April 2011

Firesheep, an add on for Firefox released in October 2010, watches connections on your LAN for anybody connecting to a website using the HTTP protocol, and lets the user of the add on steal passwords. Since the vast majority of websites still use HTTP, Firesheep was extremely effective. This woke up the tech world to the insecure and outdated nature of HTTP, by showing how easily it can be compromised.

The alternative, much more secure version of HTTP is the HTTPS protocol (the s stands for secure). HTTPS encrypts connections using strong SSL 256-bit or higher encryption. This way it is much harder for an attacker to view your password and traffic. This has pushed many websites to encrypt their connections, but the transition is happening slowly. Only recently have large websites started to add HTTPS encryption, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google (in beta).

Design a Surreal and Ornate Photo Manipulation

Final Image

Here is a preview of the image that we are going to be creating:

Step 1

Start by creating a new document (600X700px).

1 Year FanExtra Membership (over 450 Resources) – only $29

We at FanExtra are proud to have been featured at the popular design discount website MightyDeals.com.

For those of you who don’t know MightyDeals provide huge discounts on reputable design services and products. Personally we’re thrilled to be featured, and have decided to offer our annual FanExtra memberships at a massively discounted price of $29 (regular price $69).

Adam Everett Miller—our Aetuts+ editor—was recently surprised by his talented wife, Katie. She redecorated his home workspace. He loves it!

Here are some comments from Adam when he posted about it on Aetuts+ a few days ago:

Members Area Tutorial: Design a Clean, Engaging Church Website

Final Image

The result of this tutorial is shown below:

If you enjoyed Patrik Larsson’s ebook “Marketplace Tips & Tricks“, we have some great news for you. He’s been working hard on a significantly expanded second edition. He’ll be finished in a month or two.

Patrik was kind enough to give us an in-depth interview about the update. His enthusiasm is infectious. Not only has he got me excited about the book, but it seems he’s got half the marketplace authors involved in the project!

Final Image

This is the final image that we’ll be creating.

Step 1

Download this image http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1104824

Don’t think you’ve already made it as we will be tracing over the image!

Open the image in Photoshop and re-size it to what you want. I re-sized mine to 1800 px by 2546 px.

Having been doing Internet marketing and developing websites that rely heavily on natural search engine traffic for the past few years I can say without a doubt the largest challenge that site owner’s face is getting traffic into their website and that doesn’t include getting highly targeted traffic which is looking for your content. "Build and they will come" is nothing more than a slogan on your car bumper sticker.

The second largest challenge, of course, is converting that traffic into your desired result. That could be newsletter signup, sale, new reader, blog comment, new StumbleUpon fans or Twitter followers, or even just a new friends on your facebook profile.

Key To Success: Multiple Traffic Sources

Advertise here with BSA

Many of you might not be aware that the Envato marketplaces have an API that can be used to handle everything from verifying purchases, to displaying your most recent items, to tracking featured files, to reviewing private account information, like your recent sales and account balance. But the question is: are you using it?

In addition to displaying your own items, if you’re smart, you can attach your referral id to earn some extra passive income in the process!

Congratulations to this week’s featured marketplace authors!

ActiveDen Featured Author: Bedros

Our current featured author here on ActiveDen is Bedros who joined in July 2009, has a portfolio of 13 items for sale and has racked up 225 sales!
View Bedros’ Portfolio

Software engineering, messy rooms, “quality is better than quantity”, and going out with friends. Today we meet Carlos Viloria from GraphicRiver and ActiveDen.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from, what do you do for a living?

Hi, My name is Carlos Viloria and I’m a Software Engineer, developer and web designer (Flash, AS2/AS3 and HTML). I live in the beautiful city of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, and the city is well know for its kind people. I spend most of my time making files to sell on GraphicRiver, and also working as a freelancer.

5 Incredibly Useful Non-Destructive Photoshop Techniques

Non-destructive workflows are vital to being a great Photoshop designer. However, they are often overlooked by people. Personally, I was pretty late to pick up non-destructive Photoshop techniques – to my peril! After learning these techniques my workflow increased dramatically, and I was able to start editing my images much easier after finishing compositions.

30 Gorgeous and Usable Mac Applications

While windows is used practically everywhere, Mac OS is mostly admired and used by designers, developers and creative modern companies. Mac applications are often really well-designed, and kick-ass with a gorgeous interface. In the following collection we have listed 30 most loved, practical and stunning applications for the Mac operating system.

ByWord

Byword helps in your creative writing by hiding the things you don’t need on screen. Feel inspired by the beautiful typography presets and how good your text will always look with Byword.

After months of planning, I’m pleased to introduce our $41,000 web developer competition on Nettuts+ and CodeCanyon. Officially launching today, we want you to…build something! Do a kick-ass job, and you’ll win everything from cash, to an iPad 2, to the 3DS, to a seemingly never-ending string of subscriptions to amazing online services.

Vim, user interface dabbling, jQuery and the semantic web. This week we meet the Nettuts+ team. This post is taken from the site’s Meet the Team page on the site.