If you’ve ever read a tutorial on a CSS framework, I can guarantee that many comments mimic the previous statements. My guess is that the majority of these comments are stemmed from slight ignorance. Once you take the opportunity to spend some time with 960, you’ll be amazed at how much time can potentially be saved when developing your web applications. At the very least, take ten minutes to review the framework. You can always press the delete key…though I doubt you will!

Pros

• Rapidly speeds up development time.
• Clean grid structure.
• Not many browser inconsistencies. The ones you find can be fixed easily.
• It’s not "bloated" as many people suggest. We’re talking 3-4kb here, folks! You would use many of these stylings anyways.
• Build complex layouts quickly.

Cons

• It’s named "960" for a reason. If you’re hoping to use a different width for you website, you might be better off choosing a different framework.
• As with any "framework", you lose a bit of flexibility.
• You didn’t create it. There’s something to be said for code being 100% our own.

Usage

Let’s imagine that we want to work with the "12 column" structure to create the extremely simple layout seen below. First, we must create a wrapper div that has a class of "container_12". Notice the 12.

<div id="container" class="container_12">
...content goes here
</div>

Specifying an id here isn’t required by any means. However, I find that it helps me to remember exactly what the div is. One of the gripes against 960 is that the classes do nothing to define what the element is. Simply including an id fixes that issue.

Grids

Now we want to create a simple header and two column structure. When first getting started, it’s helpful to examine the demo to choose how wide a grid you should use.

I’m going to choose a header width of "940px" (+ 20px margins = 960), a sidebar width of "220px", and a main content width of "700px".

You must assign a class to each div. Naming conventions require that that the class name begins with "grid_" and ends with the number of columns needed. In our case, we’ll use "grid_12′, "grid_3" and "grid_9", respectively.

<div id="container" class="container_12">
  <div id="header" class="grid_12">
    content goes here
  </div>

  <div id="sidebar" class="grid_3">
    content goes here
  </div>

  <div id="mainContent" class="grid_9">
    content goes here
  </div>
</div>

The only additional styling that I’ve added is background colors and a minimum width for each div to simulate an actual website full of text. I won’t go over that here; mostly because they should be removed. They’re only used here to demonstrate the structure.

Without worrying about margins, floats, or IE hacks, we’re able to create a layout extremely fast. The true power of 960 is demonstrated when building complex newspaper-like layouts.

via A Detailed Look at the 960 CSS Framework – Nettuts+ .

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1-Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

2-Twitter Sharts

‘Shart’ your twitter status anywhere within your wordpress blog posts or pages!

3-Twitter for WordPress

Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

4-Twitter Widget

Adds a sidebar widget to display Twitter updates

5-Elegant Twitter Widget

A WordPress widget that displays twitter updates in yummy valid semantic XHTML code. The code is heavily commented and the output is in template functions so everything is fully customizable.

6-Twitter This

Allow to your readers sharing your blog post at twitter .

7-Twitter Widget Pro

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link .

8-Twitter Swell

You coult post message to your Twitter and show it.

9-WP Twitter Pitch

WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered – in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox.

10-Twitter Blaster

allow your visitors to post to your Twitter account. Once installed your users can update .

11-Twitter style links

This plugin allows you to add Twitter style links to comments.

12-Twitter Feed

The control functions such as connecting to a Twitter account and storing information on the tweets/blogs, can be accessed through the “Twitter Control” GUI in the WordPress admin panel.

13-Twitter updater w/ TinyURL

com status with the latest post that you’ve made. It also has the option of including a link back to your post so can people can easily click on it to view the post.

14-Twitter To TTF

displays it in a TTF Simple. Asks you for your Twitter ID. Grabs your latest tweet.

15-Kish Twitter

This plugin is using the Twitter API to get and post the updates. You need to have a twitter account to post updates.

16-Post to Twitter

Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post

17-WP to Twitter

The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

18-Twitter Links

This plugin will convert valid Twitter usernames mentioned in comments into a link to their Twitter profile page.

19-Twitter Status

Twitter Status is a very simple no-fuzz plugin that gets the current Twitter message from the Twitter ID specified

20-Latest Twitter Sidebar Widget

Creates a sidebar widget that displays the latest Twitter update for any given user.

21-Twitter To Wire

This plugin allows your twitter posts to show up in your buddypress wire.

22-Top Twitter Links by Twitturls

Widget that displays currently popular links from Twitter .

23-Thread Twitter

fetch your tweets and display them in thread style.

24-Twitter

Customizable twitter widget for your sidebar. Twitter Widget displays your tweets on your sidebar.

25-Twitter Link

Converts @username mentions in posts and pages into links to Twitter .

Find out more, and read the rest of skyje’s top twitter plugins for wordpress on his blog below

Via  107 Twitter plugins for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog

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WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs . It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It’s always interesting to see how it’s flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.

Creative Depart

Big Spaceship

Ecoki

20 jours pour la retrouver par Kevin Polof

Search Inside Video

UGSMAG

App Storm

IconDock

ANidea

45royale

Alpha Multimedia Solutions

the Art of Catalin Bridinel

EightHourDay

ESPIRA

StopDesign

via 15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress | Web Design Ledger .

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The series will be separated into days, starting with day two… ok lets get started.

Day 2 : WordPress Admin panel.

Introduction

In our video here we quickly reviewed all the necessaries that we would be using in order to use and edit our new WordPress install. He quickly went over the WordPress file structure. The necessary changes that needed to be made to the wp-config.php file when we upload, and the location of our all important theme files.

www.example.com/wp-content/themes/theme1

Body

Moving on through the video the main bulk of this video was getting the understanding of the different template files in your wordpress theme, what they do and how they work, so lets move through a few of them.

As described in our video if we go to APPEARANCE | EDITOR we will be able to see all the template files included in the wordpress theme currently activated.

If we start by importance usualy index.php would come to mind in a wordpress site. We can see there’s no doctypes or much html data in our file at all, but rather many simple php requests to header and footer and sidebar etc.. These are essentially statements that calls in those files from you directory. So header.

In our header.php we find our doctypes and titles tags and start of our html elements. This is loaded at the top of every page or post that calls get_header(). Pretty easy to understand.

Similarly our files typically end with out get_footer() call and our footer.php contains all the closing tags for information contained within our document.

Single.php – used for individual post pages.

404.php – used when a page within your wordpress blog cannot be found.

Sidebar -  calls widgets and other custom information into the 1 or more sidebars in your wordpress theme.

Conclusion

After looking through and familiarizing yourself with the themes directory withing your wordpress install you should be able to identify the different files and what they more or less accomplish. With this basic knowledge we will be able to simply identify where and what files we need to be editing in the future while we move on to developing our own theme, in the new few videos.

If you’re having problems understand the videos or information please comment and we will see if we can help you out.

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First SEO Quake found at seoquake.com

Seo quake is both for Firefox and IE, and its primary function in is to help quantitatively define the information presented on a website or page being viewed. The main feature I would point you guys too is the keyword density ability, basically it can read through your pages and find out how many times a word or group of words appears on your site. VERY HANDY if your going for SEO optimizations this is a must, try and get your good key words between 5-20 density for maximum effect on your home page.

Next we have the all powerful Developers toolbar from Chris Derick

The toolbar can be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org

Developers tool bar is a multifunction toolbar allowing users to view style information, edit css, outline styles, edit their browsers width and height and so much more. Just with those key features makes the developers toolbar the #1 Firefox extension any kind of web personnel should have. Being able to specifically target a browsers width and height is something I think we all have had to do at a specific time, and with 2 clicks boom you can view the site in that exact resolution.

Being able to edit css on the fly even on another website and save it off also a helpful or potentially a time saving feature. and of course most praised feature in my opinion is the ability to highlight hovered objects, and see their css roots. See what div, what class and what id they came from, makes editing your styles that must faster.

Umm lets see, Colorzilla downloadable over there colorzilla.com !!

Colorzilla is simple, it places an icon down in the lower left hand corner status bar and  you just select it to get an eye dropper in Firefox, thus allowing you to retrieve any color on the firefox screen. Oh its sOo handy.

Finally we have Firebug available addons.mozilla.org

Firebug has some similarities with the developers toolbar but its a lot more complex. In other words it can be used to help diagnose css related issues and help you dig deep to find what id or class your having trouble with, but where this thing has shined for me in the past is with the development of dynamic sites, the ability to track what files are specifically slowing down the loading or display of my site.

My list of Firefox plug-in’s again are

• SEO quake
• Developers toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Firebug
• and of course Firefox is the browser.

Do you  have your own plug-in you think should be included in this, feel free to comment and let everyone know about it.

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Feast your eyes over this collection of super useful CSS resources

• 20 Useful CSS Tips For Beginners
• Using CSS to Do Anything: 50+ Creative Examples & Tutorials
• 101 CSS Tips, Tutorials and Examples
• CSS Code Snippets : 15 Wicked Tricks
• 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned
• 8 CSS tips for better linking
• 8 Premium One Line CSS Tips
• 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding
• 30+ CSS Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Guides
• 10 Principles of the CSS Masters
• 10 Excellent CSS Tips and Tutorials
• 50+ Nice Clean CSS Tab-Based Navigation Scripts
• CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Tips, Demos & Best Practices
• 120 Excellent Examples of CSS Horizontal Menus
• 60+ Wacky CSS Tutorials, Layouts, Optimizers & More
• 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean
• Quick & Easy CSS Development with Firebug
• 25+ CSS Tools to reduce your work load
• 20 Useful Resources for Learning about CSS3
• 16 Usable CSS Graph and Bar Chart Tutorials & Techniques
• Top 10 Swish And Stylish CSS Tricks
• 12 Most used CSS tricks
• Five web 2.0 CSS menu tutorials
• 12 CSS Tools and Tutorials for Beautiful Web Typography
• 5 Popular CSS Frameworks + Tools for Getting Started
• 30 Excellent CSS Based Navigation and Buttons Tutorial
• Creating CSS Layouts: Best Tutorials on Converting PSD to XHTML
• 20 Ultimate CSS Tutorials That Will Help You Master CSS
• 19 CSS Menu Tutorials to Spice Up Your Web Designs
• Top 10 CSS Buttons Tutorial List
• 40 CSS Web Form Style Tutorials For Web Developers
• 35+ very Useful And Powerful CSS techniques
• 43 PSD to XHTML, CSS Tutorials Creating Web Layouts & Menus
• Creating Sexy Stylesheets
• CSS Tip #1: Resetting Your Styles with CSS Reset
• Ten CSS tricks you may not know
• 5 Tips For Organizing Your CSS
• Web Design+ Tips & Advice on Web Standards Development
• 10 CSS shorthand techniques you’ll use everyday
• The Ultimate CSS Cheat Sheet
• 13 Training Principles of CSS Everyone Should Know
• 101 CSS Techniques Of All Time- Part 1
• 16+ Easy CSS Techniques that Simplify the Webdesigner’s Life
• 15 CSS Properties You Probably Never Use (but perhaps should)
• The CSS, HTML, and JavaScript Lab
• 5 Steps to CSS Heaven
• Cool CSS Image Maps
• 20 Sites That Brought CSS into the Mainstream
• CSS Font sizing with different techniques
• Make your Site Mobile Friendly with CSS
• Examples & Tips for Great HTML/CSS Formatting
• Top 10 CSS Table Designs
• Fluid Grids with CSS
• The Art of CSS Positioning
• CSS: Magic of ‘border’ property
• How to Debug CSS
• 26+ CSS Galleries to Follow on Twitter
• Image-free CSS Tooltip Pointers
• Simple scalable CSS based breadcrumbs
• 9 CSS Essential Skills For Every Web Designer
• My Top Ten CSS Tricks
• 22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts
• 10 Invaluable CSS Resources
• 40 Beautiful Dark CSS Website Designs
• 40+ CSS Generators, Creators, and Makers
• How to: CSS Large Background
• The complete CSS guide
• Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps
• 50+ Nice Clean CSS Tab-Based Navigation Scripts
• 37 CSS Navigation Techniques
• 10 Challenging But Awesome CSS Techniques
• CSS Typography: Contrast Techniques, Tutorials & More
• 4 Uber Cool Css Techniques For Links
• 38 Free Elegant XHTML/CSS Website Templates
• CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know
• CSS Tip #2: Structural Naming Convention in CSS
• 5 Techniques to Acquaint You With CSS 3
• The Highly Extensible CSS Interface
• Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides
• Best of CSS Design 2008
• SitePoint CSS Reference
• CSS Editors Reviewed

via 84 Amazingly Useful CSS Tips & Resources | Hi, I’m Grace Smith .

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Here are 50 beautiful websites with landscape illustrations in a variety of styles.

Find Out How Serious…

Green Globe Ideas

DivVoted

StrawPoll

ten24 Media

Banjax

Visit Cascadia

DrupalCon DC

Studio7Designs

Adit Shukla

Iceberg

Vimeo

Go Glamping

Twither

Sensi Soft

volll

Tomas Pojeta

Jiri Tvrdek

Boagworld

Rawkes

10 Volt Media

Web Design Beach

Schneeballschl8

Stylized Web
S

Project Vino

Arbutus Photography

Moshi Monsters

IL FRUTTETO

eAnka

Colchester School

Cloudred Multimedia

John Cow

Dean Oakely

Brad Colbow

Nine Lion

RedBrick Health

polargold

Carbonica

The Octonauts

Yes Insurance

Viget Inspire

Reservoir34

Biowind

Happy in Greenville

Miki Mottes

Pinjata

via 50 Beautiful Websites with Illustrated Landscapes | Webdesigner Depot .

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These first two are unlike the rest because they are logo and illustration galleries.

Logo Pond

Vecteezy

Mail Chimp

Silverback

Cult-Foo

Open Doors

Biola

Web Designer Depot

Agami Creative

Mochiads

Stoodeo

DallasISP

Sheye Rosemeyer

Gourmet Web Design

Indy List

Lucuma

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A Few High Quality WordPress Themes: Evan Eckard
Over 2000 Free Web Templates: OSWD
A Small Selection of Nice Templates: Open Source Templates
A Large List of Free Templates: Free CSS Templates
Nice WordPress Templates for Download: Free CSS Templates
A Combination of Free and Pay Templates: Free Templates Online
Affordable, Quality Templates: Templamatic
Free Blog Templates: Blogging Themes

CSS Galleries

The Best Sites on the Web: CSS Remix
A Frequently Updated Gallery of Sites: CSS Mania
An Organized List of Nice Sites: Most Inspired
CSS Gallery of Quality Sites: CSS Design Yorkshire
A Selection of Only Nature Based Sites: CSS Nature
A Selective List of Well Designed Sites: Web Creme
High Quality CSS Showcase: CSS Tux
Nice CSS Websites: The Designed Tree
A CSS Collection Organized by Category: CSS Elite

Inspiration

A Great Site About Everything Type: I Love Typography
An Incredible Illustrator: Burst of Beaden
A Great Designer and Illustrator: Fully Illustrated
Customizable List of Design Resources: Cork Dump
The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada: GDC
Freelance Advice Blog and Resources: Freelance Switch
Amazing Collection of Logos: Logopond
Stunning Desktop Wallpapers: Desktopography
A Graphic Design Magazine: Computer Arts

Tutorials

The Best Photoshop Tutorials: PSD Tuts
A Talented Photoshop Designer: Abduzeedo
Photoshop Tutorials and Web Design Resources: Web Design Library
Tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and More: Tutorial Vault
A Few Neat Illustrator and Photoshop Tutorials: Design Spice
Great Photoshop Tutorials and Downloads: PS Wish
Tutorials for Every Computer Program: Tutorialing

Design Blogs

A Frequently Updated Design Blog: Veerleas Blog
A Design Magazine and Blog: Smashing Magazine
A European Design Blog: Design In Europe
A Unique Nerdy Blog: Design You Trust
The Personal Blog of a Graphic Designer: Larissa Meek
A German Design Blog: David Hellmann
The Blog of a Canadian Geek/Model: Mostly Lisa
A Graphic Design Blog: Bittbox
A Blog About Freelance Graphic Design Advice: Freelance Switch
A Design Blog Full of Resources: You The Designer
A Popular Design Blog: Fazai 38

via Eco Design Blog a: 101 Design resource sites .

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• The personal design blog, web.print.andbeyond  at Jilnteractive
• Gonno Design’s Dark theme focuses your attention to his work | Gonzo Design
• Web design company employing the funner side of illustration | GetMeFast
• Creepy animation, solid design skills | STPo
• A personal favorite, Abduzeedo links all of us to great inspiration over and over again | Abduzeedo
• Popular css gallery website | css Fresh Blend
• a UK biased company, and not so known in my circles but a very beautiful css Gallery | CSS Showcase
• Theme forest home page is what makes this site wonderful, pictures, content, nice big power button | Theme Forest
• The ever popular Smash Magazine

If you have comments about this list please feel free to leave them. This list is comprised almost in its entirety by my own personal feelings about these websites look and feels.

Additionally if your interested in a larger list studio7designs has come up with a list of 101 sites most of whitch are simply stunning. A list that I myself with be reviewing in great depth in the comeing weeks. The Additional list can be found at http://www.studio7designs.com/blog/101-design-resource-links/ and will be added to my news press section.

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