DustinsDesign.com

Looking for some design inspiration? Here are 6 websites that can get your creative juices flowing and help keep you up to par with latest web design trends.

In no particular order:

1. BestWebGallery (www.bestwebgallery.com)
   An inspirational gallery site created and managed by Nick La (Ndesign Studio). I find myself coming back to this gallery regularly.
   
2. CSS Zen Garden (www.csszengarden.com)
   A popular gallery often mentioned by designers.
3. Stylegala Gallery (www.stylegala.com/archive/)
   Reviews and a rating system give this gallery’s visitors a clear picture of the community opinion.
4. CSS Vault (www.cssvault.com)
   In addition to a great gallery this site yields useful resources and a blog.
5. CSS Beauty (www.cssbeauty.com)
   Click on ‘gallery’ in the top menu to view. Not as large of a collection as the others but still a good resource.
6. Template Monster (www.templatemonster.com)
   Many of the templates on this site do a poor job of placing proper emphasis on the content and require modification. However, it is still a good site to get ideas and has some awesome flash templates!

PING - Announce new content on your blog to the world!

When you ‘ping’ you notify blog indexing services that you have made an update to your blog. Ping-o-matic is used automatically by Wordpress at install but there are others you should take advantage of. Use the following list to make sure your content is represented by these services.

Not sure where to put these? In the current version of Wordpress (2.5.x) click on ‘Settings’ in admin then ‘Writing’ and paste them into ‘Update Services’ at the bottom of the page. Click ‘Save Changes’ and you are in business. Now Wordpress will notify these services automatically.

If you are familiar with pinging services you already know that there are plenty more pinging services available than the ones listed above. This list is researched and optimized for efficiency. Credit for the research goes to Instant Info Online. You can check out the research here.

I am days away from revealing the new iteration of the Dynamic Digital Media LLC website (For those new to this blog, Dynamic Digital Media LLC is the web development and online marketing company I started a few years back). With the new site is a new logo.

If you’ve used newer versions of Horde with Plesk, you have probably seen the news feed that runs down the left side of the screen. This newsbar is irritating at best. Here is how to get rid of it.

Open the following file in your text editor:

Around line 102 comment out the entire if() statement (lines 102-117).

If you upgrade Plesk, you will most likely have to repeat this process.

I often use the following .htaccess / mod_rewrite solution to redirect domain names based on the requested domain. The reasons for this are many. Most recent example for me is I had a single site with 5 alias domains but software licensed for only one. Even though I had the alias domains set up on the server it still did not satisfy the license. Add the line below to htaccess and now no matter which of the 5 domains are written in they are re-written to the one with the licence (need to duplicate for each domain). The license is valid since its all the same physical website and everyone is happy. Brilliant!

I am sure there is a more eloquent way of accomplishing this with mod_rewrite - but this gets the job done!

Can also be used to redirect to a landing page based on the requested domain:

Have a better solution? I’m no mod_rewrite guru so comments are always welcome!