“Well, publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google’s AdWords program.”

To be able to use this new service, you will need to apply for an Adsense account. Ad management and tracking will be done through it. Other details like how to sign up for Adsense feeds will be announced when the full-scale launch is ready. I hope it comes sooner rather than later, because statistics show that more and more people are reading blogs offsite via feeds. A way to monetize this increasing offsite traffic is more than welcome.

Recently, it just added a candle on its cake, and to mark its first birthday, they dropped the Google branding and changed the name to simply “Gears”. It’s their way of showing that this isn’t just the search giant’s project, but more of an open community development to push the web’s boundaries. Aside from allowing web apps to run offline, Gears will be focusing on creating new functionalities for browsers. It’s really a very clever move. Instead of developing a new “Google Browser” from scratch, they are leveraging existing ones that already have high market penetration by offering a plugin that extend their capabilities.

Over the past few days, there have been a lot of announcements about Gears, the biggest of which is MySpace’s adoption of Gears for their users’ mail. Aside from having access to it offline which makes retrieval much faster, it now has added search and sort functions. From the point of view of MySpace, one of the great things about it is that it lessens the computational load on their servers, now that data access is a local chore for the user’s computer. Let’s hope they put that newfound server breathing room to good use.

Another third party application supporting Gears is Wordpress in version 2.6. Now you can manage your blog offline, and faster. Your workflow will no longer be affected (too much) by the bane called “slow Internet connection”. A caveat: Don’t use Gears if you’re using a public computer as this might lead to potential privacy and security issues.

As for support, Gears is reaching for the stars. Development for Firefox 3 compatibility is ongoing, and it already supports Firefox 1.5 up to the latest version 2 release, as well as Internet Explorer. Mac users will also be enjoying Safari support, and Opera is onboard as well. Currently, Gears can run on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Windows Mobile platforms.

You can install the Gears add-on from http://gears.google.com/.

The problem with debugging pretty URLs, is that the debugging system relies on the debugger client (your IDE) starting a debugging session with the debugger server (the php extension running on your server) by sending some data through the URL. Here’s a sample of these URLs:

…/cake/controller/?debug_session_id=1000 &start_debug=1 &debug_start_session=1 &isDebugURL=1 &original_url=http://localhost:8080/carbooking/cars/

Not terribly pretty, and certainly not going to pass for your application. The main issue here is that the .htaccess file with the mod_rewrite instructions will either remove this debug URL data before it gets to PHP, or send it on incorrectly, preventing your server from establishing the debugging connection with your client. It can also wreak havoc with your rewriting in the first place; with other frameworks especially, you’d be lucky to even see the actual page with a URL like this.

However, we can get our debugger working with CakePHP applications relatively easily. Presuming your regular debugger is working just fine (try debugging a simple echo “Hello World” script in your docroot), we can disable the mod_rewrite rules and tell Cake to use not-so-pretty URLs to get debugging working fine. These instructions are written for CakePHP 1.1 stable, but should work just fine on 1.2 beta.

1. Disable all .htaccess files
Cake actually ships with three .htaccess files; one in the root cake install dir, one in /app, and one in /app/webroot. Find all three, and thoroughly rename them. Be careful of minor alterations to names, such as changing .htaccess to ..htaccess (additional full stop) - you can actually crash your Apache server this way. I’m changing all three to .htaccess.bak.

2. Add “index.php” to pretty URLs
The most common way frameworks handle pretty URLs is by using Apache’s mod_rewrite to translate them to /somefile.php/some/url/parameter format. Normally, however, you would only see the /some/url/parameter format - mod_rewrite does the magic behind the scenes. By putting this information after the .php filename, it is easily accessible within PHP. We want to avoid mod_rewrite messing up our URLs, so we’re going to revert to this format, making our Cake URLs look like /index.php/controller/action/parameter etc.

Open up app/config/core.php. Find this line:

//	define ('BASE_URL', env('SCRIPT_NAME'));

Uncomment this line by removing the //. (In Zend Studio for Eclipse, the syntax highlighting will reappear on the line.)

3. Set a breakpoint to debug
Open up one of your controllers, and double click the blue margin (left of the line numbers) on a line of code in your index action. Alternatively, right click anywhere in the margin of the line and click “Toggle breakpoint”. A blue dot will appear on that line in the margin - this represents a breakpoint, or a point where the debugger will temporarily pause and allow you to take a look at how the script is going.

4. Debug your application using /index.php/ URLs
In Zend Studio for Eclipse, click the “Debug URL” button - it’s to the right of the four debug and run buttons in the default toolbar of the PHP perspective, and its also the second-last item in the “Run” menu. Enter the URL to your controller running on your local server, and make sure you include the index.php/ section. For example, I’m entering http://localhost/cake/index.php/cars/ for the CarsController::index() action in my Cake installation under docroot/cake. “Break at first line” can remain checked.

When you click Ok to continue, Zend Studio will contact the server, work out which file you are starting at - probably /app/webroot.index.php - and pause on the first line of code (the line may be highlighted yellow). In your Debug pane (in the “PHP Debug” perspective - Zend Studio for Eclipse should automatically switch, but if not, use the arrow in the top right of the IDE) you’ll see a yellow “resume” button. This is how you navigate between breakpoints. The debugger has paused on the first line of code interpreted, but hit the resume icon to continue. You should then move onto the next breakpoint - the line in your controller’s index() action. From here you are right inside your Cake application’s execution, and can debug it just like any other PHP script using the full power of Zend Studio for Eclipse and Eclipse PDT.

NETTUTS: “Unraveling the Secrets Of the comments.php File”

One of the best tutorials I’ve ever seen related to customizing comments for Wordpress. Great for beginners because the explain EVERYTHING.

DARREN HOYT: “Styling Your Wordpress Comments”

Darren’s breakdown is a little bit less obtuse but gets the job done.

5THIRTY-ONE: “How To Style Wordpress Author Comments”

One of my favorite Wordpress designers makes his case.

THEMELAB: “Add Gravatar Support to Your Wordpress Comments”

Very basic guide on how to add images for your users.

TAMBA2: “Comment Styling”

Tamba2’s is a little old but still useful.

PHOTOMATT: “Display Comment Numbers”

This snippet of code from Photomatt is useful if you want to learn how to add numbers to your comments.

COLORFORGE: “Comment Template Deconstructed”

Wow, this guys comment template is incredibly beautiful and complex! Very much worth checking out.

With the recent announcement that Photoshop Express will include FlickR support, Adobe has realized that it missed an opportunity that Picnik quickly took advantage of. Mistakes by one company in business breed success for another and this case is no different.

Picnik is a company that build a web application that allowed people to edit images online similar to the way applications like OSX’s Preview or Adobe’s ImageReady allow you to do for the desktop. It doesn’t have the advanced features of Photoshop but it’s all most people need for uploading stuff to Flickr. There should have been a thousand groans from the offices of Adobe when they found out Picnik had partnered with FlickR. Mark Evans wonders aloud why FlickR/Yahoo just didn’t buy Picnik. Perhaps they saw this coming? Is it possible that Adobe plans leverage it’s marketshare to steal that Flickr/Yahoo partnership?

An even bigger mistake, is perhaps Corel’s (Adobe’s next largest competitor) similar slowness to embrace the web. There are plenty of web start-ups out there waiting to be purchased. If your team isn’t producing results, buy someone out who can! Cloud computing is in, if you aren’t on board then you’re out!

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class. The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.

HTML 4

vs.

HTML 5

It would seem that HTML5 is fully embracing semantic markup. Here’s an example of how your actual document might look:

<body>
  <header>...</header>
  <nav>...</nav>
  <article>
    <section>
      ...
    </section>
  </article>
  <aside>...</aside>
  <footer>...</footer>
</body>

All of this is extremely exciting and will make coding for the web much faster and much more accessible.

Read the entire article here.

Pixel

Developed over the last eight years by Kanzel Berger, Pixel Image Editor is one of the strongest applications i’ve ever used to come from a single developer! It’s also available for Linux and Windows in 32 and 64-bit versions. The 64-bit OSX runtime is still forthcoming. My only problem with Pixel is that it looks and operates so similar to Photoshop. I wish someone would try to rethink the whole image editing UI.

PhotoLine

Photoline is a viable alternative but honestly, who wants to use a numerical input UI while designing? That feature alone keeps a large segment of the population from ever even considering it. Too bad because it’s a good program. Here are some of the features that it offers that a lot of it’s competitors don’t from MacApper.

* Pixel accurate drawing and selection tools
* 16-bits per channel
* CMYK and Lab color
* Full masking support
* Fully editable text layers with proper typographic controls (such as kerning and paragraph spacing)
* Shape layers with solid bezier tools
* Layer effects (drop shadows, etc.)
* Noise
* Difference Clouds
* HDR image support (including creating HDRs from multiple source photos)
* Image slicing, image maps, and animation tools for web designers
* Useful web export tools with presets, previews, file size info, etc.
* Recordable Macros
* Useful named presets for most filters
* Ability to name and save your own presets for most filters
* Text (paragraph and character) style sheets
* Launches in less than 1s on my MacBook Pro
* No product activation

A nobel effort by the developers but these days UI is everything and this one simply doesn’t have it.

Corel Draw and PaintShop

Corel has always been a bit like Hillary Clinton. They’ve got a lot of supporters, they’re well respected, hugely influential but no matter what they try they always come in second place. Some people will even argue that it’s better than Photoshop but the industry will tell you otherwise. The very fact that it’s been around so long and hasn’t quite made it says to me that they’ve still got a long ways to go. If you’re looking for an application as stable as Photoshop, with a huge userbase, and customer support to match, this is it.

Pixelmator

Ahhh, finally a competitor to Photoshop that gets it right on both levels: interface and function! In fact, I’ll argue that the UI looks better than PS’s. Things operate a bit differently but usability is great and I never once felt like I should switch applications. The fact that it opens PSDs is a HUGE plus. As far as how it stacks compared to PS, Macteens makes some great points:

In order to transform your image, you must use an overcomplicated interface to scale your image or whatever else you’re doing to it. This process could have been simplified by just using something along the lines of Photoshop’s Free-Transform tool activated by “Command + T”….There really isn’t any pretty way to say this, but Pixelmator offers no real power over managing text in the interface.

Gimp: GNU Image Manipulation Program

If Photoshop is the king of design applications, GIMP is the king of open source alternatives. Adobe really messed up when they ignored the Linux market because it created an opening for GIMP to build a huge fan-base and a legion of diehard supporters. I like the fact that it doesn’t operate exactly like Photoshop, because If I wanted anything that was just like Photoshop…I’d be using Photoshop.

Faux Posterization

1. Open your image and duplicate the background layer (which should be your image).



2. Under “Layer Style” change the topmost layers Blend Option value to “Vivid Light”.



3. Set the Opacity of the topmost layer to “50%”. done the resulting image should be pretty high contrast and washed out.



4. If you so choose change your Image>>Mode setting to grayscale for a posterized black and white version.

Brilliant Color and Haze

High Contrast

Keep in mind these techniques aren’t the best ways to do this, but if you just want to spice up your photos and have no interest in truly learning Photoshop then they might work for you!

Well, no one is sure yet but the new features in some of the products in Adobe’s may provide some insight as to what the future holds.

Adobe has just announced that the newest versions of several Creative Suite titles, namely, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, can now be downloaded for a test run.

There’s a catch. If you’re not currently using the CS3 versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks, the trial period for these programs will end within 48 hours. Otherwise you can request serial numbers to use them during Adobe’s prerelease period.

CNet has a more in depth run down of the new features available in some of the Betas but doesn’t quite have the scoop on Photoshop.

We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver trial and liked some of the changes. Among the touted enhancements are a Related Files Toolbar and Code Navigator. The Properties panel integrates HTML and CSS coding, which could save time for those who edit dynamic sites. A new Live View Mode, driven by Webkit open-source rendering, previews pages within Dreamweaver, eliminating the need to open a browser. Adobe intends for this feature to make it easier to debug JavaScript as well as to work with Flash animation.

There’s no word yet on whether the next rough draft of Photoshop will be available for a free trial. However, Photoshop’s next iteration may become available in widgets, enabling users to mix and mash up some features with third-party content, according to a blog post last week by Photoshop product manager John Nash. We suspect that there will be more opportunities to blur the lines between the desktop, the Web, and mobile platforms within the next Creative Suite.

I have a theory that Adobe will aim at integrating all of it’s products into sister web applications like Photoshop Express (above), but that’s just my own speculation. However, some type of interface like Google’s Gears would be the big step towards cloud computing that Adobe has yet to take.

With the growing use of web apps for professional work, it’s inevitable that Adobe enter that realm.

Since most, if not all, of spams have links to other sites, why not remove the ability to leave clickable links in the comments section? Although spammers (and regular people) can still send in comments, they won’t be able to publish active hyperlinks. This can be done by accessing the server and configuring it such that all HTML tags from comment links are automatically stripped.

2. Use anti-spam plugins

If you’re using Wordpress, you can use spam filters like the popular Akismet which learns the more you use it. This ability to learn new spamming techniques via user input has been very effective so far. Another way is to utilize user validation plugins like Captcha to require commenters to prove they are living, breathing human beings, as opposed to spam-generating bots. You will either be presented with scrambled text on an image or an audio recording to listen to. Choose well because some plugins of this type are extremely hard to crack. If valid users fail to leave a comment on their first try, they might just abandon trying all together.

3. Block Googlebot from the comments

Rampant spamming can hurt your site’s SEO, so in the extreme case where you want to make sure this extraneous content won’t be indexed by spiders, use the robots.txt file to block their access to the subdirectory where the comments are stored. An alternate way is to use the meta tag to block certain pages by putting this inside the header:

4. Use nofollow tags

Make sure your comment links are padded with the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This bit of code will prevent the link from becoming a factor in PageRank calculation and your page’s relevance to keyword searches. Some blogging sites and CMS like Wordpress add this attribute to comment links by default.

5. Turn on comment moderation

However, the best way is still to play the vigilant cop in policing your site’s comments. It can be grueling if you get a lot of comments everyday, but it can also be rewarding because you get to interact with authentic visitors. Most blogs come with the option to hold the comments until you personally approve them, instead of automatically displaying these. It’s especially useful to guard against not only spammers but trolls – those who spew unnecessary hate for some unfathomable reason. I guess the Internet must have its downsides, too.