Creating Flashy Menu

Today We will going to learn how to create a flashy menu using CSS3. This tutorial is for beginners and can be completed fairly quickly.  To see the demo click here.

The HTML

Our HTML document contains an unordered list and each list item is a link with an anchor tag. The span contains the name of the menu item.

1. <ul class=”main-ul”>
2.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Home</span></a></li>
3.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Article</span></a></li>
4.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Blog</span></a></li>
5.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Gallery</span></a></li>
6.      <li><a href=”#”><span>About</span></a></li>
7.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Contact Us</span></a></li>
8.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Alumini</span></a></li>
9.      <li><a href=”#”><span>Portfolio</span></a></li>
10. </ul>

The CSS

Now let’s position menu list items. I am using 25% width for each item, so in each row four menu items can be positioned. I’m aligning text of each list item to center.

1. body{
2.      background: #eee url(../images/white_paperboard.png) repeat top right;
3. }
4. .main-ul li {
5.      float:left;
6.      position:relative;
7.      width:25%;
8.      text-align:center;
9. }

Next let’s position each anchor tag and change text decoration to none. I am using a light gray color background. I am also adding CSS3 transition effects to these elements with a duration of one second.

1. .main-ul li a {
2.      display:block;
3.      padding-bottom:20px;
4.      padding-right:10px;
5.      padding-top:10px;
6.      padding-left:10px;
7.      text-decoration:none;
8.      position: relative;
9.      z-index: 100;
10.      background-color: rgba(164, 164, 164, 0.2);
11.      -webkit-transition: all 1s;
12.      -moz-transition: all 1s;
13.      -o-transition: all 1s;
14.      transition: all 1s;
15. }

I am using ‘Kotta One’ font for span text, normal font size and weight of 20px and 700 respectively. I’ve made the font color for the text in its hover state white.

1. .main-ul li a span{
2.      display:block;
3.      padding-top:10px;
4.      font-weight:700;
5.      font-size: 20px;
6.      color: rgba(120, 120, 120, 0.9);
7.      text-transform:uppercase;
8.      font-family: ‘Kotta One’, serif;
9. }
10. .main-ul li:hover span{
11.      color: #fff;
12. }

Here comes our main part, I have already added transition effect for the anchor tags. Now add hover effects for each anchor tag list item by changing its background color. So when someone hovers over each list menu item it will change background color to a new color. I’m also adding CSS3 transformrotate effects of 3 degrees.

1. .main-ul li:nth-child(1):hover a{
2.      background-color: rgba(175,54,55,0.8);
3.      -moz-transform: rotate(-3deg);
4.      -webkit-transform: rotate(-3deg);
5.      -o-transform: rotate(-3deg);
6.      transform: rotate(-3deg);
7. }

Now repeat the above step for all list items with a new background color of your choice!

1. .main-ul li:nth-child(2):hover a{
2.      background-color: rgba(199, 204, 73, 0.8);
3.      -moz-transform: rotate(-3deg);
4.      -webkit-transform: rotate(-3deg);
5.      -o-transform: rotate(-3deg);
6.      transform: rotate(-3deg);
7. }
8. .main-ul li:nth-child(3):hover a{
9.      background-color: rgba(213, 135, 11, 0.8);
10.      -moz-transform: rotate(3deg);
11.      -webkit-transform: rotate(3deg);
12.      -o-transform: rotate(3deg);
13.      transform: rotate(3deg);
14. }
15. .main-ul li:nth-child(4):hover a{
16.      background-color: rgba(51, 143, 144, 0.8);
17.      -moz-transform: rotate(3deg);
18.      -webkit-transform: rotate(3deg);
19.      -o-transform: rotate(3deg);
20.      transform: rotate(3deg);
21. }
22. .main-ul li:nth-child(5):hover a{
23.      background-color: rgba(117,18,98,0.8);
24.      -moz-transform: rotate(-3deg);
25.      -webkit-transform: rotate(-3deg);
26.      -o-transform: rotate(-3deg);
27.      transform: rotate(-3deg);
28. }
29. .main-ul li:nth-child(6):hover a{
30.      background-color: rgba(33, 136, 215, 0.8);
31.      -moz-transform: rotate(-3deg);
32.      -webkit-transform: rotate(-3deg);
33.      -o-transform: rotate(-3deg);
34.      transform: rotate(-3deg);
35. }
36. .main-ul li:nth-child(7):hover a{
37.      background-color: rgba(109, 109, 109, 0.8);
38.      -moz-transform: rotate(3deg);
39.      -webkit-transform: rotate(3deg);
40.      -o-transform: rotate(3deg);
41.      transform: rotate(3deg);
42. }
43. .main-ul li:nth-child(8):hover a{
44.      background-color: rgba(152, 120, 92, 0.8);
45.      -moz-transform: rotate(3deg);
46.      -webkit-transform: rotate(3deg);
47.      -o-transform: rotate(3deg);
48.      transform: rotate(3deg);
49. }

That’s it, we have accomplished a simple flashy menu, so that when someone hovers over our menu items simultaneously it will change background color and slightly rotate. Thanks for reading!

A Fast and Scalable NoSQL Database Service Designed for Internet Scale Applications

Jan 18, 2012 is a very exciting day as we release Amazon DynamoDB, a fast, highly reliable and cost-effective NoSQL database service designed for internet scale applications. DynamoDB is the result of 15 years of learning in the areas of large scale non-relational databases and cloud services. Several years ago we published a paper on the details of Amazon’s Dynamo technology, which was one of the first non-relational databases developed at Amazon. The original Dynamo design was based on a core set of strong distributed systems principles resulting in an ultra-scalable and highly reliable database system. Amazon DynamoDB, which is a new service, continues to build on these principles, and also builds on our years of experience with running non-relational databases and cloud services, such as Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3, at scale. It is very gratifying to see all of our learning and experience become available to our customers in the form of an easy-to-use managed service.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.

History of NoSQL at Amazon – Dynamo

The Amazon.com ecommerce platform consists of hundreds of decoupled services developed and managed in a decentralized fashion. Each service encapsulates its own data and presents a hardened API for others to use. Most importantly, direct database access to the data from outside its respective service is not allowed. This architectural pattern was a response to the scaling challenges that had challenged Amazon.com through its first 5 years, when direct database access was one of the major bottlenecks in scaling and operating the business. While a service-oriented architecture addressed the problems of a centralized database architecture, each service was still using traditional data management systems. The growth of Amazon’s business meant that many of these services needed more scalable database solutions.

In response, we began to develop a collection of storage and database technologies to address the demanding scalability and reliability requirements of the Amazon.com ecommerce platform. We had been pushing the scalability of commercially available technologies to their limits and finally reached a point where these third party technologies could no longer be used without significant risk. This was not our technology vendors’ fault; Amazon’s scaling needs were beyond the specs for their technologies and we were using them in ways that most of their customers were not. A number of outages at the height of the 2004 holiday shopping season can be traced back to scaling commercial technologies beyond their boundaries.

Dynamo was born out of our need for a highly reliable, ultra-scalable key/value database. This non-relational, or NoSQL, database was targeted at use cases that were core to the Amazon ecommerce operation, such as the shopping cart and session service. Any downtime or performance degradation in these services has an immediate financial impact and their fault-tolerance and performance requirements for their data systems are very strict. These services also require the ability to scale infrastructure incrementally to accommodate growth in request rates or dataset sizes. Another important requirement for Dynamo was predictability. This is not just predictability of median performance and latency, but also at the end of the distribution (the 99.9th percentile), so we could provide acceptable performance for virtually every customer.

To achieve all of these goals, we needed to do groundbreaking work. After the successful launch of the first Dynamo system, we documented our experiences in a paper so others could benefit from them. Since then, several Dynamo clones have been built and the Dynamo paper has been the basis for several other types of distributed databases. This demonstrates that Amazon is not the only company than needs better tools to meet their database needs.

Lessons learned from Amazon’s Dynamo

Dynamo has been in use by a number of core services in the ecommerce platform, and their engineers have been very satisfied by its performance and incremental scalability. However, we never saw much adoption beyond these core services. This was remarkable because although Dynamo was originally built to serve the needs of the shopping cart, its design and implementation were much broader and based on input from many other service architects. As we spoke to many senior engineers and service owners, we saw a clear pattern start to emerge in their explanations of why they didn’t adopt Dynamo more broadly: while Dynamo gave them a system that met their reliability, performance, and scalability needs, it did nothing to reduce the operational complexity of running large database systems. Since they were responsible for running their own Dynamo installations, they had to become experts on the various components running in multiple data centers. Also, they needed to make complex tradeoff decisions between consistency, performance, and reliability. This operational complexity was a barrier that kept them from adopting Dynamo.

During this period, several other systems appeared in the Amazon ecosystem that did meet their requirements for simplified operational complexity, notably Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB. These were built as managed web services that eliminated the operational complexity of managing systems while still providing extremely high durability. Amazon engineers preferred to use these services instead of managing their own databases like Dynamo, even though Dynamo’s functionality was better aligned with their applications’ needs.

With Dynamo we had taken great care to build a system that met the requirements of our engineers. After evaluations, it was often obvious that Dynamo was ideal for many database use cases. But … we learned that engineers found the prospect of running a large software system daunting and instead looked for less ideal design alternatives that freed them from the burden of managing databases and allowed them to focus on their applications.

It became obvious that developers strongly preferred simplicity to fine-grained control as they voted “with their feet” and adopted cloud-based AWS solutions, like Amazon S3 and Amazon SimpleDB, over Dynamo. Dynamo might have been the best technology in the world at the time but it was still software you had to run yourself. And nobody wanted to learn how to do that if they didn’t have to. Ultimately, developers wanted a service.

History of NoSQL at Amazon – SimpleDB

One of the cloud services Amazon developers preferred for their database needs was Amazon SimpleDB. In the 5 years that SimpleDB has been operational, we have learned a lot from its customers.

First and foremost, we have learned that a database service that takes away the operational headache of managing distributed systems is extremely powerful. Customers like SimpleDB’s table interface and its flexible data model. Not having to update their schemas when their systems evolve makes life much easier. However, they most appreciate the fact that SimpleDB just works. It provides multi-data center replication, high availability, and offers rock-solid durability. And yet customers never need to worry about setting up, configuring, or patching their database.

Second, most database workloads do not require the complex query and transaction capabilities of a full-blown relational database. A database service that only presents a table interface with a restricted query set is a very important building block for many developers.

While SimpleDB has been successful and powers the applications of many customers, it has some limitations that customers have consistently asked us to address.

Domain scaling limitations. SimpleDB requires customers to manage their datasets in containers called Domains, which have a finite capacity in terms of storage (10 GB) and request throughput. Although many customers worked around SimpleDB’s scaling limitations by partitioning their workloads over many Domains, this side of SimpleDB is certainly not simple. It also fails to meet the requirement of incremental scalability, something that is critical to many customers looking to adopt a NoSQL solution.

Predictability of Performance. SimpleDB, in keeping with its goal to be simple, indexes all attributes for each item stored in a domain. While this simplifies the customer experience on schema design and provides query flexibility, it has a negative impact on the predictability of performance. For example, every database write needs to update not just the basic record, but also all attribute indices (regardless of whether the customer is using all the indices for querying). Similarly, since the Domain maintains a large number of indices, its working set does not always fit in memory. This impacts the predictability of a Domain’s read latency, particularly as dataset sizes grow.
Consistency. SimpleDB’s original implementation had taken the “eventually consistent” approach to the extreme and presented customers with consistency windows that were up to a second in duration. This meant the system was not intuitive to use and developers used to a more traditional database solution had trouble adapting to it. The SimpleDB team eventually addressed this issue by enabling customers to specify whether a given read operation should be strongly or eventually consistent.

Pricing complexity. SimpleDB introduced a very fine-grained pricing dimension called “Machine Hours.” Although most customers have eventually learned how to predict their costs, it was not really transparent or simple.

Introducing DynamoDB

As we thought about how to address the limitations of SimpleDB and provide 1) the most scalable NoSQL solution available and 2) predictable high performance, we realized our goals could not be met with the SimpleDB APIs. Some SimpleDB operations require that all data for a Domain is on a single server, which prevents us from providing the seamless scalability our customers are demanding. In addition, SimpleDB APIs assume all item attributes are automatically indexed, which limits performance.

We concluded that an ideal solution would combine the best parts of the original Dynamo design (incremental scalability, predictable high performance) with the best parts of SimpleDB (ease of administration of a cloud service, consistency, and a table-based data model that is richer than a pure key-value store). These architectural discussions culminated in Amazon DynamoDB, a new NoSQL service that we are excited to release today.

Amazon DynamoDB is based on the principles of Dynamo, a progenitor of NoSQL, and brings the power of the cloud to the NoSQL database world. It offers customers high-availability, reliability, and incremental scalability, with no limits on dataset size or request throughput for a given table. And it is fast – it runs on the latest in solid-state drive (SSD) technology and incorporates numerous other optimizations to deliver low latency at any scale.

Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that offers the following benefits:

• Managed. DynamoDB frees developers from the headaches of provisioning hardware and software, setting up and configuring a distributed database cluster, and managing ongoing cluster operations. It handles all the complexities of scaling and partitions and re-partitions your data over more machine resources to meet your I/O performance requirements. It also automatically replicates your data across multiple Availability Zones (and automatically re-replicates in the case of disk or node failures) to meet stringent availability and durability requirements. From our experience of running Amazon.com, we know that manageability is a critical requirement. We have seen many job postings from companies using NoSQL products that are looking for NoSQL database engineers to help scale their installations. We know from our Amazon experiences that once these clusters start growing, managing them becomes the same nightmare that running large RDBMS installations was. Because Amazon DynamoDB is a managed service, you won’t need to hire experts to manage your NoSQL installation—your developers can do it themselves.
• Scalable. Amazon DynamoDB is designed to scale the resources dedicated to a table to hundreds or even thousands of servers spread over multiple Availability Zones to meet your storage and throughput requirements. There are no pre-defined limits to the amount of data each table can store. Developers can store and retrieve any amount of data and DynamoDB will spread the data across more servers as the amount of data stored in your table grows.
• Fast. Amazon DynamoDB provides high throughput at very low latency. It is also built on Solid State Drives to help optimize for high performance even at high scale. Moreover, by not indexing all attributes, the cost of read and write operations is low as write operations involve updating only the primary key index thereby reducing the latency of both read and write operations. An application running in EC2 will typically see average service-side latencies in the single-digit millisecond range for a 1KB object. Most importantly, DynamoDB latencies are predictable. Even as datasets grow, latencies remain stable due to the distributed nature of DynamoDB’s data placement and request routing algorithms.
• Durable and Highly Available. Amazon DynamoDB replicates its data over at least 3 different data centers so that the system can continue to operate and serve data even under complex failure scenarios.
• Flexible. Amazon DynamoDB is an extremely flexible system that does not force its users into a particular data model or a particular consistency model. DynamoDB tables do not have a fixed schema but instead allow each data item to have any number of attributes, including multi-valued attributes. Developers can optionally use stronger consistency models when accessing the database, trading off some performance and availability for a simpler model. They can also take advantage of the atomic increment/decrement functionality of DynamoDB for counters.
• Low cost. Amazon DynamoDB’s pricing is simple and predictable: Storage is $1 per GB per month. Requests are priced based on how much capacity is reserved: $0.01 per hour for every 10 units of Write Capacity and $0.01 per hour for every 50 units of Read Capacity. A unit of Read (or Write) Capacity equals one read (or write) per second of capacity for items up to 1KB in size. If you use eventually consistent reads, you can achieve twice as many reads per second for a given amount of Read Capacity. Larger items will require additional throughput capacity.

In the current release, customers will have the choice of using two types of keys for primary index querying: Simple Hash Keys and Composite Hash Key / Range Keys:

Simple Hash Key gives DynamoDB the Distributed Hash Table abstraction. The key is hashed over the different partitions to optimize workload distribution. For more background on this please read the original Dynamo paper.

Composite Hash Key with Range Key allows the developer to create a primary key that is the composite of two attributes, a “hash attribute” and a “range attribute.” When querying against a composite key, the hash attribute needs to be uniquely matched but a range operation can be specified for the range attribute: e.g. all orders from Werner in the past 24 hours, all log entries from server 16 with clients IP addresses on subnet 192.168.1.0

Performance Predictability in DynamoDB

In addition to taking the best ideas of Dynamo and SimpleDB, we have added new functionality to provide even greater performance predictability.

Cloud-based systems have invented solutions to ensure fairness and present their customers with uniform performance, so that no burst load from any customer should adversely impact others. This is a great approach and makes for many happy customers, but often does not give a single customer the ability to ask for higher throughput if they need it.

As satisfied as engineers can be with the simplicity of cloud-based solutions, they would love to specify the request throughput they need and let the system reconfigure itself to meet their requirements. Without this ability, engineers often have to carefully manage caching systems to ensure they can achieve low-latency and predictable performance as their workloads scale. This introduces complexity that takes away some of the simplicity of using cloud-based solutions.

The number of applications that need this type of performance predictability is increasing: online gaming, social graphs applications, online advertising, and real-time analytics to name a few. AWS customers are building increasingly sophisticated applications that could benefit from a database that can give them fast, predictable performance that exactly matches their needs.

Amazon DynamoDB’s answer to this problem is “Provisioned Throughput.” Customers can now specify the request throughput capacity they require for a given table. Behind the scenes, DynamoDB will allocate sufficient resources to the table to predictably achieve this throughput with low-latency performance. Throughput reservations are elastic, so customers can increase or decrease the throughput capacity of a table on-demand using the AWS Management Console or the DynamoDB APIs. CloudWatch metrics enable customers to make informed decisions about the right amount of throughput to dedicate to a particular table. Customers using the service tell us that it enables them to achieve the appropriate amount of control over scaling and performance while maintaining simplicity. Rather than adding server infrastructure and re-partitioning their data, they simply change a value in the management console and DynamoDB takes care of the rest.

Summary

Amazon DynamoDB is designed to maintain predictably high performance and to be highly cost efficient for workloads of any scale, from the smallest to the largest internet-scale applications. You can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that enables 40 million of requests per month free of charge. Additional request capacity is priced at cost-efficiently hourly rates as low as $.01 per hour for 10 units of Write Capacity or 50 strongly consistent units of Read Capacity (if you use eventually consistent reads you can get twice the throughput at the same cost, or the same read throughput at half the cost) Also, replicated solid state disk (SSD) storage is $1 per GB per month. Our low request pricing is designed to meet the needs of typical database workloads that perform large numbers of reads and writes against every GB of data stored.

To learn more about Amazon DynamoDB its functionality, APIs, use cases, and service pricing, please visit the detail page at aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB and also the Developer Guide. I am excited to see the years of experience with systems such as Amazon Dynamo result in an innovative database service that can be broadly used by all our customers.

TechModi made it in the top 15 providers

TM_Elance

Techmodi made it at rank 11th into the top 11 Service Providers out of 29,187   registered providers on Elance across the Globe.

Techmodi Rank 11th on Elance

TechModi made it in the top 15 providers

TM_Elance

Techmodi made it at rank 15th into the top 15 Service Providers out of 29,187   registered providers on Elance across the Globe.

Techmodi Rank 15th on Elance

How to generate a thumbnail for a YouTube video.

In order to generate a thumbnail for a YouTube video follow the steps below…….. Well The good news is that you don’t actually have to generate a thumbnail, YouTube actually has several waiting for you:

For eg  if you want to see thethumbnails for :- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq9YSBlo0A8 OR http://www.youtube.com/embed/aq9YSBlo0A8

Here are the images in a couple sizes and frames, note the video id is embedded in the URL:

• http://img.youtube.com/vi/aq9YSBlo0A8/0.jpg
• http://img.youtube.com/vi/aq9YSBlo0A8/1.jpg
• http://img.youtube.com/vi/aq9YSBlo0A8/2.jpg

An easy way to embed the thumbnails in your sidebar would be to enter the image URL manually as a custom field, then customize your theme to display the custom field if it exists.

There is a YouTube thumbnail plugin for WordPress, but I don’t believe it does what I described above. There’s also a jQuery plugin to do the same.

 

 

Google Search Tips and Tricks

 

1. The best way to begin searching harder with Google is by clicking the Advanced Search link.

2. This lets you search for exact phrases, “all these words”, or one of the specified keywords by entering search terms into the appropriate box.

3. You can also define how many results you want on the page, what language and what file type you’re looking for, all with menus.

4. Advanced Search lets you type in a Top Level Domain (like .co.uk) in the “Search within site of domain” box to restrict results.

5. And you can click the “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more” link to access more advanced features.

6. Save time – most of these advanced features are also available in Google’s front page search box, as command line parameters.

7. Google’s main search invisibly combines search terms with the Boolean construct “AND”. When you enter smoke fire – it looks for smoke AND fire.

8. To make Google search for smoke or fire, just type smoke OR fire

9. Instead of OR you can type the | symbol, like this: smoke | fire

10. Boolean connectors like AND and OR are case sensitive. They must be upper case.

11. Search for a specific term, then one keyword OR another by grouping them with parentheses, like this: water (smoke OR fire)

12. To look for phrases, put them in quotes: “there’s no smoke without fire”

13. Synonym search looks for words that mean similar things. Use the tilde symbol before your keyword, like this: ~eggplant

14. Exclude specific key words with the minus operator. new pram -ebay excludes all results from eBay.

15. Common words, like I, and, then and if are ignored by Google. These are called “stop words”.

16. The plus operator makes sure stop words are included. Like: fish +and chips

17. If a stop word is included in a phrase between quote marks as a phrase, the word is searched for.

18. You can also ask Google to fill in a blank. Try: Christopher Columbus discovered *

19. Search for a numerical range using the numrange operator. For example, search for Sony TV between £300 and £500 with the string Sony TV £300..£500

20. Google recognises 13 main file types through advanced search, including all Microsoft Office Document types, Lotus, PostScript, Shockwave Flash and plain text files.

21. Search for any filetype directly using the modifier filetype:[filetype extension]. For example: soccer filetype:pdf

22. Exclude entire file types, using the same Boolean syntax we used to exclude key words earlier: rugby -filetype:doc

23, In fact, you can combine any Boolean search operators, as long as your syntax is correct. An example: “sausage and mash” -onions filetype:doc

24. Google has some very powerful, hidden search parameters, too. For example “intitle” only searches page titles. Try intitle:herbs

25. If you’re looking for files rather than pages – give index of as the intitle: parameter. It helps you find web and FTP directories.

26. The modifier inurl only searches the web address of a page: give inurl:spices a go.

27. Find live webcams by searching for: inurl:view/view.shtml

28. The modifier inanchor is very specific, only finding results in text used in page links.

29. Want to know how many links there are to a site? Try link:sitename – for example link:www.mozilla.org

30. Similarly, you can find pages that Google thinks are related in content, using the related: modifier. Use it like this: related:www.microsoft.com

31. The modifier info:site_name returns information about the specified page.

32. Alternatively, do a normal search then click the “Similar Pages” link next to a result.

33. Specify a site to search with the site: modifier – like this: search tips site:www.techradar.com

34. The above tip works with directory sites like http://www.dmoz.org and dynamically generated sites.

35. Access Google Directory – a database of handpicked and rated sites – at directory.google.com

36. The Boolean operators intitle and inurl work in Google directory, as does OR.

37. Use the site: modifier when searching Google Images, at images.google.com. For example: dvd recorder site:www.amazon.co.uk

38. Similar, using “site:.com” will only return results from .com domains.

39. Google News (news.google.com) has its own Boolean parameters. For example “intext” pulls terms from the body of a story.

40. If you use the operator “source:” in Google News, you can pick specific archives. For example: heather mills source:daily_mail

41. Using the “location:” filter enables you to return news from a chosen country. location:uk for example.

42. Similarly, Google Blogsearch (blogsearch.google.com) has its own syntax. You can search for a blog title, for example, using inblogtitle:<keyword>

43. The general search engine can get very specific indeed. Try movie:<name of film> to look for movie reviews.

44. The modifier film: works just as well!

45. Enter showtimes and Google will prompt you for your postcode. Enter it and it’ll tell you when and where local films are showing.

46. For a dedicated film search page, go to http://www.google.co.uk/movies

47. If you ticked “Remember this Location” when you searched for show times, the next time you can enter the name of a current film instead.

48. Google really likes movies. Try typing director: The Dark Knight into the main search box.

49. For cast lists, try cast: name_of_film

50. The modifier music: followed by a band, song or album returns music reviews.

51. Try searching for weather London – you’ll get a full 4-day forecast.

52. There’s also a built-in dictionary. Try define:<word> in the search box.

53. Google stores the content of old sites. You can search this cache direct with the syntax keyword cache:site_url

54. Alternatively, enter cache:site_url into Google’s search box to be taken direct to the stored site.

55. No calculator handy? Use Google’s built in features. Try typing 12*15 and hitting “Google Search”.

56. Google’s calculator converts measurements and understands natural language. Type in 14 stones in kilos, for example.

57. It does currency conversion too. Try 200 pounds in euros

58. If you know the currency code you can type 200 GBP in EUR instead for more reliable results.

59. And temperature! Just type: 98 f to c to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade.

60. Want to know how clever Google really is? Type 2476 in roman numerals, then hit “Google Search”…

61. You can personalise your Google experience by creating a Google account. Go to http://www.google.com/account/ then click “Create Account”.

62. With a Google account there are lots more extras available. You’ll get a free Gmail email account for one…

63. With your Google account, you can also personalise your front page. Click “iGoogle” to add blog and site feeds.

64. Click “Add a Tab” in iGoogle to add custom tabs. Google automatically populates them with suitable site suggestions.

65. iGoogle allows you to theme your page too. Click “Select Theme” to change the default look.

66. Some iGoogle themes change with time…”Sweet Dreams” is a theme that turns from day to night as you browse

67. Click “More” under “Try something new” to access a full list of Google sites and new features.

68. “Custom Search” enables you to create a branded Google search for your own site.

69. An active, useful service missing from the list is “Personalised Search” – but you can access it via http://www.google.com/psearch when you’re logged in.

70. This page lists searches you have recently made – and is divided into categories. Clicking “pause” stops Google from recording your history.

71. Click “Trends” to see the sites you visit most, the terms you enter most often and links you’ve clicked on!

72. Personalised Search also includes a bookmark facility – which enables you to save bookmarks online and access them from anywhere.

73. You can add bookmarks or access your bookmarks using the iGoogle Bookmarks gadget.

74. Did you know you can search within your returned results? Scroll down to the bottom of the search results page to find the link.

75. Search locally by appending your postcode to the end of query. For example Indian food BA1 2BW finds restaurants in Bath, with addresses and phone numbers!

76. Looking for a map? Just add map to the end of your query, like this: Leeds map

77. Google finds images just as easily and lists them at the top, when you add image to the end of your search.

78. Google Image Search recognises faces… add &imgtype=face to the end of the returned URL in the location bar, then hit enter to filter out pictures that aren’t people.

79. Keeping an eye on stocks? Type stocks: followed by market ticker for the company and Google returns the data from Google Finance.

80. Enter the carrier and flight number in Google’s main search box to return flight tracking information.

81. What time is it? Find out anywhere by typing time then the name of a place.

82. You may have noticed Google suggests alternate spellings for search terms – that’s the built in spell checker!

83. You can invoke the spell checker directly by using spell: followed by your keyword.

84. Click “I’m Feeling Lucky” to be taken straight to the first page Google finds for your keyword.

85. Enter a statistics-based query like population of Britain into Google, and it will show you the answer at the top of its results.

86. If your search has none-English results, click “Translate this Page” to see it in English.

87. You can search foreign sites specifically by clicking “Language Tools”, then choosing which countries sites to translate your query to.

88. Other features on the language tools page include a translator for blocks of text you can type or cut and paste.

89. There’s also a box that you can enter a direct URL into, translating to the chosen language.

90. Near the language tools link, you’ll see the “Search Preferences”. This handy page is full of secret functionality.

91. You can specify which languages Google returns results in, ticking as many (or few) boxes as you like.

92. Google’s Safe Search protects you from explicit sexual content. You can choose to filter results more stringently or switch it off completely.

93. Google’s default of 10 results a page can be increased to up to 100 in Search Preferences, too.

94. You can also set Google to open your search results in a new window.

95. Want to see what others are searching for or improve your page rank? Go to http://www.google.com/zeitgeist

96. Another useful, experimental search can be found at http://www.google.com/trends – where you can find the hottest search terms.

97. To compare the performance of two or more terms, enter them into the trends search box separated by commas.

98. Fancy searching Google in Klingon? Go to http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon

99. Perhaps the Swedish chef from the muppets is your role model instead? Check http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork

100. Type answer to life, the universe and everything into Google. You may be surprised by the result…

How to stretch a background image?

This article provides HTML code to enable you to stretch a background image. s text went beyond the boundaries of the window, the background image was ended and white space was found. This updated and more functional coding is the work of a coder called _Aerospace_Eng_. All kudos and honors go to him.

The trick to stretching an image in the background is to not have the image in the background. Instead, it is placed on the webpage (like any other image) and everything else is layered on top of it using css.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”&gt;
<html>
<head>
<title>Background to fit screen</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta http-equiv=”Imagetoolbar” content=”no”>

<style type=”text/css”>
/* pushes the page to the full capacity of the viewing area */
html {height:100%;}
body {height:100%; margin:0; padding:0;}
/* prepares the background image to full capacity of the viewing area */
#bg {position:fixed; top:0; left:0; width:100%; height:100%;}
/* places the content ontop of the background image */
#content {position:relative; z-index:1;}
</style>
<!–[if IE 6]>
<style type=”text/css”>
/* some css fixes for IE browsers */
html {overflow-y:hidden;}
body {overflow-y:auto;}
#bg {position:absolute; z-index:-1;}
#content {position:static;}
</style>
<![endif]–>
</head>

<body>
<div id=”bg”><img src=”yourimage.jpg” width=”100%” height=”100%” alt=”"></div>
<div id=”content”><p>Enter a ton of text or whatever here.</p></div>
</body>
</html>

test it out… click here for example.

Note : as always, if you are stretching an image into a size that is not the original, the image itself may become distorted or blurry.

Testing Google AdSense on a web page – the right way while testing your under development sites/project

Regular AdSense Code Example
To test AdSense ads on your pages, all you have to do is insert one line in the regular AdSense javascript code!
Let’s say your AdSense code generally looks like this:
Generic Code Example:

ADD: google_adtest
The first step is to add a line to that code; we will add the google_adtest variable to the code:
Generic Code Example:
google_adtest = “on”;
AdSense Code for TESTING
So there you have it, AdSense code for you to test your web designs and test layouts! Once you’ve made the necessary changes your test AdSense ad code may look a lot like this:
Generic Code Example:

When I began testing and designing the layout of the web pages, I wanted to preview different AdSense ad units on the various layouts, especially the wider ad formats I have not used anywhere else on my existing web sites.

I was particularly interested in the Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) ad format since it’s also one of the few formats through which image ads are also available which you can check at :-

https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AdFormats.html?hl=en_US&gsessionid=m9VWR1u24mPcFynE4ogDmA

Please contact us for future queries or comments :- contactus@techmodi.com

Web Design and Development Criteria!

Now days, web development has raised a rapid evolution, but very few achieve the true business with development standards. The reason behind this lacking is the inability to successfully delineate web criteria. These criteria are core for web development. Portfolio is the best way to analyze the experience and perfect of the web development company.

As you get satisfied with portfolio the next factor that is the core for the development is the coding quality. The code quality, code reusability and optimized codes are the main streams of sound website. Use of multithreaded applications, good code logic generates a leading edge website. Many minor factors such as web standards, HTML validates, use of external CSS files, image and graphic optimization and more. Beyond HTML, the development practices also include features like interactive flash components, secure payment gateways, shopping carts, contact form, request form or a blog.

One more factor that is content management (CMS), helpful when your website need updates now and then. It enables your website to update every time with less expense for paying web developer.

The next important factor is the browser compatibility assessment with respect to website. The code quality must work with different operating system or browsers to explore the use of website to all types of users. Code must be developed to permit multiple platforms to access and use the website. Along with browser compatibility assessment, code security is also very important and it is judged based on the technologies used to guarantee that hackers are unable to gain unauthorized access to the website. The hackers can use the website maliciously so the scripting must be very secure and the code should not have any vulnerability with all escort records and sales secure.

With these major factors, gaining customers satisfaction by resolving timely arising technical issues simultaneously with code development is also important. Always create an administrator interface to allow changes need to done on database information.

The last few factors include website maintenance and search engine optimization practices. Inquire all search engine optimization methods in your website to make it search engine friendly. Search engine optimization techniques helps to increase the traffic and business to website which is the ultimate goal of every website. It’s always a good professional practice to give the customer’s free maintenance service for some time. This helps customer as well as the developer to check the website performance with respect to functionalities, technical issues, database performance and other compatibilities.

These development standards creates a website that are surely be perfect from all perceptions. However, the criteria listed above will also help to evaluate a trustworthy website development company for your project.

Techmodi’s web design and development team has an experience of designing and developing website by strictly following all the mentioned web design and development standards. The day by day successful launch of such standards website has added a raising graph to Techmodi’s portfolio.