Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

How to Build a Successful Blog Business is a straight forward guide to building a publishing business online that covers everything from choosing a niche to hiring staff, registering a business to selling it, finding traffic to monetizing it. This is an essential read for web entrepreneurs and online publishers.

Collis is a web veteran with a wealth of experience and an easy to read style. He has founded sites such as the Tuts+ network, the Envato Marketplaces, FreelanceSwitch and AppStorm which combined serve up over 50 million pageviews a month.

In How to Build a Successful Blog Business Collis shares tips from his years of operating kick ass blogs, and reveals stats, graphs, revenue figures and inside details from three real world case studies.

Nowhere else will you be able to find information like this. It costs $39 for Ebook, $47 for Paperback Copy. You can always view a sample of the book here first. I strongly recommend this book to everyone who wants to build a successful blog business.

Source: How to Build a Successful Blog Business

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SmashingMagazine has just released Free Full Layered Facebook GUI PSD Kit. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. As usual, the kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions.

The kit brings the Facebook vector icon and logo. Also, since the focus of this resource are the UI elements, it brings a main window with the header, menu and the chat window for you to set up your realistic mock-ups. Plus all the modal components, comment boxes, buttons, message boxes, tabs, etc. All the components are full layered, built using vectors and blending options, so that scaling and editing the objects will not be a problem. The theme is released under Creative Commons. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/23/free-facebook-gui…
License: Creative Commons License

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Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of PayPal? I long have been fascinated by the extraordinary achievement from the ex-Paypal team and wonder about the reasons behind their success. In the past, mass media tried to answer this question several times but still couldn’t give us a clear answer.

Some of the past Paypal employees answering this question on Quora. After all, they should be the only ones who can tell people the inside stories. You can check the highlights of their answers within the article compiled by Primitus.

Source: Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups…

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It has been well said by someone,

“If you wake up at a different time, and that too in a different place… could you wake up as a different person?”

And what purpose does this quote serves here?
Then let me give a brief on this. This is the Age of the Internet. And as we are well aware of the fact that its use has cut all the boundaries and now, everything in this world is accessible at a single click. For instance, if you running a business website and the site is accessed in a different place, far away from the native roots, at a different time and by an alien person. Then, who would be telling that person about your business, more importantly how would you create that one ever lasting impression. You cannot afford to “wake up as a different person or identity” for different people every time.

Then, who gives you this power of creating that that visual communication between the visitor and you, that serves as an extension of your business?
The answer is the LOGO of your company. (more…)

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Nick La was trying to style CSS3 border-radius to image element and he realized that Firefox doesn’t display border-radius on images. Then he figured a way to work around it – wrap a span tag around with the original image as a background-image.

And also, Darcy Clarke has written a piece of  jQuery code which does the magic tag wrapping automatically. You can view the tutorial on CSS3 Rounded Image With jQuery.

Source: CSS3 Rounded Image with jQuery

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Alex Marandon has written a comprehensive guide about How to build a web widget (using jQuery). It covers only techniques which are specific to web widgets so you should already be familiar with JavaScript, jQuery and web development if you want to follow easily.

The interesting points will be: ensure the widget’s code doesn’t accidentally mess up with the rest of the page, dynamically load external CSS and JavaScript files, bypass browsers’ single-origin policy using JSONP.

Source: http://alexmarandon.com/articles/web_widget_jquery/

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At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users.

Pingdom has published an article: Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site, which takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/

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“Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than initiating them”

This quote becomes quite contradictory in its own terms when it comes to the web designing world. Trends hold a lot of importance when when it comes to incorporating any structure, layout, design, or even a single graphic to a website.

Technology changes with each click of the mouse. Every day, at every single click, a new trend or technology emerges, which changes web design trends. It undergoes a continuous and a very fast pace.

The web world of designs is going more humane, aesthetic, and functional in appeal. As the web industry is fickle, more and more designs trends are on their full pace. Sole web presence doesn’t really work. Incorporation of interactive and attractive designs in a website was, is and will always remain important and thus won’t hamper the new emerging trends.

The best way to communicate any idea in the world of web design is a good and a subtle straight-forward design. And it acts as an icing on the cake, when a website is launched with a creative and unique layouts. It does not stop at having a great content, the entire layout and how it has been structured, decides its readability and influence on the reader. (more…)

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Every new Apple mobile device and every new Mac — along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser — supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. These web standards are open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient. They allow web designers and developers to create advanced graphics, typography, animations, and transitions.

Apple has demonstrated how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do. You can also visit Safari Dev Center for more information about HTML5 and to see how you can add effects like these to your website.

Source: http://www.apple.com/html5/

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Google Chrome is designed to be fast in every possible way: It’s quick to start up from your desktop, loads web pages in a snap, and runs complex web applications fast. And Chrome’s browser window is streamlined, clean and simple. And also, Extensions are a great way to add more features and functionality to the browser.

Now, we have got a list of Featured Google Chrome Extensions for Web Developers. Complement Google Chrome’s developer tools with extensions, to make web development faster and more efficient. Edit HTML, test your pages on various screen resolutions, improve the performance of your apps and more — all directly from the browser.

Source: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/featured/web_dev

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