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	<title>Sidera Design &#187; Article</title>
	<atom:link href="http://sideradesign.com/category/article/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://sideradesign.com</link>
	<description>Engaging and easy to manage websites</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:58:49 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Customize your FaceBook fan page</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/09/04/customize-your-facebook-fan-page/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/09/04/customize-your-facebook-fan-page/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:58:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>sidera_admin</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=584</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p><br />
I recently created a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sidera-Design/128395143866024">FaceBook Fan page</a> for my website. I wanted to incorporate my portfolio design into it so I started looking for ways of customizing it.</p>
<p>For the page profile image, I suggest a 200px width&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/09/04/customize-your-facebook-fan-page/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/09/sideradesign-facebookpage-425x258.gif" alt="" title="sideradesign-facebookpage" width="425" height="258" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-585" /><br />
I recently created a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sidera-Design/128395143866024">FaceBook Fan page</a> for my website. I wanted to incorporate my portfolio design into it so I started looking for ways of customizing it.</p>
<p>For the page profile image, I suggest a 200px width with 12 pixels margins on both sides. This will allow for cropping which Facebook does automatically.</p>
<p>You can also create a custom tab, using the static FBML application.<br />
Once you&#8217;ve added the application, you&#8217;ll be able to use custom CSS and HTML to style the page.<br />
At the moment, I only added a banner and a call to action button, as an experiment.</p>
<p>Are you a freelancer and you&#8217;ve customized your page? Let me know in the comments!</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>My favorite web design related apps</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/18/my-favorite-web-design-related-apps/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/18/my-favorite-web-design-related-apps/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:21:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apps]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=427</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>Here is a list of the applications that I use in my day to day web design work.</p>
<p>When I&#8217;m collaborating with other independent web designers or programmers (I don&#8217;t use the term freelancer), I need a tool to centralize&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/18/my-favorite-web-design-related-apps/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Here is a list of the applications that I use in my day to day web design work.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/projectmgmt1.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-449" />When I&#8217;m collaborating with other independent web designers or programmers (I don&#8217;t use the term freelancer), I need a tool to centralize all our activities and communication regarding the project at hand. While Basecamp is an excellent project management app, which I use on some client projects &#8211; usually when they have a subscription and add me as a user &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t have a good free plan. I use <a href="http://teambox.com">TeamBox</a>, which is a great online app, similar to Basecamp, and allows to manage 3 projects concurrently. You can archive projects, which will free a slot for new projects.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/invoicing.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-442" />I use the free plan on <a href="http://www.freshbooks.com/">Freshbooks</a>, which also limits the number of clients, but allows all the functionality of the paid plans.<br />
It also has a time tracking tool which you can use to create an invoice from the logged hours. Which leads me to time tracking.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/timetracking.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-443" />I recently discovered <a href="http://www.toggl.com">Toggl</a>, which seems to be a great app. I use the free plan limited to 5 users, so perfect for me.<br />
It has a desktop utility which seems to be very clever.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/mockups.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-441" />I use <a href="http://www.balsamiq.com/">Balsamiq mockups</a>.<br />
I use the free plan for <a href="http://hello.getsignoff.com/">getsignoff</a> or <a href="https://notableapp.zurb.com/">notableapp </a>for getting feedback on the design.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/design.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-440" />I use Photoshop. Of course, it&#8217;s not free, but it&#8217;s an industry standard, so there are many resources for learning how to use it. Also clients usually give me Photoshop files to work with.<br />
I might move to Fireworks in the near future for creating my designs.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/coding.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-439" />I use <a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/index.html">PhpStorm </a>for coding HTML, CSS and Php.<br />
Unfortunately the current version doesn&#8217;t permit to edit a unique file via FTP, you first have to download the whole project to a local copy, which is actually better. It means you work on a local copy and synchronize to the server. But sometimes, you just need to quickly edit a file so I use <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepad-plus/">NotePad++</a> with the FTP plugin which is very buggy, it disconnects often or gives errors.</p>
<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/seo.gif" alt="" width="589" height="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-438" />For keyword research, competition analysis, promotion,etc.. I use <a href="http://www.marketsamurai.com/c/sidera">Market Samurai</a>. It&#8217;s a free tool that&#8217;s really powerful to quickly get the information you need.<br />
I first discovered Market Samurai during <a href="http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/">the Thirty Day Challenge</a>, it&#8217;s a free course to learn how to start an online business, how to promote it, how to optimze it for SEO, etc. It&#8217;s really fun and I encourage you to participate this year, it starts in August, with a &#8216;pre-season&#8217; in July.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>JetBrains PhpStorm IDE is awesome</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/05/jetbrains-phpstorm-ide-is-awesome/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/05/jetbrains-phpstorm-ide-is-awesome/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:28:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[development]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[phpstorm]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=409</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p><br />
I thought I&#8217;d post a quick word about <a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/">PhpStorm</a>, a new programmer&#8217;s editor that has just been released as version 1.0<br />
It was featured on <a href="http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/quick-tip-my-favorite-new-ide-web-storm/">Nettuts</a> a while ago while still in Beta, so I decided&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/06/05/jetbrains-phpstorm-ide-is-awesome/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/06/phpstorm.jpg.jpg" alt="" width="401" height="295" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-410" /><br />
I thought I&#8217;d post a quick word about <a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/">PhpStorm</a>, a new programmer&#8217;s editor that has just been released as version 1.0<br />
It was featured on <a href="http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/quick-tip-my-favorite-new-ide-web-storm/">Nettuts</a> a while ago while still in Beta, so I decided to give it a try.</p>
<p>Also, there is WebStorm which is specific for front end development, but PhpStorm has the same features plus PHP support. So for WordPress developers it&#8217;s recommended to get PhpStorm.</p>
<p>Anyway the price is 39$ for WebStorm and 59$ for PhpStorm, so I&#8217;m not sure if they&#8217;ll sell many licences for WebStorm.</p>
<p>The best features are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Native integration of <a href="http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/">Zen Coding</a>, which allows to rapidly code HTML</li>
<li> Version control (git,subversion,&#8230;)</li>
<li> Automatic synchronization of remote files (<a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/demos/ftp_sync.html">see this screencast</a> for a detailed explanation)</li>
<li> code completion for php, css, html, js</li>
<li> javascript debugging </li>
<p> and more!
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;m still discovering the many features that it offers. I&#8217;ve been waiting for such an IDE for a long time. And it&#8217;s really a bargain, 59$ until September.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>IE transparency and font rendering</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/02/06/ie-transparency-and-font-rendering/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/02/06/ie-transparency-and-font-rendering/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:16:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[css]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[web design]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=247</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>While designing a website, I wanted to add some semi-transparent backgrounds using <a href="http://24ways.org/2009/working-with-rgba-colour">CSS rgba.</a><br />
In this article, the author suggests using a PNG as a fallback for browsers that don&#8217;t support the rgba declaration.<br />
Having read about Internet&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/02/06/ie-transparency-and-font-rendering/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>While designing a website, I wanted to add some semi-transparent backgrounds using <a href="http://24ways.org/2009/working-with-rgba-colour">CSS rgba.</a><br />
In this article, the author suggests using a PNG as a fallback for browsers that don&#8217;t support the rgba declaration.<br />
Having read about Internet Explorer&#8217;s proprietary filters, I decided to use that instead, to avoid having to download another image.<br />
I added the following declarations to the IE stylesheet with conditional comments:</p>
<pre>
.content, #primary {
       background:transparent;

     filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80ebe7e7,endColorstr=#80ebe7e7);

	}

.page-title, .singular-page-title {
	       background:transparent;

                  filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr=#80146ea4,endColorstr=#80146ea4);
}
</pre>
<p>This is the result:<br />
<a href="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/02/with-transparency.gif"><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/02/with-transparency.gif" alt="" width="402" height="175" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-246" /></a></p>
<p>You can see that the result is not very pretty! The font doesn&#8217;t seem to render very well.</p>
<p>I suspected that the IE filters were the culprit, so I removed the declarations, and here is the result:<br />
<a href="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/02/with-transparency.gif"><img src="http://sideradesign.com/files/2010/02/no-transparency.gif" alt="" width="402" height="175" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-246" /></a></p>
<p>Much better!</p>
<p>Conclusion: I&#8217;ll use the PNG fallback method.</p>
<p>Have you experienced this issue? Is there a fix?<br />
Leave your comments!</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<item>
		<title>I made the switch to Hybrid framework</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/19/i-made-the-switch-to-hybrid-framework/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/19/i-made-the-switch-to-hybrid-framework/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:16:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=214</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>After reading <a href="http://bonfx.com/10-reasons-to-use-the-hybrid-framework-for-wordpress">this post</a>, I decided to give <a href="http://bonfx.com/10-reasons-to-use-the-hybrid-framework-for-wordpress">Hybrid </a> a try, and I liked it so much that I have just finished migrating this site to the Hybrid framework!<br />
I didn&#8217;t have to create any custom&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/19/i-made-the-switch-to-hybrid-framework/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>After reading <a href="http://bonfx.com/10-reasons-to-use-the-hybrid-framework-for-wordpress">this post</a>, I decided to give <a href="http://bonfx.com/10-reasons-to-use-the-hybrid-framework-for-wordpress">Hybrid </a> a try, and I liked it so much that I have just finished migrating this site to the Hybrid framework!<br />
I didn&#8217;t have to create any custom page templates, however, I did have to dig into the functions.php file and play around with filter hooks and the likes.<br />
It was hard work but worth it.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Magento theme design</title>
		<link>http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/15/magento-theme-design/</link>
		<comments>http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/15/magento-theme-design/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:42:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>paul</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Article]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://sideradesign.com/?p=100</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[<p>I haven&#8217;t posted any designs in the last two days, but that doesn&#8217;t mean I&#8217;ve been doing nothing! I plan on adding another service to my offering soon, that is Magento theme design.<br />
The reason: I feel that although&#8230; <a href="http://sideradesign.com/2010/01/15/magento-theme-design/" class="read_more">Continue reading</a></p>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I haven&#8217;t posted any designs in the last two days, but that doesn&#8217;t mean I&#8217;ve been doing nothing! I plan on adding another service to my offering soon, that is Magento theme design.<br />
The reason: I feel that although I enjoy very much working with WordPress as a CMS, I don&#8217;t want to put all my eggs in one basket, and it will allow me to reach more potential customers.<br />
I spent all day yesterday reading up on Magento&#8217;s theme design process, and the least I can say is that it&#8217;s a steep learning curve!<br />
What&#8217;s more, the documentation is not very easy to read, nor is it complete.<br />
I also read the book <a href="http://www.packtpub.com/magento-1-3-theme-design/book">Magento 1.3 theme design</a>, but I have the same gripes as with other books by this publisher, they are not easy to follow, the examples don&#8217;t always work, so I&#8217;m still not satisfied.<br />
Then I stumbled upon <a href="http://www.ecommercedeveloper.com/articles/1566-Building-a-Magento-Theme-Start-to-Finish-Part-Two-Page-Planning-Templates-HTML-5">this screencast series</a> which is very recent, only two episodes have been published, but it looks promising and I can&#8217;t wait for the next episodes.</p>
<p>Here is another resource : http://www.designdisclosure.com/2009/07/how-to-magento-ecommerce-tutorials/</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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