Two well designed blogger templates for free

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Are you looking for free Blogger templates? When you start a blog on blogger.com - Google's blogging platform for bloggers, you are faced with choosing from a limited quantity of ready made templates provided by Google, or modifying an existing design, or having to build your own design from scratch. But for those who desire a well designed free blogger template but dread the prospects of getting their hands dirty in writing code, hope is in sight.

To those of you who are direly in need of a blogger theme which is pleasing to the eyes, may I point you towards Antonio Lupetti's own blog named "Woork" where he has released two very nice blogger designs which you can download for free. These designs come with a few bells and whistles which make them a very good choice for people who are serious about their blogs.

Named Daily Inspired

and Typoork,
they are very good.

Antonio Lupetti is a web designer, blogger and engineer living in Italy who has been providing all his blogger templates for free. So if you own a blog on a blogspot domain (blogger.com), then do check out his templates.

Linux Help blog gets a fresh new look

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Your favorite blog on Linux - "All about Linux" has been overhauled and given a fresh lease of life through a massive redesign. The design is unique to this site as I have built it from scratch. Compare the old design with the new one in the images below and gauge for yourself which one you like better.

Linux is used by Hollywood extensively to create movies.

A few features worth noting of this new design

• Stress has been given to minimalism. There are very few images.This translates to faster loading of the web page. I am a sucker for minimalist web designs with plenty of white space.
• The design is devoid of tables. In fact, the number of tables you will find on this site (design wise) are zilch ... Nada.
• The site uses Google Custom Search which helps a visitor to this blog find what he is looking for very fast. And the search is prominently displayed at the upper right corner of the site.
  
  Try it out, it is really good. You can search through over a 1000 articles on this site.
• Non-English speaking visitors to this site can read the articles in their language of choice through the Google Translate widget displayed on the right hand side.
  
• I have even incorporated some of the best SEO practices into the design. Though it is early to say what effect (positive or negative) these changes will have on the site traffic.
• The "Do you Know?" box - an optional feature, allows me to prominently displays some data and links not related to the parent post.
• All the javascript (or most of it) has been moved to the bottom of the page as recommended by Google's webmaster guidelines.
• The site has a functional footer where some text is actually embedded.
  

The fine tuning is still in progress and will be done on a case by case basis. But the major work has been finished.

Can you share this blogger theme with the rest of us?

Well, I believe a unique design helps a site maintain its identity. Having said this, now that I have understood the process of designing a website, I might create further blogger designs which I promise to provide as a free download. Of course, anybody with some knowledge in CSS and HTML can easily figure out what I have accomplished here.

Please tell me what you like and what you don't about the new design of this site. All your opinions (critical or otherwise) are most welcome.

Kino - A Free alternative to Apple's FinalCut Pro

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Kino is a non-linear DV editor for Linux. There are a plethora of video editing software around; right from the Free and Open source ones such as Cinelerra, The Open Movie Editor or KDEnLive to the other end of the spectrum which are dominated by the proprietary ones which cost big bucks such as Apple's FinalCut Pro and Adobe Premiere. Kino lies at the Free end of the spectrum.

What makes Kino stand apart from the rest of the brood is it's very simple user interface which is a boon for newbies taking their first baby steps in the art of video editing. But Kino is not a toy, rather, it positions itself as a full fledged cost effective video editing solution for most peoples needs.

Christian Einfeldt who is a producer at the Digital Tipping Point, has written a very useful article on WorldLabel blog describing the strengths and drawbacks of Kino software. He goes on to elaborate on how to capture video footage using Kino and, Kino GUI's main features. Christian mentions that Digital Tipping Point crew has used Kino for sharing rough edits. And all of their 1,229 five minute “source code” video posted to the Internet Archive’s Digital Tipping Point Video Collection has been rough-edited with Kino. Just to think, Apple's Final Cut Pro costs a whooping $1299.00 USD. And if you can get your job done with Kino, that would lead to significant cost savings, says Christian.

A very informative, must read article which walks newbies through the basic process of capturing and rough-editing videos to create a story using Kino.

Free HTML editor - A shootout for the best one

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Linux has a plethora of free editors, most of them are also good HTML editors. So the big question is, which one is the best HTML editor of them all? TuxRadar.com is having a nice shootout of seven free HTML editors in Linux. Those in the fray are - Bluefish, Amaya, OpenOffice.org Writer/Web, Quanta Plus, Screem, Kompozer and Composer (Oh yeah there is no mistake, both are different editors).

If you ask me, I mostly use Gedit to edit HTML code and it does a pretty decent job too. But for large projects, it always helps if you have project support and a few other time saving features as well. So which is the best HTML editor ?

The review says Bluefish is the best there is in coding your website if you are developing it in Linux. Bluefish is no Dreamweaver killer. But it provides the best all-round package owing to its excellent reference material and versatility; and it does so at an unbeatable price as well. Now you know which editor to opt for when building your website in Linux.

Get a Free 1 Year Subscription to Linux Journal Magazine

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Linux Journal is a premier Linux magazine which has been around for around 15 years now - and still going strong. This monthly print magazine publishes articles on Linux and open source software that are considered to be a few notches above it's competition in terms of quality and content.

Costing $29.50 for 12 issues, here is a chance for you to win a yearly digital subscribtion of this fabulous magazine for free.

What you have to do

Watch Linux Journal's daily tech video for this week starting from this one. That is one video a day.

As the video progresses, watch out for, and note down any letter that the hosts will anounce. Once you have watched all the videos in order, and have collected all the letters, in the last video you will get to know the email id to which you have to send the letters. Everyone with the correct answer who responds by 11:59:59PM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time March, Friday the 13th of 2009 wins a free digital subscription to Linux Journal.

Linux Journal has named this week the "Tech Tip Video Contest Week".

10 Desirable features in Ubuntu

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Ubuntu is no doubt a fabulous Linux distribution. And it is gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds - thanks to Mark Shuttleworth and his team at Canonical. As an end user, what would you like to see in Ubuntu which would tempt you to ditch your current OS and embrace Ubuntu with gusto ?

Kumail Hunaid has a wonderful post describing what he feels are the 10 things the developers should include in the future releases of Ubuntu. The intelligent icons and the icons that talk do look rather enticing. Incidentally, Kumail is also the co-developer of Xenon - a web based operating system (still in alpha stage) designed with netbook users in mind.

Musings from Search Masters 2009 Conference at Google

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The Google SearchMasters' 09 conference was held in Bangalore on 28th February 2009. I was one of its attendees, rubbing shoulders with an eclectic group comprising of webmasters, SEO experts, online marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers from across India. The conference was worth the time and effort I spent to reach the venue - The Google Office at Benniganahalli - around 11 odd kilometers from the Bangalore Kempegowda Bus Station.

The Google India team rolled out the SearchMasters 2009 conference to introduce the web masters to the various tools developed by Google which can help enhance their respective web sites and make them more friendly to search engines. The conference also included talks on best SEO practices, building mobile friendly websites and a hands on session on two select websites providing tips on how to make them more search friendly. Earlier I had written about the Google Bus aimed at bringing Internet to the masses. This was a similar event albeit targeted at webmasters, SEO experts and bloggers.

Here is a run down on the speakers and the talks they gave at the conference.

Vivaik Bharadwaaj who is manager of the Search Quality Evaluation team in India and Korea kick started the event by giving the welcome address.

Then the stage was taken over by Adam Lasnik. Adam is considered Google's first Search Evangelist. He talked on the various search engine optimization techniques that webmasters can use to make their sites more search friendly. Specifically, he mentioned ways in which you can use the freely available Google Webmaster central tools to boost your website traffic.

Then after a brief respite, Koti Ivaturi who is a Strategist at the Search Quality team at Google introduced the audience to the Google Webmaster Help Forum where, you can post queries regarding the problems you face with your website, and participate in the discussion.

Adam Lasnik later selected two websites at random from the audience and went on to give his views on what could be wrong with these websites and how to rectify their anomalies. By the time he finished the hands-on session, it was time for Lunch (Buffet). And as with all things Google, Lunch was exceptionally good with a plethora of side dishes, salads, fresh fruits, sweets and what not.

Post lunch, Dr Rajat Mukherjee introduced the audience to Google custom search. Dr Rajat is a group product manager at Google working on the Google custom search platform. An alumni of IIT madras, he has worked with Yahoo, IBM and Verity before joining Google. He talked on how Google custom search can be effectively leveraged in various ways by bloggers, web masters, non-profit websites, syndication partners, governments, application developers and search enabled applications.

Ankit Gupta - a graduate from IIT Delhi, now working at Google, conducted a really informative session on building mobile friendly websites.

The last talk was by Deepak Kumar who introduced the Google Analytics and website optimizer to the audience. He explained in some depth the different features of Google Analytics and how it can be used to track goals.

The closing note by Adam Lasnik involved a question and answer session which gave the participants a chance to win some prizes - Courtesy Google.

All in all, the day long Google SearchMasters 2009 conference was very informative and every bit enjoyable.