Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

Every week, I get emails from potential clients who all want to know one thing: How much for a design?

Nine times out of ten, my answer causes them to run for the hills. Scary thing is, based on industry buzz, my prices could actually be considered totally reasonable by comparison. Don’t believe me? Well, today you get the whole scoop - my prices, their prices, and my always-priceless editorial commentary on the subject.

pearsonified.com

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The VirtueMart Team is proud to announce the release of VirtueMart 1.1.0 Stable. The VirtueMart Team and the VirtueMart Community have put many hours into this release of the VirtueMart eCommerce Solution. Thanks to all those who have donated their time and skills to make VirtueMart a leading eCommerce solution that is both full featured and easy to use (see the full feature list).

Virtuemart

Drupal wins 2008 Webware 100 award -

[Drupal.org]

As a site becomes larger and fill with rich contents, it is vital to have a search feature that will make life easy for your end user to find what they want on your site.

Drupal is aware of this and has ensure the built in search can go beyond just merely listing contents on a page(s). It is now more smarter and more usable than before. Here are 12 patchs submitted by Robert Douglass. The list is impressive:  read more »

When working with CSS, cross browser compatibility is also an issue. Mostly on Internet Explorer web browsers. A way many web designers/developers get around this problem is by targeting certain IE with it's own CSS stylesheet to fix styling issues since each version renders CSS differently. This method is by using an IE conditional comments placed in the HTML < Head > tag.  read more »

Web payment firm Paypal has said it will block "unsafe browsers" from using its service as part of wider anti-phishing efforts.

Customers will first be warned that a browser is unsafe but could then be blocked if they continue using it.

Paypal said it was "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers such as Internet Explorer 4".  read more »

This guide will show you how to access a computer located on your home network from outside of your local area network. For the purposes of this guide, let’s assume we are trying to access a HOME SERVER such as a Mac Mini located on your home WiFi router. The home computer could just as easily be a Ubuntu, or similarly flavored Linux machine. The first thing that we will need to do is determine your home IP address, and then we will setup port forwarding on your wireless router. Keep reading to get started with this process or go to learn how a SSH Tunnel works.

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Businessweek picks Dries Buytaert as a 2008 top innovator

The business world is certainly starting to notice Drupal, as evidenced by this article in Businessweek naming Dries as a top 30-and-under innovator for 2008.

Make sure you have a solid business plan and you've done your homework and are passionate about what you are doing, and people will recognize your potential.

Businessweek talks about Drupal and Acquia, and mentions many of the great sites that have been built in Drupal. They cite the number of businesses using Drupal at being around 250,000.

Congratulations are in order to Dries and to all of you, the people who are working so hard to make Drupal a great product.

CrossBrowserTesting.com is a new service designed to let website designers see what their website looks like in different browsers and in different operating systems. It is based on virtual server technology which allows us to keep costs low and pass the savings on to you.
You can check cross-browser compatibility under many different configurations so that you can feel comfortable that your site looks and works the way it should. Check out the demo.

Visit: CrossBrowserTesting.com

This is a site i have completed for a client and was launched over the weekend.

Dr. Turner's approach aims to integrate orthodox medicine with the therapeutic techniques of medical hypnotherapy to promote an holistic approach to genuine healing. His emphasis is down-to-earth and practical. He has particular interest in using hypnotherapy to assist patients in developing a personal sense of self-control based on improved self-esteem. With this development comes a natural and well-grounded trend towards confidently effecting behavioural changes aimed at promoting personal physical and mental health.

The website conforms to Strict xHTML & CSS. It also incorporates a backend system that runs on PHP & mySQL to allow client to edit and update website's content.

Website: Dr Stephen Turner

You can get a lot more out of Drupal, the software, if you engage with the Drupal community. This video shows you the first, easy step in that direction - getting an account on the drupal.org website. The video briefly discusses why you would want to do this, walks through the sign up process, then takes a quick tour through your account and shows some handy tools that you can enable.

This is the first video in what will be a small series about ways to get more involved and use the Drupal community resources.

Addison Berry from Lullabot

Check out the video tutorial from Lullabot

You have all recently seen those great looking trendy sites that uses a starburst background. Here's a quick tutorial on how to create one yourself. It doesn't look great after the short tutorial but it's a good starting point. Above is an example of what i did after the tutorial, only took 5 minutes.

Enjoy your weekend!

Learn how to use the pen tool and actually enjoy it when you understand...

I really like the artwork that is used in Pitchfork's website; So, I decided to re-create something similar in Photoshop, and make a tutorial on how I did it. These techniques can be used to make a logo and background for a cool grunge style website.

I don't like the logo but it's well effort learning just to create the grungy background. Link to tutorial

This module for Drupal 5 and 6 works like magic. Just find the text you want to replace and hey presto!, it auto-magically transforms the string (text) to your desire output without the need to find where to change it.  read more »

One of the things i dislike about YouTube is the Flash embed snippet they offer. It's just not valid xHTML and brings many errors. Actually, two things i dislike, the other is poor video quality compare to other sites like Revver or blip.tv but that's not what i want to discuss about.

Anyway, the proper way to embed Flash content is by simply using:  read more »

This film is called 'Eclectic 1.0' and was created by Ross Ching. It is a series of time-lapse shots that was edited together and put to music. What's amazing about this film is that is was all shot using a digital SLR camera and then edited and pieced together using Final Cut Pro.  read more »

Below is a collection of 21 Drupal 5.x video tutorials for beginners:

A good friend of mine is getting married soon and have asked me to setup a small private site for them so they can make announcements and invitations to special friends and families. A photo gallery will be added later for invited guests and others that may not make it to the wedding party to view. I chose to use Drupal 6 as the site doesn't require any modules that hasn't been updated as yet and with the granular role permissions i can protect the whole site and only allow certain users access.  read more »

The long awaited production ready version of Magento is out.

This is good news as I've been involved in project to setup an ecommerce shop for selling t-shirts but development had been postpone due to some disagreement with a printing company.  read more »

The past few days has been damn stressful. A server outrage on one of the server that hosted this site caused a corruption to the server file system.  read more »