The use of rounded corners on website has becoming very popular. Many websites are starting to kill the sharp edge and go with rounded corners in their buttons, navigation bar, header, banner, etc. Just how easy these rounded corners images can be created? I’m here to show you few which I think are few of the good ones.

1. Google Rounded Corners Generator

This google script generates a PNG format rounded corners for you on the fly. Simply copy the scripts below into a browser and hit enter.

http://groups-beta.google.com/groups/roundedcorners? c=999999&bc=white&w=4&h=4&a=tr

Tweak the following parameters to get the rounded corners of your choice.

Parameters:

2. Spiffy Corners

Spiffy Corners creates you rounded corner without using images. It make use of CSS and HTML to create a rounded corner effect that works well in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Visit Spiffy and generate your codes.

3. Cornershop

Cornershop is rather a combination of both. You fill up your requirements in the textfield, and your desired corners (in images) will be generated, together with CSS and HTML.

1. IconFinder

Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way.

2. IconLet

Iconlet is simple search engine for free icons, images.

3. IconLook

ICONlook.com is a place where to find your icons.

4. VeryIcon

The VeryIcom.com is a icon search engine, it contents over 20000 high quaility web icons in more than 1000 icon packs.

5. IconSeeker

The IconSeeker.com is the best icon search engine on web, it contents about 50,000+ high quaility icons and each icon has PNG, ICO and ICNS formats for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

6. Icons-Search

The Icons-Search is an Icon Search Engine that helps you to find quality icons available on the Internet.

Creating a Wordpress blog for your business can be a great way to keep in touch with your customers and increase interest in your product(s). For some people, their blog is their whole business.

Making a successful blog may seem like a daunting task. There are millions of blogs out there and it may seem impossible at first to stand out. The major thing that will help your blog stand out is the content you provide. It needs to be useful for your visitors. But besides that, there are free services and business plugins for Wordpress to help you along the way.

We’ll take a look at five of the essentials for Wordpress business blogs.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is an essential service to help with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Google wants your site to be Google-friendly and their tools will help you.

Getting started is simple. Log in with a free Google account (register for one if needed) and go to Google Webmaster Tools. Google will ask you to verify you are the site owner by adding a meta tag to your homepage or uploading a HTML file.

Once verified, you’ll have access to information about your site, such as which keywords are ranked the best on Google and tips on how to improve your site.

Google XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a XML format that will help Google (and other search engines) index and crawl your site efficiently. Wordpress plugin author Arne Brachhold has created a great plugin for this specific purpose called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin is freely available for download from the Wordpress download page or from Wordpress’s built-in plugin finder.

To access the plugin finder, log into your Wordpress site. On the left hand menu, find the Plugins header and click “Add New“.

After installation, select XML-Sitemap from the left-hand Settings menu and click the link to generate your first sitemap. When finished, your sitemap is available at http://your-blog.com/sitemap.xml. You can then log into your Google Webmaster Tools (from above) and submit your sitemap.

Twitter Tools

Twitter has proven itself to be a useful way of communicating with clients and customers for businesses. It’s a great way to promote new products, share the latest news, answer questions and get feedback. If you would like to show your tweets in a sidebar on your business blog and seamlessly integrate Twitter with Wordpress, there’s a great plugin called Twitter Tools by Alex King that will let you do that.

Download the plugin here or use Wordpress’s built-in plugin finder. After installation, go to your Settings and then Twitter Tools to complete the setup. You will need to enter your Twitter username and password.

To add the sidebar in the admin area, go to Design and then Widgets. From here you can add the Twitter Tools widget to your sidebar with a simple drag and drop move. You may want to change the title to something other than “Twitter Tools”, like “Our Tweets” or “Twitter News“.

Cforms II

When you’re running an online business, making it easy for your customers to communicate with you is a must. Having a contact email listed on your site will work, but it’s more professional and convenient to provide a contact form. One of the easiest ways to build a contact form is with theCforms II business plugin for Wordpress by Oliver Seidel.

After downloading and installing the plugin, go into the configuration. The plugin has a thorough set of documentation to walk you through the creation of your form.

As shown in the screenshot above, you’re able to easily add new fields. After creating your form, be sure to verify your email settings are correct. Go to the “Admin Email Options” in the configuration and double-check that the “from” and “admin” email addresses matches what you set up in your blog originally. You can then choose to add the Cforms II button to your toolbar, which will let you easily click and add the form to whatever pages you want.

WP Super Cache

As your audience grows, you may find that you need to start thinking more about optimizing your site for heavy loads, especially if your site ever becomes popular because of a site like YouTube or Digg. Without optimization your site could likely run slow or even crash completely.

The WP Super Cache plugin can help you prevent any slowdown problems and it’s a good thing to set up BEFORE your site hits the big time. Note: You need to have mod_rewrite enabled on your server to use this plugin. If you’re unsure if you have it, please ask your web host.

To get started, download the WP Super Cache plugin, upload it to your plugins folder, and activate it. Then go to “Settings | WP Super Cache“, and set the plugin status to ON. After that, scroll down the page and click “Update mod_rewrite rules“. Now as you visit your site, WP Super Cache will begin to cache pages and this will help them load faster.

If you notice any strange behavior on your site, or some other plugins not working correctly, it is possible they may not be fully compatible with WP Super Cache. In this case, you can occasionally choose to “Delete Cache” in the Cache Contents section of the WP Super Cache configuration, or you may need to uninstall the plugin completely. If so, then there are some other plugins like “WP Cache” that you could try instead, but chances are WP Super Cache will work great for you.

Original article from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/essential-wordpress-services-plugins-business-blogs/

Have you ever encounter situations where you need to create a simple yet good-looking chart, graphs or diagrams and all you have is your browser? Charts are good and effective way to show relationship between entities but sometimes creating one can be pretty challenging especially when your favorite word processing software is not around.

In today’s post, we want to highlight some of the best web services that allow you to create various charts and graphs online on-the-fly. Most of them are easy to use and don’t you even worry about the design. Your output will be as good as what you see in the screen shots below. Full list after jump.

Rich Chart Live
Create enjoyable and captivating Flash Charts from your web browser.

DIY Chart
DIY (Do it yourself) Chart is a Web-based, simple and powerful online tool to create interactive charts and graphs from static or dynamic data which may be generated using any scripting language.

Online Chart Generator
The best online chart and graph generator tool, Generate amazing 3D graphs instantly in few seconds.

Chartle.net
Chartle.net tears down the complexity of online visualizations – offers simplicity, ubiquity and interactivity online chart generator.

ChartGo
ChartGo allows users to create charts online quickly and simply paste your data in the chart data area and hit the create chart button.

Create A Graph
You can really make a detailed graph at Create A Graph and see how it might look, and then print, download, or email what you’ve created.

JS Charts
JS Charts is a JavaScript chart generator that requires little or no coding. JS Charts allows you to easily create charts in different templates like bar charts, pie charts or simple line graphs.

Pie Chart Tool
Pie Chart Tool creates a pie charts based on the data you provide. All you have to do is to type your data and the name of the categories.

Piecolor
Piecolor is a tool that creates pie chart with colors very easily.

Hohli Charts
Hohli Charts lets you dynamically generate charts.

CSS Chart Generator
CSS Chart Generator generates your charts on the fly.

CHARTPART
Google chart API and chart generator tool.

Chart Maker
Generator for the Chart Server API.

Google Chart Tools
The Google Chart Tools enable adding live charts to any web page.

amCharts Visual Editor
This editor allows you to use amCharts as a web service. This means that all you need to do is to configure the chart and paste the generated HTML code to your HTML page.

Pie Chart Maker
This free tool outputs your pie chart as an image that you can save to your computer.

ChartGizmo
With your free account from ChartGizmo you can now create charts for your website, blog and social network profiles.

Onlinecharttool.com
On Onlinecharttool.com you can design and share your own graphs online and for free.

OWTChart Generator
The OWTChart Generator is an on-line tool to be used to produce charts. A GIF image of the chart that you specified will be displayed on the screen.

Highcharts
Highcharts is a charting library written in pure JavaScript, offering an easy way of adding interactive charts to your web site or web application. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter chart types.

iCharts
iCharts is a web-services company that makes data publishing and distribution simple.

Google Chart Generator
Create a Google chart in seconds!

Original article from 22 Useful Online Chart & Graph Generators | Tools http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/22-useful-chart-graph-diagram-generators/#ixzz0j5BUV2fH

This is not a new story.. but is still valuable if you havent seen this before.

Clear out your bookmarks. You’re going to need the space for 50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1918031,00.html#ixzz0iKMybdx6

Full List

Sites to Visit

1. Flickr
2. California Coastline
3. Delicious
4. Metafilter
5. popurls
6. Twitter
7. Skype
8. Boing Boing
9. Academic Earth
10. OpenTable
11. Google
12. YouTube
13. Wolfram|Alpha
14. Hulu
15. Vimeo
16. Fora TV
17. Craiglook
18. Shop Goodwill
19. Amazon
20. Kayak
21. Netflix
22. Etsy
23. PropertyShark.com
24. Redfin
25. Wikipedia
26. Internet Archive
27. Kiva
28. ConsumerSearch
29. Metacritic
30. Pollster
31. Facebook
32. Pandora and Last.fm
33. Musicovery
34. Spotify
35. Supercook
36. Yelp
37. Visuwords
38. CouchSurfing
39. BabyNameWizard.com’s NameVoyager
40. Mint
41. TripIt
42. Aardvark
43. drop.io
44. Issuu
45. Photosynth
46. OMGPOP
47. WorldWideTelescope
48. Fonolo
49. Get High Now
50. Know Your Meme

With the rise of the CSS3, we’re seeing more & more tutorials + websites everyday that help us to use it.

Here comes a very easy to use website for creating CSS3 rulesnamed CSS3 Generator.

It simply lets you to choose the rule from a list that includes:

• border radius
• box shadow
• text shadow
• RGBA
• @font-face
• multiple columns
• box resize
• box sizing
• outline

and customize them while previewing the outputs instantly.

Visit the website: http://css3generator.com/

文章标题怎么个起法，很有讲究。比如这篇，标题说的让你一定会点击进来瞧一瞧，其实看了就知道，这不过是一篇介绍文章订阅的那些个网站：比如我们最熟悉的google alert订阅器——输入我们关心的话题或人物，它就会定期自动将相关文章发到你指定的邮箱里。不过的确是换个角度让我们看内容，启发我们去发现不同的用法。

我好奇的是，这些订阅器网站，它们是靠什么盈利的呢？因为目前的阅读器上似乎并没有铺天盖地的广告。在网上又看到了抓虾要倒闭的消息。不过在尝试feedsky的时候，发现它有一个功能——话题营销，以前没注意过，不知道是不是新功能——就是博客主可以通过写有关广告主的文章来获利，这样看来，也终究是逃不了一个广告盈利模式了。

Original article from makeuseof.com.

I recently wrote about how you can find out when someone searches Google for your name. If you are interested in who is looking for you and your general online reputation, you are probably equally interested in finding out what is being said about you online.

People could be spreading information about you or your business that you should rather be aware of. Rather than to regularly scan the search engines for results with your name, you can automate the process of monitoring your online reputation and be notified once there is a new entry containing your name. This will also work for any other subject that is of interest to you.

In this article I will introduce three services that allow you to monitor your online reputation and set up alerts for specific topics.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts provides updates of the latest Google results relevant to your search query across Google (comprehensive) or within different categories, such as news or blogs. You can choose to receive updates as-it-happens, once a day or once a week. They are subsequently delivered to your email or you can set up a personalized feed.

To receive email updates you do not have to sign up with Google. However, as a subscribed member you can centrally manage all your alerts about your online reputation.

As you can see from the example above, I have used some standard search engine operands. You can use these signs and keys to get more specific search results. So for example “Keane AND Berlin” will only return results from indexed sites that contain both keywords. A while ago I wrote an article on Google operands, which may come in handy now.

Trackle

Trackle is a service dedicated to tracking your personalized information online. To receive updates, you must sign up with your email address and password. It’s quick and simple. Once you’re in, Trackle offers many more features than Google Alerts. First of all, you can receive updates via the web portal, email, SMS, or through your feed reader.

The biggest difference between Trackle and Google Alerts is that Trackle has a lot more entertainment value. They have prepared search queries, known as Tracklets, and made them available through their Tracklet catalog. The categories include books, health, people, and travel. You can browse the catalog and add any of the Tracklets to your subscriptions.

To set up a custom search, type in your query into the text field in the top right that says “Research company, person, product, or topic“. It will direct you to a page with results from the past three days, like the one shown in the screenshot below.

From that page you can further select the types of results you’re after, for example narrow your results by credibility, select categories, and discover other users with similar interests.

Once happy with your definitions, click “Track this search” to enter the next step in which you define how the results are delivered to you. The search can be run every hour, every 4 or 8 hours, and once a day. Moreover, your search will not be executed forever, you can select a duration of up to four weeks.

Your inbox shows the latest alerts and within your subscriptions you can see what you’re tracking and eventually update it.

Other interesting features of Trackle include a widget for your website or blog or the option to create a custom newsletter.

Social Mention

Another way to receive a quick overview of your popularity or impact in the social media world is Social Mention. You can search blogs, bookmarks, comments, videos, a lot more or simply everything.

The results page provides a detailed analysis of the query. If the coverage is too broad, you can narrow down your search by specifying details in the advanced search.

The data can be downloaded as a CSV/Excel sheet and you can subscribe to alerts via email or RSS feed.

If you found this information helpful for managing your online reputation, you may also be interested in the following articles from Saikat:

10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer
Topikality – Improve Google Alerts & Get The Articles You Want

How do you keep up to date with what’s being published online?

Original article from makeuseof.com.

Original article from makeuseof.com.

挑选一些孩子从出生到现在的成长照片，上传到这个网站，网站会自动按照时间顺序排列照片，制作成slideshow，并配上背景音乐自动播放。你就可以再慢慢品味一番孩子的成长了！

Everybody has tons of pictures for their kids starting right from their birth. GrowShow is a time lapse imaging tool that lets you organize those pictures into a chronological order without any extra effort. Simply upload the pictures to GrowShow and they will automatically be sequenced.

GrowShow also automatically calculates the date of the image from the metadata and calculates your child’s age based on the date of birth. You can also choose the music and customize the settings for your GrowShow. Once you create your GrowShow, you can order it in print (for some extra cost) along with various types of frames such as square, standard or special time-lapsing frame that displays the growth of your child through pictures.

Features:

• Create a slideshow of your kid’s pictures.
• Automatically organize pictures in chronological order.
• Newly uploaded pictures are automatically inserted at the right spot.
• Add music and customize settings for your GrowShow.
• Keep your GrowShow private or share with family and friends.
• Order prints and frames.

Similar sites: Baby-Connect and Kidmondo.

我也顺手随便弄了一个，网站似乎有点慢：

Original article from makeuseof.com.

对于那些我们想要置入个人博客中的视频播放器，除了免费不限量，我个人是希望它能界面足够简洁、足够单纯，不要广告、不要出现其它乱七八糟的视频。之前一直在用Jaycut的播放器，它基本能满足这些要求，但欠缺的是视频上传后的画面质量被缩减不少，一旦有较多动感画面，看起来就很不清楚。

今天在浏览其它网站的时候，无意中发现了www.viddler.com这个视频网站，试用之后，觉得很不错！也很好的保持了原始视频的质量。如果你还没有找到满意的视频网站作为博客的视频内容链接，不妨可以试一试Viddler的。国外的Youtube、国内的土豆，虽然火爆，可是在界面设计上真不能恭维，放在博客页面上怎么看都不顺眼。

和大多数视频网站一样，Viddler也是提供有免费和升级付费两种服务。

以下是Viddler对自己所提供服务的定义：

一段来自Viddler的音乐视频——

Viddler是一个很自由开放的播放器，你可以定义视频缩略图、定义播放点、定义颜色配置，甚至允许让你自定义播放器右下角的logo，如果你需要的话。
我目前遇到的唯一问题是：它不支持断点续传，也就是说，如果上传一段视频中途出现问题，你必须重新开始。视频上传本身已经很耗时了，一旦出现问题，就意味着前功尽弃，对于网络不太好的用户，这会是个大问题。

Creating your own products used to mean a significant up-front investment — purchasing a minimum amount of the product as dictated by the manufacturer, paying for warehousing, packaging, point-of-sale systems, and other overhead costs. And that was all before you even took a single order! Thankfully, for many types of products, print-on-demand technologies have made it possible for anyone to create and sell goods over the Internet with little or no up-front costs.

Below is a roundup of 15 great print-on-demand sites that will help you create and sell everything from t-shirts to clocks, from books to skateboards, from board games to fabric.

1. CafePress

CafePress is one of the oldest print-on-demand services online and they offer one of the largest catalogs of products on which you can print your logo or designs. From apparel, like t-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats, to calendars, posters, mugs, water bottles, stickers, stuffed animals, buttons, messenger bags, and even clocks, CafePress offers hundreds of different products to sell and its thriving community of users creates over 45,000 new items each day on the site.

2. Zazzle

Like CafePress, Zazzle offers a huge number of customizable products including t-shirts, sweatshirts, bags, ties, and even aprons, jackets, postage stamps, and shoes. They offer both custom on-demand printing and embroidery on many of their clothing products, and also offer a range of non-apparel items, such as skateboard decks, calendars, magnets, and post cards. Zazzle users have created a mind blowing 19.5 billion items.

3. Spreadshirt

While the focus on Spreadshirt is on t-shirts and sweatshirts, they also offer a range of accessory items that can be printed with your designs, including bags, aprons, buttons, and neckties. One of Spreadshirt’s strengths is the ease of use of its online product designer, making is really easy for anyone to make or customize products that can then be sold to the public.

4. Pikistore

Pikistore does t-shirts and a few other customizable items, such as mugs and mousepads, and does it with a flair that other print-on-demand publishers would be hard pressed to match. For those who want a really great looking storefront from which to sell their t-shirts, perhaps one that matches the look and feel of an existing web site, then Pikistore might be a good option to check out.

5. Lulu

For authors and photographers (and musicians and filmmakers), Lulu offers an amazing service. Lulu is a great way for anyone to publish a printed book (in either hard or softcover, perfect bound, spiral bound, or saddle stitched), CDs, or DVDs. One of the best things about Lulu is that they can help you get your products listed for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in bookstores, as well as tools to help you sell and promote your work through social networks like Facebook.

6. CreateSpace

CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, lets authors, musicians, and filmmakers create print-on-demand books, CDs, and DVDs. The main advantage to using CreateSpace is that because it is owned by Amazon, your products’ inclusion in the Amazon catalog is guaranteed. That means you can also sell on the Kindle, via the Amazon MP3 store, and offer movie downloads (which means availability on the Xbox 360 and certain TiVo players). Being guaranteed a spot in Amazon’s marketplace can mean a huge boost to your potential sales.

7. Blurb

Blurb just does books, but they do books beautifully. Blurb specializes in creating printed books that definitely don’t have a print-on-demand feel, and because they create such great photobooks, the site has attracted many artists and photographers. As a result, many of the books they create are right up there in terms of design with those coming out of the major publishing houses. Blurb also makes it easy to automatically create books with your content from Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, and TypePad.

8. TasteBook

If you’re creating a cookbook, then TasteBook might be for you. TasteBooks are stunning hardcover, spiral bound cookbook binders that hold up to 100 recipes. But what really sets TasteBook apart from other print-on-demand publishers is that users can upload their own recipes or choose recipes from a large number of third-party providers, including Food & Wine, Cooking Light, Food Network, Better Homes and Gardens, Epicurious, Recipezaar, and more.

For more ways to publish a book, check out Mashable’s 6 Ways to Publish Your Own Book

9. CDBaby

Over 200,000 indie artists already sell their music through CDBaby. It’s not exactly a print-on-demand publisher, since they really just handle warehousing, selling, and distribution of your CDs (though they do offer disc duplication services as well), but it is so amazingly popular among indie musicians that it would be hard not to mention it here.

10. The Game Crafter

The Game Crafter is an awesome new service for making and selling your own board games and collectible card games. Just upload your artwork and game rules, and pick out which pieces (dice, pawns, etc.) need to be included and go! The Game Crafter will print, package up, and mail out your game every time it’s ordered. It won’t be quite as polished as a traditionally published game (game boards are printed on heavy clay-coated card stock rather than the even heavier chip core that game companies usually use, for example), but the results are still very playable and The Game Crafter’s service is bound to get better over time.

11. Spoonflower

Anyone who watches Project Runway knows that the right print can make or break a good design. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to have your own designs turned into printed fabric? Spoonflower, a print-on-demand fabric seller, does just that, letting designers create and sell printed fabrics on either quilting or upholstery weight cotton or organic cotton sateen, with prices ranging from $18 – $32 per yard.

12. Ponoko

Ponoko takes your 3D designs and turns them into actual products using a variety of materials, such as MDF, bamboo, cardboard, leather, acrylic, and felt. The result is that you can make toys, housewares, furniture, jewelry, and even electronics and put them up for sale in your own storefront.

13. Shapeways

Like Ponoko, Shapeways lets you upload 3D designs and turn them into real products using 3D printing technology. The site then lets you sell your products via a custom storefront. People are using Shapeways to sell art, toys, jewelry and other gadgets, and some people are using the site for rapid prototyping of products.

14. ImageKind

Any artists out there? Want to easily sell prints of your work? Then check out ImageKind. This site, which is owned by CafePress, specializes in prints and cards with a variety of different material, size, and framing options. For photographers who use Flickr, you can easily import your work to ImageKind and offer it for sale with custom framing.

15. deviantART

deviantART is one of the largest art sites on the web, with over 81 million submissions. Every member of the site is also eligible to sell their art through the site’s store on mugs, mousepads, coasters, magnets, puzzles, prints and other items. Prints can be offered in a variety of sizes and with a handful of different frame types.

Original article comes from Mashable.com.