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Dotcom-Monitor: Fully Featured Website Monitoring Service

Zack — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:13:54 +0000

We’ve spent a lot of time on our websites, from design, content to SEO. And when we thought everything is ready, they just went down with no hints. It happens, all the time. No matter how good you are as a webmaster. That’s why we need a good website, a good hosting and a good website monitoring service.

Dotcom-Monitor is offering this kind of service, they offer not just uptime monitoring, but also Reporting, Notification and Analysis, everything you need to monitored. With the ServerView Monitoring Service, they can monitor your websites, web applications, FTP, email server, media streaming server and VoIP server. They keep tracks of your server uptime, will notice you right away when it goes down. They show you all data of your website to help you analyze it. It’s quite important when you are running e-business websites or web applications. Application performance monitoring is a must for these kind of websites, or you might lose a lot more, not just money, but potential clients and chances.

Another good feature from Dotcom-Monitor, is the LoadView Monitoring service. It’s a monitoring service and a stress test to your server. It simulates up to 3000 concurrent users, runs from multiple distributed networks and provides you detailed reporting. This will help you to figure out how good your server is, is it enough for your websites. You can decide if you need to extend your server. Beside the stress test, it keeps monitoring the load of your server, and will let you know when it gets high, so that you can do something to low it down before it totally goes down.

Dotcom-Monitor offers five different languages, including France and Chinese. They have pretty cool design of the website, and user friendly panel, you can start with no pain and let it help with your websites right away.

Dotcom-Monitor: Website Monitoring Service

Create Your Own Logo Online

Zack — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:12:18 +0000

I always talk about making your website unique. Use a unique theme, get a special banner, even try to write different from other bloggers. These are the real stuff making your website stand out. As so many websites out there, standing out is quite a top mission for a blogger. That’s why we talk about this topic so often.

Another thing we can do to make our website special is to design a unique logo for it. And use it all through your website.

It’s not that difficult as you might think. A lot of softwares can help you with this. Photoshop is the most popular one, but it’s to expansive for a blogger, who won’t use it too many times and won’t use to many functions of the software. Paint.net is a free choice, it’s a open source software, you can use it for free, but less functions than Photoshop.

And you can also consider creating your logo online. Yes, you can do it online now. LOGASTER is a famous web logo creator. They’ve got 10 years experience in designing, their creator provides many useful features to help create logo online. You can even create a business card online with their creator.

Try it out for Free:

LOGASTER

Free Icons: High Resolution Browser Logos

Customize Your Website

Zack — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:00:50 +0000

More and more websites are been created these days. It’s much more difficult to make your own website to stand out. Of course, the most important thing of a website is always, content. But it’s not the “first” important thing, because visitors are less patient now, they wouldn’t spend 10 seconds to find out how good your content is, if you can’t catch their eye balls at the first place.

How to do that? A professional and customized design. It’s not that hard to get this done nowadays.

If you’re using WordPress like most bloggers, you can find a lot of great themes out there, some of them are even free. Of course, you need to modify those themes to make them special. Or you can hire a theme designer to create a unique theme for you.

Hiring a theme designer is a good choice, another way to get a new design for your website, is a web design company, Calgary Web Design. One of the advantage of this kind of companies, is that they always offer hosting as well, it might save you a lot of time looking for a good hosting company. And they are offering quite competitive price rate now.

If you are looking for web design company, take a look at Web Design Calgary.

Formly: The Form Glamorizer for jQuery

Zack — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:25:18 +0000

Formly makes adding forms to your site a bit more exciting. Easily add style, validation, and a more impressive user interaction with a single function.

Formly is a light little fella. 17kb in total for the full and 14kb for the minified version.

VISIT Formly

DOWNLOAD Formly Full Version

DOWNLOAD Formly Minified Version

Gury: HTML5 Canvas Utility Library

Zack — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:38:56 +0000

Gury is a JavaScript library designed to aid in the creation of HTML5/Canvas applications by providing an easy-to-use chain based interface.

With gury you can create a canvas tag, resize and style it, add renderable objects, animate those objects, and place it anywhere on the page in a single chained expression.

VISIT Gury JavaScript Library

jStat : JavaScript Statistical Library

Zack — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 03:06:20 +0000

jStat is a statistical library written in JavaScript that allows you to perform advanced statistical operations without the need of a dedicated statistical language (i.e. MATLAB or R).

The majority of jStat functions can be used independently of any other libraries. However, the plotting functionality of jStat is based on the jQuery plugin – flot.

VISIT jStat

DOWNLOAD jStat

TinyBox2: JavaScript Modal Windows

Zack — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:52:06 +0000

TinyBox modal box script brings a ton of new features and still clocks in under 5KB. The script now supports iframes and images natively. You can POST with Ajax. Clicking ESC will close the window. Callback functions can be passed for load and close events. You can set CSS IDs to override the default styling.

CSS position can be toggled between fixed and absolute. The mask opacity can be sent. You have full control over window location. And of course there is now a close button out of the box you can toggle.

The script is now executed by passing an object due to the large number of options. There is nothing to initialize, just call the function on whatever mouse or browser event you like.

CHECK OUT TinyBox2 Demo

DOWNLOAD TinyBox2

Interview with Linode VPS Hosting Provider

Zack — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 07:05:23 +0000

Back to January, I’ve written about Linode as a reliable and low cost VPS hosting provider. I got quite a lot of respond from my readers, they want to know more about Linode.

Thus I tried to reach Linode, fortunately, they are willing to share more with us. So I sent out some questions to do a interview with guys from Linode.

Here is the full interview, thanks to Linode for the detailed answers.

1. Why you guys choose VPS as your business? Why not do it like a traditional company, you know, covering shared hosting, dedicated servers and so on.

When Linode started, virtual private servers weren’t being marketed as a mainstream service, so no other hosting companies were offering them to their clients — the two choices for hosting at the time were shared and dedicated. Shared hosting limited the user to software installed by the host and offered little flexibility, and while dedicated servers offered complete administrative control over a system, they were very expensive and were outside the reach of many small site owners and hobbyists that were on limited budgets. Additionally, the resources included with dedicated servers often exceeded the needs of the user and would remain underutilized.

This gave Linode a prime advantage as it allowed us to offer an affordable product, that enabled users to have total control at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated server. As no other hosts were offering such a product at the time, this positioned Linode as the exclusive “go to” company for virtual private servers. Linode has helped define the VPS hosting industry into what it is today, and we are proud to have been able to play such an important part in what is now a thriving market.

2. We’d like to hear your story of starting the company, how did you start it? What kind of problems you were facing? What’s the most important decision you’ve made to make this company success?

Linode was started in 2003 by our founder and CEO, Christopher S. Aker. Tired with the limited control offered with shared hosting, as well as the hefty costs associated with dedicated servers, Christopher embarked on a mission which he felt would revolutionize the hosting industry: to offer a product which empowered users with the flexibility of a dedicated server, at the cost of a shared hosting package. Christopher extensively researched the virtualization platforms available at the time, until finally settling on UML (User-Mode-Linux). UML allowed the resources of an ordinary dedicated server to be split up into segments and distributed to virtual machines, which a user could then deploy their distribution in and begin managing. With the concept conceived and a virtualization platform decided on, Linode was born and the domain “Linode.com” was registered on January 26th, 2003.

While the concept alone would demand the attention of geeks and the technologically savvy, Christopher also wanted Linode to appeal to those with little-to-no prior Linux administration experience, so he began developing a powerful control panel which would give users complete control over their virtual instances: the Linode Platform Manager (LPM), or more commonly known as the “Linode Manager” today. The Linode Manager gave users control over the standard operating controls of a Linode (power on, power off, reboot), but more importantly it introduced new and unseen features such as being able to deploy and delete distributions on the fly, disk management controls, configuration profiles, an out-of-band console (Lish), and more. While these controls benefited seasoned server administrators, they also aided novice users as it gave them the opportunity to try various distributions and configurations.

The initial stages of Linode and its proprietary components took Christopher 6 months to develop. Christopher hit a number of snags during the development process as he had entered into uncharted waters; virtual private servers and automated control panels were almost unheard of at the time, so every line of code and business decision required a lot of thought and planning in order for Linode to be able to work the way Christopher had envisioned it to.

Upon completion of the development phase, Christopher placed an order for his first batch of servers and colocated them into Linode’s first datacenter selection in Dallas, TX which was owned and operated by The Planet (now known as SoftLayer). On the morning of June 16th 2003, Linode officially opened its doors to the public and began trading.

Linode has made a number of significant changes and improvements since June 16th, 2003 — the move from UML to Xen, the expansion to five datacenters across the USA and Europe, a plethora of new features (free resource upgrades, bandwidth pooling, private networks, the Linode Library), and more. After almost 8 proud years in the VPS hosting industry, Linode’s core principals and Christopher’s vision has remained untainted by its success; we will proceed to grow and improve on our services, and will continue to do what we do best: provide kick butt Linux virtual private servers!

3. What do you think about Cloud Computing, while Amazon EC2 is doing such a good job, everyone is talking about cloud computing. Do you have any plan to go Cloud.

We’re always excited to hear about new and emerging technologies and can certainly understand why the cloud computing model has been such a success. While Linode does not currently employ the “per hour” billing scheme that most conventional cloud providers have adapted, Linodes do still operate in a cloud environment in the sense that Linodes are provisioned at the click of a button, are charged by the instance-day with a minimum of a one month prepayment, are completely scalable, and can be migrated between hosts and datacenters. We also offer a robust, fully functional API which allows customers to streamline their Linode deployment process:

- http://www.linode.com/api/

With that said, Linode is certainly interested in the cloud computing concept (what geeks wouldn’t be?), but unfortunately we cannot make any comment as to where we stand with a conventional cloud offering at this time — keep an eye on the blog :)!

4. What’s your blueprint? Do you have some big steps coming soon?

We’re always looking for ways to improve, and definitely have some exciting new features and offerings in the works. Unfortunately this information is still classified and is safely locked away in the Linode vault, but be sure to keep an eye on the Linode Blog for updates:

- http://blog.linode.com

5. What makes Linode different from other hosting company? I am not talking about products, but culture.

When Linode launched in 2003, Christopher had one vision in mind: To offer a reliable product that he himself would love to use. Almost 8 years later, Linode has stayed true to this vision despite its overwhelming success. The people behind the daily operations of Linode are just like you — we’re geeks, bloggers, marketing gurus, and developers. We love what we do, and we feel it is important to listen to the feedback given to us by our valuable customers as this gives us an idea of which direction they would like to see Linode moving in. Since the very beginning, customer satisfaction has been more important to us than the bottom line of our balance sheets which we feel has aided us in our success, as opposed to those entering the hosting industry with the intentions of making a quick buck and moving on. We’re in it for the long haul, and we hope to have the opportunity to continue serving our valuable customers for many more years to come!

Again, thanks to Linode for the interview as well as the great VPS hosting service. We can see the reason why so many people love Linode in these answers.

VISIT Linode.com

Free jQuery Plugin: Easy Image Zoom

Zack — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 03:09:51 +0000

Easy Image Zoom is a jQuery plugin created by Alen. This plugin allow users to see large details of the image while moving cursor over medium sized image.

It’s designed to be lightweight and customizable. you’ll find this very easy to apply to your own websites.

CHECK OUT the demo of Easy Image Zoom jQuery Plugin

DOWNLOAD Easy Image Zoom jQuery Plugin

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin

Zack — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:53:23 +0000

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin is a jQuery Plugin to help you create beautiful subway maps. It’s free, easy to understand, everyone can create a amazing subway map with this tool.

Here is a demo of the pluging.

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin

Waypoints: jQuery Plugin for Scrolling

Zack — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:55:40 +0000

Waypoints is a small jQuery plugin that makes it easy to execute a function whenever you scroll to an element. Waypoints makes a solid base for modern UI patterns that depend on a user’s scroll position on the page.

Waypoints is dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses. It has been tested with jQuery versions 1.4+ in IE6+, FF3+, Safari 4+, and Chrome 6+.

Amplify: A JQuery Component Library for Web Designers

Zack — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:55:24 +0000

Amplify is a set of components designed to solve common web application problems with a simplistic API.

Amplify’s goal is to simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified API for various data sources.

Amplify’s store component handles persistent client-side storage, using standards like localStorage and sessionStorage, but falling back on non-standard implementations for older browsers.

Amplify’s request adds some additional features to jQuery‘s ajax method while abstracting away the underlying data source.

DOWNLOAD Amplify

User Interface Design Framework for Web Designer

Zack — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 05:31:29 +0000

User Interface Design Framework is released by Webalys, including GUI library – Hundreds vector elements for interface design, Minimal UI icons set – 260 vector icons for Illustrator and Styles library – 200 styles to apply in Illustrator.

A free User Interface Design tool for Web Designers

• Design faster wireframes and create better mockup deliverables in Illustrator.
• Design usable application interface with hundreds of common GUI elements : just drop them from Illustrator Panels or pick them in the library files.
• Customize easily the vectors GUI elements to your own needs : you can easily resize, color or tweak their appearance.
• Benefit from a consistent UI elements library made by a web designer expert in application interface design.

DOWNLOAD User Interface Design Framework

Isotope: jQuery Plugin for Flexible & Animated Layouts

Zack — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:08:04 +0000

Isotope is an exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts. You can reveal & hide items with filtering and re–order items with sorting.

The syntax is very simple, but the layouts can be really dynamic and intelligent. And also, there is progressively enhanced for CSS3 transforms and transitions.

However, please note that it is free for non-commercial use only. Commercial use requires purchase of one-time license fee per developer seat.

DOWNLOAD Isotope

Treesaver: JavaScript Framework for Creating Magazine-style Layouts

Zack — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 03:57:07 +0000

Treesaver is a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts that dynamically adapt to a wide variety of browsers and devices. Designers use standards-compliant HTML and CSS for both content and design, no JavaScript programming is required.

Key features and aspects:

Fast and compact: The JavaScript is under 25K gzipped (important for mobile).
Highly compatible: Works with most modern browsers, and degrades gracefully for older browsers (or those with JavaScript disabled).
Liberally licensed: Dual-licensed as MIT and GPL.

The Treesaver JavaScript framework is an open-source project by Treesaver. It is free for all uses and made available under the MIT or GPLv2 licenses.

DOWNLOAD Treesaver

Easy Horizontal Accordion jQuery Plugin

Zack — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 06:59:01 +0000

Easy Accordion plugin will get your definition lists (DTs) and generate a nice and smooth horizontal accordion. You can then decide to make it a timed slideshow or leave it still.

Easy Accordion Plugin keeps the HTML to the minimum, is SEO friendly and fully accessible, uses the CSS rotation to rotate the slide titles (no need for images here!), works in all the major browsers, allows for autoplay, it’s opensource and fully customizable and, what count most, it’s free!

Features:

Easily create a nice and smooth accordion effect
Decide whether or not automatically animate your slider
Insert multiple instances of the accordion in the same page
Set the active slide when the user loads the page
Include or remove the slide number
Text is rotated using CSS properties. No need for images!
Easy Accordion is totally customizable via CSS: change height, width, set borders and paddings, use background images and so on
Accessible and SEO friendly
Slide any kind of content (divs, simple text, images, lists, etc.)
Less than 8KB!
No dependencies at all!

VIEW Easy Accordion Plugin DEMO

DOWNLOAD Easy Accordion Plugin

VISIT Easy Accordion Plugin

Dynamic Unobtrusive Javascript Progress/Percentage Bar

Zack — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 03:04:24 +0000

jsProgressBarHandler is a Javascript based Percentage Bar / Progress Bar, inspired upon JS-code by WebAppers and CSS-code by Bare Naked App. Next to a structural rewrite of the WebAppers code, this javascript progress bar can easily be extended and tweaked just by setting a few parameters.

DOWNLOAD jsProgressBarHandler

VISIT Bram.us

Xinu Returns: Analytics Tool that Helps You Understand Your Website

Zack — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 03:23:55 +0000

Xinu Returns is an analytics tool for webmaster, it checks PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more data for your website, to help you find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.

VISIT Xinu Returns

Spritebox: JavaScript Tool for Sprite Image

Zack — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:36:58 +0000

Spritebox is a WYSIWYG tool to help web designers quickly and easily create CSS classes and IDs from a single sprite image.

It is based on the principle of using the background-postion property to align areas of a sprite image into block elements of a web page.

It was made using a combination of jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5, and it totally free to use.

VISIT Spritebox

Free Icons: Medical Icons Set

Zack — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:59:59 +0000

Medical Icons Set, a set with 60 original medical icons in .png 32 bit in resolutions 32×32px and 128×128px. This set was designed by the user interface design agency Centigrade.

The icons can serve as great in-app icons for desktop or RIAs in the medical domain. With perspective and reflective effects these can be a real stunner on landing pages or in touch screen application menus.

As always, you can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects.

DOWNLOAD Medical Icons Set

[via: Smashing Magazine]