CSS3 code generator

Automatic CSS3 code generator

Thanks to CSS3 (that is, Cascading Style Sheets in its version 3 of the standard) modern web browsers support lots of advanced effects. Those effects that once required several images or hacks are now available in a few lines of CSS3 code.

The best way to get your hands on CSS3 is to use an automatic CSS3 code generator which could write the CSS3 code for us just by specifying a couple of easy options.

I would suggest you this generator for CSS3 code, as it is very complete and easy to use.

Which effects can be created with the CSS3 code generator?

Using CSS3 code you can create effects like:

• Rounded corners.
• Text or box shadows.
• RGB colors.
• Multiple column layouts.
• Outlines.
• Color gradients.
• etc.

And all this just using a few lines of CSS3 code, with no need of additional images or HTML markup. That is really a big advantage in terms of code maintenance: if you want to update advanced effects of your site, you only need to rewrite a couple of lines of CSS3 code.

Which browsers support CSS3?

CSS3 is the future, and it will be the CSS standard used for all web browsers in a few years. But, by now, only a few web browsers support all CSS3 features.

So it depends on the CSS3 feature chose. But in overall, we could state that Chrome 4.0 and Firefox 3.5 (or better) support the most important CSS3 features.

Opera 10.5 and Safari 10.1 are also other web browsers that support nearly all main CSS3 features as well.

Finally, Internet Explorer 9 has a rather limited support for CSS3 features. So Internet Explorer could be considered the main obstacle to start using CSS3, as it only allows you to use rounded corners and advanced font face selection.

Fortunately, the suggested CSS3 generator would also specify which browsers could use the CSS3 code that was created in an automatic way. That is a very useful feature to be sure about browser version compatibility when using CSS3 effects.

If you want to get serious about the upcoming technologies of CSS3 and HTML5 I would suggest you to read a book on CSS3 and HTML5, and be the first when those technologies fully arrive.

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Posted by ESV

Web design e-books in PDF

Good web design e-books available in PDF

If you have some special interest about increasing your skills in web design, website development and web coding, you definitely need to check out this list of useful (and free) web design e-books.

They really cover every interesting topic that a good web developer should know: from web typography to accessibility and usability, including even some freelance business management tips.

This kind of resource, together with the lots of free e-books available, are possibly the best excuses to finally grab a good e-book reader (and, if you were wondering, the answer is yes: the number 1 e-book reader, Amazon's Kindle, already supports native PDF reading).

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Posted by ESV

Tatachan - share funny images and surprising comments

tatachan.com - Share your images and comments

TrebleClick's development team, in cooperation with Blogtellas has created another website for your pleasure, tatachan.com

Tatachan is an image based forum in Spanish where you can post and comment images which are funny, entertaining and original, related to jokes, technology, videogames, wallpapers, high definition, animated GIFs... and mucho more, everything without ever needing to register: just enter and have fun!

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Posted by ESV

Free ebook sites

Free ebook sites - download free PDFs the legal way

Did you know that there are plenty of quality books out there, that you can download for free in a legal way?

Here are some of the best free ebook download sites available:

• Free computer books is probably the best site to download software or computer programming related ebooks. It's probably the first site I would check when trying to learn a new programming language, or improving my computer skills in a very specific subject.
• PDF geni is a search engine specialized in finding free ebooks in PDF for download. It even offers search term suggestions and a glimpse at the hottest search terms.
• Project Gutenberg it's the good old initiative of turning every classic with expired copyright into a free downloadable ebook. So if you are looking for a classic book to download, check that page. And if you want a bunch of interesting suggestions, try the top 100 most downloaded ebooks.
• Google book search started somehow like Project Gutenberg, storing PDF versions of classic books. But now it has grown much bigger thanks to interesting agreements with book publishers. And now you can download plenty of quality ebooks, modern of classic, with no cost at all.

With Internet, knowledge has no barriers (and nope, I'm not talking about piracy). So go download some free quality ebooks and PDFs at those sites and increase your knowledge!

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Posted by ESV

Anti-malware tool list

List of anti-malware tools

Are you worried about spyware or malware installed on your PC? Here's a list of 5 useful anti malware tools.

My 3 weapons of choice for malware removal would be as follows:

• Spybot search and destroy is a free tool for Windows (compatible with all Windows versions from Windows 95) that will detect and remove malware applications.
• AdAware's free version provides spyware detection and removal features, suspicious file submission services and some resident system protection services.
• Hijack This provides advanced logs of running processes that will allow you to identify installed malware (or to ask an expert with highly detailed malware information).

Now you can keep your PC safe and clean of malware with these advanced free anti-malware tools.

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Posted by ESV

Open source software lists

Free and open source software listing

Fortunately, nowadays there are plenty of quality free software to perform many PC tasks. I recently talked about some of the best free open source applications. And here are some of the best free apps listings.

Open Source Living is a website with an excellent design and a complete and accurate classified listing of free open source software.

FOSSwiki (Free and Open Source Software wiki) is a wiki based website that you can update with any new free and open source application.

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Posted by ESV

Aviary is over hyped

Aviary is overhyped

If you are one of the 4 people in the world who has not received Aviary spam yet, let me introduce you what is aviary. Aviary is a set of graphic design and image editing tools which can be directly used on your web browser to create professional looking results.

At a first glance, Aviary's excellent web design, impressive Flex programming and surprising image gallery will amaze you. But, after a careful analysis, you may find out that Aviary is overhyped.

For serious purposes, Aviary tools aren't free

The main drawback of Aviary is that, if you want to create something serious with Aviary, then you will have to skip the free software part. Yes, if you want to create professional images, then Aviary is not free, because with the free Aviary tools you would be giving away your source files and your final images for their self promotion. You would be enabling other users to create derivative images from your work too.

Does any professional designer want to share every design secret with other designer in the world, or let them build derivative works upon their images? Any professional designer interested in surrendering some rights of every creation? No? Then Aviary isn't free for professionals.

And then there is the payment method part. You purchase a yearly subscription (around 85$ a year), and they claim that you are saving money, because graphic design software programmers charge too much to their customers. Well, if you purchase a single license of Adobe Photoshop, then you will have a lifetime license of a professional design application, which is less expensive than a lifetime subscription to Aviary (at least, if everything goes well with your health).

Aviary tools aren't better than other Open Source tools

If Aviary tools were unique and really impressive, they would be worth the money, right? But the truth is that there are several open source graphic design programs that let you do the same tasks. And hey, these programs let you create professional images without taking for granted some copyright rights or source files from your designs.

So let's analyze whether Aviary tools are really unique:

• Phoenix is an online image editor similar to Photoshop, with layers and effects support. However, there's already a free online version of Photoshop, as well as other online free photo editing software as Picknik or Pixlr. But if you want to be serious about image editing, then chose an off-line open source image editing software such as Paint.NET or the multiplatform GIMP.
• Raven is the first online vector drawing software. But once more, there's another vector drawing program out there that is completely free and open source: Inkscape. Nevertheless, both programs are rather limited compared with Adobe Illustrator.
• Peacock is called a visual laboratory because it lets you experiment with plenty of image editing effects using a node based interface (such as Apple Shake). I have to admit that Peacock is a quite unique tool. But is by far the most complex one, and rather experimental. If you want quick, abstract eye-candy, choose some free fractal generator such as Aphopysis and tweak the results with something like Photoshop.
• Toucan is a tool to select color swatches and palettes. It is very similar to the free color online tool provided by Adobe, Kuler.

Yes, good online software, but nothing extremely useful or innovative: there are completely free alternatives for each tool out there.

What new Aviary tools are coming in the future?

Till it isn't created, it shouldn't be reviewed. But let's take a look at what's coming to Aviary. Are there any really free open source alternatives to these graphic design tools?

• Myna and Roc are an audio editor and a music generator. Is this something FL Studio like?
• Hummingbird is a 3D modeler. Would this one be even better than the famous free, open source and powerful Blender?
• Eagle is a pixel pattern recognition tool. I wonder what is this about...
• Ibis is a font creator software. There aren't many free font creators for Windows out there (I only know the combination of Font Forge plus Cygwin). But if you want to keep full copyright with no derivatives on your fonts, then you may afford the powerful Font Creator.
• Owl is an online desktop publishing program. Yes, there aren't other "free" desktop publishing programs, but, if you want to create a simple brochure you can use something like Photoshop or Illustrator. And if you are willing to create an extensive document, why use an online tool when you need to carry big document source files?
• Penguin is a free online word processor. Are we reinventing the wheel? Did we already hear of Google Docs or Open Office?
• Starling is an online video editor. It seems interesting as there aren't many functional free alternatives. Or may it end as another Windows Movie Maker?
• Pigeon is a painting simulator. Like Corel Painter Essentials (which is bundled for free with many drawing tablets and that costs like a single year subscription)?
• Woodpecker is a smart image resizer. Let's see what this smart is about. More than the bicubic interpolation? Even more than the Photoshop CS4 resizing algorithms?
• Tern is a terrain generator. But Terragen is free for personal use, and it's the software that created the landscapes of The Day After Tomorrow. And DAZ Bryce 5 was released for free, and contains a full 3D terrain editor, a renderer engine, tree creation tools, texture editors...

We still have to wait till we can review the new tools but it seems that there are really free open source alternatives out there even for the upcoming features.

Aviary is over-hyped

Don't get fooled by the amazing sample galleries. I've seen the works of some geniuses that create wonderful pictures using the outdated Photoshop 5. The idea is that even with a software which is not impressive people can create masterpieces, because people's skills are amazing.

A strong user community of great artists and an intense marketing campaign cannot hide the fact that there are other Open Source or Free graphic design tools out there available to create professional results. Only if you are a casual designer you would want to give Aviary a try: it seems that professional designers have better free options to choose from.

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Posted by ESV

Defending copyright with a click

Discover copyright infringements with a right click

I recently showed you a way to find image copies with TinEye. But, did you know that there is a TinEye Plugin that allows you to quickly search for image duplicates?

The image search plugin is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and it makes searching for images as simple as right clicking on them (without the need to submit an image file or URL).

But be careful! If you install the image search plugin you will find that checking the popularity of your photographs through Internet or defending the copyright of your images and pictures may be an addictive task!

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Posted by ESV

Advanced Image Search

Advanced Image Search thanks to TinEye

Have you ever wondered whether the images on your website are being used somewhere else? Do you want to know whether your images under creative commons licences are famous all around the web? Or do you want to discover copyright infringements and plagiarism? Now you can, thanks to TinEye.

TinEye.com is the first reverse image search engine on Internet. That means that you provide an image or image URL, and TinEye performs a lookup of usages of such image throughout Internet.

Nevertheless, TinEye still has some limitations. The database of images where the searches are performed is still somehow small (only a few billions of images, which is far from the huge amount of images available in Internet). On the other hand, every time you perform new searches in TinEye the image database is increased with such new information.

But the most surprising fact about TinEye is that it will find image copies even when they aren't exact matches. TinEye can find duplicates even if they have been resized, cropped, renamed and somehow edited. TinEye uses the small snapshot or fingerprint of the submitted images to create the image database where the data used for comparison are stored.

I carried out some experiments and I found even image duplicates that were trimmed, downscaled, filled with noise and turned into grayscale images.

What are you waiting for? Give TinEye a try and tell me what you found!

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Posted by ESV

Find users frequent questions

Find you users' frequent questions

We recently saw that only webpages with quality content will be successful in the new Search Engine Optimization scenarios. But you cannot write quality content if you don't know what your users need.

A very good way to give your users what they need is finding out their most frequent questions. What do they want to know that is related to your business? Answer such questions, provide useful content and earn your potential customer's trust.

This question search tool is a quick way to find questions related to a specific topic. You should try searching questions concerning the following subjects:

• The main keywords of your site.
• Your offered services: what do you sell / build / provide / talk about.
• Your brand name, and other similar brands.
• The name, brand or model of your products.
• Related tools or accesories.

Remember these quality content writing tips. Discover new and unsuspected user needs through frequent user questions, and satisfy these needs, building this way high quality content.

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Posted by ESV

Goldeneye 64 on PC

007 Goldeneye 64 online: Goldeneye Source

The 3rd Beta of Goldeneye Source has just been released this month. Goldeneye Source is a free MOD developed for Half-Life 2, which perfectly recreates the death match maps of Goldeneye for Nintendo 64.

Goldeneye Source includes an Online Death Match game mode. This game is added to the Steam game list, as most MOD's are.

I have recently tested the game, and it works perfectly. The game maps are exactly the same maps of the original N64 game, but with graphics and textures of the latest videogame generations. I just miss the "bills" of texture that fell when you shot the ceiling.

This is just like playing 007 Goldeneye64, but with a keyboard and a mouse (and with cool graphics too, for sure). Those who played Goldeneye during many hours on N64 will find that the most strange situation is to fight against more than 4 enemies on a single map.

Goldeneye Source Downloads

Download Goldeneye Source

Goldeneye Source Soundtrack (it's a remake of the original videogame soundtrack, but "trendier").

Goldeneye Source gameplay video

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Posted by Dremin

Kill Windows process

Monitor, hide and permanently remove systray icons and processes

Some of the programs that we install add new system processes. These processes always consume system resources, but are often unecessary. Other programs also add new "Systray" icons (Systray is the Windows System Tray, in the lower right corner of your Task Bar, next to the clock). And some of these systray icons may not be removed by a simple right click / close option. Even if you closed a systray icon, it wouldn't be removed, and it would be restored when booting again your PC.

We can optimize the memory usage of our PC killing several system processes and system tray icons.

Nevertheless, our best first choice to permanently remove Systray icons is to double click the icon, or right click / properties on such icon, and look for options to uncheck the "Show icon on the system tray", "Display quick link icon" and so on.

Checking Windows processes

To display the active processes in Windows: Right click the task bar / Task manager, or press simultaneously Control+Alt+Del.

The tab called "Applications" is the listing of the currently open programs, which are usually displayed in the left part of the Windows task bar.

The tab named "Processes" (this is the most useful one) are the currently running system processes, no matter whether they are visible or invisible. We can check how much system memory are using these processes on the right column.

We can temporarily kill these processes (till we reboot the PC) by simply selecting them and clicking "Terminate process". There are some processes that are essential for Windows while others can be safely shutdown. To find out what does each process, you can find out detailed process information (manufacturer, software, possibilities of being a virus or spyware, function, whether it is a mandatory process or not, user comments, etc.) at liutilities.com.

Remove systray icons and processes permanently in Windows

There are several ways to permanently remove system tray icons and system processes (which don't provide a permanent removal option by default), and to prevent them from running again when rebooting the system.

An easy way is to install the free registry cleaner program called Regcleaner. Run the program and in the "Startup List" tab, select and delete the undesired processes.

This way to remove system tray icons and processes does nearly the same (plus a system process backup) as the following way (in which you don't have to install anything), which consists of clicking Start menu / run and then typing msconfig. This will open the System configuration utility. In the "Startup" tab of such menu we have a complete listing of the Windows processes. We should just uncheck the undesired processed, and we are ready to go.

Side note: removing Windows startup processes this way will make the following warning message appear when rebooting the system. It's just Windows information about the user-initiated removal of processes ran at startup.

Just uncheck the "Don't show this warning again..." and click Accept.

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Posted by Dremin

Check server down

Is your web server down? How to check it

Did you ever wonder how to check whether a web server is really down? If you cannot connect your web server, you have to check that the problem is in the web server itself, and not in your Internet connection. Otherwise, you could be just wasting the time of your web hosting support.

Fortunately, down for everyone or just me is a very useful online tool that will quickly perform a server down check.

What to do if a server is just down for you

But, what if the server is only down for you? Don't worry, because that is just not possible. Here are some possible causes:

• You may have a DNS server down, so your system wouldn't be able to resolve the web server Internet address.
• You may be experiencing some local network problem. If your network Internet connection is interrupted, you won't be able to connect any other web server at all.
• The server may be responding, but it could be sending a blank HTML document as the default web page. That may be caused by a bug on your code, but your webserver would pass any ping test, as the server is actually not down.

That's why I suggest you to perform a ping or trace route check of the server, as it will give you just information about whether the server is down or not (getting rid of web browser webpage rendering issues). Here's the example code for Windows:

ping www.yourdomainnamehere.com
tracert www.yourdomainnamehere.com

If your web server has a static IP, try to take note of such IP address, as using an IP address instead of your domain name for pinging purposes will avoid any DNS server down issues.

Domain Name Servers (DNS's) resolve domain names: that is, they translate a domain name such as www.trebleclick.blogspot.com into an IP address like 72.14.221.191. A DNS server failure is easy to identify, as your web browser will stall trying to resolve any new domain name, and you won't be able to connect any web server.

Take into account that, even with your primary and secondary DNS servers down, you may still be able to access access again recently resolved domain names, as there is a DNS cache on your operative system.

I hope these tips will help you telling a web server down from a DNS, routing or specific connection problem!

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Posted by ESV

CSS in email: compatibility list

HTML and CSS in emails: compatibility list of email clients

Probably you are familiar with this common scenario: you create a really well designed e-mail newsletter using your most advanced HTML and CSS skills, and then you find out that your recipient's email client is just breaking the whole email design and layout.

While sticking to a very simple plain text email would do the trick, you should not get rid of every HTML design element of your emails just because some mail clients are not compatible with specific CSS or HTML code. The key is to know which HTML and CSS features work on the main email clients.

This email compatibility list is a very useful resource, as it provides graphic examples of how a sample email would be rendered on popular email clients, and it's constantly updated to take into account the latest compatibility improvements of such e-mail clients.

At the present time, this list shows some interesting conclusions, such as that the Gmail mail client would only read inline CSS: Gmail ignores CSS included inside the head element, and removes CSS classes and ID's from the original HTML of the email.

By the way, if you are looking for a reliable free email client application, I would choose Mozilla Thunderbird.

Is there any HTML or CSS that works on any mail client?

So, how could we create appealing e-mails that would work on any e-mail client? The truth is that currently every main e-mail client supports HTML tables with inline background colors defined.

These tables would admit some background images in many e-mail clients. Images are very powerful when they are used to spice up the email body. But don't rely just on images: use elements that would degrade gracefully, so your HTML email would still be readable in any email client.

With no doubt, CSS is the future of HTML in terms of code maintenance and element positioning. But for sending HTML emails, it could be better to stick to a very simple (yet effective) HTML table based email content.

My advice is to use HTML tables in emails: most email clients will render the results flawlessly. And let's keep an eye on the compatibility list of CSS in email clients: the day of fully CSS based emails could be near.

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Posted by ESV