Some of these country specific domains have been in wide use for far longer. It’s not uncommon to visit sites hosted by companies in the UK using .co.uk instead of .com addresses, for instance. And this was the original intent behind the creation of the country-specific TLD’s. We even have one here in the United States, it’s .us.

As the namespace in the .com TLD has dwindled some countries with TLD’s that could be used in english words or would make sense in some regard to the wider english speaking Internet opened up the registration of their TLD to foreigners. This has led to several of them becoming popular over the last few years.

The ones I see most often are .tv and .ly. And it looks like the users of the .ly TLD may need to be aware of some of the risks involved in using country-specific domains.

Ben Metcalfe has gone public with his recent run-in with registar of the .ly domain, NIC.ly. For those not aware, .ly is the country TLD for Libya.

The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue. We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.

This is deeply concerning for everyone, but especially .ly domain owners, because it sets a precedent that all websites running on a .ly domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law in order to maintain their domains. This is especially concerning for anyone running a url shortener or hosting user-generated content on a .ly domain.

You may also not know that since June 2010 .ly domains less than 4 characters long may no longer be registered by anyone who isn’t in Libya – which suggests there is tension around foreign owned, high-value, short .ly domains.

The wider warning here, is to keep in mind that when you register a country-specific TLD, especially one that is administered by a small country, it might be wise to have a backup plan in case the country that owns the TLD changes the terms of registration or no longer wishes foreigners to own domains within their space.

The GuRuStu Group is a branding, marketing and website design firm located in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. The award winning GuRuStu Group has the most impressive team of experienced graphic artists, programmers, copy writers and social media specialists working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you are looking for a Tulsa advertising and design firm to handle your branding, advertising, marketing, SEO or social media management needs in and around the Tulsa area give the GuRuStu Group a call. We welcome you to browse our website at http://www.gurustugroup.com to learn more about us and the many services we offer.

The GuRuStu Group is an interactive media and design firm located in the heart of downtown Tulsa. We can help you with all graphic design and media needs, from radio to television and all printing needs from logos to business cards, from magazine ads to billboards. We can build a custom website to serve your individual needs and match it to your already existing branding or we can develop your new branding at the same time. All websites designed by the GuRuStu Group come with a user friendly content management system, namely WordPress. When you contract with the GuRuStu Group to build your website, you will own your code and you will be able to easily manage and update your site on your own. Your satisfaction is our top priority because when you look good so do we.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time according to StatCounter. The company’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

The dominance of IE in usage stats is without question, but the last few years have seen an increasing decline in those numbers. As users have become more aware of alternatives to IE, such as Firefox and Google Chrome.

Both of these browser alternatives not only offer better support for the latest web technologies and standards, but also include a plug-in architecture so that the base browser can be extended and enhanced with other useful features and tools.

Google Chrome Extensions and Add-ons for Firefox can make the web experience much safer or make certain tasks easier or quicker to perform. Take a few minutes and look at what’s available.

If you’re interested in checking out the alternatives to IE it’s a simple download to get Chrome or Firefox installed. Google Chrome has been making huge strides lately with frequent releases and is probably one of the fastest browsers you could run. Firefox is an amazing workhorse of a browser and the upcoming 4.0 release looks to bring it up to par with where Chrome is in many respects.

Just to let you know where I’m coming from, my current browser of choice the past few weeks has been the Firefox 4 betas. Prior to that I was a heavy Chrome user. Still, I usually have both open throughout the day and would probably recommend most users give Chrome a try as their main browser currently, at least until Firefox 4 ships.

Download Google Chrome

Download Firefox

While details are scarce on the service dubbed GoogleMe, many are expecting integration into Google’s most popular services, including Gmail and Google Maps, as opposed to an isolated product such as Facebook. Google has had some past failures venturing into the social media world, but a convenient pairing with services people already use could help create high adoption rates.

Competition is typically good for consumers, and there could be great benefits to be reaped by users of social media. It will be interesting to see not only what is in store for GoogleMe, but how Facebook and other social media leaders respond to these impending changes.

The GuRuStu Group is a branding, marketing and website design firm located in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. The award winning GuRuStu Group has the most impressive team of experienced graphic artists, programmers, copy writers and social media specialists working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you are looking for a Tulsa advertising and design firm to handle your branding, advertising, marketing, SEO or social media management needs in and around the Tulsa area give the GuRuStu Group a call. We welcome you to browse our website at http://www.gurustugroup.com to learn more about us and the many services we offer.

The GuRuStu Group is an interactive media and design firm located in the heart of downtown Tulsa. We can help you with all graphic design and media needs, from radio to television and all printing needs from logos to business cards, from magazine ads to billboards. We can build a custom website to serve your individual needs and match it to your already existing branding or we can develop your new branding at the same time. All websites designed by the GuRuStu Group come with a user friendly content management system, namely WordPress. When you contract with the GuRuStu Group to build your website, you will own your code and you will be able to easily manage and update your site on your own. Your satisfaction is our top priority because when you look good so do we.

A great tool to make simple, interactive UI prototypes without having to touch code.

The GuRuStu Group is a branding, marketing and website design firm located in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. The award winning GuRuStu Group has the most impressive team of experienced graphic artists, programmers, copy writers and social media specialists working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you are looking for a Tulsa advertising and design firm to handle your branding, advertising, marketing, SEO or social media management needs in and around the Tulsa area give the GuRuStu Group a call. We welcome you to browse our website at http://www.gurustugroup.com to learn more about us and the many services we offer.

The GuRuStu Group is an interactive media and design firm located in the heart of downtown Tulsa. We can help you with all graphic design and media needs, from radio to television and all printing needs from logos to business cards, from magazine ads to billboards. We can build a custom website to serve your individual needs and match it to your already existing branding or we can develop your new branding at the same time. All websites designed by the GuRuStu Group come with a user friendly content management system, namely WordPress. When you contract with the GuRuStu Group to build your website, you will own your code and you will be able to easily manage and update your site on your own. Your satisfaction is our top priority because when you look good so do we.

Avram Piltch reviews Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2.

I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.

In summary, Flash on the smartphone fails to deliver on any of its promises and offering no substantial benefit over already existing HTML5 technology that smartphones have adopted for online video and other uses.

If you’ve been wanting to offer HTML5-based video on your site so that users of smartphones and other mobile devices have easier access to your video it’s been a difficult thing up until today if you haven’t been able to host your own video.

Here’s an example of an embedded Vimeo video with the new player/embed code:

“Inception” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Vimeo has always been a great solution for hosting video, but now with their complete HTML5 solution they’re pulling ahead of the pack.

A ROCK-SOLID DEFAULT FOR HTML5 AWESOME.

After more than two years in iterative development, you get the best of the best practices baked in: cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain ajax and flash. A starter apache .htaccess config file hooks you the eff up with caching rules and preps your site to serve HTML5 video, use @font-face, and get your gzip zipple on.

Boilerplate is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it’s just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed.

Do yourself a favor, if you’re doing anything touching web development take a look at this site and the code they provide. You couldn’t ask for a better foundation covering all the ins-and-outs you need to be aware of to get a modern site working that takes all current browser differences into account. Not to mention the code comments are clear, concise, and informative for novices and pros alike.

The set includes:

• GUI Library – Hundreds of vector elements for interface design
• Minimal UI icons set – 260 vecor icons for Illustrator
• Styles Library – 200 styles to apply in Illustrator

While this won’t be perfect for everyone, it’s worth checking out. And the linking requirement for commercial use may make it unusable in some situations. Either way, it’s a great set of widgets and gizmos and for someone just getting started or students it’s an excellent tool to put in the toolbox.

We’re officially adding a new piece of software to the list of default common applications we expect employees to use, and that’s the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Firefox has been around for years, of course. Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we’re going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls.

Some of us started using it because it was new and fast and cool. I tried it for those reasons, but I still use it for the following ones:

• Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
• Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
• Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
• Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
• Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

Many of you have probably heard your tech-minded friend or relative try and talk you into moving from IE to Firefox in the past. The pain of installing and learning new software or the inability to choose what software runs on your work computer have kept you from bothering.

No one doubts that there is a cost to switching software in the time and effort required to get used to the new application. Multiply that effort by 400k and you might never consider it. However, IBM has decided that the cost of moving their employees to Firefox is worth the effort.

Firefox is one of the leading browsers in supporting and advocating open internet standards. If you’re not convinced to at least give Firefox a chance I’ll close with another quote from Bob Sutor:

The longstanding commitment of Mozilla to open standards and the quality of the implementation of them in Firefox gives us confidence that this is a solid, modern platform…

Visit Firefox.com to download Firefox.

To learn more about custom post types check out Justin Tadlock’s great custom post type article.

During a recent company project I had to work out how to output unique HTML for different post types in the search results. The solution was surprisingly easy thanks to the new template function get_template_part(). This technique can also be transferred to the main loop if you are going output different post types together. In the case of search results, if you set your new post type as search-able it will show up together with your posts and pages.

get_template_part() is located in wp-includes/general-template.php and accepts two arguments, slug and name. It uses these two arguments to locate a template file of your choosing. What is cool about the way it works is how the slug acts as a fallback when it can’t find the template file specified by the second argument name.

From the functions self documentation

Load a template part into a template

Makes it easy for a theme to reuse sections of code in a easy to overload way for child themes.

Includes the named template part for a theme or if a name is specified then a specialised part will be included. If the theme contains no {slug}.php file then no template will be included.

The template is included using require, not require_once, so you may include the same template part multiple times.

For the parameter, if the file is called “{slug}-special.php” then specify “special”.

@uses locate_template()
@since 3.0.0
@uses do_action() Calls ‘get_template_part{$slug}’ action.

@param string $slug The slug name for the generic template.
@param string $name The name of the specialised template.

The new default WordPress theme Tweny Ten uses this function to allow for child themes to overwrite the theme’s loop file. We however will be re-purposing it for a slightly different use. Post type conditional html loading!

Alright lets get started.

Note: If you’ve started using get_template_part() for loops in your themes or are creating a child theme for Twenty Ten ( or any other theme using a loop.php file similarly to how Twenty Ten does ) you can probably copy a lot of this code without much worry.

Create a new file called loop-search.php and copy over the current contents of loop.php from your theme.

In the loop-seach.php file, find the actual post loop and cut and paste the insides of the post loop ( what is withing the while( have_posts() ) ) and paste it into a new file called post-layout.php. Mine looks like this:

Now replace what you just cut from loop-search.php with something that looks like this:

Do a test search on your blog to make sure nothing has changed visually. If you find you theme is spitting errors make sure you haven’t made any syntax errors.

What does this code do?

Now when you search for something and your new custom post type is listed as search-able WordPress will look for a file called post-layout-{custom_post_type_here}.php when looping through the search results. If it can’t find that particular file it will fallback on the new post-layout.php template file we created.

Now whenever you create a new post type create a new file called post-layout-{your_custom_post_type_here}.php and put in any custom html you may need to output for that particular type.

For example here is the post-layout-profiles.php file we used in the company project to output a “Company Profile” for the Client.

As you can see this custom post type output uses featured thumbnails, custom taxonomies for outputting the current profile’s company title, as well as post meta that stores that profiles contact information. This file is also used for outputting the complete profile on a individual profile page by detecting whether we are viewing an archive or search view of the profile.

So what are you waiting for? Start creating new post templates for your own custom post types right now!