As every user has different screen resolutions & browsers can be resized to custom sizes, the browser won’t generate scrollbars at Flash movies with 100% sizes and possibly a part of the content may not be shown to the user.

swffit is a script that that resizes your flash movie automatically if your browser window size is smaller or greater than your flash minimum desired size to keep it accessible.

How to use it?

• Include swffit.js to your webpage
• Call the function: swffit.fit("my_flash", 1000, 590);
• That’s all

swffit can also be controlled with an API including enabling/disabling it or adding functions when it is activated & more.

Website: http://swffit.millermedeiros.com/
Demo: http://swffit.millermedeiros.com/example.html

Free vector world maps can not be found easily as there are only few around.

I needed a world map for a project of mine for showing visitor activities on a map and found very nice ones that I’m pleased to share with you.

World maps are very handy specially with the increasing use of mapping APIs etc. So, don’t forget to bookmark this post.

Here is a collection of free vector world maps that you can use in your projects:

Free Vector World Maps from Digital Vector Maps

Free vector world maps as well as dozens of other paid professional vector world maps.

Free Vector World Map With Nice Colors

Vector World Map In Blue & White

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Macromedia Flash & ajax, by default, has lacking seo features as there is, normally, only 1 url address for all the contents within these web applications.

A seo & deep linking solution for flash and ajax is SWFAddress that is developed by Asual.

SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state. SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today’s rich web technologies including:

- Bookmarking in a browser or social website
- Sending links via email or instant messenger
- Finding specific content with the major search engines
- Utilizing browser history and reload buttons

Seo & deep linking for Silverlight is on the way. There is already an example for Silverlight.

Website: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress
Demo: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/

These are some more free Silverlight tools that will help you develop faster or add a twist to your applications.

Desklighter – Create Exe From Silverlight Apps

Desklighter is a windows utility that will create a standalone exe application that renders Silverlight content that is easily portable and accessible.

Silverlight Spy – Detailed XAML Inspection

Silverlight Spy provides detailed inspection of any Silverlight application.

Use the built-in browser to navigate to a web page. Silverlight Spy will automatically pick up any Silverlight application embedded in the page and display the structure of the application in the Explorer.

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sIFR is one of the most popular solutions for using any font on websites.

There is now another similar solution named sIFR Lite which has some new features but specially much lighter (3.7kb rather than 22kb).

Here are the other differences:

• It auto-detects the text color of the elements (they are entered manually in sIFR).
• It is completely object-oriented.
• It no longer uses CSS selectors. Elements are targeted by tag name and class (a slight loss in ease of use, but faster, lighter, and more maintainable).

The original sIFR is well-tested & widely used but sIFR-Lite is not. So, it would be great to hear your experiences about sIFR-Lite.

Compatibility: All Major Browsers
Website: http://www.allcrunchy.com/Web_Stuff/sIFR_lite/

Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.

1. Join forums, forums are a great way to achieve links to your website. In most forums you are allowed to have a signature and in your signature you can put a link to your website. But another important note to look on is making sure the forum is somewhat related to your website. You will still get credit if it’s not, but if it’s related to your website than you will be accomplishing two tasks at once.

You will be advertising for your website (bringing in targeted traffic) You will also be building your websites presence.

Your websites presence is very important to your survival. The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads.

2. Submit to search engine directories. Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search engines like Google, and overture.

Most search engine directories allow you to submit to their website for free. This will allow you to increase your web presence by being listed on another search engine, and it will also be a free link.

Remember the more links you have the higher your PR will be

3. Using ezine ads (or newsletters). Creating an ezine will probably be the most beneficial step you can take to increasing your web presence. When you create an ezine you will be able to keep visitors coming back to your website for more by using signatures and giving special deals.

Ezine’s will also allow you to increase your back links. By creating an ezine you can submit your information about your ezine to an ezine directory. This directory will than link to your website(thus giving you a free link).

4. Creating and publishing articles. Articles are an easy source of generating new traffic. You can include your signature in your article. This will bring in more traffic from article submission directories.

Your signature usually consists of 4 to 8 lines. Usually the first line would be the title of the website that you are trying to advertise. The last line would be the link to the website and the lines in between these would be a sales pitch to draw your viewers into your website.

5. Links from related websites. Gaining links from related websites can be one of the most frustrating tasks you can attempt.

They are very easy to find, but can be somewhat difficult to obtain links from.

To find related websites, all you have to do is go to a search engine… say Google… and type in your subject. Maybe your website is based on ford mustangs.

You go to Google and type in ford mustangs, than you look around for pages that are somewhat related to your website. After you have done this (which should be very easy) you have to contact them in some way to get your link posted on their website. This can be the most difficult task because a lot of webmasters ignore e-mail’s from people requesting links because they don’t see the importance of it at the time. Some other reasons could be that they are rarely online, or they delete spam mail and sometimes delete their important emails in the process.

Important note: When looking for link partners don’t just link with websites that have a page rank of 4 or higher. Link with anyone and everyone you get a chance to. If you link to someone that has a page rank of zero, this will not hurt your page rank. It will only increase it because you are getting a link back to your website. Google doesn’t look at your back links page ranks to determine what yours is going to be. It simply looks at how many back links you have.

So if Google one day decided to link to a website that was just created and this website has a page rank of 0 and has a domain that goes something like this: mywebsite.geocities.com it’s page rank wouldn’t increase even though Google’s page rank is 10, it’s rank would still be zero because it would only have that one back link.

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Building websites to increase sales, and build web presence
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Silverlight, which is used in more websites everyday, has several beautiful free controls, components & tools that will help you develop websites faster & better.

They are not very easy to find as they are hidden inside the blogs of Silverlight developers or .NET products websites & there are still not so many resources where you can read about Silverlight.

WebResourcesDepot have collected these free Silverlight controls, components & tools to help making your websites brighter.

GOA WinForms

Use the standard System.Windows.Form .NET library for both Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. It allows .NET developers to write standard WinForms applications that will run on these two RIA platforms.

AgDataGrid Suite – Free Silverlight Grid Control

This free grid control has data grouping, data sorting, row editing, multi-row selection features & many more.

It is a feature-rich & very professional grid solution.

Visifire – Silverlight Charts

Visifire (see WRD post) is one of the most powerful & well-documented open source chart solution that can be found in the net.

It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. Animated 2D-3D column charts, bar charts, pie charts & more can be created with it.

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Silverlight Examples With Source By Vectorform

The examples below are produced by Vectorform and all of them can be reached from here. You can find demos for each of them & download the source codes.

Image Carousel

A Silverlight image carousel which rotates when clicked on left or right and displays the big image of the thumbnail clicked.

Silverlight Video Player

This video player has very simple controls like the play/pause button, sound & the process. It can display full-size videos & can scale to the browser size.

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Bad Usability Calendar is a calendar displaying “user interface design tips” with a sense of humor.

It has examples of exaggerated use of fancy Web 2.0 design, cover flow, personalization, pull-down menus and more…

Examples from the tips:

• Don’t require login if you don’t have to
• Offer personalization where it adds value

It is presented in multiple languages, various sizes & PDF format.

A very nice flash animations, good color scheme and the very important “the simplicity of the animations”, in the first look it gives a dam slow look but when you get in, you will be happy to browse through.

Website: http://www.creaktif.com