jQuery is becoming present in more Web 2.0 sites. jQuery slideshows or galleries take a grouping of images and turn it into an flash-like image/photo gallery. Here is a list of top options available for your website’s photo gallery.

Galleria - Galleria is javascript image gallery written as a plugin of jQuery. It uses simple html list to load the images on by one into a larger canvas. The best thing of galleria is that, it can create thumbnails for you. It is very user friendly and can be implemented easily without much knowledge of scripting. Checkout a Galleria Demo

jQuery Multimedia Portfolio - Display your portfolio items in a horizontal gallery view. A very cool jquery plugin. It is Non obstrusive and accessible portfolio supporting multiple media. It supports photos, multimedia content like flv, audio mp3 etc. It can automatically detect extension and display images/snapshots according to it. Here is a quick screen shot. Click on it for demo and download.

Space Gallery - Animate your images and display them as a gallery in space effect much like Apples time machine. These images will look like if they are in 3d space.

jQuery Slider Gallery - Rotate your images in similar effect as on Apple’s website. You can rotate images, product pictures or anything you like.

jQuery jsGallscroll Plugin - jQuery Gallery Scroller (jqGalScroll) takes list of images and creates a smooth scrolling photo gallery scrolling vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The plugin will also create pagination to allow you to flow through your photos.

jQuery Cycle Plugin - The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a lightweight slideshow plugin. Its implementation is based on the InnerFade Plugin by Torsten Baldes, the Slideshow Plugin by Matt Oakes, and the jqShuffle Plugin by Benjamin Sterling. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and many transition effects. It also supports, but does not require, the Metadata Plugin and the Easing Plugin.

EO Gallery - EOGallery is a web animated slideshow gallery maid with jQuery. It only uses basic jQuery functions and Cody Lindley’s Thickbox to display larger pictures. By the way, EOGallery is XHTML 1.0 strict valid and almost CSS valid, it has been tested on Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 6 and works even with non-javascript and/or non-css browsers.

slideViewer - slideViewer checks for the number of images within your list, and dinamically creates a set of links to command (slide) you pictures.

jQuery lightbox plugin - jQuery lightBox plugin is simple, elegant, unobtrusive, no need extra markup and is used to overlay images on the current page through the power and flexibility of jQuery´s selector. LightBox is a plugin for jQuery. It was inspired in Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar.

Galleriffic - A jQuery plugin for rendering fast-performing photo galleries

pirobox -Pirobox is another JS gallery script with the difference hatwrite by Diego Valobra.Take a look at his script,you can see that he used a few tricks to get his goal to create a good looking jQuery gallery.

jQuery Popeye - Popeye generates an inline image gallery from an unordered list of images. The gallery features clever inline image enlargement, i.e. the enlarged image stretches out over the site content without adding a visual overlay of the whole site. It stays fixed with one edge to its original coordinates, so that a sense of cohesiveness is created in the user interface and interaction. Demo

zoomimage - Present you images in stylish way. The links are unobtrusively highjacked to open the images in an inpage popup with drop shadow and border. Demo

Dynamic Image Gallery and Slideshow - This extremely lightweight JavaScript image gallery and slideshow script clocks in under 3kb packed and includes a number of cool features. Demo

GalleryView - display a photo gallery with slideshow functionality. Clicking on a frame will jump to that photo, and the overlay caption for each photo contains links to the full image. Demo

NotesForLightBox - a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

The current functionalities are:
• Rounded corners light box
• Navigation with buttons
• Real slide show with progress bar

GallerificPlus – inspired by Trent Foley’s Gallerific plugin, and Leandro Vieira Pinho’s jQuery LightBox plugin. The concept from the plugin originated from a client project that required a smooth jQuery gallery with lightbox functionality.

We forgot the one on our own chicago website design page. Do you have any plugins to add? Leave your recommendations in the comments below.

Related Articles:

How To: Build a Simple RSS Reader with JQuery

Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins

jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008

Easy jQuery Pull Quotes

jQuery Content Slider Tutorial

jQuery Slide Out Drawer Effect

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/

After a fresh install of WordPress it is essential to complete the following items. This will not only assist you get your blog up and running but help you get the most out of your blog or website.

1. Change the Admin Password and Manage Your Authors

2. Edit Permalinks

3. Upload Your Theme and Activate It

4. Add Your Categories and Change the Default

5. Activate Akismet

6. Install Google XML Sitemaps

7. Install WordPress Database Backup

8. Test Your Blog With Dummy Content

9. Add your RSS feed to Feedburner

10. Activate your Analytics

For more details as to how to do these things check out the Source.

Other Resources:

WordPress Tips + Things You Can Do After Installing WordPress

10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress

The Very First Steps After a Fresh WordPress Install

16 Things To Do After Starting A New WordPress Blog

The Post-Installation WordPress Routine

Post Install To-Do List – 20 Things You Ought To Do

Here at Blueprint Design we have been trying to figure out which WordPress Twitter plugins we should use to integrate our twitter account. Here are the results of our research. Look at the end of this post to see what we picked to use. Please note all of these plugins are compatible up to WordPress 2.7.

1. Twitter Tools - This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Pull your tweets into your blog and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress. Alternative versions by other contributors: Kevin De Mulder: TwitterComments – updates Twitter when a comment is posted on your blog. Jonathan Dingman: Twitter updater with support for tinyurl. Ceritium: Twitter updater that uses short url with your domain name. James Cridland: Bugfix for Twitter updater if it doesn’t work for you.
2. Twitter for WordPress - Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog. Features: Simply, Customizable, Widget ready, Uses WordPress resources (no extra files needed), No options page (yes, it’s a feature), Detects URLs, e-mail address and @username replies, Multiple widgets (Thanks to Michael Feichtinger)
3. Twitter Updater - The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post. You can specify the text for the updates, and also have the option to turn the auto update on/off for the different post actions in the admin panel.
4. Tweetsuite - TweetSuite adds a server side fully-featured TweetBacks service, complete with a Digg-style “Tweet This” button at the top of each post, a “Retweet This” button for each TweetBack, widgets for your sidebar, and the ability to automatically update Twitter with your latest blog entries.The self-explanatory sidebar widgets (you can customize which ones you want to display) include a Recently Tweeted widget, My Last-Tweets widget, Most-Tweeted widget, and My-Favorited Tweets Widget. That’s a lot of widgets, and they all serve very different, but useful purposes for super-tweeters who want to easily display relevant Twitter content to blog visitors. My personal favorite is the Most-Tweeted widget, which works in the same way as standard Popular Posts widgets, displaying your blog entries that get the most Twitter love in your sidebar. Source
5. WP Twitip ID - This plugin takes the pain out of adding another field to your comment form for users to enter their twitter username to be displayed as a link to follow them via their twitter page. WP Twitip ID functionality: Adds an extra field to the comment form for user to enter their twitter username, Echo out the twitter id associated with the comment being displayed, Echo out a html link pointing to the users twitter page using “Click Here To Follow Me On Twitter”, Display link as an image, Ouput just the @ username, Return the twitter id as a variable to be used by php, Display html before the extra field, Display html after the extra field, Add a class name to the extra field
6. Official Twitter Widget - Official Flash or HTML javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter. Available directly through the twitter site.
7. Twitthis - TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
8. Twitt-Twoo - Twitt-Twoo is a simple little plugin that will allow you to update your Twitter status right from your blog’s sidebar. AJAX takes cares of the hard work, and means that your page doens’t even have to reload, allowing for quick and easy status updates.”This is definitely the most aesthetically-pleasing Twitter plugin for WP to date, but it’s a shame I can’t use it as my host is running PHP4 not 5!”
9. Sociable - Sociable is a plugin which adds social media buttons to your posts, and does so easily, and beautifully.
10. Lifestream - Lifestream displays your social feeds and photos much like you would see it on many of the social networking sites. Features: Unlimited number of feeds. Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two. Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code. Customizable display using stylesheets. Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam. Localization ready! (Email us translations) Daily digest available to summarize your activities. Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website. View a live demo of LifeStream.
11. Twitme – Lets you ignore posts in a given category so that if you import posts to a special category so it would not flood Twitter. This new option also allows you to have one category on your blog lets say “Twitter friends” and you could tell Twitme to dont send posts from all the other categorys except those in “Twitter friends”. In that case you would mark all the categories to disallow except the “Twitter friends” category.
12. Twitpress - Submits a user definable tweet to your twitter account notifying any twitter followers or friends that a new blog entry has been published on your blog (or an existing published entry has been edited). Supports inclusion of a permalink to your blog posting in the tweet.
13. Birdfeeder - This plug-in serves one purpose and that is to tweet published posts. It doesn’t do anything other then tweet. It tweets in this format: [your message] [post title] [short url].
14. Tweetbacks - People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
15. MyTwitter - MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter status updates (tweets) on their WordPress site and update their status through the Options page. Includes customization options including number of recent twitters to display, formatting options, and stylesheets. It can be called as a function or used as a widget.
16. TwitURLs - Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted.
17. Tweetroll - A smart badge that shows your Twitter details and who you’re following on Twitter. It shows your friends’ avatars and invites your readers to come and follow you too.
18. NewsTweet – Set a keyword or phrase and NewsTweet constantly pulls twitter posts containing that word or phrase. Useful for bands or anyone with a specific focus for their blog. NewsTweet uses AJAX and the Twitter API so your content stays fresh without the need to refresh the page.
19. SiteTweet – sitetweet allows webmasters to post immediate messages on Twitter about specific behaviors on their site. Usually installed on strategic pages, you can configure sitetweet to send a special message when a user performs a certain action on your site. You can use Twitter’s options for private posts in case you want to control who follows your login.
20. TweetMeme Button – easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.
21. Simple Twitter Link – simply returns a URL – this URL is a link to Twitter with your post/page URL within it. It even uses TinyURL to make the link passed to Twitter even more convenient.
22. Twitter Badge – Official javascript codes that display badges showing what you are posting on Twitter.

WordPress Twitter Plugins We Choose

23. Twitterfeed - Posts your blog updates to your twitter account. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID, provide the URL for your blog RSS feed, and how often to post to Twitter.

24. Twitter Widget Pro - This twitter plugin is a sidebar widget that handles Twitter feeds. It’s true that you could just point and RSS widget at one of the Twitter feeds, but you end up with the whole tweet as a link, @replies don’t function, etc. Twitter Widget Pro properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing, feeds that include friends or just one user, and can even display profile images for the users. It’s set up like the RSS widgets, so you can have as many of as you want on your sidebars.

After long tedious testing here are the plugins we choose. Although there are many solutions like TwitterTools which integrate both the ability to show your tweets in a widget on our sidebar as well as posts from your blog to twitter we started by adding Twitterfeed to our site which is setup and configured from their site. After that since it was already setup we started searching for a plugin just to display our twitter feed. Twitter Widget Pro stood out from the rest for having a rss icon link to the feed as well as a direct title link (shown as “Follow Us On Twitter” on our page) to our twitter page. Installation was quick and simple and there you have it could you ask for anything more. Our needs were fairly simple. The other plugins above in the post are great for more advanced functionality.

Live video streaming site Ustream is releasing an iphone app that lets users watch live video streams from their iphone. Video of the product below.

The application will let users watch any Ustream channel, live, directly from their iPhone. And not only that, users will also see and be able to participate in the live chat around the video as well.

The timing on the application is near perfect with the Obama inauguration coming up on January 20. If you have the application installed you’ll be able to watch it live from anywhere, even if you aren’t in front of your TV or computer.

The world is changing before our eyes.

If you’d like to try out the application before it officially launches, we have a handful of invitations to give away. Just follow the directions below.

Instructions for preview:
1) Plug the iPhone into your computer
2) Wait for the iPhone info to appear in iTunes
3) click on the words “Serial Number” to cause it to change to “Identifier”
4) double-click the identifier number (the long string of characters) and then press cmd-C (Mac) or ctrl-C (Windows) to copy it
5) email that identifier to iphone@ustream.tv so we can build a custom version for that phone using the iPhone SDK

Source

Web design in this day and age can be confusing. Who’s good? Who’s bad? How do I know? What’s the difference between going to a web design studio and going to someone that posted an ad on craigslist for $399? Well we will explain some very important facts to let you know exactly why web site design and development does not cost anywhere from $299-$499.

This will be a comparison of “cheap web design” to “professional web design” and why professionals do not charge $499 and under for a web site and why spending the extra money will be worth it.

What is web design?

Web design is a company or individuals web presence. It can be a great way to generate leads, gain exposure, relay news, start a community, assist a cause and much more. Your web site is a first impression of what you are relaying to the viewer. With this said I can’t help but to think, why waste your time on a cheap sites when if done correctly your site can save you time and money.

Designs for $399 or less

The web is flooded with ads and posts about “cheap web design” or web design at a unrealistically low price. It is important to realize you wouldn’t go to a doctor if he worked out the back of a van. This applies the same for web design. Prices incredibly low as well as quality. Most of these sites consist of straight HTML programming and are designed with no marketing or viewer consideration in mind. Most $399 web ads are web templates (or template resellers) which are pre made web sites which may not be compatible with browsers and you may be sharing the same design with someone else. Read: What’s so bad about web templates? gives a great explanation. The old expression “you get what you pay for” comes to mind. It is also important to know almost all of these sites do not come with a CMS.

The Bad

Here is a list of bad design features that will help you separate the good from the bad.

Examples:

The examples above go against much of what makes a web site effective.

Ask yourself these questions in regards to the web sites above:

• Convey the company’s personality, character or attitude?
• Relate to your clients by conveying a feeling of familiarity and credibility?
• Have association with quality and satisfaction?
• Can I contact the website owner quickly and effectively?
• Is the website communicating news to me in a effective way?

The Good

Now take the same questions from above and apply them to the good examples.

Why is the difference so apparent? There are many examples and variations of web sites out there. This is an extreme compare and contrast. Most of the bad web sites will not look that bad but the question to ask is, “Will it do what I want it to do?”

Professional web designers have process and procedures put in place to assure effective design involving proper research, preparation, conceptualizing, understanding of the clients needs, implementing them correctly and so they are effective. This is why professional web design does not cost $499 and under.

The design process of a professional web designer typically consists of:

1. Gathering Information: They conduct a questionnaire or interview with the client to get the design brief.
2. Research: They conduct research focused on the industry itself, on its history, and on its competitors.
3. Reference: They conduct research into logo designs that have been successful and current styles and trends that are related to the design brief.
4. Sketching & Conceptualizing: They develop the web design concept(s) around the brief and research.
5. Presentation: Showing the concept site based off of all of the information collected and demonstrating how it will all function.
6. Development: Taking the approved concept and developing (or coding) it in to an actually web site.
7. Presentation #2: Showing the developed site based off the first presentation and demonstrating how it all functions.
8. Making The Site Live: Taking the site developed and uploading it to the domain and hosting accounts.

With all that said here are some links to some other sources as to the importance of web design:

Why good website design is important

Why Having a Quality Web Design Matters

Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design

Don’t have a professional web design? Check out our Portfolio and if you like what you see then Contact Us and we can give you a quote for free.

Going through and moderating our comments is a normal thing but recently we noticed something very unusual.

If you keep up with tech news you may remember sometime ago some ex employees of Google formed to start a new search engine to compete with Google called Cuil (pronounced “cool”). After some bad press a couple months following launch we haven’t heard much about them since. So we were moderating some of our comments the other day and stumbled upon 2 different ip address linking 4 times the term “new search engine” on our site going to “http://www.cuil.com/.” From what it looks to me is they hired someone to optimize for the term “new search engine.”

Screenshot below.

Why would they want to optimize for this you ask?

If you go to Google and search, “new search engine” what appeared before (and one article still remains in the #2 spot) was multiple blogs and articles that criticized and was pretty negative towards the new search engine.

So are the ex Googlers of cuil.com using their old employer to leverage the public image of their new site?

What do you think? Comment below.

Update: Cuil is hitting rock bottom

Last week if you noticed in your WordPress you should see a message saying “WordPress 2.7 is available! Please update now.” That is correct, version 2.7 has been released and you can download it here.

Version 2.7 is a major upgrade to WordPress. Here is a list of new features:

• new interface to make it easier to perform the admin tasks
• customization options on the admin screens
• the ability to reply to comments from the dashboard
• embed support for comments threading
• drag and drop support on some sections

The most useful feature enhancement (i believe) is the automatic upgrade. From now when new versions get released all you will be able to “one click install”, and the software will take care of the rest. This make things much easier for upgrading down the road.

Here is a video demonstrating some of the new features that WordPress has to offer.

If we have built your site in WordPress or you have as WordPress blog you would like upgraded contact us to do it for you.

Do you want to see snowing in your wordpress blog too?

Click - Snow Blog effect on your wordpress blog

or

if you are one of our clients contact us here all we’ll set you up for free until march ’09.

also click here to see our the bacolicious version of our site?!

We often develop sites that include static flash galleries, headers, menus, and intros.  It’s often difficult, then, to explain which parts of the site can be changed within WordPress, and which are hard-coded.  This plugin is built to manage the excellent flShow Photo Carousel within the comfort of the WordPress dashboard.

Live example of the Photo Gallery

Download:

flShow Photo Carousel Plugin for WordPress

How To Use:

1. Install the way you would any other WordPress Plugin. Upload the flshow folder to your plugins directory and activate it from the Plugins page.
2. Go to ‘Manage > flShow‘

Creating the Carousel Gallery

Create a Gallery

1. Click “Add New Carousel“, which brings up the Carousel editing interface in a thickbox window.
2. Fill out the information that you want to use. Mostly the Title and the background color.  The rest of the options you can tweak at any time, after you’ve seen how the carousel works by default.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the popup and Click “Choose Images“

Adding Photos to the Carousel

Add Images to the CarouselCreate a Gallery

1. Click “Choose Images” at the bottom of the carousel settings interface
2. In the images interface, you can do the following:
   • Find existing images from your WordPress install
   • Upload a new image for use in the carousel
   • Sort the images that you have in the current image queue by dragging and dropping
3. When you have put all the images in place that you would like to have in your carousel, click the “Preview and Finalize” button
4. If you are happy with your preview, click “Close.” Otherwise, go back and change whatever settings you need to.

Displaying Your Carousel

1. To display the carousel on your site, add the following code to your PHP templates where you want the carousel to appear: <div style="height:200px"><?php flshow( $id ); ?></div>.  You can find the ID on the Manage > flShow page:

Use the ID when including in your templates

Some minor caveats

This plugin uses WordPress’s built-in jQuery library, so there shouldn’t be compatibility issues, no matter which browser you’re running, but it does require WordPress 2.5 or above.  The plugin was tested in Firefox 3, IE7, and Google Chrome.  Also, I would recommend using smaller images that are all roughly the same size in the same carousel.  It results in a better display and faster loading times.  5.1 MegaPixel .jpg files are not recommended .

Support

If you have any issues with the plugin, please start a thread in the WordPress support forums, and tag the thread ‘flShow Manager‘.

Just a few days ago, google announced that they’re entering the browser market, with their own webkit-based browser, Chrome:

Fortunately, being based on webkit, the engine that powers Apple’s Safari browser, it won’t affect the appearance of anyone’s website. According to the comic that they posted to explain the browser, it will hopefully make javascript-powered websites faster, or at least less likely to crash your browser.

At the same time, the browser does seem woefully incomplete. It seems that it was rushed out the door due to leaked details, resulting in a very unfinished product:

The browser ships with no RSS support, which annoys power users like myself, but doesn’t affect most people. The far bigger oversight is that support for opensearch is extremely difficult to use. This means that google is basically bundling their search engine to a browser, leveraging their weight right onto your desktop.

While I understand the instructions about the URL, there’s no way I’m going to manually craft a URL for other search engines, when every other modern browser supports one-click adding with opensearch.

Furthermore, despite Matt Cutts’ Attempts to assuage people’s privacy fears, there’s no denying that google is spying on anything you read, post, or search for in Chrome. Readers of El Reg have noted that the EULA explicitly states that Google claims to own anything you post through their browser:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

h/t 69105

There’s good reason to be afraid of Google violating their own “Do No Evil” Motto. They are claiming the right to republish anything you post in the relative privacy of Facebook, Myspace, or Livejournal. Since the browser doesn’t know what privacy level you’ve chosen, only the content of your post, and the username and password you used to post it.  I’ll be staying far away from this browser until they’ve rethought it.

UPDATE: the first security flaw is out already as well.  Make sure that you click the wrench icon and set your downloads to prompt you where to download (disabled by default) h/t timetheif.

UPDATE 2: According to Ars Technica, Google made a copy/paste error with the EULA. Gizmodo is appropriately skeptical.