Jeff Star, founder and lead developer of Monzilla Media, has sent me a copy of Digging into WordPress v2 for review. He has written this book with co-author and master designer Chris Coyer of CSS-Tricks. The eleven chapter book, packed with 400+ pages of WordPress tutorials, techniques, tips and tricks was released after a year of production, design, planning and writing.

WordPress is currently the most popular publishing platform. It focuses on aesthetics, web standard and usability. It’s famous for its 5-minutes installation and comes with a complete user-contributed documentation. This is one of the reasons I like working with WordPress. Starting as just a blogging system, it has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more to the thousands of plugins, widgets and themes, WordPress is limited only by your imagination (and tech chops).

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Packt Publishing sent me a copy of PHP and script.aculo.us Web 2.0 Application Interfaces by Sridhar Rao, asking me to write a review of this book. I was quite excited about this opportunity, being the first time when a modern publishing company is asking my opinion regarding one of the books from their collection.

As both the title and the subtitle suggest, this book is meant for PHP and AJAX developers. Since there are quite some readers of this blog that use these technologies in their web applications, I have accepted the PacktPub’s invitation.

This book comprises of 13 chapters, each being hand-crafted to make sure that developers can learn and master the art of making beautiful web applications. No chapter is left without code snippets in it. The book provides a URL address where you can download the code samples. Moreover, the downloadable files contain instructions on how to use them.

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Merry Christmas to everyone!

Rollip is very kind to give away 15 Pro Accounts with each 30 credits (worth $5.98 per account) to Bit Repository readers.

What is Rollip?

Rollip is a new site that gives any digital photo a new look and feel by offering 40 filters ranging from 70′s vintage to more modern ones. This professional online service can turn your digital photographs into Polaroid lookalikes.

Extra effort has been put into giving users a selection of high-quality filters, resulting in some photographers to use this service for their professional work. While Rollip is free for smaller images, they do offer additional high-quality processing for users that register for a Pro Account.

How to win a Pro Account with 30 free credits?

Use the following URL to access the application and register:

The credits are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. So hurry up and register to win 30 credits for free!

If you intend to showcase your portfolio with style, then Flabell’s Photography Portfolio Template could be the product you’re looking for.

In this component with minimalist design and powerful features, you can define as many galleries as fit the menu, each gallery having as many images you want. A cool feature is the option to set different background colors for each image. On the homepage you can use the SWFAddress to add back button navigation and direct links to a section. The images from each gallery, the content from the contact page (including picture and information such as name, address, email etc.), the tag line and many others are customizable from the XML.

The images automatically position based on the width. Any size of the image can be used as long as it fits the height of 420px. The template is optimized for people that use monitors with a resolution of 1024 x 768.

Another nice feature is the possibility to set a default section that will open automatically when you open the page.