333 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
DocRaptor is a killer new web service that makes generating BEAUTIFUL PDFs as easy as writing HTML. The raptor also does Excel Documents, however for the purpose of this post I'm going to focus purely on the PDF side of things.
Many many years ago, I started a PDF Book Printing service called PrintFu and needed the ability to generate PDF invoices dynamically that could then be merged with the customers original PDF for the printer. While this was in 2003, I spent a retarded amount of tim...
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341 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
Building a blogging platform is incredibly easy thanks to WordPress 3.0's Multi-Site feature. I'm using this feature to power my corporate podcasting platform (work in progress).
I wanted to be able to offer my clients a bunch of unique themes to choose from, but wasn't happy with any of the "free" themes available in the WordPress Theme Directory. After digging around I stumbled on Elegant Themes, a subscription based model for 55+ amazing looking WordPress themes.
For $39 a year, y...
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361 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
Do you use Mailchimp and have a Facebook Fan Page? Then follow along to learn how to get more subscribers using this great little Facebook App.
First off you're going to need to install the Application FBML to your Fan Page. FBML allows you to simply include HTML directly in to a tab on your page. I used this to create "The Book" tab, and included HTML (and CSS) that tied to my MailChimp signup form.
Get your MailChimp Sign Up Form.
Visit your Lists section in MailChimp then click on the For...
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374 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
![Make money building a hosted LESS Service (CSS) [idea]](http://8ify.com/wp-content/themes/8ify3/timthumb.php?src=http://8ify.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/less-logo.jpg&w=100&h=100&zc=1&cropfrom=)
LESS is a technique that makes CSS insanely more powerful, using Variables, Mixins, Operations and Nested Rules. It does this by incorporating a little server side code and is available for virtually all popular development platforms.
If you're looking for a new product to generate a little money on the side, this type of service would be incredibly valuable to web designers who don't want to mess with server side code, and are looking for a way to off load their CSS on to a CDN.
Example:...
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375 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
YQL (Yahoo Query Language) is one of my favorite tools for grabbing content from other websites. It's completely free, scalable and opens up a whole new world of data. In this quick tutorial I'll show you how to grab the latest plugins submitted to WordPress.org's Plugin Directory and return the results as a clean XML document.
Step 1. Find a website you want to pull data from.
YQL "select from HTML" will grab content from any site that (doesn't block Robots), and returns the page as a valid ...
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392 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
LESS was originally a ruby gem for Ruby on Rails that made CSS significantly more dynamic. Now there's been ports in PHP, Javascript, and even .NET. None-the-LESS (pun intended), it's worth checking out! This could change the way you write CSS foreva!
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399 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
Oh hell no, I'm not going there am I? You betcha!
I've spent most of my career obsessing about usability and building user friendly websites and apps - and I am going to break one of my biggest no-no's in order to achieve better results. The EVIL POPUP!
There's no doubt that you've seen my popup for the 8ify Newsletter offering a free copy of "Whore IT Up!" - and while I too despise these types of tactics, the truth is - they work. Now my popup isn't as evil as some, it will never be s...
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418 days ago
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Produced by Brandon Corbin
Did you know there are around 6 million Wordpress self hosted blogs on the intertube? That's a lot of bloggers competing for top of mind. WordPress themes are a great way for bloggers to standout amongst the crowd - and there's a HUGE ASS market for them.
WooThemes, one of the top providers of Premium WordPress Themes, generates around $2 million a year selling themes. TWO MILLION bucks selling PHP files, and there is not a single reason why you couldn't capitalize on this yourself, even if...
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