By Cesar O.   Fonts are one of the biggest troubles for web designers to date. For ages we have been either using images or scripts to work around this issue.  If you want to use a fancy font, you have only a couple of alternatives: you could use @font-face, you could just use images (the most common way to do it), or you could use a rendering engine like SIFR  or cufon. This blog will explain roughly what these 2 alternatives are, some pros and cons and just an overview of how they work. If you want to learn in depth what they can do at its fullest I recommend going to http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/ for SIFR3 and http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ for cufon. SIFR This techniq...

By Brenda V.   We all know the meaning of the term community; however it is in these past few years that the word has taken a larger significance because of the boom caused by the social media revolution. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a community is “a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society”. In the end it all refers to an entity made by a group of people that somehow communicate and collaborate toward achieving a common goal or are bounded together by similar interests. We can find communities in places like churches, schools, work, neighborhoods, etc., the main point here is that we as human beings like to b...

by Sieena Giving customers real-time data access is a major advantage that many of them will be able to utilize in making their business practices that much more effective. By having direct access to their data as well as informational and comparative reports using the latest results, your clients will be empowered in maintaining and bettering their day-to-day operations. Instead of having to deal with waiting on reports that are not exactly up-to-date, your clients can now have instant access to the latest information as well as any analyses that have been done for them automatically.  With real-time data access and instant access to the latest results and analysis reports, not only i...

In the business world, nearshore outsourcing, or simply, nearshoring, refers to the use of another business for certain activities that are close to home.  In other words, it is the same thing as traditional outsourcing, only the companies that are being outsourced to, are in a close vicinity to the country in which the company that hired them is located.  For example, suppose a small software development firm in the US wants to find another company for IT outsourcing purposes.  It would not be unheard of in this particular industry to outsource that type of work to India or China.  If the US based company instead goes with a company from Mexico, then that would be an example of nearsho...

By Edith C.   Before any sites can be created, a Web Application must be created first.   1.       Click Application Management in the quick launch bar on the left.     2. In the Web Applications section, click Manage web applications.   3. In the Ribbon, click the New icon at the left. A Create New Web Application window opens.     4. In the Authentication section: a. Choose Classic Mode Authentication   5. In the IIS Web Site section: a. Choose Create a new IIS web site b. Set the port number (it gives you a number by default) c. Set the Host Header to the name you want (e.g. portal.contoso.com) d. The Name field will update automatically with these chan...

By Fernando G. Overview First off, we need to have a quick overview of what REST means to the development community, and we can start by what does REST stands for?  It stands for Representational State Transfer.  Right, it did not help a lot, right? In the SOA era, we have Service Oriented Systems interacting between them exposing Services, some applications act as consumers and some as producers.  At the end, a Service Oriented Architecture allows an organization to create a well thought and organized set of libraries being used uniformly among all of the participants with no redundancy of business rules and specially having a single set of Services.  Well, not always the case.  It re...

By Cesar O. This is a topic that, as a web designer, I don’t like a whole lot, because compatibility for IE6 in websites costs time, effort and money; but this is not the main problem, the main problem is that you can spend more time (and I have seen this several times) making your site work for IE6 than actually creating the whole website; so, How can you minimize this? How can you reduce the cost of compatibility with IE6? There are some simple steps you can take to try and ensure compatibility and/or reduce the time you spend making it work for IE6. 1-      From conception, from the first line of html you start typing, remember that this is supposed to work for IE6. What I mean by ...

By Edith Colegio If you haven’t already, you should think about adding social capabilities to your website. This will help you attract new users, and keep them on your website for longer and get them to come back more often.  The use of existing toolkits like the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit can be very useful to achieve this. Using the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit You can use this toolkit to integrate presence, instant messaging, and contact information using the following interfaces Windows Live Messenger UI Controls       These controls are a set of UI building blocks. The UI Controls are easy to add to an existing XHTML page. They provide a professional UI ...

By Cesar Olivas There can be as many answers for this question as people who blog, but the growth of the internet has revolutionized communications, the way we get information across, especially in places where the media is property of the government. In these kinds of places, where people cannot freely speak their mind, blogging can be extremely attractive, this is their way to express their thoughts. For the rest of us, the answer will differ. Some people would say (and have told me) that blogging is a waste of time, that I cannot possibly get anything from it, but I know that they are wrong. In this age, blogs are used to inform, to teach, to spread the word about news, technology, a...

By Edith Colegio   When it comes to SharePoint site branding, you think about styles, pages library, web parts, etc. But then you realize your site has another “side”… the “_layouts” section where it involves all pages: 1) People and groups (site permissions), 2) All site content, 3) Site settings, and all of them use a different masterpage than the rest of your site!   Then you think you can “customize” those pages with a simple modification to your “Application” master page (using your site’s theme of course). That’s not as easy as it looks. According to Microsoft there are two ways to modify/customize the application.master page:   1.       Modify the application.master page in t...