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IE8 Standards Mode Is Opt-in
Chris Wilson confirmed today on the IEBlog that for a site to render in standards-compliant mode in IE8 it will need to include a specific meta tag: “Quirks mode” remains the same, and [will stay] compatible with current content. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and [will stay] compatible with current content. If you (the page developer) […]

Chris Wilson confirmed today on the IEBlog that for a site to render in standards-compliant mode in IE8 it will need to include a specific meta tag:

1. “Quirks mode” remains the same, and [will stay] compatible with current content.
2. “Standards mode” remains the same as IE7, and [will stay] compatible with current content.
3. If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple meta element.

The meta tag, also documented by Aaron Gustafson in the latest issue of A List Apart (with careful justification and support) looks like this:

While I concede that, in order to retain backwards compatibility with the sites of yesterday (and of five years ago), opting in to render a page in standards-mode in IE8 seems the only sensible option, one thing really irka me about this approach:

Hardcoding a reference to a specific browser as a necessary part of the page’s markup feels plain dirty.

It’s one thing to specify a character encoding or the language used by the page, but the agent with which it is compatible? Fundamentally and philosophically it just makes sense for a page to be completely browser-agnostic. In fact, the sheer mention of a browser in a page could be interpreted as a geek form of advertising, while other browsers pay the penalty for being better at adhering to the W3C specs. Will other browsers follow suit, such that web developers find it necessary to write something like this?

Still, I guess it beats using conditional comments.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

WordPress Theme Releases For 1 / 23
Two Column Themes Orange and Black This is a widget ready two column theme with contrasting colors. It makes use of orange and black colors. Content area is quite big allowing to fit in more content, sidebar is to the left of the page. Sidebar comes built in with Recent Entries and Recent Comments so you do not […]

Two Column Themes

Orange and Black

This is a widget ready two column theme with contrasting colors. It makes use of orange and black colors. Content area is quite big allowing to fit in more content, sidebar is to the left of the page.

Sidebar comes built in with Recent Entries and Recent Comments so you do not have to install those plugins.

Demo | Release Page | Download

Simpleton

Simpleton is a two column theme which makes use of simple colors. The theme comes built in with recent comments and recent themes. The sidebar is big enough to fit in two rows of information.

The theme is widget ready.

Demo | Release Page | Download

UnGrid

UnGrid is a three column theme based on grids which is widget ready. The theme features an integrated banner management and a featured about section.

Font color is a bit light and could do better with a darker shade. Features a extended footer section to display more information. Comes in Greenish / Pink and Blue colors.

Demo | Release Page / Download

Three Column Themes

iPhone Theme

Widget Ready theme with vast use of rounded corners for headers. The main header area is a bit small which makes it hard to have a custom logo. Makes good use of gray color throughout the theme.

Sidebar is divided into two columns with additional space to show off 125 X 125 banners.

Demo | Release Page | Download

MackOne

A fluid theme based on dark colors consisting of red and black. The background and graphics are appealing. Makes use of white text for better visibility on the dark background.

The theme is widget ready and comes built in with related posts, Flickr support, recent comments, WordPress native tags and Socializing options.

Demo | Release Page | Download

Blue Iris

Blue Iris is a fluid three column theme with widget ready sidebars. Colors are mostly made up with variations of blue. The theme has a wide content area making it easier to add wider images.

The header section and sidebars can do with a bit of improvement. Sidebars are fitted in too close together.

Demo | Release Page | Download

29 Brilliant Music Videos

Music has always been an excellent source of inspiration. Particularly if you are stuck with some problem you can’t find a workaround for, a beautiful song can give you a new perspective, let you see the problem from a different angle. And sometimes it’s just useful to make a break — for instance, watching some music videos.

In this post we present some unusual music videos for your monday’s coffee break. Some of the videos are thought-provoking, some of them are funny and some are bizarre. While many of them are well-known, you’ll probably find some videos you’ve never watched before. The videos all perfectly to the music which is being played in the background. Hopefully, everyone will find something new and inspiring for himself/herself. Please notice that you might need to watch some videos at least twice to get the idea behind them.

You might want to read the descriptions of the videos — they are provided below every link. The screenshots often don’t reveal that much about the videos they stand for.

Music has always been an excellent source of inspiration. Particularly if you are stuck with some problem you can’t find a workaround for, a beautiful song can give you a new perspective, let you see the problem from a different angle. And sometimes it’s just useful to make a break — for instance, watching some music videos.

In this post we present some unusual music videos for your monday’s coffee break. Some of the videos are thought-provoking, some of them are funny and some are bizarre. While many of them are well-known, you’ll probably find some videos you’ve never watched before. The videos all perfectly to the music which is being played in the background. Hopefully, everyone will find something new and inspiring for himself/herself. Please notice that you might need to watch some videos at least twice to get the idea behind them.

You might want to read the descriptions of the videos — they are provided below every link. The screenshots often don’t reveal that much about the videos they stand for.

Music Videos

Unkle - Rabbit in your Headlights (hi-res Quicktime)
What is the guy whispering? Who is the guy? And what is he doing in the tunnel? You need to watch this video till the very end. You won’t be disappointed.

Jason Forrest - “War Photographer” (2005)
These freaking vikings are both cool and strange. But it doesn’t make them less sympathetic. And they can play both on drums and guitars pretty well.

Bat for Lashes — What’s A Girl To Do
00:38 is the best moment in the history of music videos. Well, this one is kind of scary. Hares driving on the bicycles and clapping their hands at the same time? A masterpiece from the year 2007.

Nick Cave & Kylie Mingoue — Where The Wild Roses Grow
Probably one of the most beautiful music videos ever made. There is no need for words. Watch it.

Rob Dougan — Clubbed To Death
Incredible editing and directing. So symbolic, so powerful.

Fujiya & Miyagi - Ankle Injuries
What about a music video which is made with thousands of 6-sided dice? Exactly. And the music fits perfectly.

Radiohead – “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” (1995)
The video for this song was shot using different film frequencies, allowing various actions to unfold at different rates within the same frame. The emotional effects of this practice range from silly to unsettling. Try not to watch this video too many times; it begins to feel a little more disturbing each time. [Jeff Shreve]

Sia – “Breathe Me” (Quicktime)
The production of this video clip took several thousands Polaroid photos. The result is… at least unusual.

Citizens Here and Abroad - You Drive and We’ll Listen To Music
Jason Koxvold’s video pairs crashing cars with crashing guitars. Rock. Very well executed and perfectly edited. Must see.

Moby - Porcelaine
Such a beautiful song. One of the videos you are amazed about once, and you never forget again.

The Strokes - You Only Live Once (Imeem)
With a Hundred ways to do a dozen things, why not try it all? Directed by Warren Fu.

Arctic Monkeys - A view from the afternoon (Quicktime version)
A song about a passion and unstoppable willingness to do what you love. Simple, yet so effective.

“Glosoli” - Sigur Ros
“Glosoli” depicts a young drummer boy gathering up the other denizens of what appears to be an adult-free utopian land, and leading a revolution to freedom. So beautiful and so touching. Don’t miss the last scene.

The Avalanches - “Frontier Psychiatrist”
This is freaky. Sometimes the most obvious concept for a video also turns out to be the best. The ghost choir is the best. Except for the nightmarish old-man turtle, of course. [via PitchForkMedia]

Royksopp - Remind Me
We’ve featured this movie already, but it’s worth mentioning it in this post. You can watch it dozens times and still not catch everything. A day in the life of an average working Jill, broken down into its minutest component parts. The unstated joke: mankind has erected immense, resource-devouring systems of almost incomprehensible complexity just so you can sit in your cubicle.

Blur - “Coffee & TV” (Quicktime)
Actually, this song is about a dancing milk carton. However, its adventures are funny, cute, but with a pleasing streak of cruelty. The milk-carton protagonist even has its own fan site.

Boards of Canada: “Dayvan Cowboy” (Quicktime)
It’s pretty easy to get wrapped up in the grainy, existential pulchritude of this thing and completely miss the cheeky self-reference. So, um, where can one surf in Canada? Directed by Melissa Olson.

Move Your Feet - Junior Senior
That’s weird. And that’s what makes it special. A pixel-based video clip.

Daft Punk - One More Time
Probably one of the most colorful animated music videos of all time. Daft Punk, one more time.

Xploding Plastix - Joy Comes In The Morning
A music video about the world we live in and the world we’d like to live in.

Unkle - Eye For Eye
A haunting track with a creepy animation, which won an award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Nasty weirdness drops from the sky and then moves on.

Vitalic - Poney
Flying dogs in light of a laser and in slow-motion. Nobody has ever done something like this before.

OK Go - Here It Comes Again

Justice “D.A.N.C.E.” (Quicktime)
Sometimes even T-Shirts can speak. For instance, in this music video. “D.A.N.C.E.” was nominated for “Video of the Year at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. On the first of November Justice received the “Video Star” award at the European Music Awards in Munich.

Forss - “City Ports”
The visualization fits perfectly to the music.

Radiohead - Just
What could the man on the street possibly have said?

Prodigy - Out Of Space
Prodigy’s “Out of Space” is probably one of the weirdest videos ever created. Welcome back to the 90s — this is how some videos looked like then. The song which was * for the whole generation.

The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony
A video everybody has seen. And everybody would see again.

RJD2 - Work It Out
This guy just want to have some fun with his crooks and his skateboard. A one-shot-video from 2007.

The week in ColdFusion: 9–15 Jan 08: Survey Mania
Big news this week: Obviously well into planning mode for ColdFusion 9, Adobe is seeking end user feedback through a series of surveys. From Adobe “Director of Engineering” Damon Cooper’s blog, there’s firstly the ColdFusion IDE survey: The Adobe ColdFusion team would like to understand more about how you develop CFML code, […]

Big news this week: Obviously well into planning mode for ColdFusion 9, Adobe is seeking end user feedback through a series of surveys. From Adobe “Director of Engineering” Damon Cooper’s blog, there’s firstly the ColdFusion IDE survey:

The Adobe ColdFusion team would like to understand more about how you develop CFML code, what tools you currently use, what features you look for, use and would like in a IDE.

Next, there’s two surveys that ask what you think the ColdFusion team should focus on for ColdFusion 9 (codenamed “Centaur”): the Adobe ColdFusion Features Survey and the Adobe ColdFusion Platform and Vendor Support Survey.

On the ColdFusion frameworks front, things were busy in the Model-Glue world with new releases of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion and for Model-Glue for Flex.

Still on frameworks, Instalment 6.2 of Adrian Moreno’s Mach II Primer was released: Processing Data with Beans and DAOs using Event Filters. You can follow the Mach-II primer from the beginning with Moving From Procedural to Object Oriented Programming with Mach-II for ColdFusion. Adrian’s primers are a in-depth but still easy to follow - a really good read if you’re new to object-oriented ColdFusion, or even if you’re not!

The buzz around Ajax continues with an Ajaxian article on using the newly released ExtJS version 2.0 with any version of ColdFusion. For those interested in leveraging the built-in ColdFusion 8 Ajax features, Steve “Cutter” Blades posts a short but helpful tidbit: Calling functions when paging the CF8 DataGrid.

Former Adobe Director of Architecture Sean Corfield posts an in-depth look at Common ColdFusion Arguments – addressing issues that pop up all the time on blogs, forums and mailing lists, like whether ColdFusion should be free and/or open source, if Adobe should be doing more marketing or employ more evangelists, and whether ColdFusion should be taught in schools. It’s worth checking out, especially for Sean’s closing call to arms: for every CF developer to convert one non-CF developer to CF.

Ben Nadel comments on the tendency for programmers to self-deprecate in Don’t Be Lazy, Be Proud. For the record, I’ve long believed that a lazy programmer is a good programmer, but Ben’s post is certainly food for thought.

Finally, don’t forget to check out the ColdFusion Open Source Update (detailing 7 updates and 2 new projects this week) and for those with long commutes, the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast features the CF_HotSeat with Jared Rypka-Hauer, the “Chief Instigator” of the cf.objective() conference which will be held in May in Minnesota.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

Matt Cutts On Securing WP
Matt Cutts has published an article which highlights three different ways to secure your WordPress installation. The first tip involves locking down your Admin directory. Matt configures his .hatccess file so that only his IP address is allowed to access the WP-Admin directory. For the second tip, you should create a blank index.html file to […]

Matt Cutts has published an article which highlights three different ways to secure your WordPress installation. The first tip involves locking down your Admin directory. Matt configures his .hatccess file so that only his IP address is allowed to access the WP-Admin directory. For the second tip, you should create a blank index.html file to place into your wp-content/plugins directory. Not doing so allows your plugin folder to be wide open, giving nosy people an idea as to what plugins you have installed.

Matt’s third and final tip involves subscribing to the official WordPress development blog - http://wordpress.org/development/feed/ As we should all know by now, this is the best way to stay up to date.

Matt also offers a bonus tip where he suggest removing the line of code within your header.php file that publishes your WordPress version.

All of these are excellent tips. But what do you do to secure your WordPress installation?

Productivity Boost: Key Stroke Launchers

Productivity is a tricky thing. Once you’ve found your way to get things done, you aren’t likely to change anything until the system (your workflow or your tools) doesn’t work any more. For instance, many developers tend to use the very same versions of applications they’ve been using over years. After all, you get things done and you’ve got used to it — so why should you introduce any changes? “Never touch the running system” is the principle which is often followed in such situations.

However, this approach has its drawbacks. For instance, you might simply be not aware of some useful tools which would save you many headaches, a lot of money and dozens of sleepless nights. Using them, you can become more efficient, more productive and consequently minimize the time you spend on tiring, monotonous daily routine tasks.

Over the next months we are going to cover a number of useful tools, services and applications which might help you to improve your workflow and increase your productivity. Most of them will turn out to be life-savers in practice, as they help you to accomplish some tasks automatically and you would need to do them manually otherwise.

In this article we present some free key stroke launchers — desktop-applications which you can use to start some other applications without a single mouse click.

Productivity is a tricky thing. Once you’ve found your way to get things done, you aren’t likely to change anything until the system (your workflow or your tools) doesn’t work any more. For instance, many developers tend to use the very same versions of applications they’ve been using over years. After all, you get things done and you’ve got used to it — so why should you introduce any changes? “Never touch the running system” is the principle which is often followed in such situations.

Touch The Running System!

However, this approach has its drawbacks. For instance, you might simply be not aware of some useful tools which would save you many headaches, a lot of money and dozens of sleepless nights. Using them, you can become more efficient, more productive and consequently minimize the time you spend on tiring, monotonous daily routine tasks.

Over the next months we are going to cover a number of useful tools, services and applications which might help you to improve your workflow and increase your productivity. Most of them will turn out to be life-savers in practice, as they help you to accomplish some tasks automatically and you would need to do them manually otherwise.

In this article we present some free key stroke launchers — desktop-applications which you can use to start some other applications without a single mouse click.

Key Stroke Launcher?

If you are a professional web-developer you might have dozens of different tools you use on a regular basis. And, once you have them, you also want them to be ready to hand once you need them. However, the regular Windows start menu consists of a long list of applications, and the desktop is usually full of icons, so it’s pretty hard to have a big picture of what is where placed.

Not every application’s shortcut is perfectly arranged for a quick launch, because the programs are not sorted in an alphabetic order or the desktop looks like an icon-jungle. So you need to navigate through the Start menu or minimize some windows to finally click on the desktop icons. That’s not effective.

Good news: you can do better. In such cases you can use Launchy, KeyBreeze or Google Desktop to improve your productivity.

Launchy

Launchy is a free, lightweight Windows utility which helps you to open files, folders, web-sites and applications with a few key-strokes. In the shape of a little search bar, the tool appears to your service by pressing the Alt + Spacebar key combination.

Just type the first letters of the program you’d like to start or site’s URL you’d like to visit and the tool provides you with possible matches of your query.

Image: Launchy

Apart from a number of plug-ins, Launchy also offers some further functionalities for specific search. To look up some topic in Wikipedia or Google, type in “wikipedia”, or “Google” then hit the tab key and enter the topic you are interested in. If you’d like to check the weather, type in “weather”, then input the zip code, city name or state. Similarly, you can also play your favourite tracks and search local directories for some file.

If you don’t like the default look or would like to change it from time to time you can can select one of the skins. You can find a number of Launchy skins here; however, most of them don’t work with the latest version of the tool, so you might need to download the previous version (1.25).

“Aero” skin

Launchy is the winner in the category “Best new project” in the Sourceforge.Net 2007 Community Choice Awards.

Keybreeze

Similarly to Launchy, KeyBreeze is a free key stroke launcher which tries to guess the application, document or site you’re looking for. However, it has a dozens of further features which can serve as little productivity tweaks.

The tool also enables you to perform system tasks, control windows on your screen and use macros for some repetitive tasks, such as backing up files and folders.

If you’d like to insert some phrase you tend to use often in your conversation, you can instead of using some data stored on your PC, you can use text functions which will paste predefined text automatically into the document or text field which is currently active.

What makes KeyBreeze particularly useful is that you can create notes and to-do lists on the desktop and also set reminders — instantly.

There is also a portable USB version of the tool as well as a number of plug-ins which are available on the official web-site.

Google Desktop

Actually, Google Desktop has proved to be the ultimate solution when it comes to desktop search. Coming with a Google Sidebar, Desktop brings the advanced search functionalities as known from the conventional Google search.

However, Google Desktop can also be used as the ultimate key stroke launcher. Once the tool has finished indexing your data, you can hit Ctrl twice and the quick search box will appear. As Google Desktop provides full text search over email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail and web pages that you’ve viewed, you can launch applications, open files and load web-pages in a browser without a single click.

Apart from that, there are a number of great uses for Google Desktop, such as file versioning or file recovery. You can also place gadgets on your desktop to show you new email, weather, photo and personalized news. In fact, we’ve covered a number of useful gadgets and modules for Google Desktop in our article Google Gadgets, Widgets and Modules.

Conclusion

Whatever tool you choose in the end, used properly, it will save you a number of unnecessary clicks and help you to get a little more productive without any effort. On a large scale these small changes can completely reduce annoying tasks you needed to do on a regular basis. Just getting rid of them is a significant step towards a more effective and productive workflow.