So if you’re looking for support, or if you just have an Idea you would like to see implemented into a plugin or script of ours, head over to the board @ forum.gdsweb.ca.

The plugin is called ‘My Brand Login’ (MBL), and it lets you customize the login and registration page. I’m going to use most of the text from my original post on my personal website (www.krisjaydesigns.com), but I will update it as needed.

MBL lets you Re-Brand and Customize the WordPress Login/Registration Screen on Any site running 2.1 up to 3.0+. The interface is very simple and user friendly, allowing anyone who can click, copy, and paste to very easily and quickly customize/re-style the Login/Registration page to match the current theme of their WordPress powered website.
The plugin also lets you change a few aesthetics in the back-end. Add a BG image, a logo, and it also removes the wordpress footer and version at the bottom of the screen. Have a look below at some screenshots of the interface, and a couple examples of customized login/registration pages.

This plugin is 100% free to download and use for your own needs. You can download this from quite a few places, but the best place would be from the WordPress.org website. I have provided a link to the Informational page about the plugin, and a link to download it from the repository. Each time I make a new upgrade to the plugin, you will be prompted to upgrade. Before you do that I suggest going over to my website (it’s being built), for the MBL plugin at www.mybrandplugin.com to see what has changed, to determain if you really need to upgrade or not. Anyways grab it, or read more about it by following the links below. Oh, and one other thing, if you like it, talk about it and tell other webmasters about it!
Thanks in Advance….Enjoy!


Downloaded from WordPress.org ⤥ 17,437 Times Alone!!

On a different note (still web development related), I was Interviewed by the fine Folks @ Famous Why dot Com (www.famouswhy.com) about the plugin I made called ‘My Brand Login’. They are the same people that awared me my ‘Software Award’ earlier this year for development of ‘MBL’. I suggest you head over to the site and check out my Interview (click here).

That’s all for now…..

Google App Engine for Business:

The Google App Engine has been around for a couple years, but now comes Google App Engine for Business – allowing business to build custom applications and run them in the cloud for greater portability and easier administration. Consider this service a direct competitor to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft’s Azure platform. In addition to the centralized management features (a single administrative console) users will have access to Google API’s in Java or Python, access to a hosted SQL relational database, and some added security with SSL communications on hosted apps. Each application costs $8 per user, per month, with a maximum of $1,000 per month.

AdSense Upgrades:

New AdSense options look to help publishers and developers better target their users. AdSense for search ads only lets publishers include ads on pages and include them in native search results — above, below or beside the results. In the past, publishers could only use AdSense for search within Google results.

AdSense for Ajax solves the problem of serving relevant ads when content of a page changes. When a user is on an Ajax-heavy website, they can now be served changing ads based on the changing context within the page. In the past, new ads were only served when the page was refreshed. As Ajax does not require refreshing the page even when the context of the page changes, relevant ads were a problem.

There’s an added benefit of AdSense for Ajax. From Google, “In addition to the ads refreshing, you might wonder why the subject of the ads changed since the crawlable content on the page didn’t change much when the tab changed. The second benefit of AdSense for Ajax is that it allows you to provide hints about your site’s uncrawlable content with each refresh.”

Google Font API and Directory:

Google’s Font Directory and API are now available, providing “high quality open source Web fonts” for everyone. The fonts are enabled by CSS3 @fontface standard, hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.

Each font is cross-browser compatible, fully searchable and accessible to users with screen readers. Utilizing search-engine friendly fonts is a nice way to separate your website from others and provide a little “flair” for users to enjoy.

Google Wave (Labs):

Wave might have started slow, but Google’s new Wave (Labs) announcement might turn the tide. Wave is now open to businesses, schools and organizations. The focus is on collaboration within organizations. Members of a wave can play back previous developments within the wave and remove the discussion when the project is complete. Also, new extensions (such as maps and voting gadgets) allow for more collaboration, and developers can develop custom extensions within Wave to suit their needs.

More information about Wave is available, as is registration for a webcast that will detail new additions and answer user questions.

WebM:

In addition with other companies, (Mozilla, Brightcove, Skype, Opera and others) Google announced WebM, providing an open, standard video codec that looks to provide high-quality, optimized video under a royalty-free license. It includes:
VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

According to Google, VP8 results in more efficient bandwidth usage (lower costs for publishers) and high-quality video for end users. A developer preview is available at webmproject.org

To see how it works, look at the sidebar of this post and click on the icon bar. To close it, Click the bar again. It shortens your URL to something like: cmin.us/1234 and grabs the Title of the page or post. It then instantly provides links to social media sites with the title and shortURL included, ready to submit. Most of the functions are run from my server, including the cURL used to pick-up the page/post title. Comments Welcome!…. enjoy!

Well the team here at Graphic Dreams are pleased to announce the launch of our new free ShortURL service. We decided to jump on the Social Media type bandwagon. Cmin.us gives you the ability to use custom Keywords in place for your shortened URL. Lets say you have a URL that is 95 characters long and it’s main topic is ‘dogs’, you can go to Cmin.us and shorten your URL to 19 characters using the Keyword ‘dogs’ at the end of your new ShortURL! ex: http://cmin.us/dogs (while availability of keywords are there). We took that part down while we finish developing a WordPress Plugin (if you see a ‘Get The ShortURL’ icon at the bottom left of each post, that’s the WordPress plugin), and a stand alone cut and paste script to add to any php website. What the Plugin and Script will do is link the page URL to cmin.us and give you a ShortURL in one click. Simple, just like a social media icon. We’re just finishing up so watch for it by Monday.

We intend on keeping this service forever, so your links will always be there, ready to do their thing. We’re working on setting up the API for development uses in the near future, but for now we’re just leaving it how we have it. You’ll be sure to notice changes to the website in the upcoming weeks, but rest-asure that everything will be online 24-7. Hope you all go check out this nice new ShortURL. It’s perfect for replacing your long URLs on Twitter, due to their 140 letter limit. Enjoy!

So far, ICANN has received 21 requests for IDN ccTLD(s) representing 11 languages. 13 requests have successfully passed through the “String Evaluation” (second stage) and now are ready for the requesting country/territory to initiate the request for TLD Delegation (the final stage). Last week, the first three have been delegated into the DNS root zone, meaning they are available for use.

Arabic which is among the most highly used languages on the Internet today, has become the first non-Latin script to be used as a IDN ccTLD. The Middle-East has a Internet penetration of just over 20%, and shows big potential. Users in the region will now have easier access to Internet, with the ability to use their primary language for their whole domain name.First IDN ccTLDs Available from ICANN

“Salesforce.com is excited to bring the data services industry into the era of Cloud 2” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com said . “With Jigsaw, we’ll make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes.”

From the Salesforce.com release: The acquisition will combine the power of salesforce.com’s suite of CRM applications and leading enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw’s cloud-based model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data.

“Companies are utilizing crowd-sourced data services in the cloud more than ever because it offers the best quality information,” said Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw. “This is an exciting opportunity for all of us at Jigsaw, and will help us accelerate our ability to bring cloud-based data services to a wider audience.”
SalesForce and Jigsaw – Together At Last

Over 50 percent of the agency executives who participated in the study, indicated that online video was the most effective, with 83 percent saying they were getting more value with video advertising spent in early 2010 than in the previous year (2009). A Huge 94 percent revealed plans to spend more with online video ad campaigns this year than ever before.

Another sign that video advertising has matured in 2010 is the 60 percent + of respondents that said behavioral targeting increased the performance of their vido ad campaigns. The targeting capabilities of video ads were cited as the biggest concern among agency executives in 2009. The biggest concern revealed in this year’s study was maintaining credibility with video ads, with executives saying that videos that start automatically were the biggest detractor. I agree…
Online Video the Best Form of Advertising, Say Agencies

If you scroll dow to the bottom of this post, you will see a box with my picture in it, my bio that i filled out in my profile page, a link to my personal website, and yes…thats right, it’s also displaying my latest tweet! I have combined the function of displaying the author info, and twitter using jQuery and JSON, tossed it in a WordPress Salad, and now I’m serving it up to you to use and abuse

It’s simple to use. Just upload it to your plugins folder, un-zip it, activate and go to your profile edit page. Once you’re at or on your profile edit page you will see a new input title ‘Twitter Username’. Simply enter JUST your username that you use on twitter, fill in your bio info, add you website to the mix and go check out your new ‘Author Tweets’ Box!

The Author Tweets box can be styled easy by going into the authortweets.css file and changing a few things around. Default color scheme will blend with most websites tho…

You can also style the Author Tweets Box in other ways, such as how I have incorporated Cufon-YUI into the box on this website (Graphic Dreams).

Have Fun and Enjoy!!

**This Download is from the WordPress.org Plugin Repo.

⇩ Below is a Working Example of ‘Author Tweets’ ⇩