Clipart ETC
Clipart might be a thing of the past or something most people associated with powerpoint/office, but it can still come very handy for people doing design. Clipart ETC has a heap of clipart that can be used in a variety of areas, and one of my faves was the clocks. It has clipart of an analog clock at all points in time, this basically related to a flyer I was doing where I had to find clocks to elaborate on time frames, but getting two similar looking clocks with the times I wanted was proving pretty hard, and I wasn't for designing my own given the time frame.
It's definitely worth a look if you're after some clipart and aren't happy with what you get by default in office.
Presentation
If you're looking for alternatives to Powerpoint or basically want to put up an online presentation and in turn reducing the issue of the viewers needing a particular software then there are a few sites worth looking at.
If you're looking at a close to standard Powerpoint based presentation then have a look at 280 Slides. It allows you to import your powerpoint presentations and if you're going to create them from scratch then it offers just about everything Powerpoint does.
But, if you're looking into something different then Prezi offers something different with its zoom in and out functionality, Prezi is being taken up by teachers due to it's ease of use and it's zoom function. It's not for high-end presentations where you're looking at putting in menus and making it interactive but more as a strict presentation tool.
Finally if you're looking at an interactive soft of presentation, then wix is the way to go. I've mentioned Wix earlier of course and it's still perhaps the best online application to create flash websites/presentations in, it's easy to use and you can create some pretty amazing sites/presentations.
Joomla SEO URL’s Fix
This is often a common issue in Joomla and if you google about it you'll find countless questions regarding this and how people have trouble getting them to work. If you've used Joomla you'll know the default URL's it produces are far from SEO friendly with incredibly long extensions, and with the common practice of sharing links on Social Networks it makes it absurd to share a link that stretches for about 100+ characters.
In the backend in the Global Configuration you have the option of setting SEO friendly URL's, use Apache mod_rewrite and adding suffix's to the URL. The latter option is rarely used and it's purpose is to mainly give an extension on that page (so for example instead of "contactus" it'll be contactus.html).
The first two are the options you want to enabled (say yes to), now the most common issue or rather issues is that the CSS gets messed up for any other page than your index if you enabled SEO friendly URL's, and if you also enable the Apche mod_rewrite you get a 404 error. There is a easy fix for this, and while it isn't 100% (some complaints are made regarding it messing up the active li menu item) it's the most effective and the simplest.
First you have to make sure you rename your htaccess.txt to .htaccess, the Joomla htaccess by default is htaccess.txt and you're more than likely to have a default .htaccess on your site. You can either go through your CPanel file manager and change the name or just use your FTP client to rename the file. Make sure you change the extension as if you were to just rename it to .htaccess.txt it still won't work and more so could stuff your website access up.
Once you've renamed the file you need to edit it, either download it your local drive via your FTP client (recommended so if you stuff something up the original file will still be there) or go through your File Manager and edit it, but make sure you make a copy if you're relatively new to this stuff.
There is one little edit to make, if you scroll down your file you'll find a line (see image below)
# ReWriteBase
You simply need to delete the hash (#) in front of it and your SEO friendly URL's will be working. So you'll soon have URL's such as www.domain.com/contactus instead of the old www.domain.com/itemid=$34234tg_?dfdsfdsf based URL's of previous and you will no longer see the 404 error or have issues with CSS not working outside the index page.
This is the quickest fix for this issue and the easiest by far I've come across.
Source (solution given by julian8759)
Recommended Plugins
WordPress has countless amounts of plugins available for it, I happen to come across two very handy plugins for anyone using a WordPress blog/site etc. The first being Sexy Bookmarks which is perhaps the most presentable among the social network sharing plugins, it's got a nice concept and presentation about it unlike a few of the others which are pretty boxed up and cluttered. Sexy Bookmarks has been done by the people at Shareaholic, it's been downloaded over 350,000 times and I'm sure most of you have seen it on some website you ran across (see it in action below this post).
The 2nd one is the jQuery Lightbox, in fact when I searched for a plugin for this there were quite a few of them. After testing out a few others I finally the wp-jquery-lightbox which is the work of Ulf Benjaminsson. It's definitely great if you want to implement lightbox and you can have the ability of customising so it only certain images open through lightbox, a few others either didn't quite work or didn't have this option.
15+ Tips to Speed Up Your Site by Jeffrey Way
Here's an extremely useful site, had a lot of great tips some of which I've implemented and some of which I'm definitely targetting on implementing.
15 Tips to speed up your website and optimize your code
Out of that the most valuable are Smush.it, Javascript Compressor and Onlne CSS Optimizer all of which help hugely in compression. Smush.it is fantastic, it manages to keep the quality of your images whilst shrinking at least by 40% minimum, in some cases it can do alot more and it's definitely a must. The Javascript Compressor was also useful in compressing big Javascript files, it reduced one of my files from around 50KB to a mere 300 odd bytes, and finally the CSS Optimizer can also save you a KB or two although the end of the day the fluidity of the CSS is in your hands.
I definitely saw a big difference in the load up of my site by just using those tools, props to Jeffrey Way for that article.
Handy Joomla Plugins
Ran across this today, some really useful Plugins that can be used for Joomla. Some of the stuff uses JQuery but cuts off the need to implement it in the first place, I did notice the tabs-slides does have a bit of an annoyance in terms of the slides and how they load up and the AJAX ranking did stuff up the site I was working on. The most useful one is probably the Disqus comment system, lots of blog sites already use this and it's ability to integrate users from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo etc means you don't have to be part of say that particular community to even comment, so for example in the case of Joomla they don't need to be registered to the site anymore.
They have a few others that I didn't really use but could definitely be handy for use in Joomla, especially for people looking to organise and display content better and without having to really know about scripting.
It's worth checking out if you're running a Joomla site/Blogging site, kudos to the people at JoomlaWorks.
Wibiya Toolbar
I've spoken about this before and used it before, anyway the Wibiya bar is no longer in restricted mode so anyone can go grab it, all you got to do is sign up. It's a useful widget for blogging sites, mind you if you use a lot of JScript on your site you might want to avoid it as it's known to have conflicts. It does give you an option of avoiding such conflicts with the latest version but its not fool proof. Still a worthwhile addition, mind you Facebook uses pretty much the duplicate of this.
WebTreats ETC
If you haven't got the time to do your own textures, icons, brushes, patterns etc well WebTreats ETC is a great place to drop by. It's got some of the best textures I've seen and they're all free, they also have some great looking social network icons that you can use for your blog or website.
Good textures are hard to find, and creating them does take time so to have a site like this really helps your efficiency; I've already used some of the textures in some of the work I'm doing right now which is flyer/brochure design, and it's hard not to find a texture that you can't like.
Considering a lot of sites would charge heavy prices for even something such as a gradient it's good to know that people still take the time to deliver high quality free to use material.
If Flash is your thing
If you're after Flash Templates/Websites or are a Flash Designer and want some ideas well check this site out. Some of the templates are flat out amazing and I can't imagine how long it must have taken to design them and then most of all write the script for each and every little sprite and image.
Definitely been impressed with that site, the buyout prices are way past my budget but the price to purchase them is pretty good for the 60-70 range most of them come under. Im not sure how easy it is to customise the templates especially for say a novice PC/Flash user but for people looking for a website solution in flash it's well worth it.
Mind you Template Monster also has plenty of non-flash templates including templates for CMS' so the site is worthwhile visiting.