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Exploring the Software and Techniques Behind Facebook

Exploring the Software and Techniques Behind Facebook: "

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.

facebook-backend

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

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Top 15 SEO Blogs To Follow If You Want To Brush Up Your SEO Knowledge

Top 15 SEO Blogs To Follow If You Want To Brush Up Your SEO Knowledge: "

For all we know, Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is used for obtaining the right keywords when we search for something on the internet. But only few of us know is that SEO is used in obtaining rankings for a site under relevant keyword phrases.

SEO has several uses not only in business, but also in making research at school, or at work. Admit it, if this was not invented, you would really be having difficulties in searching and of course, a good SEO means, you won’t be having difficulties and the saves you time looking for what you want.

Following are some of SEO blogs that I consider in the top 15 of my list. And after you go through with them, the more you will appreciate about SEOs.

Seomoz

Seomoz is a website that offer tons of SEO tools and information. Some of the tools are free, and some of them require premium subscription. Their SEO blog is updated frequently and you will always find quality articles over there.

Seomoz

Seobook

SEO Book is not only a blogging site, but also offers certain training programs, not only to web professionals, but also to marketing professors. It also offers exclusive community forum as a value added service. Try this out!

Seobook

Small Business Search Marketing

This Small Business Search Marketing site is designed for small businesses that want to compete with big businesses in terms of advertisements and promotions of their products and services at low costs. So if you’re one of those beginners, this is really helpful to you.

Small Business Search Marketing

Bruce Clay Inc

Bruce Clay Inc., offers different kinds of SEO services such as trainings and consulting services. It caters not only to small and medium businesses, but also to large multi-national companies. You can check this one out to find out more about this site.

Bruce Clay Inc

TopRank

Top Rank Online Marketing Blog has introduced search engine marketing and optimization since December 2003, together with other digital marketing and public relations topics. This site has been promoting and giving tips for certain SEO topics that can help you in improving your own businesses and can compete with other competitors.

TopRank

SEOchat

SEO chat has forums and chat tools, that will guide you for more information how to configure your websites and learn new ways in configuring your website. From this, you can also interact and join with the forums that you are interested in.

SEOchat

Cre8pc

This site is not only in specializing SEOs, but is also relating it to other website-related informations that will optimize and improve your website. This is a very useful tool so check this out!

Cre8pc

SEO by the sea

In SEO by the sea website, not only this offers Search Engine Optimization services, but also Internet Marketing, Consulting and Research services. If you want to improve and make your website look professional, this website is the one that you need! So try it!

SEO by the sea

Mr-seo

This is one of the best Search Engine Optimization websites that will help you in improving your website. It offers articles, tips, and strategies of online marketing. You really have to see this!

Mr-seo

Phoenixrealm

Phoenixrealm is not only an SEO informative website but also a web design news for begginners and intermediate web designers. In this website, you will find informative and useful tips and informations for Search Engine Optimizations that will be very useful for you.

Phoenixrealm

Neuromarketing

This is one unique website where not only does it talk about web marketing, but also about sciences, particularly brain research and ethical dilemmas. Check this out and see for yourself!

Neuromarketing

Best SEO Blog

Best SEO Blog is a latest search engine marketing website with new tactics and techniques in making your website marketable. This website has great authors who have been writing articles about Search Engine Optimizations. See it for yourself!

Best SEO Blog

Quantum SEO Labs

Quantum SEO Labs is a simple website for Search Engine Optimization for serious webmasters and designers. When you open this website, you will notice that it talks more about business, and when we say business, that includes marketing your website and making profit out of it, right?

Quantum SEO Labs

Search Engine Roundtable

With Search Engine Roundtable, you will find the most interesting topics about Search Engine Marketing that will help you save time in looking for what you really want to find. See for yourself and you would know that this is one of the best SEO blogs you’ll ever know of!

Search Engine Roundtable

Traffick

Traffick’s first name was “PortalHub” and as it grew to reinvent, it changed its name to “Traffick”. This started as a hobby only and became a more useful website helping businesses to earn more profit and be competitive in the search engine market.

Traffick

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50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers: "

Being a web designer is not easy. Not only do we need to have a good understanding about visual design, typography, information architecture, psychology and a plethora of other disciplines; in our work, we need to take care of so many details, so that our job becomes more and more time-consuming, requiring dozens of tools, attention span and an effective workflow for beautiful, timely and functional results.

And this is where small time-savers become handy. Be it a handy checklist, batch installer, dummy image generator or converter from Excel spreadsheet to HTML — all these things can save us a couple of minutes every day, making our work easier and more efficient. And this is why we keep collecting them for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Whether you like lists or not: this one will probably help you find those little nuggets out there that will help you avoid headaches and stress. Below we present useful time-savers for web designers.

You may want to subcribe to Smashing Magazine’s E-Mail Newsletter (32,600 subscribers) to keep updated about new useful tools, techniques and resources. The newsletter is sent out once every two weeks.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Time-Savers For Web Designers

LaunchList This tool helps you review important items before the big launch. By default, the tool provides 28 items to be checked, but it also allows you to add custom items to the list. Each item can be commented on or crossed out. Once you’re done, you can send the report along with project’s details to multiple recipients via email. Alternatives: Ultimate Website Launch Checklist and Paul Boag’s The Ultimate Website Prelaunch Checklist.

Launch in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Pencil Project: Sketching and Prototyping with Firefox Pencil is an open source GUI prototyping tool. It contains built-in stencils for diagrams and prototyping, on-screen text editing with rich text support as well as standard drawing operations. Works in Firefox 3.5+.

Useful-tool-212 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Zootool Zootool is a bookmarking website and tool for collecting images, documents, links and videos from anywhere on the Web. A bookmarklet allows you to collect items quickly and easily. You can then tag and organize your saved items in Zootool’s back end. You can also integrate Zootool with Tumblr, Twitter, Delicious and FriendFeed to share what you find. Screenshot via MacStories.

Tools-154 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Bounce A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website. The tool allows you to make notes, write feedback in an overlay of every site and then share your notes with friends.

Useful-tool-220 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Ninite Batch Installer Ninite lets you pick your favorite software from among an extensive list (Web browsers, messaging, media, images, documents, security, runtimes, file sharing, utilities, compression, developer tools and more), creates a batch installer for them and then installs them for you automatically. Alternative: Allmyapps allows you to bundle your favourite applications, install them in a single click and reinstall them whenever you need to.

Handy-004 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Support Details When in doubt, send your customers to this tool. Their data will be automatically read out of the browser (including Flash version, operating system, cookies, JavaScript status, screen resolution, browser size and more) and can be copied, sent directly to you via email or saved.

Supportdetails in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

MugTug’s Darkroom When you need to modify a picture but don’t have your favorite software on hand, you can use the all-in-one image processor MugTug’s Darkroom which was created for photographers. You are able to adjust levels, white balance, exposure, contrast and saturation and apply a few photographic effects. In addition, Darkroom allows to upload pictures from Picasa and Flickr. Alternatives: Pixlr and Sumo Paint.

Handy-005 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Visual Website Optimizer Visual Website Optimizer is undoubtedly the best A/B, split and multivariate testing software ever created by mankind.

Tools-151 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Keyonary This site a nice little application for finding shortcuts in Mac OS X, Photoshop and so on. Currently, more than 250 Photoshop shortcuts have been added. Simply type the name of application in the search box, and it spits out a long shortcut list.

Tools-143 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

gridr buildrrr This generators allows you to choose the grid for your layout, preview it online and generate the CSS code right away.

Tools-145 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Instant Blueprint – Create a web project framework in seconds. Instant Blueprint allows you to quickly create a web project framework with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS in only a matter of seconds, allowing you to get your project up and running faster!

Useful-113 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Hummingbird Hummingbird lets you see how visitors are interacting with your website in real time. Hummingbird is built on top of Node.js, a new javascript web toolkit that can handle large amounts of traffic and many concurrent users.

Useful-tool-227 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

jsFiddle Online Editor for the Web, with support of JavaScript, MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, YUI, Glow and Dojo, HTML and CSS. The tool lets you save and run your applications within the web browser.

Useful-tool-213 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

String: create a multi-language website or app Essentially, String is a version control for localization. This tool allows you to manage your language files – from PHP to PO to Rails to iPhone apps. You can invite users to translate your content, and keep track of changes. You can add new sections and languages as you go and then download your updated language files and place them in your app.

Tools-132 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Titanpad This tool allows you to edit documents simultaneously with other users, highlighting each user’s edits in a different color. Editing is done in true real time. Nice solution for everybody who works collaboratively on text documents, whether in the same office or on the other side of the world.

Titanpad2 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Pixelnovel Timeline: Version Control for Adobe Photoshop This tool basically integrates a Subversion client in Adobe Photoshop with an Adobe Photoshop plug-in. You can preview versions right in Photoshop and manage version control directly from Photoshop. Not free.

Tools-142 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

0to255 A simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color. Simply pick the color that you want to start with and 0to255 gives you a range of colors from black to white using an interval optimized for web design. Then, just click the variation you want to use and the hex code is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Tools-135 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Load Impact: Website load/stress test The tool lets you find out the performance limits of your website before you learn the hard way. It is an online service that simulates users accessing your site and creates test report graphs to find out how many users your site could handle.

Useful-213 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Ideone: Online IDE & Debugging Tool This tool is an online compiler and debugging tool which allows to compile and run code online in more than 40 programming languages, among them C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Nice alternatives online: PHP Anywhere (online PHP editor) and CodeRun (allows you to develop, test and debug ASP.NET, PHP and Ajax applications online).

Tools-105 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Online Dummy Image Generator This online tool generates dummy images for you site: you can specify size, background and foreground colors, image format and add custom text. You can also use shortcuts for several standard dimensions including ad sizes (mediumrectangle, skyscarper, leaderboard etc.), screen resolution sizes and video standards (ntsc, pal, hd720, hd1080).

Tools-156 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

HiFi RegExp Tool Regular expressions can be a pain. The HiFi RegExp tool is 100% JavaScript using jQuery. This tool was created to help developers learn, practice, and compose regular expressions.

Tools-146 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Tableizer Clients often provide data in spreadsheet form, and reformatting it into HTML can be a real pain. This tool generates HTML tables out of spreadsheet data. Just copy and paste the cells from your spreadsheet, choose your options (font, font size and header color) and you have a properly formatted HTML table for your data.

Tableizer in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

FollowUpThen: Easy Email Reminder If you don’t mind sending your e-mails to a third-party, try this tool for easy email reminders. On your next email just include time-interval@followupthen.com and the tool will follow up after the time interval you specify. No account is required.

Tools-124 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Divine: Conversion tool from PSD to HTML Divine is a plug-in that sits on top of Photoshop. Once you’ve finished designing in Photoshop, launch Divine plug-in in Photoshop, assign WordPress roles to the main elements (e.g. #footer, #header, etc.), and then the plug-in will prepare all the files you need. Once you set FTP access, the tool uploads the theme automatically to your server. Absolutely free.

Useful-200 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Kaleido This tool allows you to create meaningful visuals for code and can be used to plan, organize and navigate code in a more intuitive way.

Tools-109 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Sketchpad This application is a powerful online image editor. Its tools are organized in handy, draggable boxes that can be positioned very much as you would see in traditional image-editing applications.

Sketchpad in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Unicode code converter Type or paste text in any of the green or grey shaded boxes and click on the button Convert button above it. Alternative representations will appear in all the other boxes. You can then cut & paste the results into your document.

Useful-155 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Grid System Generator This tool generates grid systems in valid css / xhtml for rapid prototyping, development and production environments. The grid system generators offer the ability to customize the width, no. of columns and margin(s) to allow more flexibility for various designs.

Useful-176 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

ud.com namecheck The tool checks availability of social usernames, domain names and trademarks.

Useful-tool-217 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Typograph — Scale & Rhythm A useful tool for testing typographic scale and rhythm. It lets you set factors such as the typographic scale (traditional, 3:5 Fibonacci, Le Corbusier, etc.), the font size in percentage, line height, the layout, padding and the line height for h1, h2 and h3 headings.

Scale in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

ColorBrewer Intro – Selecting Good Color Schemes for Maps ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to help people select good color schemes for maps and other graphics. It is free to use, although we’d appreciate it if you could cite us if you decide to use one of our color schemes.

Useful-210 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

CSS Inliner Tool If you’ve ever sent an email campaign, you know that if your CSS is not coded inline, it is likely to get stripped out by email clients, which can make your email design pretty funky looking. Writing CSS inline can be time consuming, and repetitive. MailChimp has a CSS inline conversion tool built right in that will automatically transform all of your local styles into inline styles. Designers have found it so useful, we thought we’d share it with everyone else – even if you don’t have a MailChimp account.

Useful-222 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

HTML Purifier – Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way! HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. HTML Purifier removes malicious code (better known as XSS) and make sure your documents are standards compliant.

Useful-223 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Rendera Rendera helps you learn HTML5 and CSS. Type in your HTML code and see it rendered in real-time. Then style it with CSS. You can use any of the HTML 5 or CSS3 tags your browser supports. The tool supports HAML and SASS, too.

Useful-tool-204 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

RegExr An intuitive tool for learning, writing, and testing Regular Expressions.

Useful-tool-211 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

try ruby! (in your browser) This tool allows you to try out Ruby code in the prompt command line online. It supports Ruby’s built-in methods, and contains a step-by-step tutorial for Ruby newbies.

Useful-tool-216 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Google Command Line GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs.

Useful-tool-222 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Tiny Fluid Grid Simple tool that generates code for fluid grid-based layouts.

Useful-tool-206 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Fonolo.com This online tool lets you skip the phone menus for hundreds of companies and makes it less frustrating to call large companies. For business owners, Fonolo allows your customers to actually see your phone menu options, before they call you.

Tools-152 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Producteev: Creating To-Do Lists with Emails Forward your important emails to task@producteev.com and the tool will create to-do lists on the fly and send you alerts when needed. It can be integrated in E-mails, IM, Web, iPhone, Gmail, Google Calendar etc.

Tools-127 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

AddUse – User research made easy AddUse is a web based tool that helps you create, manage and present your user research in a simple, easy to use and cost efficient way. It’s a tool to use at any given moment in your development process. It presents the results from your user tests, surveys and questionnaires in a graphical way, efficiently helping engineering, marketing and management groups make the right decisions.

Tools-148 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

bookwhen Online registration for events, workshops, classes and courses. The free version allows for 150 events with 300 bookings per month.

Useful-tool-218 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

Further useful tools

see[Mike]code: tool for remote coding interview This simple tool lets you conduct a short coding interview remotely: it creates a disposable page for the job candidate and allows you to discover people who struggle to code on big or small problems.

jsdo.it This tool allows you to write code your browser, fork and modify any code, fix bugs and add features and also ask the community about your problems.

JavaScript Error Tracking The service tracks JavaScript errors that occur on your site and provides you with a stack trace to help you debug. Similar errors are grouped together.

Old Version Old Version has exactly that, the older version of some of your favorite programs. Why? Because newer is not always better. Sometimes the newer versions cause conflicts. This way, you can always go back to the older version that worked for you.

Onbile Onbile is a free platform for creating and managing your Mobile Website version for iPhone, Android and Blackberry users

Free Bookkeeping, Accounting, & Tax Services; Self Employment & Freelance Success Easily import from online accounts to put your bookkeeping on autopilot and prepare taxes. Get up-to-date reports that give you visibility into your P&L, income, and expenses.

iSendr iSendr lets you send files to your friends directly, without uploading to a server.

seekWP WordPress documentation search engine.

speedtracer Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

the Awesome Highlighter This tool lets you highlight text on web pages and then gives you a small link to the highlighted page.

OpenWith.org This page provides detailed information about most file extension and links to free programs that can open and create each type of file.

Last Click

Kuku Klok Online alarm clock and wake-up call for those of us who often work too much and fall asleep in front of the screen. Open the website, select the desired alarm time and set your favorite wake-up call. Keep the browser tab open. Happily, this online alarm clock works even if your Internet connection goes down. The available sounds are “Classic Clock,” “Electronic,” “Slayer Guitar,” “Military Trumpet” and “Cockerel.”

Tools-158 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

What the Hex? Among the variety of methods of representing color values, some are easier to identify than others. The hexadecimal system, though, often looks incomprehensible. If you feel you know colors pretty well, then this is a simple game for you. All you have to do is match the hexadecimal code (which is actually a group of three hex numbers: #rrggbb) with the corresponding color. Of course, this is easier said than done, but you can adjust the difficulty by displaying between 2 and 48 possible answers.

Tools-160 in 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers

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