My website has a new design!

DustinCowell.com, my home on the internet has a new design! My business websites are also getting new designs to match. If you would like to see what the website used to look like for comparison, click here.

Posted by Dustin Cowell in Programming on 05/25/2010 at 3:11 PM

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Slideoo

Today I discovered a really awesome website called Slideoo at http://www.slideoo.com!

Slideoo is a free tool that takes your Flickr photostream and turns it into a horizontal slide show. You can then copy and paste code onto your website to have it show there. On my website you can see the one I made. If you move your mouse over the left or right sides you will get a "+" or "-" sign that allows you to scroll through the pictures. You can also drag the grey scroll bar at the bottom of the pictures too.

TECH WARNING! The slide show uses Flash so I wrote some javascript that detects if Flash is enabled or not. If it's not enabled then a standard HTML Flickr badge shows in place of the slide show. If anyone would like the code, feel free to contact me.

Awesome free tool for anyone who has a website!

Posted by Dustin Cowell in Programming on 01/28/2010 at 9:37 AM

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New Website Design & Colors

About three days ago I decided my websites needed some design work in preparation for my businesses going live later this month. I was unhappy with the old colors (here's how it looked before). I got to thinking the old colors just did not represent me or my business well. To me it looked like bank colors or investment website colors, not software website colors.

When you have five websites that all share the same design (see the tabs on the top of this page) and require unique colors that don't make the websites look like the rainbow, it is a REAL challenge. Luckily for me, I have a wife who has AWESOME design sense! I just told her what kind of look I was going for and she found the colors to match what was in my head to a T! Best wife ever!

So now you are reading this entry on my new design. Check out my other websites at the top of this page. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the colors and page designs!

Posted by Dustin Cowell in Programming on 01/22/2010 at 1:54 AM

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GPL is Freedom

(The GPL software license logo).

In my opinion, the GPL software license is the greatest software license in existence. It is in the best interest of software end users and software developers alike. For those who have no idea what I'm even talking about, the GPL software license allows computer software to be freely available, freely modified, and freely distributed. You can not take a piece of GPL software and turn it into proprietary software either, it has to remain free. This way you are not suddenly roped into paying for something you have come to enjoy having free access to.

I don't know about you, but I like free. Free as in the freedom to do whatever you want! I don't like downloading software that is *cough* free and having to worry about getting caught and going to jail. I just want it to be free period. You might think "well if all software was free then how would companies be able to exist and pay their developers, distributors, and support people". The answer is simple. If companies cared more about writing innovative/high quality software versus writing a heaping pile of crap full of bugs, then end users would be more willing to pay for the software and less likely to try to get it for *cough* free, hence saving companies from loosing TONS of money to software piracy. I need to get that cough checked! Ha ha!

A good example of what I am talking about is companies that operate on donations. These companies have to work really hard to produce quality products and/or services that people will really enjoy, otherwise they won't get paid a dime. Think of all the crappy software you have ever downloaded on your computer that has made it unstable, crashed, or even worse... gave you a virus! Now imagine those same software developers giving away their software for free and asking for donations if you liked their work. Guess who would be out of a job! You see, if all companies gave away their software the world would only have really high quality software programs to deal with and not all the crap. Sure, even a successful donation based company might not make billions and billions of dollars, but they would probably make millions and that's enough right? When you start making billions that's when you get lazy and start producing crap again.

Posted by Dustin Cowell in Programming on 01/17/2010 at 12:32 AM

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Coming Soon

Work continues on getting my new websites going for FreePHPShoppingCartSoftware and FreePHPBlogSoftware. I am expecting a launch of both websites later this month!

It is going to be really exciting to see some pay back from 3 years of hard work! You might ask yourself how in the world is he going to make money when the product's names have "free" in their names. Well, I guess you will just have to wait and see. I have a pretty awesome plan in mind.

Posted by Dustin Cowell in Programming on 01/11/2010 at 11:34 PM

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