Web Concepts

The Lunarpages Gift Cards are the perfect choice for any webmaster on your holiday or special occasion shopping list.  Now, you can purchase the gift of web hosting for your family members, friends and co-workers, and let them experience the outstanding support and performance that Lunarpages has to offer.

Once purchased, our Lunarpages gift cards are delivered electronically.  This makes it the perfect gift for anybody out of state or out of the country, because there are no shipping rates you have to worry about adding in.

When purchasing, all you have to do is select the gift card you wish to give, and complete the fields on the gift order page.  You will then receive an e-mail to confirm your purchase and an e-mail that you can send to your friend telling them how to redeem their special web hosting present. 

To learn more about this amazing offer, or to check out the one of four different gift cards we have available, be sure to go check out the Lunarpages Gift Cards site.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Could Lunarpages in fact be the greatest phpBB web host out there?  I would say so.  For those of you who do not know, phpBB is one of the most widely used open source forum solutions to date.  It’s user friendly installation process and easy to use administration panel has made it one of the most popular forum scripts out there too. 

At Lunarpages, you have the option to install phpBB manually, via cPanel’s Fantastico script collection or if you have the LPCP control panel, through the WebApps Pool.  Every method listed, is very simple to do.  You can customize phpBB to fit any situation.  With the modifications and styles they provide, you will be able to setup a set of forums that are powerful enough for your needs and look just the way you want them to look.

• Learn More About the phpBB Features

The only big flaw I can find with a script like phpBB is it is very exploit prone.  Due to the fact that it is very popular, it gets hit with security issues more than your average forum script.

Need Help? To help you get started, here are a few tutorials to help:

• How to Install phpBB onto Your Own Hosting Account
• CHMOD Permissions for phpBB
• How to Create a Private Forum

You can find more help and tutorials about phpBB at the web hosting wiki too.  The folks at OpenSourceCMS also provide a demo of phpBB you can try out before you install it on your own web hosting account. 

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third-party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third-party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third-party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Web Hosting Forums Get a New Design
• Hosting with osCommerce
• SMF Web Hosting at Lunarpages

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

I have had many people ask me what resources do I learn from, when it comes to being a modern day webmaster.  Now, there are many resources out there – but here are 60 of the best links (taken from my own bookmarks to your browser) to assist you in mastering the art of CSS in web design.

1. Perfect 3 Column CSS Liquid Layout. No Images, Cross-browser
2. CSS Zen Garden
3. 5 Tips For Instantly Writing Better CSS
4. Andy Budd CSS/Web Standards Links
5. Mastering CSS: Styling Design Elements
6. Nice CSS How-To and Template site
7. CSSDog
8. Free CSS Templates
9. W3CSchools CSS Tutorial
10. CSS-based Navigation Menus
11. CSSeasy.com
12. Divine CSS – CSS Showcase Gallery
13. SlickMap CSS
14. 15 Great CSS Galleries
15. Ultimate list of CSS hacks
16. Styling <hr> with CSS
17. 101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts
18. 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design
19. CSS Portal
20. Clean CSS – Optimize & Format Your CSS
21. CSS Basics
22. CSS on Delicious
23. Top 50 Best CSS Articles and Resources
24. Sitepoint CSS Tutorials
25. 20 CSS Short Hands You’ll Love
26. CSS-Tricks
27. Listamatic – Styled Lists
28. 20 Useful CSS Tips for Beginners
29. Mastering CSS: Advanced Techniques and Tools
30. UniqueCSS.com
31. 5 Popular CSS Frameworks + Great Tutorials &amp; Tools
32. CSS Design
33. Web Design from Scratch: CSS
34. HTML Dog – HTML and CSS Tutorials
35. Open Design Community
36. Position is Everything
37. SitePoint CSS Reference
38. CSS Help Pile
39. CSS Positioning
40. 10 Creative &amp; Rich UI interfaces &amp; How to Create Them
41. Aeon Interactive
42. CSS from the Ground Up
43. CSS tutorial of the Float element
44. 30 Exceptional CSS Navigation Techniques
45. CSS Layout Techniques
46. 456 Berea Street – CSS category
47. Sexy Drop Down Menu w/ jQuery &amp; CSS
48. A List Apart CSS Topics
49. Ruthsarian Layouts
50. ͩC – Cascading Style Sheets
51. Learn CSS
52. CSS Articles & Resources
53. PSD to HTML/CSS &amp; Implementation
54. The CSS Gallery List
55. Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps
56. Holy CSS Zeldman!
57. 30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples
58. Eric Meyer: CSS
59. 50 Beautiful and User-Friendly Navigation Menus
60. CSS Navigation Magnification
61. 50+ Nice Clean CSS Tab-Based Navigation Scripts
62. CSS Tricks
63. minimalsites.com
64. HTML Dog CSS Tutorials
65. CSS Perk

Know of another great CSS tutorial or resource that you would like to share?  Don’t be shy!  Leave a comment, and add it on the list as pick number 66, pick number 67, pick number 68, and so on. 

Related Tips and Tricks:

• MooTabs Brings Pizzazz to Your Site Navigation
• Free Design Stencil Kit from Yahoo!
• All the Lunar News That is Fit to Print

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don′t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Adding a Cascading Style Sheet to your current web site layout and save you time and make your web site look a lot more professional in the process.  Cascading Style Sheets, or sometimes referred to as CSS, is a style sheet language used to describe how a web page should be formatted.

For example, if you wanted to make some text on a web page look bold, you might use this snippet of HTML code:

<strong&gt;this will be some bold text!</strong&gt;

Which seems simple enough.  However, what if you want to chance the color, font, and how this text is shown in that spot across all of your web pages?  Well then your HTML in your pages becomes a rambling mess.  That is where Cascading Style Sheets come in handy.

Cascading Style Sheets allow you to, in a much more organized way, sort out how your web site design looks in a totally separate file, or chunk of code in between the head tags.    For example, let say you wanted the title of your page to be bold, green, and a different font style than the rest of the page.  In your HTML code, you would use something like this:

&ltp class=&quotmycooltitle&quot&gtthis is my page title&lt/p&gt

That tells the browser that everything within this paragraph or &ltp&gt&lt/p&gt tags will follow the design setup class I have defined as “mycooltitle”.  Now, in between the head tags (&lthead&gt &lt/head&gt) I want you to add this:

<style type=&quot;text/css&quot;>
    .mycooltitle {
        font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
        font-weight: bold;
        color: #336633;
    }
</style&gt;

This CSS code tells the web browser to apply these design settings to the class marked, “mycooltitle”.  It does three things.  It says it will use the Verdana font, the font will be bolded, and it will be colored green (#336633 is the HTML color code for a shade of green).

That is how you apply Cascading Style Sheets to your web design and layout of your own web pages.  One of the major benefits of using CSS is that it helps to separate your web site code with your design.  This way, you can change one aspect very easily in the CSS file (when or if you start to master external style sheets).  I’ll save that lesson for another day.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Wizzypage &ndash Great (and free!) Web Site Editor
• Inspiring Web Design
• CSS Round Box Generator

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

A widget platform which really simplifies the development, syndication and statistics of the widgets in question is yourminis.  They give you both a gallery of widgets to copy and paste onto your own web site, as well as, the tolls you will need to develop your own customized widgets.

If you need a widget to slap on your web site, this is the perfect place to start.  Just browse through the widgets they have and find the one that meets your needs.  For example, we have the clock widget.  To use it on your web site, click the “Copy Me” icon, then grab the embed code.  Copy the embed code into your clipboard and then post the embedded content on your own web site layout.

You can check out the full gallery of widgets here:

• Recently Addeded Widgets on yourminis.com

Developers, they give you many tools to work from too.  You can check through some of this documentation to help you get started on your own widget.

• Learning Center – All the documentation and tutorials you will need to learn our API
• Resources – Downloads and tools for working with our API
• Developer Network – Get answers to your questions or connect with the rest of the developer community
• Developer Blog – Read about events, updates, contests, and more

No matter if you are looking for a neat way to develop platform independent widgets for your web site’s side bars, or your just wanting to grab a neat looking one to display on your own web site yourminis has your bases covered when it comes to adding a little decoration to your web site.

Related Tips and Tricks:

• 25 Most Popular Twitter Plugins for WordPress
• Best of the Bit.ly Tools
• Bacon Flavored Link Shortening

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Who would have ever thought to look for web designer resources at a place called forwebdesigners.com?  It is so simple, its brilliant.  Here you will find some of the most popular resources for (you guessed it) web designers.  From fonts, to CSS resources to everything in between – it has something everybody can get something out of.  No matter if you are a web designer just getting started, or an old pro – this is a resource to bookmark.

Just to give you a little taste of what is in store, here are some of the great sites I found looking under the “inspiration” category:

• Web Creme
• CSS Inspirace
• CSS Mania
• CSS Galeries
• CSS Beauty
• Fazai38’s Inspirational Blo…
• CSS Blue

Check out the rest, and be sure to let us know about some of the great resources you find. 

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Two Great CSS Cheat Sheets
• CSS Tab Designer
• Free Design Stencil Kit from Yahoo!

&copy; Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

Cloud computing has become very trendy term, many interpretations which often conflict with each other appeared, and I’ve seen many people to get confused with the terminology. When it comes to putting “Cloud computing” into practice including the implementation of this style of computing into web hosting industry, then it comes really cloudy. I can […]

Original post by Your (optional) podcast author email address (http://hostingblog.b10wh.com/)

By Mitch “It is Monday Already?” Keeler

Here is a neat Online tool that will allow you to spell out any word, using famous Web 2.0 service logos.  I am not exactly sure if this is all that helpful – but at least you can say is it fills a void. 

For being such a simple service – it does include an API as well.  Just use this link here:

http://weϖ.0write.com/api.php?t=something

Then replace “something” with the text you wish to have written out.

Here is an example:

To try it out for yourself, go visit: http://web2.0write.com

&copy; Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Winter Special!

Original post by Mitch