pixelfantastic wrote this today:

Bought a blackberry Bold and an Nokia N71 last week, and need to sync them to two MacBooks. Plugged the Nokia N71 into the Mac, and that was just about it, sync setup and done in a few minutes. Lovely.

BUT…not so easy with the Blackberry. It needs additional software to sync. Two were suggested, ‘Missing Sync’ at 39 dollars, and ‘PocketMac’, which is free. I chose to spend the next three evenings fighting with Pocketmac,and blackberry updates, rather than part with 40 bucks. What a mistake!!!

Pocketmac seems to work for some people, but when you give software away for free, there is a reason. And there isn’t any income to justify keeping free software bug-free forever as new phones are released. So after losing half the week, I still didn’t have my phone synced, so in utter desperation, i bought Missing Sync online. Within 30 minutes, all my contacts, appointments, tasks, everything was beautifully synced with the Mac.

Took a photo on the Blackberry, and as I walk towards my mac, it detected the bluetooth presence, and automatically started copying them into my iPhoto. Wonderful!!

So easy, so fast….So if you need to sync a Blackberry, my advice is if you value your time at all, don’t waste time on free stuff, it’s cheaper to buy Missing Sync from www.markspace.com

As blogs and personal websites become more and more important in day to day life, everyone seems to want to blog and leave their little mark on the internet. However, historically building websites is tricky, and most people, even designers don’t know exactly how to build a website, even if they’ve designed it perfectly in Photoshop.

How do I easily and cheaply convert my Photoshop file in to Wordpress or HTML?

Thankfully, there are a few good companies on the internet that have taken the initiative and now offer a ‘PSD to HTML conversion service‘. You upload your PSD and specify your desired format, and delivery time, and they take the hard work out of your website creation. Not only does this take the stress out of building a website, but also allows graphic designers to concentrate solely on what they are good at; Design. More and more designers are opting for this process of web development as it leaves them free to move on to the next design and create great looking sites without loosing every ounce of creativity they have, because they have their heads buried in HTML code at 3am!

ThePSDCoder will happily convert your PSD to HTML or blog format at exceptionally good rates. They are reliable and friendly, and most of all, the quality of work they produce is fantastic.

thepsdcoder reviews have been amazing… great service, and quick turnaround. We definately recommend using thepsdcoder.com for all your HTML conversion requirements.

How do I get People to Subscribe to my RSS feed? Good question, there are so many different ways to help boost your subscribers to your RSS feed, we decided to post a guide to help you get started.

We will use the very popular iPhone website, iPhone User Guide, as an example of good web practice when actively trying to increase your RSS readership.

Step 1. Show your feed icon off well.

There’s no point having RSS on your site, if users can’t see how to subscribe. Make your icon big and bold, and don’t deviate too much from the RSS icon we’ve all grown to know and love.

Step 2. Keep your content to one subject.

Users are more likely to subscribe to a blog if the WHOLE site interests them, not just one article. By keeping the blinkers on and only blogging about one subject will greatly increase your chances of getting more subscribers.

Step 3. Use Feedburner

Feedburner is an RSS utility that takes your website’s feed, and adds a whole load more functionality to the feed before repackaging it and sending it on. Not only will it allow you to track your subscribers with more detail, but it will also do things like send out a daily email newsletter of your recent blog posts for you. If you’re blog posts are interesting, some of them will get forwarded on to others and help you get more RSS Subscribers.

Step 4. Use Social Bookmarks

Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon & Delicious are just a few of the Social Bookmarking sites out there right now. Add the ObSocialBookmark plugin to your WordPress blog, and users will be able to bookmark your blog posts on the big social bookmark sites, thus increasing your readership, and as a result RSS subscribers.

Take 1 week to build up your friends and submit quality articles to all of them. You can have a stumbleupon toolbar which makes it easy to stumble articles. You can also use the social bookmark icons on nearly all blog posts; again this makes it easy to submit articles to the sites. At this point do not submit any of your own articles unless you have been using the sites for a while. It is very important to build up your friends lists and submit articles. Make a point of submitting for an hour every day for 1 week.

Step 5. Hold a competition for RSS Subscribers only

With Feedburner, you will have access to all your email subscribers email addresses, so why not publicize that only Subscribers will be eligible for a free giveaway of some sort.

Step 6. Put a link to your RSS feed after every post.

Edit your WordPress theme, so that under every blog post there is a link to the RSS feed. Make it discreet and small though.

Step 7. Show off your feed count

People are generally like sheep, and don’t want to feel like they are ‘missing out’ on anything… Once you gain over 100 readers, tell the world! New readers seeing that you now are getting ‘popular’ will want to sign up and ‘follow the herd’ as it were.

Step 8. Enable Full Feeds

Full feeds Vs Partial feeds is always controversial, because having partial feeds teases readers and encourages them to click the email to read the full article on your site, however, lets not be greedy. Whilst hits are nice, this article is all about getting more RSS subscribers. We recommend enabling Full Feeds on your RSS Feed.

Step 9. Offer exclusive content to RSS subscribers

Use the Feedvertising plugin for Wordpress to link your readers to a ’secret page’ on your site with extra content. Feedvertising links only show up in the feed (and not in the post), only feed subscribers will see the link and have access to this content.

Step 10. Post in forums

If you have an information style blog, take a look at the community websites in your niche, and start posting. DO NOT POST BLATENT ADVERTS. That’s just bad karma. But if someone is talking about something you’ve talked about on your site, there is no harm in stating your opinion and leave a link to your blog at the bottom. Remember, no one likes a newbie who posts links everywhere, if you do this, you will probably get banned from the forum by the moderators.

Ever fancied running a Job Listing site, but don’t have the knowledge to do so, well now you can with JobPress. JobPress is a wordpress theme that turns your WordPress website into a perfect working Job Board Software.

Job Press is a new Wordpress theme that lets you to create job listings within Wordpress instantly. You don’t need plugins to enhance the functionality of the Job Press theme. Everything you need is included with this WordPress theme. The theme is really nicely designed and allows you to customize the theme images to describe your fulltime, part-time, and freelance type of jobs in the listings. Also, you can categorize jobs based on skills, locations, and so on, which makes this Wordpress Theme extremely flexible and powerful.

JobPress is available now from E-Junkie in two flavours:

Single License: $79
Developer License: $199

In this simple tutorial we will show you how to retouch modelling images and give them that professional look and feel using Photoshop CS3 available from Adobe.

How to retouch skin / face to give them a glamour fashion model look: Having a Wacom Tablet instead of a mouse to retouch your photos, makes life a LOT easier, and if you are serious about Photoshop retouching and model retouching, you really should consider investing in one.

Enjoy this free basic model photoshop retouching tutorial.

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Creating a nice Gradient Effect is acutally far easier to make that you’d imagine. This mini-tutorial shows you how to in just a few easy steps.

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Super Cool Frilly Bits Typography from godonholiday on Vimeo.

The genius’ over at Abduzeedo have posted this awesome video to help you take any standard font and make it a nice swirly styled piece of artwork.

Luxa always offer great photoshop tutorials and we’re not left disappointed with this tutorial. Learn how to make that club flyer effect around body parts easily and quickly. Luxa’s article follows: Here’s a great effect that will bring some energy to your subject. We’ll be wrapping this singer’s arm with a glowing beam of light, adding sparkles, and adjusting the colors to make it all seem magical.

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OpenSourceHunter has spent a lot of time gathering these 44 tutorials for Photoshop. With these tutorials you can easily (with a little Photoshop knowledge) create some totally radical text effects. Thanks to these guys for posting such a great resource online!

Click on the images below to choose your tutorial

How To Create A Gold Text Effect In Photoshop

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