A good, skilled web site developer can be an effective tool for the growth of your business. It makes your business exist on the internet. This can be done if you hire a professional web site developer to make your website look appealing and effective.

Steps to select an efficient web site developer

• Always make a research work on website development to make you acquainted with the fundamental language.
• Always decide on the work you would like your web site developer to do.
• Decide whether you require a web site designer or a developer.
• Compare the probable candidates and what are they skilled in.
• Search the web and check out the sites that grabs your attention.
• Ask your developer about any recent project of theirs.
• Ask proposals from each probable candidate.
• Select your developer to develop your web site.

( Read more )

I love Picasaa. Here are five reasons you should use, as well as tips. They are listed in no particular order.

1. Picasa Photo Viewer is a quick and Beautiful

Picasa's Photo Viewer provides a nice alternative to the default Windows Photo Viewer. It pops up the image a nice smooth animation and gives you some options that appear in the picture. It'sa very aesthetically pleasing way to view the photos, and doesn't have to use the other part of Picasa! After Picasa is installed, just go to the Start menu, go to Picasa 3, and then click Set Picasa Photo Viewer.

( Read more )

Ubuntu makes it easy to enable automatic login if you're using a login manager such as GDM. I was recently setting up a minimal Ubuntu 9.10 system with an LXDE desktop and no GDM. Here#8217;s how I enabled automatic login.
Note: This was tested on Ubuntu 9.10. Previous versions of Ubuntu require different procedures because of changes to the way Ubuntu boots.
Open /etc/init/tty1.conf as root:

sudo nano /etc/init/tty1.conf

Change the last line of this file to (where USERNAME is the username of the user you want to log in):

exec /bin/login -f USERNAME < /dev/tty1 > /dev/tty1 2>#038;1

Reboot, and the user you chose should be logged in automatically after boot. If something goes wrong, you can switch to a different TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and log in normally.
If you want this user to be logged into a graphical environment instead of just a shell, there#8217;s more work to be done. Open your user#8217;s .bashrc file:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following to the end of the file:

if [ $(tty) == "/dev/tty1" ]; then<br /> startx<br /> fi

This code will start X (the graphical environment) whenever the user logs in on TTY1. You can add more code after startx that will be executed if the user logs out of X.

[via tombuntu]

Today, finally install Ubuntu 9.10. I've only to update the system for several hours, but everything seems to work smoothly.
II used my usual technique to install the new version of Ubuntu. I'm using a separate home and root partition. To use a custom installer Ubuntu partition and converted small partition using the new ext4 file system and use the old boot partition as the new boot partition. Setup has finished in less than nine minutes. Before leaving the live CD, opened a file browser (Alt-F2 and «gksu nautilus») to remove the old configuration files (files and folders from the period in your home directory). With the exception of a few applications I don't want to have to reconfigure, I moved the old config files in the backup location. This allows me to start new applications and application configuration, without having to backup and restore my data.
Ubuntu 9.10 is out for a while now, so surely everyone knows what's new. I'll just mention a few things I've found setting up the new system.

The default theme (and especially the icons) are much improved in Ubuntu 9.10. But I'm not a fan of orange so I installed the elementary theme (just the GTK and icon themes). I'm getting a warning that I don't have the right theme engine installed, but I like how it looks so I just ignored it.
The first thing I noticed after installing the Nvidia drivers and getting Compiz running was how moving windows around looked jerky. I reapplied my settings from Make Compiz Run Smoothly and Without Tearing to fix Compiz's refresh frequency and now it's back to being smooth.
I'm using Chrome for web browsing now. Before the upgrade I was using the daily builds of Chromium. I used Google's bookmark sync to save my bookmarks, but couldn't restore them because the official release of Chrome lacks the sync feature. I couldn't find a way to get at the bookmarks online (why isn't this integrated with Google Bookmarks?)(update: A commenter points out that bookmarks are available in Google Docs), so I copied .config/chromium/Default/Bookmarks from my backed up configuration folder to the new Chrome configuration at ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Bookmarks.
I installed Ubuntu Restricted Extras as usual to install Flash, Java, web fonts, and media codecs. For some reason this didn't install the Java plugin. I installed 'sun-java6-plugin' separately to fix this.
After installing the latest version of GNOME Do I was pleased to find that it can now open my home folder. This bug (I think it was actually in Nautilus) has been annoying me for ages.
I added the new Wine PPA to get the latest versions of Wine. Trying to install the 'wine' package failed with a «unresolvable dependencies» error. Installing wine1.2 instead worked (all 'wine' should do is install wine1.2 anyways). There's a forum thread about this issue.
Ubuntu 9.10 has a little mail icon near the notification area called Indicator Applet. I'm using web-based mail and instant messaging, so the Evolution and Empathy integration aren't useful for me. I am using a utility called Gmail Notifier which integrates with Indicator Applet and Ubuntu's notification system. When I get a new email it pops up one of Ubuntu's fancy notifications and lights up the mail icon.

[via tombuntu]

Article writers are submitting their articles to lots of article directories to supply publishers free content and to provide themselves with a selling tool for their website. As someone interested in obtaining good content for my websites and blogs, I review masses of articles submitted every day for possible inclusion in my blogs.

I have the enjoyment of both reading and publishing quality articles, and the unlucky task of declining those that don't meet site standards.

I have spotted many mistakes by writers that wind themselves up with an 'article denied'. It can be unlucky as the articles having have rich content, but minor issues will end up in a refusal. Let's have a look at some of the basic techniques you can guarantee that your article gets licensed and submitted to the article catalog.

One - Unused article Content. One of the most significant things is to make certain your article is completely unique to the article list. Article directories are searching for new text. Don't submit copied articles.

Two - Select a descriptive title. With writing a completely unique article, select a title that describes your content well and targets your article keywords. Some titles of articles I receive will include only 1 or 2 words. Be as precise and detailed as possible. Choose a title that may draw your reader in! Another crucial thing to notice is a title marked in all capital letters is generally scowled on by article directories.

Three - Format your article correctly. Many article directories don't like the use of hard breaks. Hard breaks should only be used for paragraphs. Also, focus on what the article index needs as far as coding goes. The secret is to make it easy on your reader to read the article. A formatted article also portrays professionalism and quality. Part of professionalism and quality is to use the spell check. A poorly spelled article will end up in a refusal and a delay in getting your article broadcast.

Four - Length. It's important before you even think about submitting your article to an article catalog to be certain your article is the suitable length. It's a safe presumption the article must be at least five hundred words. In the middle of making sure your article is a good length, don't spam the article with rubbish.

Five - Keywords. Do ensure you select appropriate keywords that apply to your article. Keywords are critical for your article. Keywords make allowance for your article to be found by users looking for those words in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Keywords are crucial for gaining maximum exposure for your article.

Together with these 5 elements, take some time to read the submission guidelines for the article catalog. This could appear like a particularly apparent principle, but I don't have the feeling many follow it. Generally the submission tenets are not lengthy. The elements above are pretty much standard for gaining an inclusion into an article catalog, but it is always wise to read the site rules so you are certain to meet the article index's standards.

The question “what problems will I have when migrating to the cloud” gets asked often enough. If by cloud you mean Amazon EC2, then from a technical perspective there isn’t much that changes. The biggest thing that changes is just how you pay your bill.

Having said that, there’s still a few potential gotchas:

1. There are no Virtual IP addresses. Most High Availability tools (like MMM or DRBD+Heartbeat)
   work on the principal of having a floating IP address which is used for the application to connect to the current master. With EC2, you can’t do this.
2. There’s no customization of the memory. The maximum amount of memory you can have is 15GB, so some users with larger working sets may find this a limitation. If you look at the Dell online store, it costs $2094 to upgrade an R900 from 4G memory to 64G (or $4378 to upgrade to 128G) which justifies that some problems are best solved by just throwing memory at them. With EC2, you can’t do this.
3. Even the largest instance types have slow disks. Related to the point above – you can’t change the disks either. Both software RAID striping the internal disks on an extra large EC2 instance or using striped EBS volumes is still going to be slower than a good RAID 10 controller with a battery backed write cache.

If you can live with these three things, then hopefully your migration should work smoothly. If you can’t free yourself from these limitations, then perhaps you should either look at a cloud hosting provider that can host non-virtualized servers for you in the same data center, or hold tight for the moment.

[Morgan via www.mysqlperformanceblog.com]

It is not easy for a new web developer to get clients for whom he can show off his debut of work. However uneasy, it doesn’t mean that there is no way to Rome. The following ideas to get the first client may be inspiring your new job to work better in market.

1. List the names of everyone you know. Try to get at least 100 names on the list. In order to get these names readable, you can use any techniques convenient for you, such as including the full name, nickname, profession, address, phone numbers, interest, organs, and may be social clubs also. The target audience of people could be your own relatives on the family tree given, neighbors, colleagues at work, your previous college mates and school mates, people who play the same hobbies with you, people at the place you have regular worship, and many more. To be more obvious, don’t forget to put down some particular characteristics and physical appearance like red-haired, good-humored, the skinny, Mr. Fatty, and so on. Some details might be sensitive to tell to person. That’s why you just keep these characteristics and physical appearances secret in your note book.
Soon after you have done these names listing, you can start to call them one by one in order to let them you are really doing at the moment. If possible, ask for recommending your service to any fellows they have got. Asking to these people about other counterparts in the same business which is just started recently will be useful as well. In case of getting bad response from an individual contact, try to cover this annoyance with another two or more people to introduce your profession. Doing listing step and socialization of your current business will the primary cornerstones where in need people might call you soon for carrying out some projects of web developing.

2. Local businesses are more feasible to reach than others. Get to know about them through their websites. Observe the performance, layout, structures, and eve traffics of their websites and put down the report obviously. Prepare an offering service email while attaching these few page report of your observations and send to them. Manage to set up a meeting face to face to discuss about your ideas on developing their websites. We cannot deny that this might be voluntary work at the beginning. It is the price to pay for as a new web developer. Somehow, be confident of what you harvest and thereby you can reap good values of devoted efforts.

3. Borrowing the idea from David Frey, you can take benefits from the available information provided by Yellow Pages. There are hundreds of names from which you can decide the prospective ones to bid. Since the writing on Yellow Pages looks very small, blow up 2-3 times bigger than the original fonts to make it more readable. Afterwards, circle the names of competitors you might have on these Yellow Pages sheets especially for your most potential clients to be. Write down a sheet of letter to your competitors saying that you would like to greatly help carry out one company’s project. State in your letter that the project would be for the development of company’s business while hoping that they were not one of the competitors who bid the same project.

It comes to a turn to reach a few names that you consider potential companies to offer you current service of web developing. If possible, arrange a meeting with them wherever convenient to discuss and explore more about your business.

These three tips are definitely cheap to carry out as the first move. The way will not always be as smooth as planned usually. No problem for this fact. Your determination to be a professional web developer will be appreciated in time by the people as soon as you begin to do the three steps above. Keep moving to make a success!

“The new zone is always challenging for everybody”. This sentence might be an exact impression that I can say about my new profession as a Project Manager. Having 10 year experience in software programming and development, I’m not new actually in a professional world of company businesses. Approaching my second year of project manager, I’m still considered still green for this position. Never mind. It is not an obstacle for me anyway to share what I had learned from this job during my first days. I would like to share about tools, processes, principles, and best practices that were proven useful to support the position as a project manager. Those elements may not be an absolute model by which everybody can apply effectively for their different situation of work. Yet, my personal experience would be an enriching idea from which individual project manager could take one or two inspiring lessons to carry out their jobs.

My first debut as a project manager was begun by a question on how to decide on the best method to carry out my projects successfully. Consulting companies came to me with the suggestion of applying their powerful method to bring a success for my project. I wasn’t really assured that the advice would help much as there is no definite method of success that works for different forms of projects. Finally, I decide to neglect the suggestions and tried to find my own method of making a project a success instead.

Perfect planning was my first concern to set up besides several factors that I thought they would help contribute to the success of project management. A perfect plan, in my opinion at that time, would bring a good direction of the project. Yet, the plan given was still away from what my developers understood about the project. I missed an importance of goal setting that signified principal ground of working with the developers on the same track of success. An idea of perfect plan eventually left nothing but a waste of energy to my project.

Being challenged to work together with a few developers, I got to realize that project team are the soul of a project success. They need the best conditions whereby they can focus on jobs and carry out well the tasks given on schedule. The best conditions that enable comfort nuance of work exactly. Since then, I knew that project management is not simply about the accuracy of minds and perfectness of plan on paper. It is more about how to work in team with a clear cut direction and comfort environment to bring a success for a project.

In conclusion of my brief experience to be a project manager, the following lesson might be useful and valuable

“Leave to me everything that makes you difficult to carry out this project. I will handle it. So that, you don’t need to worry anymore”

It must be interesting to make money while becoming a college student.

As college students have sparse schedule of lectures, they have a chance to use up their leisure time possible to be a freelancer. Yet, both academic activities and professional freelance work have to be managed correspondingly to make sure that each runs on the expected track. Time management for college students is not hard to plan, but quite challenging in practice. In this regard, the following steps on becoming a college freelancer might be helpful to follow.

 

Step 1: Summer is a good moment to get started

This step applies for freelancing novices who cannot get a client immediately. It’s common to happen. Even if you don’t have any previous portfolio, summer will be a good moment when you can practice producing quality samples of work to attract any potential clients of yours. You have three months at least during summer. Don’t feel sorry for being unable to spend time together with fellows for having fun. However, you are just about to start harvesting you prosperous-freelance tree in this summer. The following things are worth preparing instead of your sorry:

1. Build up your own website. You can ask for some help, if you cannot do website building by yourselves.
2. Post your best portfolios. Regard this step as your voluntary work in order to build up your freelance profile upon the client’s image.
3. Simple management of freelance job is important, bookkeeping especially.
4. Market yourself to clients as well as you can.
5. Decide on the tasks that you can possibly carry out during school year.

 

Step 2: Class Schedule First

Schedule is always important to help manage our activities run smoothly. Good schedule can prevent from clashing time between classes and freelance task from clients. Make sure that you have put down wall your classes, related academic activities, as well as the due dates of freelance tasks on the same calendar. It is much easier to know exactly whole plans you have got to do in a week or month. Thereby, you can keep track due dates of your freelance tasks while being assured that you will not miss any class at college. The big college days like final test or exam can be made free of client’s task to work out. You can focus more on making good score at college still. Additionally, if you were involved within social organs with a few regular agendas, you would have to write them down on the calendar.

 

Step 3: Equip yourself sufficiently

Not all colleges provide enough facility like computer for students at campus. Even if, some do so, several up-to-date software and programme are not yet available. Most of colleges and schools ban any commercial-oriented use of campus facilities by the students. In fact, computer is the only weapon to get the client’s order done on due time, especially freelance writers, web developers, and IT-related jobs. It is a good choice to invest your extra cash to procure such equipment for the sake of your own easiness to carry out the freelance tasks. You can use own computer as you please to earn some dollars from freelancing.

 

Step 4: Focus on long term gigs if possible

Freelancing normally takes the rest of time that college students have after their fulltime studies at campus. If you decide to work as a freelancer while having fulltime schools, it means you have to minimize extra activities out there besides the two. Since finding a new project after another usually takes time, focus on the long term gigs possible spanning for months. You may be selective to decide on working for a short term project but clearly affordable to accomplish. Having long term gigs will be much easier to manage in terms of scheduling and psychological comfort while focusing at the same time on your studies.

 

Step 5: Keep your Students Status covered

College students are somewhat considered as entry-level freelancers no matter the quality of your work usually. If you college students status is known by the employing company, you will face such a lower price of payment. The worse scenario will be repeated rejection from certain companies who do not have an interest to employ college freelancers. Therefore, keep your status covered. Avoid putting any facts about your fulltime activities by which your companies or clients can know more about your personal data. Simply let them know about the quality of your work to get the tasks given done very well.

 

[via freelanceswitch.com]

The following are some of the many cool NetBeans IDE 6.0 keyboard shortcuts that no programmer will be able to do without, once you know they're there. Not all of these are new in 6.0, some were there before, but deserve to be highlighted because often they're overlooked: Move/copy up/down. Press Ctrl-Shift-Up and the current selection is copied to the lines right above the current selection. Press Alt instead of Ctrl and it is moved instead of copied. Press Down instead of Up and the lines of code will be copied below the current selection, as below: Inplace rename. If you want to change a variable, method, or other item, of which more than one are used in your code, press Ctrl-R, and you will see that all instances of the item turn blue at the same time, as shown below. Now, when you change the selected item, all the other instances change at the same time, until you press Escape, at which point the inplace rename mode comes to an end.

( Read more )