WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you're as picky as me you'll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I'm going to save you the bother and present the five free Wordpress portfolio themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you'll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you're going to need a little help. There's a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that's plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad'ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you're not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one's for you.

For the more courageous there's a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you're not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme's stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There's some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won't really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder's Contrast didn't win. But that doesn't matter, because it's awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it's lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It's bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we've not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

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WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you're as picky as me you'll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I'm going to save you the bother and present the five free WordPress themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you'll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you're going to need a little help. There's a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that's plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad'ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you're not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one's for you.

For the more courageous there's a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you're not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme's stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There's some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won't really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder's Contrast didn't win. But that doesn't matter, because it's awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it's lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It's bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we've not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

• How To Use A Self-Hosted WordPress Blog For Project Management (22 comments)
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Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they're hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We've chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar specifically women with coding skills please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are Internet famous. Some, less so for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We've even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She's a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation's CTO. She's also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she's affectionately known as The Open Source Diva in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she's a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she's the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how's this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen's goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we'd guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She's done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She's an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an Internet engineer, a self-applied job title we don't see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can't argue with the description. She's a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She's an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she's the company's VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she's particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take that means she started out before blogging was called blogging. She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she's perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She's currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda's Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute's Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration's 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan's Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O'Dell's Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix's Dev Chix

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

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You've heard it plenty of times before: We're at the precipice of a transition in the way we, as developers, do things. Leading the way are future standards like CSS3 and HTML5, both already partially implemented in 4 out of the 5 major web browsers, with IE9 promising support, empowering us as with new ways of making interactive and rich user experiences.

Just how awesome is CSS3? Find out by checking out these 10 experiments and demos that push the capabilities of the specs.

1. Our Solar System

This experiment presents our solar system's planetary orbits (fast-forwarded, of course) by utilizing CSS3's border-radius, transform, and animation. Additionally, hovering over the names of each planet on the right displays an animated tooltip using CSS (learn how to make CSS3 animated tooltips). You can read about how this experiment was developed from this walkthrough by Alex Girn, the creator of this stellar CSS3 demonstration. The animation, at the moment, only works on the WebKit browsers (Google Chrome and Safari).

2. CSS3 Ads Versus Flash Ads

Flash animated web banners are notorious for being intrusive in the user's experience. Ad-blocking apps can turn these off by looking for all embedded Flash objects on a web page and hiding them. However, using CSS3 animation, these Flash ads can be mimicked in functionality, but will be harder to disable with third-party software. In this experiment, several ads were recreated using CSS3, and the results are almost identical to their Flash-constructed counterpart.

3. CSS3-Man

This is a robust animation sequence inspired by the Spider-Man animated television series in the 60's. Making the sequence work involved using CSS3's transform, @key-frame and rotate; a bit of jQuery was used to preload the images as well as HTML5 for the audio. The creator wrote an explanation of how the CSS3-Man animated sequence works, which will give you a general idea of the level of effort involved in this amazing experiment.

4. The Man From Hollywood

This demonstration is an animated sequence (based on kinetic typography) that explores a way in which we can replace rich animation components such as Flash or After Effects. This proof of concept chiefly utilizes advanced CSS selectors and CSS3 animation, however, it's not purely CSS since JavaScript was used to toggle element classes on and off.

5. Anigma

We often use Flash (or Silverlight) for rich and interactive web-based video games. This CSS3 demonstration is a puzzle game and a proof-of-concept of how we can use open standards to create games though admittedly, not as facile as Flash yet if you compare it to Flash games on sites like Kongregate. HTML5's <audio> element was used to embed the sound.

6. Animated Polaroids

This demonstration is of stacked images that look like Polaroids. Hovering over a photograph transitions it smoothly to the front of the stack, making for an interesting interaction for presenting your photo gallery. The demo was made by leveraging transition, transform, dynamic psuedo-selectors (to animate the target element), as well as stylistic properties such as box-shadow for visual effects. Read the tutorial on how this was constructed if you'd like to learn how this was developed.

7. CSS3 Music Player Menu

With HTML5's <audio> and <video> APIs, which will enable us to utilize multimedia without dependence from proprietary plugins, we'll eventually have a need for GUIs that provide our users with controls for the media we serve them. Though we could use static images in conjunction with other HTML elements (such as buttons) to build these interfaces, using just HTML and CSS to render media controls mean we'll have a more malleable solution. This user interface for a music player was built using only CSS3 (gradient, border-radius, box-shadow and all that good stuff). Read the explanation on how this was contructed in this tutorial.

8. Sliding Vinyl with CSS3

This demonstration, found in the ZURB Playground, takes vinyl album covers that, when hovered on, animates the sliding out of a vinyl record that contains additional controls ("more information" and "play"). This proof of concept could one day be used as an elegant web-based interface for a site that plays music when combined with HTML5's <audio> API.

9. Gabriel Sharp's Small Planet

This animated cartoon sequence depicts a fast-forwarded cycle of day and night. It works on WebKit browsers (Safari and Chrome) using the @keyframes CSS3 property for moving and transitioning PNG images.

10. Falling Leaves

WebKit presents the capabilities of CSS3's animate property with a spectacularly smooth demonstration of falling leaves. Tip: Use your browser's "view source" feature to read the source code of the demonstration the code's well documented with explanations of how it works. Read WebKit's blog post about the animate property to get a better feel for all the possibilities.

Related Content

• CSS3 Techniques You Should Know
• Basic CSS3 Techniques That You Should Know
• 20 Useful Resources for Learning about CSS3
• Related categories: CSS and Web Development

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He's also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you'd like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

Just a short while ago, Flash was one of the primary technologies used by web designers to add interactivity to a website.

Since the introduction of the iPad, with its lack of the Flash Player, there's an acceleration in the web development world to use alternative technologies to Flash, such as jQuery, Ajax and others.

Although Flash is still a very powerful and useful tool, which works great on many cases, several of the effects that web designers are accustomed to creating in Flash, can be just as easily implemented using jQuery.

Here are 21 online demos that show the power of jQuery for creating advanced effects and interactivity that can rival Flash.

1. Flip! A jQuery plugin

This demo mimics the popular card flip technique which can rotate an element 360 degrees around its own x or y-axis.

2. jQuery Quicksand plugin

This is a great plugin for sorting an array of elements/icons on a page with nice fade-in/fade-out and animation effects.

3. ImageFlow

This image viewer is similar to Apple's CoverFlow interface that has become so familiar in their various products and applications.

4. Building an interactive map with jQuery instead of Flash

This demo joins the power of jQuery with Ajax to really create an engaging interface.

5. Slideout Tips With jQuery & CSS3

Clicking on the + symbols reveals additional information with a nice smooth animation effect.

6. Zoomer Gallery

In this demo, what appears to be a regular static image gallery is given some extra interactivity by using a multi-layer zoom effect when hovering over an image.

7. jQuery Circulate

This demo shows the much used Flash effect of circling an image around a page all done using jQuery.

8. Photo Zoom Out Effect

This demo looks deceptively simple, but upon further examination you will find there are several layers to the complexity of the zoom-out effect.

9. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

Here we get to see how powerful transitions can be created using jQuery, a technique once reserved for Flash developers only.

10. CSS3 Lightbox Gallery

This plugin looks like it was written specifically for social-media. Dragging and dropping a photo on top of the share box will open a modal window that can be the interface to call an API via AJAX which can allow the user to share a photo on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites.

11. Making a Photoshoot Effect With jQuery & CSS

Although this demo may seem like eye-candy at first glance, it could be a very powerful tool for working with large images when coupled with AJAX or HTML5 local storage.

12. Awesome Bubble Navigation

Here the developer makes good use of color transitions and animation to produce a very attractive and interactive menu.

13. Beautiful Background Image Navigation

In this demo each user action triggers several transitions which all act to fully immerse the user in the interface.

14. AviaSlider

AviaSlider uses classic Flash-like transition effects to enhance what would appear to be a standard slider interface.

15. Background Image Slideshow

Animated backgrounds are one of the areas where Flash used to dominate in web design. Here is an example using jQuery instead.

16. Panning Slideshow

Another unique take on the typical slideshow interface. Here the author adds diagonal navigation to spice up the interface and to make it stand out.

17. jqFancyTransitions

This plugin can be used to display your photos as a slideshow with fancy Flash-like transition effects.

18. iCarousel Horizontal images slider

Another slideshow that adds just a touch of easing to make the transitions really stand out. It's no wonder that they chose to showcase sexy Mac products in this demo.

19. Making an Interactive Picture with jQuery

This demo can be used to take advantage of websites where there is lots of screen space. Clicking on a section of the website reveals a modal box which displays more information about the clicked section.

20. Cloud Zoom

A plugin that looks like it was designed with eCommerce in mind. Cloud Zoom is easy to implement and can really enhance the user's experience.

21. Apple-like Retina Effect

Anyone who has used an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is familiar with the Retina View that will enlarge a small area on the screen when you touch the area for an extended period of time. This demo implements this effect for the desktop.

Compiled exclusively for WDD by Kalim Fleet. He is a professional web designer and blogger with over 6 years experience. The web is his passion as he splits his time between blog writing, software development and social media. He loves using and developing new applications for the web, mobile, and desktop.

Do you know of any other great examples of jQuery effects that can rival the power of Flash? Do you ever suggest jQuery effects over Flash when your clients request them? Please share your views and examples below!

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: H0Oa9C

Windows Live Essentials 2011, now available in a public beta, is the local client component of Microsoft Windows Live, a collection of programs and web services. WLE 2011's components include photo editing and organization (WL Photo Gallery), video editing (WL Movie Maker), email and calendar (WL Mail), instant messaging and social media (WL Messenger), blogging (WL Writer), cross-platform file synchronization and Windows remote access (WL Sync), and web and IM filtering (WL Family Safety). Before the public beta was released in late June, Windows Live Essentials 2011 was known as Windows Live Essentials Wave 4. In this article, you'll learn what new and improved features the latest WLE wave brings with it.

What's New

Most of WLE 2011's applications now feature an Office 2007-style ribbon menu to enable easier access to new and improved features. However, the improvements are more than skin-deep. WLE 2011's components now feature better integration with each other and with the online portions of Windows Live. For example, slide shows in WL Photo Gallery can be converted into WL Movie Maker auto movies with just a couple of clicks or can be published online to Windows Live SkyDrive's 25GB of cloud-based storage.

WLE 2011 also plays nicely with others, with integrated support for Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube and the ability to share social messaging from Facebook and MySpace with WL Messenger. You can also add support for many other services.

The downside? WLE 2011 is designed for use with Windows 7, and will also work on Windows Vista, but Windows XP users are out of luck. For now, you can still get the previous version of Windows Live Essentials, but after you see what you can do with the 2011 version, you might be ready to give up XP for 7.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

As with previous versions (and its Windows Vista ancestor, Windows Photo Gallery), WL Photo Gallery is designed to organize photos and perform light-duty editing. In this edition, WL Photo Gallery provides many more features for both organization and editing.

People tagging has now been enhanced with face recognition. When you select a photo for people tagging, WLPG automatically highlights each face in the photo and prompts you to tag them. You can also manually highlight other faces and tag them with their Windows Live contact names or names you enter manually.

The more you use people tagging with face recognition, the smarter the feature becomes: as WLPG learns the characteristics of each face, it can tag or suggest tagging the same people in other photos.

When it's time to find a few favorite photos out of an immense forest of digital images, WLPG 2011 makes searches simpler as well. The Quick Find menu on the Home tab provides face-based searches as well as calendar, star rating and flagged/non-flagged lookups.

Switch to the Find tab for more advanced options, including AND/OR searches, star rating searches by specified rating, specified rating and higher (or lower), selected or most-used tags, and free text search to find photos by people tags, descriptive tags, or geotags. You can also pin a search to make it available at all times.

The Edit tab now features a customizable auto adjust repair tool, individual automatic tools to straighten, improve exposure, improve color, and remove noise, and the ability to select a group of photos for automatic repairs. User-controlled repair tools are now found in the Fine Tune menu, including a new Retouch tool for removing small flaws such as dust and scratches and an improved Reduce Noise tool that maintains detail while reducing JPEG artifacts.

New goodies on the Create tab include Photo Fuse, which enables you to combine the best parts of two or more photos into a single image, an enhanced Movie command that interfaces with WL Movie Maker 2011, and easy access to additional Microsoft photo editing tools such as PhotoSynth and Collage Pro.

Windows Live Movie Maker

WL Movie Maker 2011 pairs up with Photo Gallery 2011 in a couple of ways: in addition to its ability to convert WLPG 2011 slide shows into movies, Movie Maker creates videos you can tag and organize with Photo Gallery. However, even if you never take a digital photo, you'll still appreciate the new video import and editing chops in Movie Maker. You can now import webcam video directly into MM.

And, regardless of where your video comes from, MM 2011 features plenty of new ways to manipulate it. The Speed option in the Edit tab lets you vary the speed of a video clip from a dreamy 0.25x slow motion to a frenetic 64x fast motion. Spilt and trim tools are now easier to use, and you can fade audio in and out at three different speeds.

The Visual Effects tab provides options to adjust brightness, change color, and add a large variety of special effects to your video clips (edge detection is shown in this example). The real-time preview means you can see how each effect changes the video immediately.

The Animations tab now provides timing options for effects such as fade-in, fade-out, and other types of dissolves, and you can now add the same effect between all clips with a single mouse click. To see the effects applied to any clip, hover your mouse over it.

The Home tab now offers captions as well as credits and title slides. Captions can use any installed font and feature adjustable transparency levels. Preconfigured credits templates make it easy to add acting, directing, and other types of credits.

When it's time to output your creation, MM 2011 lets you choose from an expanded roster of standard settings for PC, DVD, or mobile playback, or you can create custom settings.

You can also publish your movies to Facebook, YouTube, Windows Live SkyDrive, or Windows Live Spaces.

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail 2011 not only features the near-ubiquitous ribbon menu, but also puts the formerly-hidden Calendar (which integrates with Windows Live Calendar) on top. In addition to making working with the calendar simpler, WLM 2011 also provides powerful tools for working with email and stopping junk mail.

If you're tired of dredging up help files from your email provider to figure out your email server's name, port numbers and so on, here's good news: WLM 2011 auto-configures email account settings for you when you set up a new account. And, when you read your email, WLM 2011 now uses conversation threading as the default, or you can choose other sort options such as priority, size, attachment, flag, watched items, and more.

WLM 2011 supports photo email, a new way to email photos that stores the full size versions in the sender's Windows Live SkyDrive shared storage while sending reduced-size thumbnail links to the recipient. If the recipient wants to download the full-size versions from SkyDrive, there's a 90-day window in which to do it. Choose from a variety of formats to make your photo email even more eye-catching while relieving the strain on your recipient's inbox.

Other new and improved features include the ability to set the default encoding used for email messages (Encoding), enhanced junk mail filtering with options to block specified top-level domains and encodings, and offline calendar and email support.

WLM 2011 continues to include RSS news feed, newsgroup, and contact management with improved layout options to make using each type of content easier to use. WLM 2011 also supports launching Windows Live Writer and Windows Live Messenger directly from its interface.

Windows Live Messenger

WLMessenger 2011 reflects the following social-network realities:

1. You and your friends use lots of different social media platforms
2. You'd like to find out what's up with your friends and the world without wasting time switching between websites
3. Microsoft is just one player in the social network/media game

When you start WLMessenger 2011, you can choose from a large window view that brings up news and entertainment feeds from MSN or an identically sized Social view that displays your friends' latest comments and news from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace. When you add a contact, you can specify how much of your information to share.

WLM 2011 also includes a more compact and easier to use picture in picture' interface for video chatting along with HD video support, a resizable window so you can see your contacts in multiple columns, easy sharing of audio clips and photos, and better integration with WL Mail: photos you receive through WL Mail also show up as social updates in WLMessenger.

Along with support for the most common social-networking PC clients, WL Messenger 2011 also supports the Apple iPhone and other mobile platforms.

Windows Live Writer 2011

WLW 2011 also benefits from the ribbon interface shared by the rest of the content-creation gang in WLE. As with its predecessor, it enables you to use a single blog editor to post blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Windows Live, and other blogging platforms. To set up WLW2011 to work with your blog, answer a couple of question and WLW2011 does the rest.

To make your blogging easier, WLW 2011 offers three views of your posting: the default Edit view, a Preview view showing how your post will look in a browser, and the traditional HTML Source view

WLW 2011 features easier insertion of pictures and videos from your own computer or from the web, and you can also insert videos from online services such as YouTube. It includes integrated tools such as word count and a spell checker as well as HTML and character-based formatting. The Insert tab also lets you insert tables, maps, and Bing (Windows Live) searches into your blog entries. You can also use it to create an online photo album hosted on Windows Live SkyDrive.

WLW 2011 continues to support a growing library of plug-ins, so you can customize it to meet your needs.

Windows Live Sync 2011

Windows Live Sync 2011 is a not-exactly-new member of Windows Live Essentials. It is a replacement for two older Windows Live synchronization services that were available in separate downloads: Windows Live Mesh and Windows Live Sync.

The 2011 version of Windows Live Sync borrows Live Mesh technology, but offers only 2GB of storage (which comes out of the 25GB of cloud-based storage all Windows Live users get as part of SkyDrive).

However, Windows Live Sync 2011 provides cross-platform PC to Mac synchronization without using up your online storage (get the Mac client here) and provides remote access between computers running WLSync 2011. The Devices.live.com website lets you see the status of the drives and devices being used by WLSync 2011.

If you currently use Windows Live toolbar, Windows Live Sync or Windows Live Mesh, be sure to see the instructions for preparing your system to use WLSync2011.

Windows Live Family Safety

Windows Live Family Safety 2011 is the least glamorous member of the WLE 2011 family, but if you're trying to keep your children away from the seedy side of the Internet or from age-inappropriate programs on your computer, it could be the most important. WLFS 2011, like its predecessor, requires that each family member you want to monitor have a standard user account on the computer. However, it's not necessary to set up a Windows Live account for each family member unless you allow them access to social networks and enable contact management.

WLFS 2011 also includes a new Warn on Adult Content setting, blocks paid ads, and includes an adult image content filter. Activity reports now display only sites that users access, so it no longer clutters up the report with popup ads that were never clicked on.

To avoid flipping between the WLFS 2011 management tool and the limited family protection settings already in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, WLFS 2011 also includes time limits and program blocking as well as game rating limits, so you can use it to manage both local and network content. With WLFS 2011, you decide how much access to provide to younger users.

Conclusion

Windows Live Essentials 2011's integration, feature set, and scope bring it closer than ever to the original Windows Live Vision of seamless integration of social networking and social media. It's a worthwhile download for anyone using Windows 7 and for all Windows Vista systems that meet the requirements.

Mark is the author of the forthcoming book Using Windows Live.

So, for anyone who doesn't have photo editing know-how, expensive editing software and a load of time to spare, here's how to create a retro profile pic in a matter of minutes using some absolutely free, entirely online services.

Let us know in the comments if we've missed any!

The Original Shot

This is the photo we're editing, shown here as a control pic so you can gauge how dramatic the effects we've picked really are. A standard snap from a point-and-shoot camera, there's nothing wrong with this image, but read on to see how it can be made so much more fun in just a few clicks.

1. Phixr's Cross Process Effect

The Effect

In film photography, the cross processing effect was achieved by switching different chemicals used to process print or slide films. This made for dramatic colors, contrast and grain.

Although the effects of cross processing have been known since the 1960s, it was in the 1990s that the effect reached the height of its popularity with photographers like Nick Knight bringing cross processing to fashion and studio work.

How to Get the Effect

It's possible to recreate the effect using photo software by playing around with the color balance and contrast ratios (there are plenty of tutorials around the web to help). If you don't have the time/inclination/correct software, then Phixr offers the effect at the click of a button.

Simply head to Phixr and hit get started, which will bring up account options. If you want to set up a free account you can do so from here, but you can also skip this step, which will give you access to Phixr (as long as you're not on it for more than six hours straight, which, trust us, you won't be).

You then need to upload your chosen pic from your computer (or via a URL) and hit the upload button, at which point the pic will be be resized if it's too big.

After your photo has loaded, select the color effects button from the icon menu on the left hand side and scroll down one line to select cross process.

At this point there are options to adjust the brightness, contrast and opacity, but for the effect in the image above we kept it all at the auto levels pre-loaded by the site. The effects are previewed, however, so if you'd like to play around, you won't be committed to the changes until you click execute.

2. Picnik's 1960s Effect

The Effect

Although many technical advances have been made now, back in the old days the colors in photo prints were made up of dyes that decay with age especially if exposed to light hence why so many of your parents' or grandparents' photos take on pink or yellow tones as the years go by.

The faded color helps to date a photo almost as much as the outlandish fashions that might be found in it, and is a great effect to give your modern pic a vintage feel.

How to Get the Effect

Drop into Picnik and click the get started now button. Upload your chosen photo, hit the create tab along the top, and select effects from the secondary tab menu. Now scroll down the menu on the left hand side of your display and choose 1960s which brings up further options.

You get the option to keep the round corners (we did, as it helps achieve the dated look even more) and what color you want to fill them in with (we chose white for a subtle effect) as well as how much fade you want. We maxed our fade in the pic above (zero percent) but again, you can play around with a preview, so feel free to experiment before hitting apply and saving the photo back to your computer.

3. Rollip's Styled Lenses Effect

The Effect

In the 1960s, cheap cameras like the Holga and Diana were mass-produced as toys and were predictably made of cheap construction and parts, including such photographic abominations plastic lenses.

Of course, though poorly made, these low quality cameras actually produced really interesting effects such as light flares, blurs, distortion and vignetting (darker or blurry edges) that have, in recent years, gained the cameras a cult following (best seen from the Lomography movement) by those interested in the unpredictable and often beautiful results.

How to Get the Effect

If you're at all interested in super-simple retro photo effects then you need to head to Rollip pronto as it offers over 40 options. We narrowed our choice down to this Styled Lenses option which emulates the kind of effect you could hope to get from a quirky old-school film camera.

To find it on the Rollip site, hit click here to start on the home page and then scroll through the more effects option until you get to page 5/10. Click Styled Lenses and select the photo in the top left hand corner. Once you've done this, it's just a matter of clicking to browse your computer for a photo and wait for Rollip to work its magic.

4. Photobucket's Color Splash Effect

The Effect

Coloring black and white photographs by hand using photo oils or tinting pencils was popular in the first half of 20th Century before the advent of affordable color film. Recreated digitally, it makes for a nostalgic effect and can increase the emphasis to a certain part of an image, such as a person, or a features like lips or eyes.

How to Get the Effect

You do need an account to use Photobucket, but it's a simple email and password affair, so not too arduous to get set up. Once you're good to go, upload an image from your computer and then hit edit. After your photo has loaded, select effects from the tab menu at the top of the page and choose the first option called color splash.

The software will then greyscale your photo to black and white, leaving you to choose which part you want to fill in with color. The actual coloring in is super-easy: Just dab the circle over the area you want the color restored too. We stuck to the standard size blob in the image above, which worked fine, but if what you want colored is smaller, or more detailed, you can change the blob size to suit.

Finally we took advantage of another free effect from Photobucket to complete our image and employed the blur edges tool (on the default setting) from the effects menu to give a blurry vignette feel. This helps focus the eye on the colorful figure.

5. Picnik's Polaroid Effect

The Effect

Polaroid photographs are iconic and immediately recognizable as the instant photo format of choice. Polaroids ruled up to the start of of digital photography when slower, film-based formats were pushed out of the market.

Since Polaroid's decline, nostalgia for the product has seen various groups campaigning for a revival of the format. With some success, film and cameras are now back on the shelves. It looks like Polaroid will live on for a few more years yet.

How to Get the Effect

There are various Polaroid-erizing tools on the web, the most notable of which is Poladroid, however, this requires a download and we're nothing if not impatient. We wanted an in-browser service.

Picnik offers a Polaroid look as part of its frames options, but that doesn't give the image an aged look. We countered this by using the 1960s effect (detailed above in number two) but nixing the round corners and setting the fade to 40 percent for a less dramatic effect.

Once you've applied that, go to the frames menu under the create tab and select Polaroid. We opted for a white background color and a five percent angle. When you've made your choices, it's just a matter of saving the pic down to your computer and you're all done!

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- 4 Tips for Producing Quality Web Videos
- 50+ iPhone Apps to Enhance Your Photo and Video Experience
- 20+ Great Adobe AIR Apps for Photos & Videos
- 5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter
- Top 10 Robot Videos on YouTube
- Top 10 Wedding Dance Videos on YouTube

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kevinruss

More About: Phixr, photo editing, photobucket, photography, picnik, polaroid, profiles, retro, rollip, vintage

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More and more people are turning towards coding as a profession/hobby. From freelancers to actual developers, everyone seems to have their foundations strong in at least one programming platform.

However, more often than not, there seems to be a problem of actually finding good content online that can teach you to code. Experimenting with a language can only get you so far. To master it, you need to have proper guidance from people who actually know what they are talking about.

So where can you find expert guidance without shelling out a fortune for it? You could start with checking out the websites below:

Dream In Code

Just taking a look at their logo ought to tell you that the community at Dream In Code isn't something to mess around with. You can browse their content for free, or you can sign up to become a permanent member.

They have everything. Right from fundamental elements to programming examples, Dream In Code can help you master any language you choose. That's because Dream In Code is not restricted to only one language. It covers almost everything under the sun and the community of users/experts is just amazing.

They also have a video channel and links to developers' blogs if you want to look deeper.

W3Schools

If what you want to master is a Web technology, you've got to give W3Schools a look. There's hardly a place on the Internet that's as exhaustive as W3Schools when it comes to tutorials about Web technologies.

You can get tutorials ranging from plain-Jane HTML, right up to AJAX and the likes. There's even Server Side Scripting thrown into the mix if that's what you fancy.

Eloquent JavaScript

If you've ever had to use a Greasemonkey Script or a Bookmarklet, you have a clue about the kind of power that JavaScript possesses. It can dynamically modify the contents of the page that you are viewing.

If you've ever wondered how any of this is done, then you've got to checkout Eloquent JavaScript. This is an interactive tutorial, which you can either read off the Internet, or download as an archive and use on your local disk. It includes a live console to try out any code that you might want to. The entire tutorial is written in very lucid English, and is very easy to follow.

TryRuby

Ruby is another one of those languages that is taking the world by storm. Slowly, but surely, it's making its presence felt on the Internet. If you are thinking of venturing out into web application development, then you've got to give Ruby a shot. There's a chance you may never have to look back.

The only trouble is finding good sources of Ruby tutorials. TryRuby is a website that's dedicated to teaching you about Ruby. When you first open the page, all you get is an interactive console for you to code in. Type help (without the quotes) and hit Return/Enter to start the Ruby tutorial.

Like Eloquent JavaScript, TryRuby is not at all intimidating. Five minutes into the tutorial and I was wondering whether the syntax can really be that simple.

A Miscellany of HTML5 Tutorials

Last but not least, we come to HTML5. HTML5 has been creating a furore all over the Internet over the last year or so. It's definitely going to be big (especially with giants like Apple and Google backing it). Therefore, as a developer, you've got to have knowledge (either elementary or advanced) about the capabilities of this standard. Tripwire Magazine has a list of more than 30 tutorials at their website. You can get access to all of them using the link above.

Now that you have our list of resources from where you can learn how to code, why don't you pick up that keyboard and put your fingers to good effect? Once you master a language and come up with an awesome app, let us know about it and we might just dedicate a post to it.

In the meantime, check out some other programming / coding posts that we have done in the past, for further inspiration :

Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers by Ryan
Learn To Code At Any Level With Google Code University by David
4 Great Websites To Make You A Visual Basic Guru by Ryan
6 Beginner Resources For Learning Mac Programming by Bakari
6 Free Sites To Learn About Programming in PHP by Jack
Top 5 Sites To Learn CSS Online by Daniel

Image Credit: kakaopor.

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