Rcadez.com is the latest project am involved. It’s a free online Flash games arcade site. You coul play games of various genres such as Action, Racing, RPG, Casino, Retro, Shooting, Puzzles and Sports games for free. Game collection features 2500+ games in total. Feel free to spend your time on our site and register with us to get more gameplay tokens.

Utubed Version 2.0 changes

• Powered by newer Gdata API
• Option to switch between older and newer APIs on the fly
• Added feature to watch videos in Fullscreen
• Feature to sort video search results by rating, views …etc
• Ability to show YouTube user comments
• Features a Comment posting and management system
• Features a Tell a friend service
• Allows to add any HTML code to pages, like Stat trackers …etc
• Option to enable/disable tags to limit content
• Option to enable/disable search to limit irrelevant content
• Added options for better video management
• Added options for for better tag management
• Bug fixed on Remove video option and optimized
• Replaced button icons on video playback pages
• And some code optimizations and bug fixes

Demos sites:
• Game Videos - Gaming niche
• Soccer Videos - Soccer niche

- Utubed Video Search Script

At last I finished developing the PHP project I have been busy all these days…

Utubed Video Search Script, allows you to earn money online easily with your own Content-Rich and Highly-Customizable Video Site. This is a modifed version of the U-tubez script I developed earlier. This PHP powered site package has the ability to update itself automatically with thousands of fresh video content and comes search engine optimized, which makes these sites favorable by search engines. Also this script features a high quality control panel, which provides options to customize almost all the features of the site to make it unique among video sites on the web. And you’ll also get free installation, support and future updates for the script.

Server Requirements
• PHP-4 or PHP-5
• 3GB Monthly Bandwidth
• 30MB Disk Space
• Htaccess Support (mod_rewrite)

Demo sites
• U-tubez Videos - 2 months old & has 70,000+ pages listed on Google
• Utubed Videos - General video search engine
• Car Videos - Automotive niche
• Music Videos - Music videos niche
• Funny Videos - Funny videos niche

Demo control panel
• Utubed Videos - username/password: demo/demo

Ututbed Video Search Script

Yeah, it is free and legal. Auction Ads, ebay affilate advertising service gives away free $25 credit from Auction ads, to every new publisher who signup with them. I got my $25 credit last week, I signed up with them few weeks back, planning try it on several sites…

Auction-Ads was recently acquired by MediaWhiz, which is also the parent company of TLA.

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Google’s initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising $1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion. Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among others.
- "Google" on Wikipedia

• Google monopoly

• History of Google.com

- Google 1960

- Google 1998

- Google 2084

more…

This post is a tutorial on creating your own Favorite icon for your site or blog. Favicon would make your site stand out from the rest on a bookmark list or on a desktop shortcut. And now that most browsers support rendering favicon on their address bars, beside the site url, it is also a cosmetic (Web 2.0 ? ) mod for your website.

First download IcoFX, a freeware image editor for Icon format (.ico). Install it and run the application.

If your planning to use an image or logo you already have with you, as an favicon, please skip this paragraph and go to next. Else If your planning to create an icon by yourself read this one and skip nest. I’d recommend importing an image . On IcoFX application, click File > New, select 256 Colors for color setting and click on 16 x 16 for Size setting and click OK. Now design an whatever image you want. It has variety of tools and effects a high-end image editor software has.

So if you’re planning to use an existing image as the icon, resize/crop your image or logo to 256×256 pixel resolution using another image editor like IrfanView or Paint.net and save it to Jpeg format(.jpg). Now click File > Open and open that image, select 256×256 for Size option the New Image dialog box and click OK. Now proceed to the next step.

Go to Image tab and click on Create Icon From Image (or CTRL+I). Now untick, all checkboxes on ‘XP colors’ row and ‘256 colors’ row and make sure 16×16 and 48×48 are check boxes ticked on ‘16 Colors’ row (for compatiblity and file size issues) and Click OK. Finally you’re icon has been created, you can preview it on Preview tool box. Save the icon by clicking on File > Save, save the ico file as ‘favicon.ico’.

To add the save icon to your site, move the favicon.ico file to the root folder of your site. And add the following HTML code into the Head area (nested by tag ) in your webpage and save, upload.

HTML code: <link rel="Shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" mce_href="/favicon.ico" />

That’s it!! Access your site on Firefox and see whether your Favicon shows up

[Am writing this post as a reply to the blog titled “Making Websites for ALL“, which was posted by Chamara, as a reply to the comment I made on a one of his blogs, titled “Web Standards Awareness Survey For Sri Lankans”.]

First of all I do appreciate your concern about Web standards and awareness about it among web developers (of Sri Lanka). Infact it is true, as you say Web standards are made for Accessibility, and Usability, which should allow internet to be accessed by every new mechanism that is invented to access internet in a standard way.

Anyway, what I meant on my comment as “cross-browser compatible” was compatibilty for as much web-enabled devices as possible, incase you got it wrong or I posted it wrong… I prefer to code using Notepad, rather than WSIWG editors. So I just prefer not to code Doctypes (even Google doesn’t), Namespaces …etc …etc (most of the time). Which are just code bloat (or time waste) according to me, am not just a web designer, I also have to spend time to add content to my sites. And I haven’t stepped into XHTML yet, which is a bit strict i suppose (and not supported by some high profile web browsers as i heard??). And should we code XHTML or HTML 5 in future? *confused.

Following are few of my Web development standards…

• Valid, efficient, clean, forward & backward compatible design & development
• HTML with non-deperecated elements & non-proprietary elements
• Valid (and efficient) CSS usage, with stylesheets
• (Error-free) Javascript usage (only when required)
• (Proper) Navigation
• Cross-browser compatibility, as much as possible (also includes browsers on web-enabled devices)
• Meaningful (and search-engine friendly) URLs
• And optionally - Usage of RSS feeds (for non-browser users), Tagging content and data, Rich applications and interactions(eg: Ajax), Multimedia platforms that could reach a wider audience(eg: Flv) …etc.

And I make sure webpages are rendered properly on Firefox, which makes sure it’d be rendered 100% accurately on IE , which is the browser used by 75% of visitors who visit my sites. I prefer atleast one Table for layouts, should use Divs with CSS in future, although not much a satifying option…

Although am not following Standards exactly according to the book, I always try to make sure my webpages are accessible by most web-enabled devices(used by the target audience ). And I have seen hits from devices such as PS3, Web TV, Mobile devices …etc (eg: ICS), on my Raw access logs (So I assume my websites are accessible by most Internet enabled devices).

As for the Accessibility and Usability part, Its a challenging topic to every developer, for which no one could achive 100% satisfying solution. But we should make sure our webpages are coded in a clean way. For an example use of CSS divides the content from formatting and designing elements of HTML on a webpage, which would make it possible to be read on devices like screen readers for blind people. And few other simple pratices like these would provide disabled people some amount of equality on the web. But it is impossible to make sites for ALL as you say , rather than text files

I guess browser wars would never end, as long as new web technologies are introduced. Agree or not, browser makers aren’t caring about standards, they just keep on modding their toys with some new gadget to bloat they are the king. This one of the reasons, why Web Standards Suck(this guy expresses this better than me, but on an XHTML page?? ).

“There is no true standard for anything on the web. It’s not possible to write a ‘valid’ XHTML document. Whining about invalid markup is whining. All extensions are valid. Microsoft wins. We all lose.”
- Jodawi

Even W3C chairman agrees…..

“The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain.”
- Tim Berners Lee

So is it worth the trouble, developing for not-yet supported standards. Sad and bad, but most people think so. But there are some aspects of Web-Standards and related practices which could be used to create a cleaner web, for which I agree. Also some of these practices make sites optimized for Search engines, which is an added advantage. But some are just cosmetics (Gadgets for geeks??) expected to be supported in future.

And I guess and hope, In Web 3.0 era, every web accessible device might have the ability to manipulate web information in an equal standard way. For an example, try accessing a Web 2.0 site with a Opera Mobile browser on a Symbian mobile device (*no need to develop WAP sites anymore), it renders and allows to intract with pages exactly as in a PC. I hope these capabilities would be developed further for Web 3.0 and future devices would be capable of manipulating information better than ever.

Well, some parts of your post were jibberish and not related to webstandards AFAIK, But I learnt about some new technologies and terms thanks to you, Thanks

So my opinion is - if you make properly coded webpages, it isn’t a matter, if you do follow Standards (as they are defined) or not, as far as it does the job properly. As you say, it is….

A matter of targeting the target audience

I have always preferred not to use “WWW.” for urls to my sites (on links, site promotions …etc), I dont even type “WWW.” on my browser’s address bar. Because I have always realized it’s an unwanted part on a domain.

World Wide Web:
Abbr. WWW
• The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.
• A collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

But am not redirecting site traffic from www url to non-www url. But if you want to do so, add the following code on the ‘.htacccess’ file on your site’s root folder.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Above code (301 permanent) redirects all requests on ‘www.domain.com’ to ‘domain.com’, but it is better if you also make sure to edit all inner links within the site to be non-www.

http://no-www.org

Defending your computer, from internet-based threats has turned into a (difficult) part of netiquette lately. Threats from internet come in various forms like spyware, viruses, trojans, hackers …etc.

 My conception is, if we’d be careful enough, to not to roam around insecure sites (or verify suspicious sites), like sites related to warez, porn …etc, we’d be far from Internet threats. And definitely, we should keep our pc’s operating system updated with the latest updates, Updates for Windows OS could dowloaded manually or set to be done automatically by the OS. If we’d be using a proper email client with online virus scanning of mails, it’d be an added advantage.

We must have a proper Anti-virus software on a system, for data to survive. AVG, AntiVir, AOL AV Shield, Avast are some popular freeware antivirus softwares. Some anti virus applications have integrated spyware detection for some extent. Still we should have some spy-ware detection software.

Currently, am using Ad-Aware to run spyware scans (monthly) and I update its definitions using its update feature, before making a scan. And also am using Spybot - Search & destroy, a freeware application used to track spyware. It also has a feature called Immunize. A bad url blocking tweak for browsers, similar to JavaCool’s SpywareBlaster, this allows you to tweak some internal Internet Explorer settings to block the installation of known spyware, installers and similar threats. Spybot-S&D is able to set all entries to be blocked, for those that are in its database, which could be updated through the application.

Well, if you cant resist visiting insecure sites use Sandboxie, an intresting solution which works as a secure layer between your computer and the browser. Stealth plugin for Firefox, is one of the best available privacy tools for almost ‘anonymous’ surfing. Which allows a Stealth mode in which the browser doesn’t keep track of browsing history, cache data, cookies, form information, downloads …etc. You can use online virus scanning services to scan files, there are services like VirusTotal, Jotti Scanner …etc. Else if you want to scan a file for viruses by providing a url over the web, use - Dr.Web.

Also you can use a web based proxy tool like Google Translate to browse suspicious pages (not the securest method though). Still, if you’re feeling insecure, get Zone Alarm, firewall solution, a well reputed freeware application to keep your ports clean of unwanted intruders.

http://static.wikipedia.org

Downloadable version (HTML files) of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, Which has information about almost everything under the sun.