To showcase some of the things Firefox 4 can do, Mozilla has teamed up with GlobalVision and set up a demo page featuring 360-degree videos and other demos showing the versatility and power of HTML5 and CSS3.

Among the demos, you’ll find three time-lapse, 360-degree videos filmed in three beautiful locations: Angkor, Cambodia; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Cannes, France. Other demos showcase shadow and lighting effects, interactive motivational poster creation and other possibilities that come with new web standards, fully supported in Firefox 4.

To see the demos, head on over to demos.mozilla.org, but you’ll need to have a browser that supports both WebGL, HTML5 as well as a recent set of graphics drivers to be able to see the 360-degree videos.

Several Gmail help forums were filled with users who had experienced this problem. Users reported that they were able to receive new messages, but that none of their previous email exchanges were appearing. Contacts appear to have been preserved and the issue only seems to be affecting a subset of Gmail users (”less than .29% of the Google Mail userbase,” according to Google).

“I have lost ALL on my emails/folders etc. from gmail. Why would this happen? How can I restore everything?” wrote user bkishan.

“I was on my eMail normal and when I refreshed all my account settings, eMail, labels, contacts etc has just disappeared. I was running at 80% capacity is that anything to do with it? Is there a way that one can restore all of that?” asked another.

LibertyLondonGirl wrote in a blog post, “It is clear from the Gmail forums and Twitter that hundreds if not thousands of people have had their Gmail accounts compromised. A firm believer in the concept of cloud computing, it never occurred to me that my Gmail account could one day disappear.”

Google is aware of the problem and updated their App Status dashboard to acknowledge the issue.

Google wrote at 3:09PM ET on February 27, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.”

The home page is the page that loads when the Home button is clicked and usually the first page you see when a website loads. Therefore, it is one of the most important pages on your site. Do you agree?

If a person wants to be loved, the first thing he or she will do is to be attractive to get the attention of the opposite sex. Then, they will find a way to search and know that person well. We know that the first thing a person looks for is the physical appearance, that’s why we are doing almost everything just to look attractive. Haven’t you thought that this can also be applied to web design? If a website wants to get the viewers’ attention, then the physical appearance must also be attractive.

Must-Have Characteristics of a Homepage

1. Attractive

Every pages of a site must attract viewers. This way, they won’t get bored while visiting each page of your site. But the home page must be more attractive than the other pages of the site because this is the first page your viewers will see. In creating your homepage, you may ask the question, “How can I make the home page attractive?” The answer to this question is good designing.

Appropriate and Attractive Color Scheme

Colors capture viewers’ attention, especially if they are used in an appropriate manner. If your expected viewers are children, the best colors you can use are the bright ones but make it pleasing to the eyes. If you are designing for a company, then you should choose colors that can give a professional look.

Creatively Designed Header

Headers also attract people. With modern designing, headers are now becoming very dynamic and really creative. Take a look at the example below. There are different kinds of tools gathered together and on the monitor part, there’s a video clip playing. This is a good concept of telling the audience that the website is related to media such as photography, video, audio, etc.

Easy-to-Understand Navigation

To capture lots of viewers, you need to have a well-designed navigation. Viewers want everything to be spoon fed on your site, so when they see your navigation they should already understand how it works and so.

Carbonica is one good example that has a well-designed navigation. The designer made a nice concept where the buttons are labeled so that people know on what to expect when they clicked a certain button. Like when clicking the motorcycle button, the page that loads is a calculation of a motorcycle’s emission.

2. Focused

Home page must focus on its purpose. For instance, if the website advertises a company’s services then the viewers must instantly know what the website’s purpose is. And that is to advertise the company and its services.

Viewers do not want to waste their time thinking on what could be the site is all about. Instantly, they want to get the information as soon as the page loads. Like when you are searching for a specific book in a library. If you are looking for a PHP for Dummies book, you don’t want to waste your time going around each section, rather you will just go to the Computer section of books to find what you are looking for. That’s what viewers expect on each site, and you can already give them an idea on what your website is with your home page.

3. User-friendly.

One thing that viewers expect on a website is how friendly it can be used. It should provide a comfort and fulfilling time when they explore the site. Many people will say that a home page is just a single page, so it is not important if it is easy to use. I tell you, if the viewer finds it hard to explore the home page then they will just press Alt + F4 or Ctrl + T.

What are the criteria of a user-friendly home page?

Speed

Your home page and other pages must be fast in loading. Or else, your viewers will get disappointed on your site.

Content

There are two things to focus on the content: language and grammar.

In terms of language, English is the widely used all over the world. It is very annoying for viewers when they cannot understand the language you use. If I were to ask, I prefer English to be the language to be used on a website.

There are some people who tend to get annoyed of wrong grammar and leave. So before posting, be sure that the grammar is correct.

Buttons

It should be easy to use and understood by your viewers. Especially in the home page, for this is the starting place of your viewers. So if your buttons are not user-friendly, then they might just leave your page and search for a related one

Some Tips to Ponder

I have here some tips that can help you create a captivating home page. To give you comfort in reading, I have categorized each tips based on the elements to be found on a home page.

1. Do not be a spoiler

Home pages are intended to tease viewers, and will have the move to explore. Do not spoil them by putting all information they need on the homepage.

2. Attract

Attract to get their attention by:

Choosing a good background. You can use an image, or a graphic for your background or you can also leave it plain and simple.

1) Find an inspiration to motivate you to work.

You may have not noticed it but you have been working hard too long. You tend to be preoccupied with work that you forget to have an inspiration. Having an inspiration provides you the significance of why you should work. You may also refer to other people who have done a great job.

2) Allocate time to learn

Whatever you are doing within a day or a week, allocate time to learn. Learning newer things about your job is easy. You may refer to some reference materials that will help improve your craft. It could be reading magazines, books, blogs and trade journals. You may even opt to go back to school and learn new things. Whatever is your decision, it is time to refresh your mind with excellent lessons to enhance your freelancing career.

3) Taking classes to further enhance your skills.

It is a great advantage if you take classes to work-out on your skills. This is because constant communication in school makes you learn new things and allows you to interact with co-students. A teacher is the best mentor to improve your skill.

4) Work with good people

Learning new things from people who have mastered their craft is also beneficial. People like this know what they are doing. They are good examples and you can begin by merely observing how they perform their skill. Working with them, be part of their team sounds great. You can also ask them questions if something needs to be clarified.

5) Stay focused and pay attention to your skills

We may have skills that need to be polished. Stay focused on this skill and find ways to improve it. You can work on this skill, practice it till it gets perfect, explore new horizons and be creative. Who knows it can take you to places like having more clients. And having clients believe in your capacity brings great advantage.

6) Take some criticisms positively

We might think that we have done an excellent job. But sometimes we are engrossed with work that we forget about its own share of mistakes. Whatever the case may be, we need other people’s opinion about work. Of course, there will always be painful criticisms. But if you take things lightly and on the bright side, we learn and can try to improve the craft.

7) Try new challenges

Things will turn customary when work is started. There may be instances where it becomes boring. When this occurs, you need to assert a certain diversion and explore new challenges. Experiment by trying new methods that cans further enhance your skill. For instance in writing, you can experiment blogging, article writing and forums so things will sound interesting.

<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Share on Twitter</a>

Your readers are now able to send your post url to twitter! Hope it will bring you some traffic and new readers

1. Staying up to date with releases

Staying up to date with the latest version of WordPress is critical. In every update, there are usually a lot of performance enhancements. The developers at WordPress don’t release updates just for fun, but because they’ve upgrades or made something about WordPress better.

Same situation with WordPress plugins, stay up to date with the latest versions. It’s as important, and for the same reasons. WordPress plugin developers release new versions because they’ve modified the code in some way to make the plugin better. So keep up with the releases!

2. Disable or delete unused plugins

This is probably one of the biggest issues that causes WordPress sites to slow down. Depending on the plugin, they can have tons of scripts and code. So if you’re not using a plugin disable it and maybe even delete it. Decide which plugins are necessary for your site to run and then do-away with the ones that aren’t needed. It’s as simple as that.

3. Clean up your code

Since your code is what runs your site behind the scenes, optimizing it can do wonders for your load time. Below are some easy ways you clean up your code to load faster.

• Decreasing WhitespaceWhitespace refers to the spaces used in your code. Some coders, like myself, like to use a lot of whitespace (indented tabs, line breaks, etc.) for better readability and organization. But, decreasing whitespace will speed up your site’s load time by shaving off some extra bytes off the total size.An example of using some whitespace:

  .test {
font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: #000000;
}

  An example of minimized whitespace:

  .test {font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 12px; color: #000000;}

• Using external scriptsInstead of placing tons of code in your header.php file, use external scripts. This allows the browser to cache the script so it won’t have to read it for every other page.An example of using external scripts:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="example.js"></script>

• Using shorthand CSSUsing shorthand CSS is great for everyone. It’s great for you, your browser, and your site visitors. It allows for your CSS to be more concise, and it loads faster too!An example of using long ass regular CSS:

  .test {margin-top: 7px; margin-right: 1px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 3px;}

  An example of using shorthand CSS:

  .test {margin: 7px 1px 5px 3px;}

4. Minimize PHP and database queries

And most important of all, cutting down on PHP and database queries. Each time a page on your site loads, if your browser has to execute any PHP queries, it adds to the load time. If you replace the PHP queries with static HTML, every time a page loads, your browser just reads the HTML.

An example of lots of queries & requests:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/mootools.js"></script>

An example of minimized queries & requests:

<title>WPCandy - The Best of WordPress</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.3" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://wpcandy.com/wp-content/themes/wpcandy/files/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpcandy" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://wpcandy.com/wp-content/themes/wpcandy/files/mootools.js"></script>

While I am in wp-admin area, I will randomly get redirected to my main blog URL with a Not Found message.

Anyone experience this and know of a fix?

Solution : Try deleting your .htaccess, change your perma links and change them back again allowing wordpress to write your .htaccess again . Im not entirely sure if that will fix it but its an idea to start with as usually when i have redirect issues its normally a permalink issue or a missing file somewhere

Failing to prop up the basics is the easiest way to make errors in coding. There are a lot of small places where a developer may make a mistake which causes software to fail. And the worst part about sloppy programming is that advances in language design aimed to fix these problems don’t do their job. There have been improvements in syntax in programming languages. For instance, the latest version of Java tries to make null-pointer checking easier by offering shorthand syntax for the endless pointer testing. But such syntax improvements can only prevent code from crashing. They don’t eliminate the root of the problem: the proliferation of null values due to fast and loose programming.

Overcommitting to details

On the flip side, overly buttoned-up software can slow to a crawl. Relentless devotion to detail can even lock up software if the obsessive checking requires communicating with a distant website over the network. Here, the challenge is to design the layers of code to check the data when it first appears, which is much easier said than done.

Not simplifying control

Not simplifying control over tasks in their code may invite disaster for developers. The software assumes that if someone creates an object of type Name with two fields first and last, then it should immediately create a database table called Name with two columns, first and last. The names are specified in only one place, avoiding any problems that might come if someone fails to keep all of the layers of configuration in sync.

Delegating too much to frameworks

Sometimes the magic tools lead only to confusion. By abstracting functionality and assuming what we want, frameworks can all too often leave developers at a loss for what’s gone wrong in their code. The rules are, while quite reasonable, not entirely trivial. As the app grows, it depends on more and more of these almost-trivial bits of external knowledge.

Trusting the client

Many of the worst security bugs appear when developers assume the client device will do the right thing. For example, code written to run in a browser can be rewritten by the browser to execute any arbitrary action. If the developer doesn’t double-check all of the data coming back, anything can go wrong.

Not trusting the client enough

Sometimes too much security can lead paradoxically to gaping holes. Because of this, many Web developers are looking to reduce security as much as possible, not only to make it easy for people to engage with their products but also to save them the trouble of defending more than the minimum amount of data necessary to set up an account.

Relying too heavily on magic boxes

Many programmers assume they can link in the encryption library, push a button, and have iron-clad security. But many of these magic algorithms have subtle weaknesses, and avoiding these weaknesses requires learning more than what’s in the Quick Start section of the manual.

Reinventing the wheel

Then again, writing your own libraries just because you think you know a better way to code can come back to haunt you. But grow-your-own cryptography is a welcome sight to attackers. Many libraries don’t need to be perfect, so grabbing a magic box is more likely to be better than the code you write yourself.

Opening up too much to the user

Placing the onus on users to customize functionality they do not fully understand can invite disaster in the form of inadvertent security holes and privacy violations. When making purchasing decisions, most users can’t handle the breadth of features offered by any given piece of software.

Overdetermining the user experience

Some developers decide to avoid the trouble of too many features by offering exactly one solution. But if users don’t like the idea, they will look for ways to work around these limitations, and it will lead to an outcome that could translate into security vulnerabilities.

Closing the source

The decision to not distribute code works against the integrity of that code and it can discourage innovation and fixing bugs. Just opening up the code forces you to make the info more accessible, understandable, and thus better.

Assuming openness is a cure-all

While openness can make it possible for others to pitch in and, thus, improve your code, the mere fact that it’s open won’t do much unless there’s another incentive for outside contributors to put in the work. Opening up a project can also add new overhead for communications and documentation. Moreover, a good open source project comes with extensive documentation of the API and road maps for future development.

I had a new installation of magento. But I was unable to login as an administrator. I went to the admin login page, entered correct username and password but was redirected to the same login page. I could not enter the dashboard page. Error message is displayed when I enter wrong username or password. But nothing is displayed and I am redirected to the same login page when I insert correct username and password.

Solution:

I  found these solutions:-

1) Use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost in your url, i.e. using http://127.0.0.1/magento/index.php/admin instead of
http://localhost/magento/index.php/admin . But this didn’t solve my problem.

2) Since I am using Windows XP, I was suggested to open “host” file from
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and have 127.0.0.1 point to something like magento.localhost or even 127.0.0.1 point to http://www.localhost.com . But this also didn’t work either.

3) This solution finally helped me out of this problem. The solution was to modify the core Magento code. Open app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php. Comment out the lines 80 to 83. The line number may vary according to the Magento version. But these lines are present somewhere near line 80. You have to comment the comma (,) in line: $this->getCookie()->getPath()//,

Well, I am out of this problem. Hope, this solution you also help you.

There has been an error processing your request

Exception printing is disabled by default for security reasons.

Error log record number: 281887837

This issue specially comes on localhost. Please forgive me if I left anything out.

You have not do much more for this problem.

Open this file ‘app\code\core\Mage\Core\Model\Session\Abstract\varien.php’ and comment these lines, from line no. 77 to 98

$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),
$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),
$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()

and

if (!$cookieParams['httponly']) {
unset($cookieParams['httponly']);
if (!$cookieParams['secure']) {
unset($cookieParams['secure']);
if (!$cookieParams['domain']) {
unset($cookieParams['domain']);
}
}
}

if (isset($cookieParams['domain'])) {
$cookieParams['domain'] = $cookie->getDomain();
}

I hope this will help you.