You can check the website at http://www.curtti.com/ – it’s in Portuguese! Enjoy.

Barack Obama heads the list, no surprise here, considering he is the “leader” of the world’s richest country. Second place goes to Hu Jintao, president of the People’s Republic of China. According to growth data and predictions from economists and analysts, China will soon become the 2nd largest economy in the world (it has already surpassed Germany). Third spot goes to the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladmir Putin. At 4th sits Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, the man in charge of reestablishing the American economy. These are the four men which are currently in charge of guiding the governments and economy of some of the most influential countries in the world.

Other than placed in high government positions, all of them have something in common. Their spot in the top of the list, and maybe even in the list as a whole, is temporary. And I don’t mean temporary as in ‘they will all die one day’, but rather, their terms will soon come to an end. As it happened to George W. Bush, Jian Zemin, Viktor Zubkov and Alan Greenspan, which are not present in the list, the current top four will  soon pass on their influence to their successors.

Now you may ask: “OK, but where are you trying to get with all of this?” And the answer is… drum-roll… number 5! Ta-da!

At number five we have Sergey Bryn and Larry Page, the guys behind Google. Nerds are placed at number five in the Forbes list. There’s no need for me to talk about Google, you know what it is. My point is, these guys will most likely remain on the list longer than any of those who are currently listed above them. They may never be first or go higher than five, someone will always be the president of the U.S. or China, and so on. I’m not saying they are going to be in the list for as long as they are in business. I’m not even saying they are going to be in the list next year. Google may go bankrupt or whatever, but a very probable scenario is that it will remain as the leading  search engine on the planet for the foreseeable future. What is impressive about this is that these guys reached fifth place because of the information they have gathered about the world. People often say that ‘knowledge is power’, and Google is probably the best example of the truth behind that saying. They are not the largest nor the most profitable company out there, but they possess something much more valuable, they know what the world wants.

http://www.iconfinder.net/

http://findicons.com/

For the app I needed an icon for “shower”, I know, not a very usual thing. I couldn’t find a decent shower icon on any of the top 10 google results for “icon search engine”. But for all my other queries I ended up finding some cool high quality icons.

Have fun

The current twitter account of the game reached 1,300+ followers within a few hours. It was great to see the response of the people who played the game and how quickly the word was spread out. The mastermind behind this idea is my good friend @prosopopeio. For the first game the prize was Dexter: The Complete First Season in DVD, which was given to one of our participants successfully completed the puzzle within 24 hours. Next week we’ll start another game, if you want to have some fun, win prizes and at the same time pimp your twitter profile, I highly recommend you to checkout Tweezzle.org!

So many things have happened that I don’t even know where to re-start. I moved to another country (Norway), started my Master’s course, got a new job and right now I’m developing a few online projects. There’s not much time left for other things but I still manage to do some sports and have fun with my friends. Amazing huh?

Regarding my new projects, one of them involves Twitter and is based on an idea from a friend of mine (one of the smartest guys I know), the second is a Social Bookmark website and the third one will target the Mobile community. I’m lucky to work with good old friends in the development of each one of them. Hopefully we’ll be launching a Beta version of these projects soon, while I study, work and still post updates here in the meantime.

Life’s good, I can’t complain.

If you can create amazing scripts from scratch and loves to spend time writing endless lines of code this tutorial is not for you. I’d really like to be able to create my own applications from scratch, I’ve tried learning some programming languages before (PHP and Ruby on Rails) and hope that someday I’ll be able to master one of them so I can rely on my own skills to create and debug websites. But as of now I just can’t get past xhtml and some css. You see, I’m more of a design/marketing guy. I highly suggest you try learning one of the main web development languages before trying to create a website, and I’m not talking about html.

I decided to write this tutorial for people who have great website/service ideas but have no technical expertise on how to create them. I’m not a coder but I’ve been able to manage the development of a few websites that turned out exactly as I had them in mind. Remember, I’m not a coder so I might be very wrong about some of the concepts and/or terms I use here, I will just state what has worked for me so far.

You don’t need to know how to write code in order to create a website. Getting things done will probably happen faster if you do. But you can still manage to have a website online. Even though I can’t code a half-decent website myself, from all the hours/day I spend surfing the web I know exactly how a website should function and I bet you do to.

1. SELECTING THE BEST PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE:

There are many languages out there to choose frome: ASP, PHP, Perl, Ruby and so on. On one of my attempts at learning a programming language I’ve googled “The best programming language” and couldn’t find it. I’ve read somewhere that the best language is the one you are most familiar with. In other words, you can develop awesome websites using whatever language you choose as long as you can work it to do what you want. What I noticed though is that PHP is very popular among programmers and is probably the one with the highest number of free scripts available. I also recommend PHP because most of the hosting companies support it and you can run it on a linux server, which are the cheapest. Some amazing websites have been developed using php including Facebook and Youtube.

2. CREATING THE CODE:

Ok, if you are reading this you probably don’t know how to write code, so what we have to do is hire someone to do it for you. There are many ways you can find the right people to do the job, here are a few resources:

• GetAFreelancer
• Elance
• SitePoint MarketPlace

I really recommend GetAFreelancer, it’s my favourite place to find talented programmers.

There are more places you can go to find amazing programmers to work for you. If you want to develop an open-source project try SourceForge, people may help you for free over there.

3. EXPLAINING WHAT YOU WANT:

It’s not easy to pass the idea to someone else if you are only going to use words, I suggest creating a design of the website and sending images of how you want things to work. Explain every single detail because programmers will quote depending on that, this is very important specially if you have a limited budget. You don’t want to ask programmers to add things later on the project because they will charge more for any extra  work.

4. IT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE:

Try searching for available scripts at HotScripts. There are a lot of scripts available there that might help your programmer build your own application. Instead of having the programmer create everything from scratch ask his opinion on some of the scripts you find that might make his work easier. Sometimes it’s cheaper to purchase a script and have it implemented to your project than creating it.

If you have a good idea write it down and create a layout kinda like a sitemap. Explain every section and functionality of the site in detail. It’s good to use websites as reference when explaining for ex: “The comments system should look like Youtube’s.” You probably want a lot of features that already exist in a few sites out there, skip the trial and error part and just design something similar (unless you have a better concept in mind). It’s great to see an idea becoming a reality, once the site is ready you will need to market it, that’s the next topic I will write about. Stay tuned, and if you have any suggestions or tips please comment below. Thank you.

eBookCritique.com

So check AdVitorio.com out!

You need to ask yourself: “What can my site offer to social network users?”

There are already a lot of applications and the companies using these strategies are pulling great results.

According to Wikipedia, screen display resolution is also set to change, 640×480 was the standard resolution from 1990 to around 1996. 800×600 was the standard resolution until around 2000. Last time I checked, the majority of active computers have their resolution set to 1024×768, but new PCs are coming with even higher resolution settings, so that too is set to change.

Other than the resolution issue web designers should also take into account the browser differences. Internet users with the same resolution might customize their browsers using different settings like toolbars. There’s also the browser issue: IE, Firefox, Opera, etc… they all display websites in different ways. To get around this resolution problem you should create liquid designs, which uses the available space on the browser window to display the page’s content. Of course not all pages have the same design concept, in some cases you will not be able to create a liquid design, it really depends on the lay-out.

I’ve been designing websites using Corel for a long time, and just recently started working with Photoshop. I gotta tell you, if you are starting right now, go with Photoshop. This software is perfect for web designers, it let’s you slice images, export for the web, create animated gifs and so much more. It is as if Adobe developed the software with the web designer in mind. I once read that the best design software is the one you are good at, and that’s really true. I have seen beautiful designs from people using different software. In the end, the software is not going to create the design for you, the most important thing is to have creative and artistic skills.

UPDATE: An awesome free website to check how your site looks on various browser, operational systems and resolution is http://www.browsershots.org – try it!