not for users who are forced to keep 5 links in footer.

One the other side, there are a lot of situations when a theme has two footer links and nobody has problems with it:

a. Designer and coder: designed by designer and coded by coder.

b. Designer of html and css template and guy who ported in to WP or other script theme: designed by designer and ported to WP by wp coder.

c. Situation when creators place links like this: theme name(link to download page) by author name(link to homepage).

d. Derivative work: theme by author1, based on theme by author2 .

If one person design and code complete theme, it is obvious that that person has done double work than everybody in examples above. It is also obvious that creator of full theme can allow one more link in theme(sponsored one if he decides to charge for 50% of his work).

2. Don’t accept sponsor links from sites you wouldn’t link to

Designer allows gambling, viagra or adult content sites to sponsor his theme, as long as they offer biggest amount of money and refuses to think if that will hurt sites that use this theme.

In this case, I wouldn’t blame anyone who removes those links form sponsored theme.

3. No keywords stuffing in anchor text of required to keep links.

Imagine footer on your site like this: designed by best credit card rates and sponsored by cheapest online flowers delivery.

This looks very spammy and user may decide to remove those links. Stick to official sites names. Your theme user’s site isn’t Google Adwords. If you still want to place some keywords in anchor text of link-don’t overdo it. And be sure to allow users to change it to official site name if they like that better, as long as they keep correct link and don’t add nofollow tag to it.

After all, you deserve credits-not using other sites for keywords targeting.

I almost got to Quick Buck Crew website for changing 4 keywords anchor text to official site name in link of sponsored theme. I believe this is just not right.

4. No hidden links in free themes.

Placing hidden links by display:none method is just not ok. This may hurt websites using such a theme and get them banned in Google. Nothing more to explain.

5. Clearly state theme usage requirements

Ones you release theme, state what links are required to keep in order to legally use sponsored theme. Put this on download page(visible place) and be sure to include it in “read me” inside zip file.

6. Give your theme users option for link removal

Last, but maybe most important rule of ethics. Two situations cross my mind:

a. Person likes your theme much more than any other paid theme, but wants to run serious business and make site more trusted in eyes of visitors.

b. Person built a site based on your theme, modified it, got custom logo done to fit it. After some time, site started to bring profits and owner is ready to go to next level and pay for link removal.

By not allowing link removal option, you are forcing your theme users to keep links or to break law by removing them without permission. Not very fair.

Be sure to include price and payment details for links removal. If you ask me, it is ok to place price anywhere from 10-100% of cost of unique theme. You can charge 50% and sponsor other 50%, or allow your sponsor to get full payment depending on your initial deal with him.

Ones, I was spam bombed from same email. I got 50-60 emails in my gmail inbox in like 20 minutes. I was really freaking out, and after I asked for help on forums I got very valuable information. Here is what you need to do in case this happens:

1. Trick to block spam is to forward it to spam folder using filters. To create new filter click “create a filter” on the right of the search input(see image).

2. You will be given a choice for criteria to filter emails by.

I used “has the words” option and entered one sentence from full text of email I was receiving(same email). Be careful with this. If you enter some general and “safe” words you may end up in loosing emails you want to read. In this example I used “Viagra: as most common spam word. After you are done click “next step”

3. On next screen, you need to decide what to do with email that contains words you want to filter.

Simply choose “skip the inbox” and confirm your choice.

Easy isn’t it? But if you don’t know it, you can loose a lot of nerves.

You need to code a theme for some php/mysql script and there is no tutorial available? Guess what-you don’t even need one. Just follow my method and with some time and work you can become guru.

Note: You must have some knowledge in html & css.

Software you need: Firefox browser , Web Developer extension for Firefox and Adobe Dreamweaver(not a must have).

1. You need to have script installed on your host or locally on your computer. For local installation, I use Xampp which is making my computer act like server. I am not going to go into installing and using Xampp now,(it is very easy-just Google for some info), so let’s assume you installed script on your host.

2. In most cases, script you are editing has template files in separate folder. That folder will be usually named “templates”, “tpl” or something like that and will be located in root or sometimes in “includes” or some other folder. If script you are working on doesn’t have any of this don’t worry-we have a solution for this.

3. Most common template files for every script are header.something(html, tpl, php…) and footer. Those files are repeated trough whole skin and included in all other files using some sort of “include” function. For scripts with 2 columns layout(like Wordpress) you can also expect file called “sidebar”, “left” or something like that.

4. Let’s just forget all those files and folders and say you have no idea what files to edit. Open your script in Firefox and use Web Developer’s function Outline>Outline Current Element.

Move your pointer over page and look at top bar of your browser.

You will see html path of every page element.

5. If you located all template files open them all in Dreamweaver. Ones you red id of element you want to change(example #maintbl on image above)-try to locate it in files. If you can’t find it use search function(Edit>Search and Replace or CTRL+F).

From first drop down menu, choose Current Document(if you know it is in file you are viewing), Open Documents(if you opened all template files) or Folder… and locate folder where copy of your script copy is by clicking on folder icon besides(if you have no idea where your element is). After you choose your search method, click Find Next.

6. Repeating this process will help you get to know with your script template system. Ones you know classes and id’s of your elements, you are ready to edit css file to suit your needs.

Stripe generator is web 2.0 application that allows you to make your own stripes patterns. While those patterns are quite easy to make, this tool will still save you some time and few mouse moves in Photoshop.

With Stripe generator, you can set width of your stripes, space between them, colors of stripes and background, change direction of stripes and even give them a shadow.

With this ajax powered generator you will not have to reload page for every change you make. You will just need to click download button and save your pattern to your hard drive.

In addition they offer gallery of users created patterns, so you can also download some ready made ones.

As a big time saver, Stripe generator must find it’s place in your bookmarks.

P.S. Thanks to Shabu for pointing me to this one.