While there is nothing quite like Napster anymore for free music, AlbumBase.com certainly was close. The site was like a P2P network except instead of downloading questionable software and hosting the files on your own computer/Internet connection you would upload full albums to various gray-market file hosting sites like Rapidshare.com and then send the link to AlbumBase.com. AlbumBase acted as a middle man letting you search their database of links that would take you off site to download a complete album. The community really blossomed for the couple of years I have been using it. And the devoted fans constantly keep the selection of music up to date, they had pretty much everything I was looking for all the time.

But on November 7th, the site went dead. Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired reported on a rumor that the RIAA/FBI was responsible for the 404’d site but none of the rumors were ever confirmed. Calls to the Seattle police, the Seattle FBI department, the IFPI, the RIAA, and the BPI (the IP address of AlbumBase’s web server puts it in Great Britain) to try to figure out what exactly is going on turned up nothing. It’s a sad, sad day for mooching-music lovers like myself. Now what will I do?

Oh wait, AlbumHunt.com does pretty much the same thing and has an extensive collection of links already. Never mind, the beat goes on. Piracy never dies.

This past Sunday I joined the boys and girls FCA flag football teams for their weekly practice. I was taking pictures, they were working out. This marked the second outing with my new sports lens and I had been reading up on football photography tips that I wanted to try out after the first practice I attended.

At the end of the three hours that I was there I snapped off 342 photos. A lot more were keepers this time around thanks to two simple tips I picked up. First, I set the auto focus to the center point which meant the camera would only focus on things in the dead center of the frame. Before I was getting lots of background objects near the edge of the frame in focus leaving the action blurry and out of focus. Since I was trying to fill the whole frame with the action, only having a center focus point didn’t bother me. The other thing I did was bump up my ISO speed from 100 to 200. This allowed me to use a smaller aperture which resulted in a deeper depth of field. In English, this means more of the subject would be in focus which decreased my chances of getting something blurry.

Besides football there was also a cute chihuahua that was literally the size of my hand. It provided for a few good dog shots to break up the monotony of sports photos. In between water breaks I also took some leaf macros from a small, nearby tree.

The worst part of taking so many photos is processing them all. I quickly rushed through them in Picasa resorting to just cropping and sharpening before pushing them out on the web. I have no idea how others find the time to carefully tweak their images in Photoshop. Picasa is by far my favorite photo app because it is so simple to use and quick to get through a ton of photos. Google really needs to get Picasa onto the Mac because iPhoto is a pain to use.

You can see all of my photos from Sunday in Album 1 and Album 2.

Most web designs use a classic header, columns, and footer layout, so there is no point in slaving over the details of the basic structure when you are starting a new design from scratch. YAML Builder makes the process quick and easy with a simple WYSIWYG online tool to build out your starting point.

You start out with a basic three column layout and from there you can customize it to fit your specific needs. Choose the doc type (I prefer HTML 4.0 Strict), optional base elements, and the number of columns to start out with. You can specify the widths of various elements choosing between a static width or liquid layout and the source order of the columns. Finally, the fun can begin by adding specific elements like headings, paragraphs, and lists to complete your basic web page. It should be noted that adding the specific content is not as straight forward as I would have expected. You need to click on the ‘Add +’ toggle in the upper left corner of the element before you can drop in child elements. Throughout the whole process you can click the ‘Toggle View’ button to see a real time preview of the final rendered code. When you are all done click the ‘Get Code’ button and the builder will display the HTML code, the base CSS code, and even an Internet Explorer bug fix CSS in a slick modal pop up so you can be off to a great cross-browser start.

YAML (Yet Another Multicolumn Layout) is an open source CSS framework meant to get you up and coding quickly while reducing the tedious detail work associated with CSS design. Download Squad recently reviewed the Yahoo CSS Grid Builder tool which does a similar thing but is much less polished. The YAML builder also offers a greater flexibility with your design as well as using less code in the end.

If CSS has left you a bit dizzy in the head or you simply want a quick place to start, the YAML builder is the best place to go to.

Here we are at the last post in this series of My Favorite WordPress Plugins. If you missed the important, information, or article tool ones, check them out. And now on with the best tools for keeping your readers looped in.

Syndication Tools

Feedburner Feedsmith – Everyone should be using FeedBurner for their RSS feed simply because it makes it a cinch to gather statistics. The Feedsmith plugin will automagically detect every possible way for someone to access your feed and redirect them to your Feedburner feed. This takes all the guess work of setting up the redirects yourself and now you can easily track your RSS subscribers. Screenshot »

Google (XML) Sitemaps – Give Google a hand and alert them to whenever you post new content. This plugin will automatically generate an XML Sitemap file that the Google Spider-bots use to find new content to index. Everytime you publish a new entry this plugin will edit the sitemap file and ping Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com to give them a heads up that they should send their spiders over for some new content to munch. Screenshot »

Twitter Tools – Everybody loves sharing what they are doing all day long, why not let them know when you have new posts to read? Twitter Tools will automatically create a tweet whenever you publish a new entry. You can also do the reverse and post a blog post for every tweet you make on Twitter. That seems like a silly idea to me but they also have the option to publish a daily digest of all your twitter postings which sounds more digestible and less annoying for your readers.. Screenshot »

Wordbook – Wordbook is a Facebook application that will alert your Facebook friends when you have a new blog entry. It adds a new event to your Facebook feed so everyone can keep tabs on your blog even if they have no idea what an RSS feed is.

WP-SEO – This isn’t really a method of syndication but this plugin offers a host of search engine optimization tweaks to help the search enginge spiders find your content easier. There are too many little tweaks you can fiddle with but the main ones include rewriting your description and keyword meta tags for each entry as well as adjusting the title of your post. SEO stuff is kind of a black magic that is hard to measure results. At any rate, this plugin makes it easy to optimize. Note: The site is german but there is a link to an english version of the plugin right on the homepage. Screenshot »

So there you have it. 20 excellent WordPress plugins that are the cream of the proverbial crop. If there are any ones you think I missed be sure to let me know in the comments section and I hope you found this brief blog series of value.

I have covered information related plugins and the utmost most important plugins so far. Today I am going to talk about tools that are helpful during the writing process of blogging.

Blog Article Tools

Similar Posts – The ability to relate blog posts to one another is vital in recycling old content that is otherwise sitting there being ignored. This plugin indexes words in your post when you publish it to match it to other blog articles. There are lots of options to tweak in order to get the relevancy right where you want it. There is even the ability to edit the similar keywords on a per post basis for even more fine tuning. Screenshot »

Recent Posts – This is similar to the similar posts above. In fact it was written by the same guy, Rob Marsh. This plugin is self explanatory as it lists the most recent posts wherever you want in your template using <?php similar_posts(); ?>. The beauty of this and the similar posts plugin is they are both cacheable meaning less load on your database. Screenshot »

Postie – You might remember my how-to post about getting Postie setup on WordPress. The ability to post from my mobile phone has been a lot of fun and makes good use of the 400 picture message bundle I pay for every month. It is pretty simple to get going and the ability to post from anywhere I have cell phone coverage is quite a profound idea. Screenshot »

WP-FLV – Posting video on your blog can be daunting if you don’t go through a site like YouTube. Even then, WordPress’ visual editor makes a mess of the embed code. To handle with all the messy details of embedding flash video in my posts I use the FLV plugin. It adds a button to my editing tool bar that wraps a link to an FLV in <flv> tags that get processed later when I publish. The video shows up in a basic flash player and I am good to go. Screenshot »

WP-Amazon – Have you ever needed to link to something on Amazon.comAmazon.com but didn’t feel like opening up another tab and running a search? WP-Amazon lets me do all of that right within my Write Post interface. The little Amazon button reveals a search sidebar that lets me find anything in any category on the whole site. The real use for this is you can drag the link straight into your post and it will automatically insert your affiliate ID to the link so if anyone buys anything after clicking on your link, you will get a cut. Screenshot »

For the fourth and final installment of this series, I will cover syndication plugins that I employ on my blog.

Yesterday we saw my important plugins but today I will take a look at plugins that make it easier to access a wide array of information about my blog in order to track certain patterns and statistics.

Information Plugins

WordPress Reports – This plugin is the equivalent of crack. It adds a new tab in my admin panel called reports and displays Google Analytics data for the last 7 days in nifty bar graph form. Stats include Weekly/Daily visitors and page views, average page views per visit, top inbound links, rising inbound links, popular blog entries, rising blog entries, falling blog entries, top entry pages, percent of new versus returning visitors, and circulation via Feedburner statistics. Be careful with this one as checking my stats is a new obsessive habit of mine. Screenshot »

Adsense Earnings Report – Yup, I have ads on my blog in case you haven’t noticed, but just for individual postings. I don’t expect to earn much money from them but I do like to keep track of my earnings and now I can do it from right inside the WordPress interface. It only shows impressions, clicks, and earnings but what else is there? I have noticed the numbers are a little off compared to actually logging in to the AdSense console but it still gives me a reasonable idea. Screenshot »

Diagnosis – I like to know some of the geeky backbone information about the server running my blog and this plugin makes it real easy to dig ALL of that info up. It mostly tells me what version of PHP/MySQL is installed, the name of the server, what PHP extensions are loaded, and the database load. I mostly use it for the last item to make sure my database is chugging along swimmingly. Screenshot »

WordPress.com Stats – These give pretty much the same information as the Google Analytics reports mentioned above. I just use the WordPress stats for comparison reasons. Two perspectives are always better than one. Screenshot »

TD Wordcount – When you blog pretty much everyday it is amazing to look back and see how many words you have written over the life of your blog. TD Wordcount breaks it all down in a multitude of ways including total for published entries, total for unpublished entries, entry with most words, average words per post, percentage of posts with 300+ words per entry, how many words per author, and number of posts per author. I always get a kick out of these kinds of stats and as of this post I have written 24,820 words! Screenshot »

WP Plugins Tracker – With all of the plugins I needed a way to make sure I was up to date with the latest releases. Plugin tracker does just that by checking your installed plugin version with the current version in the WordPress Plugin Database. Screenshot »

Tomorrow I will take a look at article tool plugins that make my life easier when I am writing.

Over the next couple of days I will share my thoughts on my favorite WordPress plugins that are installed on this very blog. To make things easier, I have divided them up into four sections: the important ones, information aggregators, article tools, and syndication tools. Below are the ones that I feel every WordPress blog should have for a more stable and protected blog.

The Important Ones

WP-Cache – This plugin generates static HTML pages to serve up instead of hitting the database on the backend every time a user requests a page. Sending HTML is a lot less resource intensive and will fortify a blog from going under when a massive crowd pounces on the content, also known as the Digg effect. Screenshot »

Akismet – From the same people that created WordPress comes Akismet, the anti-spam plugin. Have you ever recieved a comment that seems like complete gibberish with a ton of scrupulus links? Then you have gotten attacked by comment spam. Akismet uses the wisdom of crowds and sends all of the comments you recieve through it’s barrage of tests to determine if it is real or junk. It’s free for personal use and is a snap to set-up with any WordPress blog. Screenshot »

Bad Behavior – In tandem with Akismet is Bad Behavior which aims to block most malicious spam bots from ever posting on your site to begin with. It says it has blocked 360 spam accesses in the past 7 days but I have no clear idea on what it is doing. All I had to do was install it and forget it so it is worth keeping around. Screenshot »

Tomorrow I will take a look at information aggregation plugins that make it easier to analyze trends with my blog.

Every color has a name but up until now it has been quite a task to separate the Periwinkles from the Mischkas from the Thistle Green. Name That Color lets you select the a color via RGB value, HEX number, or a simple color picker. From there, the handy little web app will let you know the appropriate name for that certain hue. Feeling a bit lazy? Then use the drop down menu to sort through the zillions of names and find ones like Rangitoto, Wattle, or Hot Toddy. Seriously those are all valid color names.

Apparently this guy has been spending way too much time over at COLOURlovers.

(via DownloadSquad)

Sony Media Software put up a teaser for their upcoming release of Vegas 8. One of the first changes right off the bat is the name which is now Vegas Pro 8. This helps differentiate between the Vegas professional users have known to come and love and the more consumer oriented Vegas Movie Studio. New software features include a 32-bit floating point video engine, Multicamera editing built right in, Blu-ray disc burning straight from the timeline, and a ProType titler (one of the most requested features for a long time.) With the new title tool you can…

Create animated text effects with splined paths, per-character animation, and advanced curves. Add shadows, glows, blurs, and gradients for unique text treatments. Supports Unicode and TrueType fonts, as well as OpenType fonts with kerning pairs, alternate styles, bidirectional text, ligatures, custom kerning, and more.

The 32-bit video capability will allow for more presice color with less gradient banding. Most other video editing suites support up to 10-bits and if you wanted more control over your color you would have to jump over to Adobe After Effects or Apple’s new program Color. Now you can stay right in Vegas for a speedier workflow while you color correct without losing quality.

Earlier this year at the National Association of Broadcasters conference Sony was showing off a preview of 64-bit Vegas which would take advantage of the new processing power in modern chips. Video is the sort of application that would really benefit from 64-bit processors as it is extremely data intensive. There has been no word if there is 64-bit support, but Vegas is multi-threaded aware meaning it can utilize the multi-core chips that are becoming mainstream to process video faster.

Vegas 8 doesn’t come with a few dissapointments. Corporate politics seem to have limited support for some formats as it will only back Sony’s own Blu-ray DVD burning (from the timeline i.e. no menu’s) and only Sony’s flavor of AVCHD from it’s own camcorders. The lack of HD-DVD burning is a bummer especially since the proclaimed winner of the format war seems to flip-flop every week. There are other camcorders out there that record to the AVCHD format including Panasonic and Canon. While Vegas could have been the first editor to support native tapeless AVCHD editing, they have instead dropped the ball choosing to support only their own devices.

One of the more head scratcher features announced will the support for digital signage. This makes it easier to produce and edit video that will be displayed on tall, rotated video displays. The software makes it easy to switch between a taller format and a regular widescreen horizontal format.

Sony will demo the new software at the IBC tradeshow on September 7th – 11th. Vegas 8 will go on sale September 10th for $699 which includes DVD-Architecht 4.5. I anticipate getting my hands on Vegas 8 to try out the new goodies and report back with a full review in the near future.

Mashable.com created a list of 30 Firefox extensions for web developers and designers. To be honest, you really only need two: Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar. These two extensions incorporate nearly every other extension listed, and who wants to manage 28 separate extensions when they could just use two.

If you are still digging through source code by hand, then do yourself a favor and get to know Firebug. You’re job will never be the same again.