05 · 07

Did Apple Force WePad To Change Its Name To WeTab?

Neofonie, the German company behind the much-hyped iPad rival WePad, has changed the name of its tablet computer to WeTab, in a surprise move. The company has announced the name change on its Facebook page, stopping short of explaining why.

We have a sneaking suspicion a certain computer and smartphone maker based in Cupertino has something to do with it, though.

Read the rest of this entry »

05 · 07

Should your browser address bar show 'http://'?

Chrome omnibox is ditching the 'http://' in front of the Web address.

Chrome's omnibox is ditching the 'http://' in front of the Web address.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

With a new version of Chrome, Google has taken a second crack at shielding users from a technical detail that browsers traditionally show: the "http://" in the browser's Web address bar.

Did Google just do us a favor and free up a few pixels in the ever-more-crowded area around a browser's viewing area? Or did it hide some genuinely useful information?

I'm inclined to think the former. Many people don't know that HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and that there could even be something else there, such as "ftp://" for File Transfer Protocol.

The "http://" is a useful label to help one's brain realize the text immediately afterward is a Web address, to be sure. But in the context of a browser's Web address bar, I suspect it's redundant. Sound off in the comment section if you disagree.

Here's where Google got into trouble, though. In its first try at removing the http:// text, it went too far. Specifically, when you copied the Web address from Chrome then pasted it in some destinations such as Google Docs and TweetDeck, the "http://" wouldn't be pasted along with the rest of the address. And outside the browser address box, that http:// label is useful and often necessary.

Because of the problem, Google reversed the change to its address bar, which is called the omnibox.

With the new Chrome developer release, version 5.0.396.0, issued Thursday, the "http://" is hidden again, but this time it copies.

Update 4:32 a.m. PDT: If you visit an secure site using secure HTTP technology, Chrome doesn't hide the "https://" from the address bar, and it adds a green lock icon as well. Chrome also shows "ftp://" and "file:///" when using FTP or opening a local file stored on your computer.

Google releases its developer preview version of Chrome relatively frequently--roughly once a week. The better-tested Chrome beta versions emerge less often, and the stable versions intended for mainstream use less often still.

05 · 07

300+ Essential WordPress Hacks, Tools and Frameworks that Will Change the Way You Develop Themes

The WordPress theme market is a huge opportunity for designers and developers, especially since sites like ThemeForest have made it so easy to produce premium themes and make money from them. If you do it right, you can easily make a substantial income solely from WordPress theme design.

Of course, in order to do it right you have to know the tools and tricks that enable professionals to create work that is worthy of that title. Let’s check out some of the most vital, helpful and game-changing hacks, tools and frameworks to help you achieve that professionalism in your themes.

Being Prepared – 199 High-Quality Resources

15 Exceptionally Useful Resources for WordPress Theme Designers


This is a very high-quality and varying collection of theme-related resources, from frameworks to cheat sheets to dummy content sources and beyond.

WordPress Theme Development Checklist

Oops – you don’t want to forget something before releasing that theme and then end up regretting it later. Stefan Vervoort’s theme development checklist can help you avoid that!

20 WordPress Theme Frameworks and Starting Resources

Using the right tools can obviously make a huge difference, and this roundup of frameworks and resources is a good place to check out the options and get well informed before making a decision.

63 Essential WordPress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files and Cheat Sheets


SpeckyBoy compiled this solid collection of WordPress resources, and it’s a good place to start becoming familiar with WordPress customization.

100+ Resources for WordPress Theme Developers

From DesignM.ag, this post presents an enormous and yet relevant array of theme resources – definitely enough to keep any WordPress lover busy for a long time!

Knowing How to Do it Right – 135+ Amazing Tips, Tutorials & Hacks

8 Top Tips for WordPress Theme Development


This article was posted by James Whittaker after completing a from-scratch WordPress theme for his blog, and has some great tips on how to accomplish common theme-development tasks.

13 Useful Code Snippets for WordPress Theme Developers

A truly useful collection of hacks/code snippets from WDL. Fun stuff like customizing your login page, detecting mobile devices and more. These are all fun tricks that I think every theme developer will use from time to time.

20+ Useful WordPress Recipes


WPRecipes is a well known and useful source for fun WordPress hacks, and in this fun post by Nick La you’ll learn 20 very useful recipes allowing you to add social buttons, register custom shortcodes, interact with the Twitter and Feedburner APIs, and a whole bunch more.

23+ Excellent Tutorials for WordPress Theme Developers

If you’re looking for some high-quality theme-development tutorials, this is an excellent stop, providing you with lots of great ideas and code snippets.

30 Most Wanted WordPress Comment Hacks


Looking to become a comment-hack expert? This excellent post on InstantShift is an great place to start. You’ll learn everything from neat styling tricks to getting the total comment count for your blog to separating trackbacks from comments and more.

40 Awesome Tutorials and Techniques for WordPress Theme Developers

This article was published by Tripwire Magazine, and is another great collection of how-to resources for theme building. My favorite part about this article is how well organized it is  (sorted into different sections like ‘Comments’, ‘Feed Hacks’, etc.), making it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Advanced Power Tips for WordPress Theme Developers


In this post you’ll learn several impressive advanced techniques for developing robust, exceptional themes. Once you’ve mastered many of the basic hacks and customizations, this is an excellent read.

Excellent Tips for Speeding Up WordPress Theme Development

This article touches on a topic that we all can appreciate – maximizing your efficiency when developing themes and making the most of your time. Some interesting thoughts here!

Creating a Quality WordPress Theme


And one more excellent article – this one from Noupe, with 12 essential thoughts on infusing quality into your WordPress theme. After all, if it’s not the best you can make it then what’ s the point?

Using the Right Tool for the Job — 4 Awesome Frameworks

WordPress Starter Theme Project


This basic theme framework (developed by Dan Philibin of WPCandy) is definitely an excellent choice – although I’ve never used it to develop a theme before, I have sifted through the code and I can definitely say it’s very clean and well organized. If you’re looking for a clean, straightforward blank theme to jump start your development, this is what I’d recommend.

Starkers


You are probably already familiar with Elliot Jay Stocks’ blank WordPress theme, Starkers. It is a bit more advanced than WPCandy’s Starter Theme, and has several more features like a couple custom page template files. Most notable is the complete absence of any styling elements/classes what so ever. It’s 100% semantic, leaving you to do whatever you’d like with the styling and eliminating the need to strip out styling elements you don’t need. Another great choice.

Thematic


Thematic is a very versatile and famous WordPress framework, exceptional for a huge variety of uses. If you’re going to be doing heavy WordPress theme development, I highly recommend becoming familiar with a heavy-duty, powerful framework like Thematic or Ashford.

WordPress PSD Framework


This isn’t a coded framework – it’s actually a set of Photoshop layers and elements that’s just perfect for rapidly generating theme mockups. If you’ll be creating lots of theme mockups, this is worth looking at – it could save you a lot of time.

That’s All, Folks

There is definitely a huge amount of prime resources out there for the WordPress theme developer – and a lot of opportunity, too. By working a little at a time and learning something new every day, we can all improve our skills and have a lot of fun with WordPress theme development.

I’d encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t done so before, and as always please share your opinion and let me know if I’ve left something out!

05 · 06

Wikipedia Now Lets You Order Printed Books

05 · 06

10 Essential Tips for Building Your Small Biz Team

In a startup, it’s all about the team. Even if you have a ground-breaking idea, it’s useless without the right team to develop and execute the vision. If you’ve been in business or entrepreneurship, these revelations shouldn’t surprise you.

Hiring the right people can be the most difficult part of building a company, but talent is hard to find, and bad apples can be even harder to let go. That’s why it’s essential to have a clear idea of how to look, where to look, and what tools you should be using to uncover the gems.

Here are ten must-know tips for finding and building a world-class small business team.

1. Have Very Clear Objectives

You have a clear idea of what you want to do with your business, so why shouldn’t you have a clear idea of what you want in your team? Before embarking on the difficult task of building your small business team, ask yourself a few questions:

  • What talent do I need to get the job done?
  • What type of personalities am I looking for?
  • What type of people will compensate for my weaknesses?
  • What can I afford?
  • How many people do I want?

Be flexible when you are looking for new members of your team, but remember, hiring someone you don’t actually need is a waste of resources.

2. Master the Art of LinkedIn


LinkedIn (LinkedIn

) is a very effective tool for finding and evaluating potential prospects, but that’s not the only thing it can help you accomplish in your quest to assemble the perfect team. You can also:

  • Follow companies where you can find talent. It’s a new feature that will let you know who joins and who leaves companies that produce talent.
  • Research your connections’ connections. Don’t just ask a friend or contact to provide suggestions of who you should hire. Instead, pick and choose people from their connections who fit, and ask your contacts about those people specifically. You’ll end up with a better ROI.

3. Go Where the Talent Is

You can look at every job site on the planet, but if you really want to find talent, you have to go where they are: Universities, job fairs, hackathons, and social communities.

You also need to look online. If you’re looking for entrepreneurial developers, then you’d better get to know the Hacker News (Hacker News

) community, for example, or if you’re looking for writers, Mediabistro is a good starting place. And finally, you’d be surprised what you can turn up in a few searches on LinkedIn, Twitter (Twitter

), Facebook (Facebook

), and the blogosphere.

4. Make Your Company (and Yourself) Accessible

There are a lot of people looking for startups to work at, but it isn’t easy to find one that fits. Lower the barrier for people looking for a new team to join by utilizing social accounts and having an easy-to-find website that explains exactly what your company wants to do.

You, as the business owner or hiring manager, also need to be visible as a leader. People want to know what the team is like before they even apply. Giving people the ability to connect with you is one step towards potentially landing your dream hire.

One of the best examples of a company that practices this philosophy is Zappos. The company has a tweeting CEO, an active blog network, and has even live streamed its meetings. The result has been a world-class customer service team and a nearly $1 billion exit.

While Zappos is likely much bigger than your current business, the lessons are still valid: Accessibility helps you find team members.

5. You Have to Sell Your Business to Your Team


No, I don’t mean sell your company shares — I mean that you have to always pitch the virtues of working with the team you’re building and selling potential hires on the vision that you have. Great teams are driven by passion, not by money (although you shouldn’t insult great talent with unfair offers).

To that end, you need to sell your company in person and in the virtual world, and not just to those you’re trying to hire, but to those who are already part of the team. The key is constant, honest communication. Don’t promise a potential hire something you can’t deliver (e.g. promises of 300% growth, a guaranteed raise, a hot tub, etc.). Do be open to new suggestions, but be clear about what you can and cannot do based on your budget.

For a good example of using social media to sell your startup to potential hires, look no further than Twitter. The company recently created a Twitter account, JoinTheFlock, which provides simple and accessible recruitment information and broadcasts it to thousands of people. Twitter also launched a tool at SXSW earlier this year to show the locations of their employees at the conference so that interested individuals could chat with them about life at the company. It’s been an impressive recruitment push that has garnered a lot of attention.

6. Learn About Their Side Projects and Passions

Work experience is useful, but side projects are revealing. Does the person you potentially want to hire like to contribute to open-source projects? Does he or she like to cook or do extreme sports in his or her spare time?

Side projects are good things — they demonstrate that a person has ambition and drive. However, the types of things potential hires are developing, the types of blog posts they write, and what they tweet about are all telling signs of what type of team players they will become. Look for their personal blogs and less-obvious profiles for a fuller picture.

7. Project Management Tools Are Your Friend (Mostly)

Building a team isn’t just about finding the building blocks — it’s about keeping them there. Tools such as Basecamp (Basecamp

), Google Apps and Yammer (Yammer

) help solve different aspects of the project and team management problem. Basecamp tracks ongoing projects, Google Apps helps your team better communicate internally and externally (check out our small biz guide to Google Apps for some tips), and Yammer provides a feed of what your co-workers are working on.

These tools are vital — organization and communication are key to keeping the team on the same page, regardless of whether you’re big or small. But it’s also about effectively using these tools. That means using only the tools you absolutely need and doing research on the tools you’re thinking of using.

8. There’s More to Your Team Than Your Employees

If you want to create a cohesive, functional team that works well together, then you need to think of the team as being more like a web than a pyramid.

Who are your investors? Which people are providing you and your business team with advice? Do you have customers that provide constructive feedback, or do they just complain? What about the supporting characters, such as friends, family, and significant others?

In the end, your team is much larger than who’s on the payroll. If you want to build the ultimate team, it has to be on the same page top to bottom. Openly communicate with every player and choose people that add value instead of conflict to your company.

9. Use Social Media to Build a Voice


Creating a company blog and a Twitter account can be far more than just a marketing tool. Having employees blog allows them to express their creativity and connect with the cause. Being open about what you’re offering can and will attract potential new team members to contact you, rather than you having to contact them.

Social media is an outlet for your the voice of your business, but the exercise can also help you develop it. Having a voice will help make the message and the mission clear, both internally and to the type of people you want to add to your team.

The Tom Bihn story is an excellent example of using social media to build a voice. The 22-person company has successfully used Twitter, YouTube (YouTube

), Facebook, Flickr (Flickr

), and its company’s blog to really spread the message.

10. Trust Your Gut


Two weeks ago, I had a dinner discussion with a group of entrepreneurs about best practices for hiring a stellar team. While many of the answers varied (some of which made this list), the one that stood out to me was simple: Trust your instincts.

Someone can have a stellar resume, amazing accolades and glowing recommendations, but if there isn’t that immediate chemistry, chances are that it won’t work out. It boils down to this: If you are not on the same page as your team, then you’re not a team at all.

When you’re hiring, trust your gut. If you think something’s off about a potential hire, then move on to the next candidate.

What are Your Suggestions?

It’s your turn. We want to hear your tips for finding, hiring, and building the best small business team possible. We encourage you to share your knowledge by posting your experiences and small business ideas in the comments!

Kyle Reddoch

I am an aspiring Web Developer, Android Fanatic, Family Man, and all around Web Geek! I also do Freelance Development work.

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