Hope you have noted Amit posting a few stylish 3d tile images of his blog in posts.It’s one of his ideas to make posts attractive. Instead of posting screenshots, going that extra bit, you can also make such 3d tiles of any image, and all you need is Photoshop and a bit of patience.
Step 1 - Get a screenshot (of your blog).
Open the blog in your browser, Hit F11 to maximize the window, and hit the print screen button.

Step 2 - Open Photoshop .
Create a new file by hitting CTRL+N, the dimensions will be that of your screenshot, since it’s already in the clip board. (Select preset to clipboard)Smart photoshop! Just make sure that the background colour you select is the same as your blogs background colour - in my case white.

Step 3 -Use it.
Paste the image in to the New document and trim off the unwanted areas(browser window) using the crop tool. Reset the image size to smaller size - say 500 pix width.(Alt+CTRL+I)
Now you have just the blogs screenshot.

Step 4 - Artist in you.
Hit Ctrl+T(Edit>Transform) and resize the image to half of the total canvas size.(So that a shadow of the same image can fit in the window)
Hit Ctrl+T again and right click inside the selection to select “Skew”.

Keep the pointer to the top right corner and drag the corner point to a lower level so that you get an image similar to the screenshot.Now it’s a 3d image!

Now go to the Windows>Layer panel and right click on the image layer(not background) and select “Duplicate Layer”- This will make acopy of the existing image.

Now go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical - This will invert the image.

Drag the inverted image using the pointer tool to the base of the original image, so that they both stick to each other.

Now select the inverted layer and hit CTRL+T(Transform) and resize its height to a smaller size, never mind if it juts out of the window - make sure the total height is almost 1/2 of 1/4 of the original image.

Now in the Layer window - right click on the copy layer and select “Blending Options”
> Select the “Gradient Overlay” button - and select the gradient with one side transparent and other side colour(see the drop down menu of gradients).

> Double click on the gradient - and move the Opacity spot to almost middle - (see screenshot) and all the other colours being selected white.

Now you would get the reflection of the original image(See screenshot).

You may also transform the shadow by hitting CTRL+T and selecting “perspective” from the menu and tweak with the image so as to get better 3d shadows - see screenshot.
Hnt - Playing around with the drop shadow property and Transform - Persepctive,Skew can give you some cool effects!

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Stock photography has been an alien affair to India as of 2000. Come the MNC’s and stock photography industry has penetrated into the much desired market - India.

India was never seen as a potential market because, the law had it’s pitfalls in ensuring the license concept for major channels like movies and music. There were always the threat of piracy lurking under.

Thanks to the proliferation market by Digi cams and gadgets, there are more photographers than ever in India today. And the advertising and the editorial market gambling around with lavish money, this is the right time to plunge in.

Recently, Getty Images which is the world’s number one player in stock photography Industry, has tied up with a local player churning out Visage Images - an Indian based agency for Getty. Visage has been doing it’s campaigns off late which even had a competition for designers over the topic - India alive.

Corbis also followed track soon - they tied up with an Indian agency India Picture(CEO Dushyant Mehta) to mark their presence in the most allured market.

Alamy which is a UK based stock photo agency has been doing it’s operations in India, and is accepting Indian based photographers to it’s collection.

The benefited is the photographers who can now earn a living with these agencies.

Details on how to earn money with these agencies..

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Here’s a tip on how to scrap in Malayalam in Orkut?

It’s as simple as a copy - paste thing.

1. Goto www.quillpad.com
2. Type in your scrap in english(Manglish) i.e - Namaskaaram Aliyaa. in the lower window.
3. On the upper window it will show the malayalam text highlighted in yellow.
4. Copy the malayalam text as you would select any text.
5. Paste it into the Orkut Scrap window! Presto!

Also take advantage of the “suggestions” shown in the window. If you have trouble typing in the correct word, take the suggestion. It works!

There are other options of Hindi,Kannada,Telugu,Tamil and Marathi. The above technique can be used to scrap in these languages also in orkut.

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These days Google is showing “tips” to their product related searches. If you search query contains the term “blog” then you get a “tip” to use Blogger. And if you search for “photo sharing” you get a “tip” Picasa. See screenshots below.

There is a big debate going on in the blogosphere regarding this topic. When one side says that “Google is Pimping” the other side says “It’s delivering quality”.

I would like to stand by Blake Ross(Firefox Team) who expresses his concern over the matter in his post titled - Trust is hard to gain but easy to lose. In which, he says that -

But if that sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because Google already works that way. After all, Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top. Search for “photo sharing” and you should already get the highest quality services. According to Google, Picasa is not one of them. These “tips,” then, can only be a tacit admission of failure:

So, these tips are not helping the end-users at all. They are put in just because they aren’t the good services around probably? Even if they are, it leaves a negative impression on Google.

Matt Cutts, on the other side says that this(the tips) are only to help the users get better results.But that is not a clarification.

He says - when searching for images, if Google suggests you to use Google Image Search then, isn’t that delivering a good user experience. Yes may be.

But, suggesting it’s own products over competitors (which may be even better products) isn’t really a good idea.

As Blake puts it - What if Microsoft used it’s Windows users to use Microsoft Live search instead of Google? Why haven’t they done something like it earlier?

The answer seems obvious.

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This is a simple workaround that will help you embed a translator option for your blog/site.

There are a lot of translator plugins available at the moment like the Altavista Babel translator plugin. Despite being very good plugins(javascript code linking to altavista site) they cannot be modified to suit your site’s theme. They simply stick out. Even the Yahoo Babel plugin recommended by Amit is not fully customizable to your blog theme.

Comes Google with it’s wonderful translator tool. But no ready made widget for your blog at the moment. No worries - let’s play with it and make one!

Before implementing this plugin(wonder if it can be called one!) to your blog just learn some few translator language.

When ever you translate a webpage using the Google translator tool - the resulting url will be similar to this. -

http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Ces&u=thewebsiteurlhere

Note the two red coloured letters - en is Google’s code for English and es is for Spanish.

Similarly Google has various codes for each country. Using these codes ihave managed to make a javascript enabled pull down menu that simply transalates any page to the currently selected language.

Here is the code -
=================================

<FORM NAME=”nav” width=”100%”>

<DIV>

<SELECT NAME=”SelectURL”onChange=”document.location.href=document.nav.SelectURL.options
[document.nav.SelectURL.selectedIndex].value”>

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cen&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”
SELECTED>Translate this blog

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Ces&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Spanish

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cit&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Italian

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cfr&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
French

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cpt&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Portuguese

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Car&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Arabic

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cja&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Japanese

<OPTION VALUE=”http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cko&u=http://dailydose4me.blogspot.com”>
Korean

</SELECT>

<DIV>

</FORM>

=================================

You may modify the website url to your blog.You may also want to add more language sets by simply converting any webpage(at Google translator) into your desired language and then copying the country code from the resulting url.

I prefer this one because it sinks in with your blog theme perfectly, unlike that Altavista Yellow fish.

See the demo on the top left menu(below the technorati tag).

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If you visit this site, at the first glance you may not notice anything in particular but once you read a few lines, you’ll probably call up your buddy and ask him to visit it too.

Site’s called abasicsite.com who are basically web designers offering some out of the world hosting plans. The site is just a plain html coded one, and you’ll probably think of the designer as a 10 year old kid to be designing something like it.

Do check out the pricing page where the various plans, free offers and the additional charges are explained.It should give you some good time.

There is also an “Examples of our work” section where in you can see whole lot of MFA’s piled up. There are a few good ones too that arouse nostalgia in you. you know, the kind of website you used to visit when you were in the High-school?

If my guess is right, the designer(Mr.Jim Hundrup) just wanted to have some fun and have a good laugh - which is why the site is in tact after designing it in 1998. Anybody interested may call him up too, he’s left his numbers at the footer.

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