I was looking for scripts for compact, on-page image galleries this morning and came across this great post on scripts for galleries and slideshows. Mostly I’m looking for a CSS version and there are a number of really good-looking ones here. I need something for a new photography client, but I’ll also want to use one of these for my web portfolio maybe on my new site.

I’d been using Marketleap’s link checking tool for a while, but today began using Yahoo’s query terms because they allow the user to remove internal links from the results.

Here’s what you do:

1. To check the full number of links to a domain use this:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com

2. To do the same but without including backlinks:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com –site:mysite.com

3. To check backlinks to a specific page:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html

4. And to do the same without including those internal links:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html -site.mysite.com

Nifty to know for a quick check.

I don’t often do product reviews but in this case one is deserved.

I started using a business number on Skype several months ago and bought a pair of headphones with a microphone. Admittedly I didn’t buy top-of-line but what I purchased was about mid-range in price and with a fair number of decent recommendations online.

I discovered that Skype can be good for gaming.

Suddenly the headphones started getting a lot more use and after a month I couldn’t stand them anymore. My ears hurt while I was wearing them and I couldn’t wait to get them off…

I bought another pair, a smaller, lighter and behind the neck style. Those lasted about two months, but again, they lacked enough adjustability to make them comfortable for long-term use.

My husband bought me a third pair for Christmas - and they are wonderful. They’re also cheap - about $20 at Best Buy.

They’re Altec Lansing AHS322’s. They are by far the most comfortable headset I’ve ever owned. Like many excellent products, when they’re doing their job you don’t even notice them. My ears never hurt. They’re extremely lightweight and very adjustable and the boom mic is just a twisty wire, easy to position.

Again, they’re cheap. They’re wired. The sound quality is IMHO very good, but not blow-your-head-off outstanding. Their literature says that these are very popular for call centers - and that implies a high degree of comfort, which by this point was my main concern.

Highly recommended if you want lightweight and decent sound quality for very little cash.

A friend sent me this link to a color palette tool from Adobe called Kuler.

What a slick site. You can create a five-color custom palette starting from any combination from the color wheel. Well-executed, minimalist and quite striking visually.

I’ve posted a few of the color palettes from the layouts I made yesterday - my username is dac.

I just learned about the site www.giveawayoftheday.com - every day they give away free copies of licensed software. Today it’s Icon Constructor 3 for Windows, which I’ve just downloaded. It looks pretty useful, creates .ico files and other small graphics from images you provide.

I see from the comments that a lot of people are complaining about IC3’s install process, but it took about a minute. As one of the commenters said, it’s not rocket science.

One of my clients asked me to create an ‘image of the week’ page for them using whatever method I thought looked and worked best. I remembered seeing the JavaScript/Ajax tool Lightbox JS in another blog recently and thought that looked pretty cool, and had the capability of showing a slideshow as well, so I got it and installed it on my client’s home page.

It worked great, unless the images were bigger than about 400px on a side. Then Firefox didn’t like it and the ‘close’ button’s functionality was lost (actually the clickable part was just pushed down in the y direction so that you couldn’t get to it to close the image. This problem didn’t occur in IE (to my amazement), just in FF and Opera.

So… back to the drawing board. I really liked the way the script functioned so I went looking for similar ones and came across Thickbox. This is another JavaScript/Ajax tool, it functions nearly identically but for my purposes this one was the better choice because it doesn’t break on large images.

Well, let me clarify - Thickbox is set by default to resize images larger than the current browser window. I tried changing this in the code, but if you don’t use it you can’t scroll up or down to see the rest of the image. So…

I put the code back to its original state and showed the result to my client. He’d originally wanted to show 800px images, too big for Firefox/Opera if I used Lightbox JS and forcing a resize in Thickbox. But he was okay with the resizing and is now happy with the results.

Here’s his page with Thickbox in action. Pretty cool and it really only took about 30 minutes to get it installed and running once I decided to use it.

Last week I went hunting for a little script that would rotate an image and a caption with every screen refresh. Should be a simple task, no?

I found many JavaScript ones, all different. I’m not a JavaScript expert and I like implementing code that I can get my head around - not many of the ones I found fit that bill. Plus, knowing that some visitors may have JavaScript turned off I thought better of it.

I looked for PHP scripts - I didn’t find as many, but I think I really lucked out when I discovered this tiny little PHP rotation script from Sue Crocker.

I love this. You just put it where you want to show the images and bang, it runs. No problems, no confusion. You put the images and accompanying captions into a text file separated by NEXT statements like this one. Within this text file, you can assign a CSS class to the captions so that they’ll show up in an absolutely positioned space and not directly under the image, as you can see in this page in progress. It’s the Featured Flower at the bottom that’s running the script - refresh the page to see it in action.

And it works beautifully. This is one of the most elegant and simple solutions I’ve found in a while.

I’m a newish reseller for a certain hosting company that offers WHM AutoPilot as a free automated services center for hosts. This program is pretty cool - basically it’s a tool that exists on your site and lets people sign up for hosting and other services automatically. They sign up for what they want, pay, their account is set up and they get billed for it periodically all without the reseller’s input.

The control panel for WHMAP is pretty well done, it makes sense and is easy to get synchronized with the data you’ve entered in WHM (the hosting manager that integrates with cPanel). However, I found that integrating it into my site proved harder than first thought. My host is not using the latest version of WHMAP, but I’m not sure if that’s a factor here or not…

You create a header and footer template that matches the rest of your site and WHMAP feeds its data into the central area of the page, however you’ve defined that in a div or a (shudder) table cell. That went fine - it popped in nicely.

However, the problems started when I wasn’t happy with the way lines of text ran together. There are many spacing and formatting issues right out of the box, and applying CSS styles to some of these was just agonizing for me.

I probably spent a good 5-6 hours playing with just the first step of the order process and still wasn’t even close to making it pretty on the page. I knew that WHMAP has a big brother named WHM Complete Solution. I knew it wasn’t free, but I’d heard from other resellers that it was much easier to deal with.

I told my husband of my coding woes and asked him what he thought about me buying WHMCS rather than continuing to struggle with WHMAP. He shook his head and told me ‘go get it.’ Why waste so much time, he said, when I could probably be cruising along with the better product?

I downloaded the 15-day trial of WHMCS and had the thing loaded and running in about an hour. I’m not quite done with the integration, but it certainly was a heck of a lot easier than WHMAP and looks 100% better. I’m really happy with it, and the price tag ($166 I think if you buy a copy outright) is in my opinion extremely reasonable. It makes my hosting site look pretty professional, IMHO, and I hope to have it up and running by this weekend.