Plagiarism is the theft of ideas or texts, passed off as the work of someoneone else without acknowledgement of their true origin. It’s the bane of teachers marking student assignments and it’s certainly a scourge to those of us who run online businesses or write as part of our living. (more…)

It’s an exciting time for developers who create applications for social networks. Google has just launched OpenSocial; a common set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) that will be adopted by some of the biggest social sites around. (more…)

I’m just curious about what readers of Taming the Beast.net prefer. Do you prefer to watch video or to read articles? (more…)

Should you still create sites taking into consideration users running 800×600 screen resolution? It’s certainly looking as though 800×600 is continuing to lose popularity rapidly. Here’s a list of the top ten monitor resolutions based on visitors to Taming the Beast for the past 7 days, compared to some historical statistics from the site. (more…)

Providing links to external sources to either provide further information to your visitors or perhaps to substantiate a claim or testimonial is a great idea – but by remembering this simple guideline, you won’t give your traffic and perhaps customers away. (more…)

While it increase your sales? Probably not. Will it help you win friends and influence people?.. hrm.. unlikely. Still, putting a map on your site where visitors can easily add their location, photo and a message is a nice little interactive novelty that can help you connect a little more with them. Here’s a widget that takes under a minute to configure. (more…)

Writing articles or instructions for your customers and need to use an example domain name? There is a domain set aside specifically for this purpose. (more…)

Ever copied and pasted a Word or Excel document into a HTML page and then viewed the source code? It gives a whole new meaning to the term code bloat :) (more…)

Always wanted to have Google Maps on your site to show customers your business location or your readers a geographical area in relation to an article – but couldn’t be bothered messing around with the API? Now you can with just a snippet of code! (more…)

I was talking to a web designer a couple of days ago who was having trouble pricing his services. When starting out, it certainly can be hard to peg an hourly rate or quote on projects. (more…)