TalkingApes

Expanse CMS System

Expanse +++ dream. create. do.

Expanse is the new CMS System created by Nate Cavanaugh & Jason Morrison aimed at giving designers more control over their blogs and portfolios.

Expanse lets you upload your artwork and photos, create thumbnails, add press events and your latest news, as well as allowing people to interact with you and keep up to date on your work.

It enables you to create and manage a website without being bogged down in the details.

Some of the notable features:

• easy 3 step install
• automatically crop and resize your thumbnails
• drag and drop reordering of your items
• sell your items through paypal
• easy integration with your current site
• add multiple items to your portfolio in an instant
• add additional images to each item you post
• have multiple users help manage your content
• easily add unlimited multiple categories
• easy content formatting
• post into the future
• add custom fields to your entries
• manage your site’s themes with a click
• super simple (yet powerful) template system
• rss feeds, commenting, smilies and more…

all for $29. Seems like a steal. Check out the Demo here.

technorati tags: expanse, cms, content-management, designers,

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MediaShift: Newspaper Sites Hot to Blog, Cool to Podcasts

Newspaper companies are feeling the shift hard, as people go from reading print newspapers to getting their news and classified ads on the Internet.

MediaShift . NewspaperShift::Newspaper Sites Hot to Blog, Cool to Podcasts | PBS

MediaShift by Mark Glaser has quickly become one of my favorite blogs. In this particular post, here are his main points in the cited article:

- Blogging is all the rage.

Out of the Top 100 newspaper sites, 80 of them have blogs. Of those 80
sites with blogs, 67 sites (or 83%) let readers comment on the blogs.



- Podcasting is still a province of larger papers.

Unlike blogs, podcasts are employed by a minority of Top 100 newspaper sites — 31 of them.



- Video offerings are widespread.

61 newspaper sites of the Top 100 offer video on their sites, which is a pretty strong number.



- Newspaper sites offer RSS — but not with full text or ads.

Out of the Top 100, 76 sites have RSS feeds and almost all of them offer feeds for particular sections of the site.



- Forced registration is losing steam.

Only 23 of the Top 100 newspaper sites require people to register in order to read articles.



- Editors are not hip to reader comments on stories or bookmarking.

Only 19 sites allow readers to comment below each article, and only 7
sites offer either internal or external bookmarking features.

technorati tags:mediashift, newspapers, podcasting, media, blogging

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USATODAY.com – Niche competitors crowd into MySpace

USATODAY.com – Niche competitors crowd into MySpace

Is MySpace losing its cool? Margaret Marks, 17, thinks so.The Birmingham, Ala., high school senior was an avid user of the No. 1 social networking website for two years.

“But I never use it anymore, because most people my age now use Facebook,” she says. “I can talk to people I haven’t spoken to in years, and you can join college networks and meet people. MySpace is good for looking at bands and music, but for your own website, Facebook is much better.”

As the social networking phenomenon continues to grow, competitors are snapping at MySpace’s heels — er, portal. Facebook, Xanga, Wayn, vMix and others are salivating over MySpace’s 95 million users and recent crowning by tracking service Hitwise as the Internet’s most visited domain, surpassing longtime champ Yahoo Mail.

This kind-of goes hand-in-hand with what I said in this post about MySpace.com. People are starting to get tired of it already. Question is, what is going to take its place? According to USAToday, the main competitors are:

Facebook.com — geared towards high school and college kids.

vMix.com — centered around the photo and video lovers.

Xanga.com — focuses on blogs, looks nicer than MySpace.com

Whyville.com — geared towards kids 8 to 15.
technorati tags: myspace.com, competition, xanga.com, facebook.com, whyville.com, vmix.com, social-networking

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Twins Nation | Minnesota Twins Fan Site

Twins Nation | Minnesota Twins Fan Site

I really like the design of this site — clean and precise, lots of information but not an overload. For not having ANY pics of anything minnesota twins, it’s pretty awesome.

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Mike Davidson — sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Mike Davidson — sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson umm, thats me and Mark Wubben. Through this extensive work, we, along with a invaluable stable of beta testers, supporters, and educators like Stephanie Sullivan and Danilo Celic of Community MX, have completely rebuilt a DOM replacement method originally conceived by Shaun Inman into a typography solution for the masses. It is this technology which provides the nice looking custom type headlines you see on sites like this one, Nike, ABCNews, Aston Martin, and others. Weve released sIFR to the world as open source, under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge.

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bbPress » Forums from the people that bring you WordPress

bbPress » Home

bbPress is forum software with a twist. bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. Most software in this space is focused on features like avatars or file attachment and if thats what youre interested in, bbPress probably isnt for you. Were focused on keeping things as small and light as possible for the explicit purpose of creating a community around support.

A very interesting concept. I admit that I haven’t been that much of a forum tester-outer lately, as I’ve been happy with Invisionboard. This forum still is too bare-bones for me, however I really do like the navigating with tags format.

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Webmonkey Q&A: Fjax

Webmonkey Q&A: Fjax

Developers Jay and Steve McDonald have come up with a solution to this problem, and it’s called Fjax. Fjax works a whole lot like Ajax — it uses an XML file to pass data to a browser — except that it uses a tiny bit of Flash, instead of the browser, to parse the XML. All of that browser-specific code is eliminated, leaving the application more lightweight and putting less of a strain on the browser.

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Get Vanilla!

Get Vanilla!
Vanilla is an, open-source, standards compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web.

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Lussumo Filebrowser

Lussumo Filebrowser – Now with awesome thumbnailing power
The filebrowser is a lightweight PHP application that allows you to thumbnail images and view them in a web browser. That’s it. Short and sweet.

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PaulStamatiou.com » HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows

PaulStamatiou.com » HOW TO Quickie: Embedded Flickr Slideshows
Dig those flash Flickr slideshows? All that’s needed is a bit of code to embed them within your website to give your readers something dynamic.

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