Windows 7 Screenshot
Windows 7 has really made up for the mistakes made in Vista and is quickly winning back the hearts of consumers. This is before it has even gone on sale. Well apparently the wait is coming to and end in October, well 22nd of October to be exact, Microsoft will put Windows 7 up for sale allowing the masses to move to the latest flagship OS from software giant Microsoft.
We have not heard anything official about the launch date but some industry leaders have all confirmed this. Will keep you up to date.
Browser Demographics
Internet Explorer has been the standard web browser for many years now. Only due to the fact that all the Microsoft OS’s come standard with it on them and users don’t know the benefits of other browsers which includes useability and security.
However most internet users are slowly getting educated on what is cool and what is the right internet browsers to use or should we say should not use.
Aparty from IE being a web designers/developers nightmare it also has had a history of security breaches and holes that have left many Microsoft OS using computers full of those irratating things called viruses.
Well, we would all be glad to know that at the current rate of decline, IE should be less of a worry at 2021. Awesome! Not quite but it is a start, and as Microsoft betters there IE engine it might just be accepted by more people including a few of the web savvy developers or designers.
Also with news of Microsoft looking to trash IE for a new web browser on a new engine we may just have a change of heart towards the browser we all seem to love to hate.
Gatorpeeps Peep This
Tx Daily has just launched the Peep This plugin for WordPress. This plugin is a very useful social tool that allows your blog readers to send notifications to their Gatorpeeps accounts about the post by a simple click of a button!
This is the support page for the Peep This plugin. To download it, visit this page.
Please use the comment form below to let us know what your support query is or if you have any comments.
WordPress Logo
WordPress has always been great because of how easily you can extend the free software. With the large community backing this Open Source project there are now a fair number of plugins that will do an array of things to be both a benefit to you, your visitors and of course those potential visitors we all desperately seek.
Here is a list of WordPress plugins we recommend that you use on your blog.
Headspace 2 is one of the best and definintely one of the most important WordPress plugins around. It sorts out a lot of the simple SEO functions as well as giving you a lot of extra functionality with built in page and site wide modules.
Page specific features:
Site wide features:
There is also a cool feature to import data from many of the other plugins used to improve on SEO such as UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior), SEO Title tags, All-in-one SEO, Jerome’s Keywords and Simple Tagging to name but a few.
This is a highly recommended plugin to anyone who cares about SEO, who doesn’t?
Sitemaps should be used on every site which is this plugins core functionality. Having to update your websites sitemap everytime you publish a post will literally become a pain in the ass and that is what Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress removes entirely (the pain that is).
Apart from having to create the sitemap.xml once there is no actual work required from you and the sitemap is updated every time a new post is created.
Another cool feature is that is ties into the Popularity Contest plugin and will assign the relevant priority to popular posts.
This Redirection plugin is perfect for managing 301 redirects, 404 error pages and generally neaten up any loose ends.
It is also great if you need to redirect posts from an old site or have changed your WordPress directory.
Features:
.htaccess files.htacces filesSEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. This make sure that the important keywords in the URL are kept and the unimportant words removed.
Cross linking posts has quickly become very popular with in blogosphere and SEO Smart Links is a plugin that automates this for you. You have a few options to use that allows you to decide on which posts are linked to each other.
Features:
These are definately some of the most important WordPress SEO plugins and it would be beneficial to have them installed from the outset. However it is still not to late to optimize your blog and install all of these plugins giving older posts a slightly better optimization and making all the new posts optimized for best success.
Please note: this does not mean that your website will jump to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) but it definately make a difference.
Ask any web designer about IE (Internet Explorer) specifically IE 6 and you will most likely hear a cringe followed by a grunt and then a few words that we cannot mention on here. Internet Explorer is Microsoft’s web browser (if you didn’t know, you may be that lucky) and it has caused head aches to many web designers and developers including myself.
The biggest problem with IE and maybe with Microsoft as well is that they would rather set some sort of standard even though the rest of the World is using another one that is working very well. In IE 6 this is very apparent and when you design a website, 99% of the time, it will not display the same as any other one of the famous browsers out there such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari and funnily enough its replacement IE 7 (get that for a joke).
So now when you design a site you have to split it into 3 phases.
As you can see Microsoft has made a balls up with the versions and as with their operating systems they seems to lack the consistency of building up from a platform and would rather try to create “cool” new features that try and blow their consumers away (fail).
With the release of so many competitve web browsers with faster engines, enhanced features and with some even having the ability to extend the capabilities to allow for more features through plugins, Microsoft are loosing many users and are frantically trying to plug the leak up.
I must admit, they have done a good job with the latest release and I was very happy to find out the emulation feature which allows you to force IE 8 to behave like an older version, brilliant! Make it behave like IE 7, design a website for IE 7 and display messages to the users who are so far behind times that they are still using IE 6.
IE 8 also features a far more standards compliant engine, not totally but still much closer.
As soon as I heard news of Microsoft developing an all new web browser it struck me that they had done it again. They had repeated the mess up in the Vista Operation System and were looking to pull a Windows 7 out of the bag which would get the world talking and maybe bring a few people back to the software Giant.
These are only rumours and I cannot even give you a name for it but at least it is good news especially because there is talk of them using the same engine that Chrome and Safari run on. That would be awesome!
jQuery Logo
Tx Solutions and Tx Daily both support and use the jQuery Library. This allows Tx Solutions to easily deploy cool new functionality on any of the websites we push out.
jQuery is a JavaScript Library with many features so that creating feature rich websites becomes a breeze and can be deployed quickly and easily.
jQuery simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions which were all considered tedious tasks which sometimes took days to complete.
It is pretty easy to see why it is a good idea to use jQuery. It allows us to easily deploy awesome functionality quickly and effectly. With today’s competitive market in the web design and development field having a library like this allows us to launch improved functionality without loosing design and development time which is key to staying ahead of the competition.
jQuery contains many features as well as conforms and sets many standards. It also boasts to be one of the most effecient and one of the faster JavaScript libraries which makes it one of the best out there.
Some of the features found in the jQuery library:
Using jQuery is very simple and is just a matter of downloading the library and including into all the pages you wish to use the library.
Once you have downloaded, move it to a location on there server (I like to make a folder in my website’s directory called ‘js’ and I put all my JavaScript files in there).
Add this line into the ‘<head>’ section of your web page:
[html]
[/html]
Now you have the ability to use the full power of jQuery.
These are the websites that we think will be useful to you
