by Jacob Gube of Six Revisions.

Flash is unparalleled when it comes to providing users a highly rich, memorable, and interactive experience. For developers, nothing matches Flash’s relative ease in allowing them to develop dynamic, complex web-based applications. For a vast majority of users, the required Flash Player plug-in is already installed, making it the most popular choice when it comes to animation and effects on the web.

When should you use Flash?

• When there’s a need for rich, dynamic user interactivity. JavaScript’s ability to provide fluid/smooth effects and interactivity is made easier with frameworks such as script.aculo.us and mootools, but it doesn’t come close to what Flash has to offer in terms of dynamic animations, effects, and interactivity.
• When accessibility is not a high-priority. Flash, unfortunately, is not as accessible when compared to an XHTML based design, not only for assistive technologies such as screen readers, but also for non-traditional browsers such as those found in mobile devices. For example, the Apple iPhone does not currently support Flash.
• When you need to show off your abilities. Flash developers naturally opt for Flash-based designs so that visitors can see their aptitude in designing Flash applications. In this way, Flash is also appropriate for those in similar fields such as web designers, developers, and front-end interaction designers.

When should you use something else?

• When you expect a wide variety of visitors. If your website caters to a niche such as individuals interested in graphics and animation, chances are, they’ll have Flash Player browser plug-in installed and enabled. But if you anticipate a large range of viewers, that last 2% of people who don’t have Flash installed can mean hundreds of visitors not being able to view your website. In addition, many users disable Flash because of Flash-based advertisements.
• When it doesn’t add value or interactivity to a website. Some websites use Flash simply for the sake of using Flash. When it doesn’t compliment the design or enhance the user’s experience, it’s best to use technologies and techniques such as JavaScript and CSS instead.

In this article, I’d like to present 30 outstanding websites that truly showcases the power of Flash and the ingenuity of their developers, as well as to inspire you should you choose to design using Flash.

American Airlines

Prospect Denim

Zikadias

Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab

The Lure Lounge

Audi R8

Deadline Advertising

MaxHaus Virtual

Teh Cafcat

Canon EOS 400D

IKEA - Back to college

TurboChef

AIGA

Suitsupply UK

Starbucks Coffee At Home

Got Character?

IFAW

PiotrowskiMichal.com

Lake Nona

Carbon Studio

Climax Media

Erguvan Platin Evleri

Greenlight Marketing

Imagined Creative

Nokia: Nonstop Living

Hema

Converse

MINIUSA.COM

Bearfootfilms.com

Volkswagen 60 jaar

Some tips on designing with Flash:

• Avoid opening another browser window. Not only is it annoying to the user, but pop-up blockers may suppress your Flash application from opening.
• Don’t ask the user to click a button to enter. It’s unnecessary. Just load your movie without requiring an additional action from your viewers.
• Don’t resize the user’s window. Some designs force the browser to be resized, avoid doing this or you risk frustrating the user.
• Don’t remove the browser’s navigation. Similar to resizing windows, when you remove the controls of a browser (such as the back and forward button), it may frustrate your users.
• Make sure your Flash movie loads quickly. A good time to aim for is less than 5 seconds on a broadband connection — any more and you might find that many of your visitor’s will leave before your application loads.
• Consider having an XHTML version of your Flash site. You can use JavaScript to detect whether the user has Flash, and then serve the appropraite version of your site. Here’s Adobe’s Flash Player Detection Kit. This is not a completely bullet-proof method, so another option is to present the user with a choice upon entering your home page.

Jacob Gube is a web designer/developer and the creator of Six Revisions, a blog that shares useful information and resources for web professionals. To follow Jacob at Six Revisions, subscribe to his feed.

What’s New in 6.1

NetBeans IDE 6.1 is a significant update to NetBeans IDE 6.0 and includes the following changes:

* JavaScript support.
* Spring Framework Support.
* New MySQL support in Database Explorer. This feature allows you to register a MySQL Server, view databases, view, create, and delete databases, easily create and open connections to these databases, and to launch the administration tool for MySQL. This also allows you to easily create NetBeans sample databases so that following tutorials, blogs, and so on is significantly easier.
* Support for Java Beans. You can now view Java Bean patterns in the Navigator and BeanInfo Editor.
* JSF CRUD Generator. With this feature, you can generate a JavaServer Faces CRUD application from JPA entity classes.
* Javadoc Code Completion. Editing of javadoc comments is more convenient with code completion.
* Shareability of projects. This new feature in Java SE, Java Web, and all Java EE project types allows you to create projects that share definitions of libraries. That in turn allows you to create self-contained projects or sets of projects that can easily be built from the command line, on continuous integration servers, and by users of other IDEs without problems.
* Existing infrastructure has been enhanced to support window transparency (on platforms that provide it).
* Javadoc and sources association. Now any JAR item on the project classpath can be associated with its Javadoc and sources too.
* Inspect Members and Hierarchy Windows. Inspect Members and Hierarchy actions now work when the caret in the Java Editor is on a Java class for which there is no source available.
* On Demand Binding Attribute for Visual Web JSF projects.
* Axis2 support for web services.
* SOAP UI integration for Web Service testing and monitoring.
* The integration of the December 2007 through March 2008 bug fixes listed on the following page: http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeans6.0PatchesInfo.

For information about the main development features in NetBeans IDE, see the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Information page.
Supported Technologies

NetBeans IDE 6.1 supports the following technologies and has been tested with the following application servers. If you plan to use versions of JBoss, WebLogic, or Struts other than those explicitly listed, please note that you may encounter unpredictable IDE behavior as a result of the technologies being external interfaces which the project team has little or no control over.

Supported technologies:

* Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0
* JAX-WS 2.1
* Java Persistence (JSR-220)
* JavaServer Faces 1.2 (JSR-127)
* Java Servlet 2.5
* JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.1

* Struts 1.2.9
* Java API for XML-based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC) 1.6
* Java APIs for XML Registries (JAXR) 1.0
* Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.4
* Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.1
* JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.1

Tested application servers:

* Sun Java System Application Server 9.0 (GlassFish V1)
* Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 (GlassFish V2)
* Sun Java System Application Server PE 8.2
* Tomcat 5.5
* Tomcat 6.0
* JBoss 4.0.4
* WebSphere 6.0
* Websphere 6.1
* WebLogic 9.2
* WebLogic 10

Note: If you are using the GlassFish application server, it is recommended that you run GlassFish V2 in order to work with NetBeans IDE 6.1.

Read more http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/61/relnotes.html

Do you own a website? Would you like to know how much it cost for an advertiser to place a link on your website. First of all you need to understand what page rank and link rank are. Usually page rank and link rank are measured from a score of 1 to 10.

In order to have a high page rank you need to have many quality links pointing to your website. It is a good idea to have many links pointing to your website but in order to get a good page rank you need quality links. Google doesn’t shows backward links from pages having PR value lesser than 3. Google has recently stopped displaying all backward links it knows. Webmasters have two general opinions upon those links, which are now displayed as backward links: 1. Google randomly shows backward links. 2. Google shows that backward links, which are considered relevant for this page (relevant means that a page, which contains a link to your site is somehow related to yours in subject (content)).

So which is more important, page rank or link rank. Page rank and link rank are equally important. Google care more about page rank than link rank, while Yahoo & MSN care more about link rank. From my experience I find it is easier to obtain a higher link rank than page rank. I am a webmaster of TDJOBS.net and I realize that obtaining a link rank score of 7 is not hard at all. It can be done by creating many subdomains for the site. For example, TDJOBS.net has more than 200 subdomains and each subdomains represent a separate site. Each site has at least 1 or 2 links pointing back to the main site. So how do you get about 338000 links pointing back to your site. The solution is simple, create a huge site that serve mostly dynamic pages but make sure you direct the crawlers to index all of your pages. You can take a look at TDJOBS.net website by going to http://www.tdjobs.net and you’ll get an idea of what I am talking about. So getting a link rank score of 7 is easy? The answer is yes, you do not have to trade link with other webmasters at all. How long do you have to wait to get 338000 links pointing to your website? If you do what I do, 3 months is the longest you have to wait.

The question is, what if you own a site that has page rank of 7 and link rank of 7? You’re looking at around  $500 to  $1,000 per month the advertiser have to pay you for 1 link placed on the main page of your website. Is that great income? Heck yeah! What if you have 4 customers? You’re looking of  $2,000 easily, residual income too! There are many places on the internet that you can go to and ask them to appraise your website. This will give you a general idea of how much you should charge an advertiser to place a link on your website. Good luck to all of you. I hope this information really help.

WordPress is a simple to use blogging tool. The beauty of WordPress is that it can become so much more with the simple installation of plugins. With a few clicks, WordPress can become a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). Here is a rundown on the top 10 best plugins every blogger should have installed.

Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular Wordpress plugins which every blogger should have installed. Enjoy the list.

Akismet - Simply the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

WP Super Cache - An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

WP-PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily.

WP-PageNavi - A WordPress Plugin that adds more advanced page navigation to WordPress. It does this by adding page number links to your different pages. Using this plugin your readers will be able to jump from the first to the last page and other pages of your blog very easily.

Simple Tags - A plugin does everything related with tagging. With this plugin you can generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry. The tags can be used to search your blog and are picked up by blog search engines like Technorati and can bring in new users.

All in One SEO Pack - Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog, everything you need to get your site optimized for search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps - Simple tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

Wordpress Thread Comment - This Plugin is an enhancement for Wordpress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

FeedBurner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

Wordpress Database Backup - Automated or on-demand backup solution for your wordpress database. Don’t leave home without it!

[via Moonlight Blog]

The demoscene first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, and came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit home computers (the Atari ST and the Amiga). In the early years, demos had a strong connection with software cracking. When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit with a graphical introduction called a “crack intro” (shortened cracktro). Later, the making of intros and standalone demos evolved into a new subculture independent of the software piracy scene.

Prior to the popularity of IBM PC compatibles, most home computers of a given line had relatively little variance in their basic hardware, which made their capabilities practically identical. Therefore, the variations among demos created for one computer line were attributed to programming alone, rather than one computer having better hardware. This created a competitive environment in which demoscene groups would try to outperform each other in creating amazing effects, and often to demonstrate why they felt one machine was better than another (for example Commodore 64 or Amiga versus Atari 800 or ST).

Demo writers went to great lengths to get every last ounce of performance out of their target machine. Where games and application writers were concerned with the stability and functionality of their software, the demo writer was typically interested in how many CPU cycles a routine would consume and, more generally, how best to squeeze great activity onto the screen. Writers went so far as to exploit known hardware errors to produce effects that the manufacturer of the computer had not intended. The perception that the demo scene was going to extremes and charting new territory added to its draw.

Even with modern technology, where much of the effects seen in demos could be replicated in programs like 3D Studio Max, the point of demos are not just the beautiful visuals and music but the abilities of the programmers involved to write code so tight, so efficient, that something might be several megabytes if rendered in a 3D program comes out to less than 100k. So here’s IHC’s favorites from the demo scene of the last few years. These demos are in no particular order, and while we’ve provided Flash video links to each demo, the greatest joy is downloading them (PC only) and giving your graphic cards something fun to chew on.[via I Heart Chaos]

MUMBAI, India —Astrologers were consulted, the gods gave their blessings, the white stallion was ready and delirious fans milled around the marigold-bedecked home. The stage was set for Bollywood’s “wedding of the century.”

Film-crazy India held its breath Friday as two of its biggest stars, the emerald-eyed former Miss World Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan, a romantic hero and son of an Indian cinema legend, celebrated their wedding.

The affair, hyped by Indian media as “the wedding of the century,” was filled with the melodrama so beloved in Bollywood, India’s flamboyant Hindi film industry: secrecy, dance routines and even a suicidal fan who claimed to be the groom’s jilted lover.

Hundreds of fans cheered as Bachchan, wearing a gold and cream turban — his face covered with a traditional veil of white flowers — emerged onto the streets outside his home astride a white stallion, giving his admirers a thumbs-up sign while his friends danced around him.

Bachchan bobbed his head and punched the air with his hands in time to a Bollywood tune played by an accompanying band of red-turbaned musicians.

He then made his way to a huge, flower-filled, air-conditioned tent encircled by gold curtains in the garden adjoining the Bachchan family home — where to the sound of trumpets, drums and clanging cymbals, he and Rai reportedly exchanged garlands and wedding vows.

A super sari
Rai remained hidden inside the barricaded venue, but the Indian media was split down the middle with reports that she either wore a red-and-gold, intricately embroidered sari, or a gold-and-cream creation.

Hundreds of fans lined the roads, climbed trees or scaled buildings, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wedding party.

Despite the intense interest in the fairy tale wedding, details — from the clothes the couple would wear to the guest list — have been shrouded in secrecy. Dozens of police officers kept overeager fans away from the stars.

However, the festivities were marred when a young woman slit her wrists outside the Bachchan home in Mumbai early Friday.

Identifying herself as Jhanvi Kapoor, she said Bachchan had promised to marry her after they met when she was one of the dancers in a promotional music video for a movie “Dus” (”Ten”), in which Bachchan starred two years ago.

“He is not talking to me,” she told reporters. “I want to know why he doesn’t talk to me.”

Arrested for suicide attempt
She was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, then arrested by police for attempting to commit suicide — a crime in India.

“This is a stunt,” said police officer A. Mohite. “She seemed to have done this purely to catch the attention of the media.”

She was later released on bail of 10,000 rupees ($238).

a long time ago, my teacher has told me that I should go to watch the movie”closer” while I was watching another movie of Natalie Portman. Seriously, I pretty appreciate the actress and I think that she’s kind of different from any other actrees (one of the reason is that she graduated from Havard). Anyway. so happy that I finally got a chance to watch it.

At the beginning of the movie, a song sung by Damien Rice suddenly serves as a sorrowful background of the whole story,then the two main actors comes out. Somehow, they fell in love with each other.By the way, the most part that I don’t really satisfied with is no one /nothing preshow the next step of the story. And London, before the movie, I bet that I dislike it.However, from the movie, the emotion hidden in the movie, the sadness, the romance, the abandoness, the love ,the hate, the selfishness,everything seems so serene but amazingly warm.I don’t know why but this is the real feeling for the movie. London is safe, conceal yourself in trillions of people and walking on the street lonking for the one. I mean this is a fantastic natural movie though I don’t really prefer the complex relationship between four of them and some obscene stuff (maybe only to convey some sort of mind or Alice’s characteristics). In all,I like it..really cool one!

Hi guys, most of us are webmasters, site owners.. just want to know what advertisement site do you use to monetize your site? mine is ADSENSE, CLICKSOR and WIDGETBUCKS.. how about yours?I currently do not really monetize my site yet.But I’ve looked through such advertising networks. Other than Adsense, you may want to take a look at text link ads(TLA) and amazon affiliates….The only thing I’ve ever tried is Google AdSense and it wasn’t too profitable due to the size of my sites, so I just dropped ads all together.Hmm.. I don’t rely on ads to earn, but i do freelance design for “pocket money” not for a living yet. ^^Cool.

However, ads can generate quite a substantial amount of revenue if your site is popular enough and you use the right ad service.

There are people for are professional bloggers relying on ads as their monthly income source.Yep. Saw how a few bloggers managed to earn quite a cool sum from just blogging. Knew of a friend who did nothing but clicking on links and he is earning some $4k per month. Good money I would say. But still I am skeptical towards such program.so what do you think guys, which ads are more profiteable, I going to use them tooI dont use any for now but im planning to use bidvertiser, thanks to this ThreadTry Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac Wrote:Try Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac
Thats good. Maybe I should check it out too…

gensephyr Wrote:

Wrote:Try Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac
Thats good. Maybe I should check it out too…
Yeah, a sample is in the bottom of our right sidebox in the front page of the forum, just below the shoutbox have a look

Zac

Wrote:

gensephyr Wrote:

Wrote:Try Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac
Thats good. Maybe I should check it out too…
Yeah, a sample is in the bottom of our right sidebox in the front page of the forum, just below the shoutbox have a look

Zac

I didn’t realize that was Bidvertiser! haha.
I thought that was adsense at first glance. It looks so similar….

gensephyr Wrote:I didn’t realize that was Bidvertiser! haha.
I thought that was adsense at first glance. It looks so similar….
Yeah they are very similar, I don’t know which one copies which

I have also put in a leader board recently, if you view new post you will see it - forumsearch.p…ion=getnew

Zac

Wrote:Try Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac
Bidvertiser pays depend on your traffic, if you got more traffic you’ll be paid more & Vise Versa.

Wrote:Try Bidvertiser, apparently they pay more than adsense and they pay you straight to your paypal account or cheque..

Zac
I had tried Bidvertiser but my experience with them was sour, they didnt cr me properly so i dumped them. Also many adult ads are a part of their inventory which can be embarrassing. Hopefully you will have a better experience than me.

Adsense though it pays lesser is more attractive to me as i can trust it will pay me what’s due to me always. Thats the advantage of working with a big company.

Here are the lists of top 10 seo blunders people make i have collected from other sites, and i will love to share these facts with Hb members.
Please give your valuable feedbacks.

1. Non-Relevant Linkage.
External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engine algorithms and can be considered an endorsement of your site. But if you are being linked to from sites that have no relevance to your content, then that is now considered a negative endorsement and will not raise your ranking in the search engines. Ensure all links to your pages are from relevant sites. Be wary of link builders who acquire links from gambling, pharmaceutical or adult themed sites, especially if your site is not of the same theme. Link building is as much a science as it is an art, one we take very seriously.
2. Untargeted Keywords.
The people who use search engines are ‘normal’ people who are not likely to use words used in advertising brochures. Get to know how your customers ask for your servicesproducts and use these in your content. Often times, actual keyword research will surprise you.
3. Excessive Graphics and Flash Content.
This looks good on a web page, but to search engine crawlers it means little. Search engines are looking for content, keywords, and relevancy to the search terms. By all means have some graphics, but don’t forget the meat. This doesn’t mean Flash designed websites are bad necessarily. In fact, some big businesses do use it. For most webmasters though, Flash sites are best avoided. Unless your Flash designer does high-end websites and knows how to integrate the content and keywords within the Flash, hybrid sites combining Flash headers with HTML content will be a good option.
4. Believing all search engines are the same.
What pleases Yahoo might not necessarily please MSN or Google. Optimize your content, keywords, inbound links, and internal linking structure so that there is something for at least one of the three top search engines.
5. Multiple Search Engine Submissions.
In the very early days of search engines, this technique may have had some success, but now it can lead to slower indexing and rankings. A site with inbound links from other sites will get indexed naturally and search engine submission is not necessary. In fact, multiple submissions may be construed as an attempt to spam the search engines. The top 5 engines account for more than 90% of all activity so it is wise not to ruin your chances of ranking naturally in the search results. (comScore Media Metrix qSearch data, August 2005)
6. Incorrect Use of Title Tags.
Most people consider the title to be for their company name or product. Not so. You must include your most important search phrases within your title tag and if you do want your company name there, keep it for the end. Keep the title tag to less than 65 characters long to avoid the appearance of title tag keyword-stuffing.
7. Use of ‘Black Hat’ techniques.
Techniques such as doorway pages, hidden text, and overstuffing keywords may have had success in the past but now they will earn you penalties and could even get you banned. Avoid them altogether if you are seeking long term success. Some black hat techniques can work on a short term basis, but in the long run prove very costly.
8. Expecting Immediate Results.
SEO is an ongoing process and should be treated as such by your SEO company. Good optimization will involve building good links with quality sites and this takes time.
9. Use of Unethical SEO Consultants.
Beware the consultant that guarantees rankings with no past clients to back it up with or claims of special relationships with search engines. Many such “consultants” or “experts” will probably take your money and run. Choose a reputable SEO consultant, one who will keep in regular contact with progress reports and updates.
10. Decide to do optimization in-house.
Probably possible in the past, but now with ever increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, this is an area best left to an expert. Furthermore, the good SEO experts usually have other income streams from their online marketing activities and a regular paycheck to work full-time simply doesn’t justify their time invested. We’ve yet to meet a good SEO who doesn’t have virtual real estate bringing in a nice chunk of cash.

We’ve certainly seen our share of Alessandra Ambrosio and her Victoria Secret friends half-naked in underwear and lingerie, but now you can see them fully nude in French Photo magazine.

This special issue is celebrating 20 years of Supermodels, and who’s more super than Victoria Secret models Alessandra Ambrosio, Izabel Goulart, Miranda Kerr, Adriana Lima, Karolina Kurkova, and Selita Ebanks.