For today’s news we have a great collection of useful Photography cheat-sheets, visit the resources for the full articles and download pages.

Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Portrait Lighting Cheat Sheet Card; The Photographic Cheat Sheet by Gordon McKinney; 49 Photo Tips Cheat Sheet; Light Falloff Cheat Sheet Card; Photography Cheat sheet; PhotoBert Cheatsheets; Reflector Card Cheat Sheet.

You can download the all of the photography cheat sheets from here: Helpful Photography Cheat Sheets to Make Your Life Easier.

12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets

Here is a list of all the cheat sheets available from this resource: Adobe Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts; Photoshop Lasso, Brush and Pen Tool Cheatsheets; Photoshop Elements 7 For Dummies Cheet Sheet; Photoshop Toolbox Reference; Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Cheat Sheets.

You can download the all of the photo editing cheat sheets from here: 12 Extremely Helpful Photo Editing App Cheat Sheets.

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

So How Do We Choose the Right One?
The first step you need to take is to make sure you decide upon a framework that has an established and accurate representation of detailed documentation. This is vital to the steps you’ll take in implementing and utilizing your framework the way it was intended. Next, you should analyze what problems the specified frameworks of your choice will solve. As you come across frameworks that you believe might “fit the bill” for the project(s) at hand, then it would be wise to compare each of them and elaborate on which framework addresses which concerns and satisfies your needs.

Also, don’t hesitate to ask other developers and colleagues which framework has worked best for them and why? This will help you gain valuable insight based on the experience of others, something that can’t be bought. Another point I would like to make is the role your chosen framework’s community plays. How big is it? Are the members helpful? Does it provide invaluable resources? Every one of these questions help you determine if your framework’s community is going to be of use. The logical point of view is, the larger and more involved the community is, the better your chances are at finding the right type of help when you need it.

Below we will take a look at 8 of the best frameworks we found to be useful for both developers and designers.

Blueprint CSS

The Blueprint CSS framework uses a grid-system that has pre-built typography and includes various plugins, built-in form styles and more. With BP you’ll also find good stable documentation, a wiki, an active discussion group, and examples of sites built on the Blueprint system.

Elements CSS Framework

Overall, the Elements framework makes it much easier and efficient to write CSS code. It’s a way to keep your files organized, benefit from a collection of present classes that can make your development process much friendlier, and it’ll automatically add respective icons for external links so that users will be able to quickly find and access them as well.

Content with Style

Content with Style is a CSS framework that helps you style and structure your website with amazing design and typographical elements. With six different layouts to choose from that include vertical navigation, two content columns, horizontal navigation with two columns of content and useful one content columns. Content with Style is an efficient way to “prioritize” the content on your site and focus on areas such as the header, main content, sub content, and more.

Emastic

This lightweight CSS framework uses PX, EM, or % widths for the process of signaling a page width, and it is also based on an elastic layout. Emastic comes with various pre-defined styles for your typography and much more. Predominantly, the grid is made up of blocks that are sized from 5 to 75em units. The default sizes can be changed at any time and the frameworks design options depend on the grid layout.

960 Grid System

The 960 grid system is a powerful CSS framework that lets us develop and prototype websites rapidly. The layouts are based on 12-16 columns and the layout templates are for Illustrator, Photoshop, Expression Design, Fireworks and more. You can also print a variety of templates for use with pen and paper if that’s what suits you best.

Yui Grids

The foundational YUI Grids CSS offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations. Features included are support for fluid-width, easy customization, flexible template columns, and more.

Yaml

“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an (X)HTML/CSS framework for creating modern and flexible floated layouts. The structure is extremely versatile in its programming and absolutely accessible for end users. YAML is focussed on web standards and accessibility, slim framework core with numerous extensions, complete multilingual documentation, and robust, flexible layout concept (columns & grids).

SenCSs

SenCSs stands for Sensible Standards CSS baseline, (pronounced “sense”). It supplies sensible styling for all repetitive parts of your CSS, and doesn’t force a lay-out system on you. This allows you to focus on actually developing your website’s style. SenCSs isn’t a framework like other CSS frameworks, it doesn’t include a layout system littered with silly classes and pre-set grids, so what does SenCSs do? SenCSs does everything else: baseline, fonts, paddings, margins, tables, lists, headers, blockquotes, forms and more.

Guest Post by Fonts2U

We all know picking the right font is important when working on your creative projects. There are so many fonts out there, and it litarally may take hours until we find the ONE. To save you some time, here is a collection of 30 quality fonts hand-picked by Fonts2U. Enjoy!

Who wouldn’t want these on their bookshelf. Read further on in this post to find out how to enter and, hopefully, win these fantastic books.

Here is an overview of the books you can win:

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

jQuery: Novice To Ninja

jQuery: Novice to Ninja, from sitepoint.com, will show you how to unleash the amazing power of jQuery. In this easy-to-follow guide, you’ll master all the major tricks and techniques that jQuery offers—within hours.

jQuery has quickly become the JavaScript library of choice, and it’s easy to see why. This JavaScript framework dramatically improves how you add interactivity and animation to your website.

Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility.

Inside, WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the blog and shows you how WordPress can serve as a CMS, a photo gallery, an e-commerce site, and more.

Digging into Wordpress

There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. From your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years, this book is packed with truly practical information.

Rocket Surgery

Rocket Surgery, written by Steve Krug, it’s a how-to book that explains exactly how to do your own web site usability testing.

Thanks to everyone who has participated the hosting giveaway contest. InMotion Hosting would like to thank you by doubling the prizes. As a result, six winners will be getting a free one-year hosting account. The winners are: 56, 71, 103, 192, 198, and 244 (winners will be contacted by InMotion). For those who didn’t win, InMotion is also offering a $45 discount. To redeem the discount, email contests@inmotionhosting.com and include your original comment post.

Thanks to everyone who has participated the hosting giveaway contest. InMotion Hosting would like to thank you by doubling the prizes. As a result, six winners will be getting a free one-year hosting account. The winners are: 56, 71, 103, 192, 198, and 244 (winners will be contacted by InMotion). For those who didn’t win, InMotion is also offering a $45 discount. To redeem the discount, email contests@inmotionhosting.com and include your original comment post.

The following tools manage and monitor various levels of quality relating to the uptime and security of your servers. These tools will help you identify any problems so that you’re able to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Take a look at the ones we’ve compiled below, and then test whichever ones appeal to you the most in terms of functionality and reliability.

Webmetrics GlobalWatch

GlobalWatch is an interactive tool that allows you to monitor a variety of web applications and sites. It digs deep into the root of the problem and quickly identifies and diagnoses any downtime errors, and poor performance levels in detail reports and customizable alerts. With this tool you’ll always be informed of any of your websites irregular performance.

Pingdom

Pingdom ensures that your website is accessible and responds accordingly consistently. It’s able to monitor uptime, various levels of performance, multiple applications, FTP servers, email servers and any application that’s accessible from the Internet. Pingdom provides you with detailed email and SMS alerts if anything is wrong. It also lets you read results in the form of charts and tables that are extremely legible. This tool is also available as an iPhone application.

McAfee Secure

McAfee Secure strategically monitors any and all of your severs that may be at a potential security risk. This powerful tool will protect your servers against security breaches, the end-users from being subject to identity theft, credit card frauds, viruses, scams, and your dose of annoying spam. Your site will be in good hands since McAfee will test it and certify it on a daily basis. McAfee currently monitors and certifies over 80,000 websites ranging from a wide scope of business sizes and structures.

Nimsoft Monitoring Solutions (NMS)

NMS actively monitors your servers and any applications found on the servers. Everything from CPU to memory, server resources, even logs and more are accurately monitored and recorded. Being quick and easy to install is just the beginning, NMS is also a lightweight application that has the power to monitor thousands of servers at a time. NMS is also very easy to use, alerts and details are always clear, and it also visually shows you your servers interconnected, color-coded indicators, and the response times from server-to-server. It’s a great choice no matter the size of your servers.

Simple Server Monitor

Simple Server seems to understand the importance of having a valuable application that can effectively monitor your servers. It’s designed for those on a small budget and offers a free 30-day trial. Useful features such as the monitoring of uptimes, performance levels, and FTP/HTTP/POP/IMAP servers (to name a few) are included. It’s ideal for those who wish to receive updates and alerts within their desktop in the form of pop-up messages, SMS format, and charts.

Solarwinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Orion’s NPM tool monitors all of your servers and ensures that their running without any problems every minute of the day. It also monitors all of your routers, switches and wireless access points within your network as well. It comes with a fairly easy set-up and the support of 100’s of expert network engineers. It’s extremely easy to use and Orion can be up and running in less than an hour right after it’s been downloaded!

ENVIROMUX Server Environment Monitoring System

Nagios hit the ball out of the park when they developed powerful tool that monitors your servers temperature, humidity, liquid presence, motion, intrusion and vibration all to ensure that your server’s in tip-top operating capacity. You’re able to create custom alarm signals, monitor and manage security conditions over IP, monitor/ping up to 64 IP network devices, and manage your servers using a single attractive web interface for all systems connected.

SiteUptime

SiteUptime works like clock-work by monitoring your website 24/7 365 days a year. SU provides free and advanced remote monitoring services that notifies you when your servers are down via email and or SMS text messaging. This will ensure that the errors are sent to you with priority and speed so that you’re able to quickly fix any problems with your connections. SU allows you to view detailed statistics about your website’s availability and server response times anytime you’d like. Overall, it’s a very useful multiple monitoring tool for servers that runs tests on specific intervals (every couple seconds).

Further Resources

• How to Easily Monitor your Web Server Using PHP
• Setp-by-Step: Monitoring and tuning your IIS Web servers
• Optimizing Apache Server Performance
• How to Monitor Server Availability

It has been yet another good week on Answers, thanks for your support!

“Have you asked a question yet?“

Can anyone recommend a free wordpress shopping cart plugin?

This question was asked by Ajay.

Answer from Kopanomedia:

Take a look at this Simple WP Shopping Cart app:SimpleCart(js) is a simple, attractive, and flexible WordPress theme that taps into the power of both Thematic and WP E-commerce. Features include AJAX cart functionality, a grid layout for products, and a flexible color scheme, easy to swap out images and completely customize the theme to your needs.

Answer from Jacob Mcdaniel:

The WP E-commerce plugin rocks (bit.ly, very customizable, and you can get extra add-ons for a price.

Answer from Ejaz:

WP E-commerce is a great shopping cart plugin for Wordpress. But you should have good shopping cart themes (e.g. www.shopperpress.com as well so that it can be integrated properly.
There are other good options as well e.g. eShop wordpress.org and shopplugin.net.
Also see 10 Powerful Shopping/Ecommerce Plugin Solutions For Wordpress for in depth review on speckyboy.com.

What’s your choice for wordpress security techniques to protect against attacks?

This question was asked by Autobots.

Answer from Joel Reyes :

That’s easy, stay up-to-date with your WordPress plugins, database, widgets, and versions. As newer versions come along, the old ones become easier to hack. The newer ones of course, are a bit harder since they haven’t been out long. So make sure you stay-to-date and you should be good.

How can i display more than one twitter feed on my wordpress blog?

This question was asked by Rollback999.

Answer from Autobots:

We do this by accessing the persons Twitter account RSS feed, then fetching it and embedding it on your site.
Replace the example RSS’s with the ones you’d like.

get_item_quantity(3);
$rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems);
?>

<?php if ($maxitems == 0) echo '
• No items.

';
else
// Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink.
Foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>

• <a href='get_permalink(); ?>'>
  get_title(); ?>
  

I have multiple authors on my site, how can i display their info?

This question was asked by Themans.

Answer from Joel Reyes :

If you want to display their info at the bottom or beginning of the post, then use this and place it in the corresponding area of your WordPress files. (i.e. Single.PHP or Comments.PHP)

Edit the author box as necessary.

Unanswered Questions

As per usual we need a little help with some of this weeks unanswered questions, can you help?

1. What’s the Easiest Way To Create a Countdown Widget?
2. How Can I Make Images Completely Remove Themeselves When They Failed to Load Properly?
3. What is the Best WordPress Plugin to Display Code?
4. How Do I Change/Add a Different Color to a Place Holder for My Search Box?

Thanks again, firstly to everyone who asked a question, but most importantly thanks to everyone that took the time to offer always helpful and useful answers.

For today’s news we showcase the best in web design navigation and menus for your inspiration.

40 Creative Navigation Menus

In this article from ProBlogDesign they have pulled together some of the best designed navigation bars (both horizontal and vertical) to help give you some ideas to enhance your own navigation.

40 Creative Navigation Menus

25 Mega Menus for Your Design Inspiration

Mega menus are a current popular web design trend that take drop down menus a bigger step forward in an attempt to make it easier for visitors to navigate through a larger site.

25 Mega Menus for Your Design Inspiration

A Showcase of Website Navigations with Serious Click Appeal

In this article you will find a showcase of websites that successfully achieve "Navigations with Serious Click Appeal" in a very stylish way.

A Showcase of Website Navigations with Serious Click Appeal

CSS Menu Samples

With over 100+ menus on display in this showcase, in every possible conceivable format (CSS, Javascript, Flash…), in almost every possible style (vertical, horizontal…), you are practically guaranteed to find inspiration.

CSS Menu Samples

Last week I posted a CSS3 dropdown menu and someone complained that I didn’t explain the CSS code in detail. Well, here is a post on the basics of the new properties: text-shadow, box-shadow, and border-radius. These CSS3 properties are commonly used to enhance layout and good to know.