Have you been to Barack Obama’s website and seen the cool slideshow that he has on his home page? There is actually a splash page that you have to go through first, before you get to the home page. But then you will see it. It looks like this:

Have a Slideshow on your site just like Barack’s!

Well guess what. Thanks to our friend Guillermo Rauch over at devthought.com, you can now have the same slideshow for free! Guillermo has put together a script in Mootools using a bunch of CSS to give you the same type of look and feel and cool slideshow effects that Barack has on his website. The script is fantastic looking and very lightweight so it doesn’t slow loading time up too much. See the Demo Here.

The Creation

Here is a little bit more of an explanation of the slideshow. “I took my previous class (SlideList), and made a few changes here and there. It works with MooTools 1.2, and supports all kinds of shape transformations (top and left coordinates, and height and width properties), which means it can now be used with vertical, horizontal, or even irregular lists. I extended it and came up with a new class that receives the images and loading spinner as parameters (note: it’s arguable whether this is the best decision OOP-wise, but due to the simplicity of this script, this was the right call)

The Code

To ensure all images are loaded before the user makes any interaction, the MooTools Assets component is used. The CSS plays a major role (as in every other animation-focused script). I suggest you analyze it carefully before implementing it in your applications or websites. You’ll probably need to adjust the ids, or use classes instead to keep your stylesheets clean.

The markup is meaningful and simple. Two lists are used (one for the images and the other for the links). The loading element is included in the HTML, but it’s probably better to inject it from the script directly. You can download the files for this slideshow at Guillermo’s Blog at devthought.com

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Laconica is an open source Microblogging tool that you can use to build a microblogging website of your own. Websites such as identi.ca use Laconica as it’s platform. The dependencies for running Laconica are Pear, XMPPHP, php-openid, and OAuth.php. You can learn more about the dependencies and how to install and configure Laconica by going here.

What is Microblogging?

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. The most popular of this type of service is Twitter, which i’m sure you have heard of lately. People are still trying to figure out exactly how it is they can benefit from such a service, but I think right now the possibilities still stand as “endless”.

What would I do with a Microblogging Open Source Tool?

Now this one is up to you. But the ideas that microblogging brings to the table are literally endless. And chances are you will probably be introduced to a project of your own, or of someone elses that will require such technology. One thing that I have thought of is to have all developers on an open source project microblogging together to collaborate on that open source project. This would increase productivity and communication at a faster and more effective rate to help get projects done quicker.

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Slideshow 2 is an open source Mootools slideshow class for streaming and animating the presentation of images. It’s definitely one of the better looking slideshow’s out there. A very impressive look is given to your images in a much more professional manner. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like (without mootools of course)

You can choose from a variety of different effects of course which gives you some good flexibility on how you want it to end up looking. The cool thing is that you can input your slideshow via HTML with one simple line of code. The example they give is this:

new Slideshow('show', ['1.jpg', '2.jpg', '3.jpg'], { controller: true, hu: ‘images/’ });

Here are the features as listed in the blog article that featured this tool from webresourcesdepot.com:

• Dynamic resizing - Slideshow can accommodate any size presentation.
• Thumbnails - intelligent, auto-scrolling, tracking, etc.
• Full-featured controller - completely style-able with CSS.
• Animated captions - plain text or formatted with HTML.
• Fully accessible - Slideshow can be controlled with access keys.
• Automagic slideshows - create slideshows from existing HTML images.
• Varied hyperlinking options - allows for mashups with Lightbox, Slimbox, etc.
• CSS slide transitions - designed in stylesheets, not javascript,
  allow for an infinite combination of effects (plus support for all
  Robert Penner transitions).
• Unobtrusive and degradable - Slideshow even functions with Javascript turned off!

So if you are looking for a cool javascript slideshow to add some spice to your website then try this one out. There is some good documentation to help you along the way in customizing it to fit your needs. Enjoy!

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As many of you may know Wordpress has just released it’s version 2.6 which you and I will need to upgrade to (as soon as we can all find some time of course!). The new version of course comes with some new features as well as many improvements. Here’s the video of the brief tour for Wordpress 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

This is basically a new feature that tracks content changes made to any posts or pages, similar to the way MediaWiki content management system works. This comes in extremely handy for those who run collaborative blogs with multiple writers.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

They developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

In this release Wordpress stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing development.

And the rest of Wordpress 2.6 Features & Improvements

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

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Okay, so I spent some serious time this weekend researching, testing, and researching some more to find 10 really good Commerce/Advertising related Modules for Drupal. Needless to say I found some really fantastic stuff that I think will be extremely helpful for you!

A Referral Credit System for Users

1. User Referral
This module provides users with the ability to refer other users to a site they are registered at. When the new users registers, the referral is recorded. Users can see a list of users they referred, and the site admin can view more detailed reports. The module works by displaying a referral link (such as referral/123) in the user’s page. When a non-registered visitor clicks on this link, and then registers to the site, the referring user’s ID is recorded
in the database.

If the Adsense module is installed and Revenue sharing is enabled, then the referral is used to share the revenue between the referring user and the referred user.

Sell “TextLinkAds” on Your Website

2. TextLinkAds.com Integration
Simplified setup right on your site. All you need is your Website XML Key from Text-Link-Ads.com and you’re ready to start publishing ads. A built-in tool to customize the looks of the ads, including borders, background color, link color and font size. Access to your publisher statistics from within your website. See your site details, including how much money you’ve earned and how many links are being served. Cron-based updates of your ads. The ad links are kept up to date via Drupal’s cron functionality.

Tell a Friend Tool

3. Tell a Friend
Module creates a “Tell a Friend” page that allows page viewers to send form e-mails about the site to their friends.

Integrate Drupal with SugarCRM

4. SugarCRM Webform Integration
Adds capabilities to webform to facilitate submitting a form to SugarCRM to capture leads. The module adds configuration fields to editing the webform, and constrains the field keys on the form to parameters that the SugarCRM lead captures script (leadCapture.php) is able to process.

Paid Listings on your Drupal Website

5. Pay2Publish
Pay2Publish lets users publish basic versions of listings (nodes) for free, and later be able to pay to “upgrade” them to custom Levels (categories) to add more visibility (Views plays) and/or show more information (CCK fields). set up different “Levels” with different costs and properties (Silver, Gold, Platinum style). Each level will have its corresponding taxonomy (category) term. to upgrade a node, the user will have to buy the desired “Level” and assign it to one of his published nodes. The corresponding taxonomy term will be assigned to the desired node.

Sell Content Pages on Your Site

6. PayPal Node
Use PayPal to charge users to post a specified content-type. Costs are calculated based on combinations of taxonomy terms. Nodes can be set to expire (become unpublished) after a specified number of days. Use this module to create a custom classified advert system, or charge for hosting any content that users might categorise.

Click Thru Tracking & Reporting

7. Click Thru Tracking
This module provides the ability for site admins to track clicks on their site such as advertising campaigns and newsletter click throughs. The clicks are organized into groups, so ad campaigns can be tracked if they involve more than one node.

Your Own Affiliate Program

8. Affiliate
This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When anonymous users follow these links, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and optional keyword. When referred users sign up for an account, the account is associated with that affiliate.

Ad Management & Tracking

9. Advertisement
The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

Product Feeds from Commission Junction/Linkshare

10. Affiliate Products Shop
This module targets the users who want to use affiliate products on their drupal sites. The module facilitates affiliate products feeds transfer from http://www.commissionjunction.com/ and http://www.linkshare.com/. You just have to fill information that the above sites provides and the system will bring the products links to your site in a fully categorized and alphabetically sorted fashion in terms of different merchants. The module also provides the facility to edit these feeds once in your database.

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Here’s Linus Torvalds being interviewed by Charlie Rose on the Charlie Rose show. Linus covers topics such as open source, Linux, and of course Microsoft! Enjoy.

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