HTML5 is re-designing web. Originally created in the 90s, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) has come a long way to its standardization as HTML4 in 1997. Time flies and now we have HTML5 – the next generation of HTML.

Although HTML5 is still in its early infancy, or rather, still work in progress, the good news is that most modern browsers in their latest version like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (many more of course) are already HTML5 compatible or have some forms of HTML5 support.

Why the fuss and hype about HTML5? Well, I got one clear definitive answer why every web designer/developer, blogger and anyone who want to have a web presence must adopt, or at least to look at, HTML5. It’s “mobile compatible” too!

Let me eloborate what I meant saying HTML5 is mobile compatible. If you head over to one of my blogs – EcoCityZone.NET, you’ll see a cool QR-code ready mobile version of the portal. Go ahead and open up EcoCityZone.NET/app on your mobile device. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding the popular iPhone, an Android smartphone or even a Blackberry, chances are, you’ll be able to view the “app” on your mobile device’s browser which no issue. In fact, the “app” will appears the same on all the smartphones. It’s cross-platform … thanks to HTML5.

Yes, the “app” is just a mobile-optimized web version of the blog that is specifically designed to be displayed on small screen size of a smartphone.
Did you see the power of HTML5 now?? One stone killing 2 birds. In this case, a carefully designed blog or website developed with HTML5 will works well and looks good on desktop monitors, smartphones and even tablets like the iPad. Combined with CSS3 and JavaScript, you can even allows auto-detection of the screen size and the appropriate version of the blog/site will display itself optimally on the display devices.

One interesting fact about HTML5 is that its standard will not be finalized until 2022. No need to rub your eyes and there’s no typo error, the year is 2022. That’s still a long way from now, you might shouted. Nah nah. You don’t need to wait until every to settle to start leveraging on the power. Why follow the trend while you can ride on the first wave of the trend now. You should have started to learn HTML5 yesterday! Kidding, it’s never too late. And you’ll not regret to learn this gem.

I’ll be putting up more posts regarding HTML5 here in Designing Web and share with you the best ways to learn and “conquer” it. Stay tuned.

In previous post, I’ve recommended osTicket which is currently my favorite online support ticketing system.

However, for those who are installing osTicket for the first time, it might be difficult to get it to work properly. Well, the easiest way to get it up is via Fantastico in cPanel. The difficult parts are in configuring osTicket to allow submission of ticket via email ie. support@yourdomainname.com – see http://osticket.com/wiki/Email_Piping.

The email piping must be done properly from within your cPanel -> Forwarder ->

Another nagging problem is the frequent refresh to osTicket admin scp login page. This is a known issue if you check out osTicket official support forum. To solve this nuisance frequent admin login problem, all you need to do is to uncheck “Bind Staff Session to IP” in osTicket Admin Panel’s System Preferences and Settings. Yes, that easy.

Well, if you still encounter problem installing and configuring osTicket, easy, just drop a ticket to me and I’ll assist you.

I’m an avid fan of Warrior Forum. Or rather, I admit, I’m addicted to it. Addicted because WF is not just simply a goldmine, both in terms of learning and earning. For anyone who wish to make money online, I’d strongly encourage to be a warrior.

There is this WSO (Warrior Special Offer) now available in the forum about this guy, Spencer, who started a challenge to create 100 niche AdSense sites in 30 days … check more. He is now in his 19th day of the challenge. Motivated by his challenge, I’ve decided to mirror his challenge on my very own way too.

For anyone who wish or just starting in internet marketing, aka making money online, you can be very sure that the one thing that makes the difference is … TAKING ACTIONS, MASSIVE ACTIONS. At times, you really get to give yourself a target, a plan and persistence to take actions.

If possible, rope in some of your friends, interested in this, to do it together. For now, let me invite you to join in. First thing first, go to the WSO and let’s do it together.

What Spencer has shared in his blog is simply solid gold. He could has compiled that into an ebook or program to make money out of it. But instead, he openly shared his techniques, plan, results, and most importantly, the persistence to carry through.

I’ve recently had a look at Facebook API for developer and my attention was immediately captured by Facebook Connect.

In fact, I’ve been looking at Single Sign On (SSO) solution for multiple portals for quite some time. It seems like Facebook Connect might just be the holy grail. Check it out at http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php.

Imagine having Facebook users to register for your site and set up a profile using their Facebook account. These days, almost everyone has a Facebook account. With Facebook Connect, you eliminate the hassle of the normal registration at your new sites. And according to Facebook, using Facebook Connect will increase your registration rate by 15%!

For those setting up bigger websites that require member registration, such as a community site, game site etc., integrating Facebook Connect is definitely a great idea! I’ll be looking closely into this and feedback the result here.

I recently purchased a report online and I got frustrated when my broadband somehow was unable to complete the downloads.

However, the main reason for my frustration and total waste of time is because the product owner actually zipped the small report (which is the main product) together with the bonuses (of no interest to me) into a huge >130MB file!

The owner claimed that I’m the only one with the download problem except for another buyer with dial-up. That’s not the point. You should never assume every one is on broadband; even so, it doesn’t imply download will be okay. It is webmastering best practice to always make download size small.

If you’re selling an ebook or report together with tons of bonuses, you should provide separates download links for your ebook (which is the main product) and link(s) for your bonuses. In this case, the buyers can simply download the report first and choose to decide whether to also download the bonuses or come back another time for the bonuses.

I’ve recently developed an e-learning portal for my institute. After an extensive online research and trial on several other e-learning platforms, I’ve settled down on MOODLE which stands for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. MOODLE proves to be the best e-learning platforms which is also an opensource (I’m an avid opensource fan) – meaning, it’s free (under GPL).

The purpose of this post is to share with you a “horrifying” experience in the development of this portal. Now, the e-coursewares were developed using Powerpoints and I’ve bought a software PPT2Flash Pro to convert the Powerpoints to Flash .swf files for embedding into MOODLE. It works seamlessly when I use my primary browser, Firefox, to view the embedded Flash. To my horror, many of my colleagues are using Internet Explorer and they claimed they can’t view the content. I first disregard this as I thought it could be some settings in their IE that caused this “glitch”. But when 6 of my colleagues claimed they can’t view the Flash, that’s where the red flag was raised.

I combed through MOODLE forums and search all over Google to find out why IE can’t view those Flash in MOODLE. The horror kicks in when I saw some news online that due to the infamous Eolas lawsuit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas) on IP regarding embedded thingy, IE was unable to autoplay/activate embedded object.

If you’re a webmaster and you’re facing the same dire situation of not seeing .swf in IE, fret not. I’ve spent hours to test out many ways to play, in this case, .swf in MOODLE and I’ve solved the issue. The answer is SWFObject found in code.google.com (http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/). Just go through the documentation (yes, I know it’s seems daunting) and follow the steps to make .swf viewable in IE. The good news is – it works!

So what is the essence of this post? As webmaster, you really got to do 100% UAT (user acceptance test) on both Firefox as well as IE (and possibly also Google Chrome).