If you’ve changed the default WordPress admin user name from ‘admin’ to something else, great. However, if you write a post as the admin, your new admin username will be displayed on your blog. Not good.

In order to help you keep your admin username a secret from would-be hackers, I’m releasing a new WordPress security plugin: Admin Post Reminder.

How Does It Help?

The Admin Post Reminder plugin is useful if you’ve got a separate editor account just for posting.

Sometimes you’ll still need to log into WordPress as an admin to change settings, use certain plugins, etc. It can be easy to forget that you’re still logged in as an admin when you go to write a post.

What Does It Do?

What Admin Post Reminder does is simple–it checks to see if the user that’s logged in is an admin. If they are, an alert is displayed at the top of the page, reminding the user not to publish any posts while logged into this account.

Regular logged in users won’t see the message.

Download the Plugin

You can view the plugin page for more details or

Download Admin Post Reminder at the WordPress Plugin Repository

Buy Me a Coffee

If you enjoy this plugin, consider making a small donation–any amount is appreciated. Thanks!

Here’s a list of 30 cheat sheets (most of them printable) for popular graphic design programs, as well as printable photography-related sheets to help when shooting photos.

These cheat sheets contain reference cards for tools, keyboard shortcuts and other important commands to help speed up your work.

Note: Links with ‘(PDF)’ beside them indicate that the link goes directly to the PDF file itself.

Fireworks

• Fireworks CS3 For Mac OS X
• Fireworks CS3 For Windows
• Fireworks MX (Mac)
• Fireworks MX (Windows)

Photoshop

• Adobe Photoshop CS4 Help (PDF)
• Photoshop Secret Shortcuts (WebDesignerWall)
• General Photoshop Tool Shortcuts (With a video ‘manual’)
• Photoshop CS4 (Mac) (PDF)
• Photoshop CS4 (Windows) (PDF)
• Photoshop CS3 For Mac
• Photoshop CS3 For Windows
• Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts For Mac
• Photoshop CS2 Keyboard Shortcuts For Windows

Illustrator

• Illustrator Shortcuts (WebDesignerWall)
• Illustrator CS4 Shortcuts (Mac)
• Illustrator CS4 Shortcuts (Windows)
• Illustrator CS

InDesign

• InDesign CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts (Mac)
• InDesign CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts (Windows)
• InDesign Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• InDesign CS

Photography

• Black and White Cheat Sheet For Photoshop (Helps you convert color photos to black and white)
• Portrait Lighting Cheat Sheet (Helps you set up lighting for portraits)
• Reflector Card Cheat Sheet (Shows color bounce and effects of different covers on a 5-in-1 reflector)
• Light Falloff Cheat Sheet (Shows the effects of a large light source will have on light fall off)

Fonts and Typography

• VisiBone Font Cards
• Periodic Table of Typefaces

Other Cheat Sheets

• GIMP Quick Reference Card (PDF)
• GIMP Keyboard Shortcuts (PDF)
• Color Hexagon (GIF)

What cheat sheets did I miss? Share your links in the comments below.

Remember the mottoes you learned when you were a kid: “Winners don’t do drugs”, and “Cheaters never win”?

Well, a little cheating never hurt anyone… when it comes to using cheat sheets, that is.

TechPosters has a colossal collection of cheat sheets for just about every program, coding language or OS that uses code or keyboard shortcuts.

Since there’s such a huge list of cheat sheets, let’s look at some of the useful cheat sheets for web designers.

HTML

• HTML 5 Quick Reference Guide
• HTML 5 Cheat Sheet
• XHTML Cheat Sheet v 1.03
• XHTML 1.1 and HTML 4.01 Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
• HTML Help Sheet (HTML 4 and XHTML)
• Form Tags
• Character Entity References in XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4
• HTML – Special Entity Codes
• HTML Common Tags

Note: If you’re looking for more resources for UTF-8 special entities, check out my earlier post, Most Used XHTML Character Entities.

CSS

• CSS3 Quick Reference Guide
• Core CSS Part 1 (by Molly E Holzschlag and published by DZone), Part 2, and Part 3
• CSS Properties
• CSS2 Cascading Style Sheets
• CSS Shorthand Guide
• CSS Shorthand Cheat Sheet by Example
• CSS Property Index
• CSS Cheat Sheet v2
• CSS2 Quick Reference Guide
• RGB Colour Codes

jQuery

• jQuery Selectors (DZone)
• jTouch – jQuery Cheat Sheets For iPods and iPhones
• jQuery 1.2 Cheat Sheet 2
• jQuery 1.2

There are a ton of other cheat sheets for javascript in general, as well as other frameworks like EXT JS, Prototype and an entire category for Mootools.

These can be found in the general Javascript Cheat Sheet category.

PHP

• PHP Cheat Sheet (DZone)
• Symfony PHP5 Framework – Admin Generator Cheat Sheet

Plus Many, Many More

There are also tons of other web design cheat sheets for MySQL, ASP.NET, Flash, Silverlight, XML and more.

Another nice thing about the TechPosters site is that you can subscribe to RSS feeds for each category and know when new cheat sheets are added.

Share

Do you use any great cheat sheets for web design that are not included here? Where do you get your cheat sheets from?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Many of the fonts are free and can be used in both personal and commercial projects, but as always, check the license of each font first.

Individual Retro Fonts

B-Movie

Make your own ‘classic’ movie poster with this dramatic family of retro fonts.

Surrounding__

A sans-serif font that would be great for signs or posters.

Hitchcock

A fantastic retro movie font from the great Saul Bass/Alfred Hitchcock movie posters.

Blackout

A unique but very readable open source sans-serif font. Also available for web embedding via @font-face (CSS 3).

Chunk

Thanks to the League of Moveable Type for pointing out this open source slab serif font (as well as Blackout). Also available to embed via @font-face.

Plaza

The art deco font used (or really close to it) in ITV’s Poirot television series of the ’80s and ’90s during the opening credits / title sequence.

Mayberry Pro Semi Bold

A very nice free sans-serif typeface from Ascender Fonts.

Comfortaa

An art deco / sans-serif font that also looks very clean and modern.

Roadgeek 2005

A clean, subtly-retro font family inspired by the lettering on US interstate and road signs.

Retro Font Resources

You can find tons more retro and vintage fonts on the web. To get you started, here are a few places you might try.

Tack-O-Rama

A huge collection of 757 free retro fonts, as well as retro clipart, photos and more.

B-Movie Poster Fonts (MyFonts.com)

Did you like the B-Movie fonts? My Fonts has a whole category dedicated to old movie poster fonts.

FontDiner.com

Font Diner has some fun and unique retro fonts. Makes me want to go and grab a ‘burger at a roadside diner!

Chank.com

A must-stop site for funky, fresh, fun retro and vintage fonts.

RotoDesign.com

Find instantly classic retro fonts and even some dingbats on Rotodesign’s site. (PS: I want me some x-ray glasses)

Fontoville.com

Fontoville’s got a fun collection of retro typefaces that work equally well for surf posters or cartoons and illustrations (think Dexter’s Laboratory).

GirlsWhoWearsGlasses.com

A diverse collection of classic clipart and fonts.

Die Typonauten (MyFonts.com)

A type foundry specializing in retro and vintage fonts.

Retro Fonts (FFonts.net)

Some nice retro fonts from the newly launched FFonts.net site.

DaFont.com

A whole section dedicated to classic fonts at DaFont.

15 Beautiful and Free Urban & Retro Fonts (Web Resources Depot)

Web Resources Depot’s recently featured blog post of free urban and retro fonts.

Retro Category on SearchFreeFonts.com

Some funky and psychedelic fonts at SearchFreeFonts.com.

Prop-A-Ganda.com

Large collection of advertising and product fonts from the Prop-A-Ganda font foundry.

Retro Fonts (1001FreeFonts.com)

1001FreeFonts.com has an entire category of retro-style fonts.

Retro Fonts (UrbanFonts.com)

UrbanFonts.com’s retro font category has classic ’50s, ’60s and ’70s fonts, as well as quite a few art deco typefaces.

1001 Fonts

A wide variety of vintage fonts.

Free Retro Fonts (AndyNortnik.com)

Some fun and funky vintage fonts and clipart.

High Resolution Textures

Living up to its name, High Resolution Textures offers jumbo-sized free textures in a number of categories. There are also tutorials; offering tips on creating and photographing textures yourself.

Lost and Taken

The Lost and Taken blog features posts targeted on specific types of textures–from vintage wallpaper to tape to book covers and more.

Textures on BittBox

BittBox has been providing free textures for quite a while, so there’s quite a selection to choose from.

CG Textures

CG Textures boasts itself as the world’s larges free texture site. It contains 34 categories of textures, including some unique textures: animals, bones, x-rays and ink.

CG Textures also contains a nice collection of texture tutorials.

Mayang’s Free Texture Library

If you’re looking for unique textures that won’t be found anywhere else,  Mayang’s Free Texture Library is a good place to start. All the textures on the site were either photographed or created by site owners William Smith and Mayang Murni Adnin.

Wood Textures at defcon-x.de Textures

Defcon-x.de has an impressive collection of free wood and wood grain textures scanned at 720 DPI.

TextureVault.net

TextureVault has an insane number of royalty-free textures in 19 main categories. While larger sizes must be purchased, the medium quality/sized textures are available as free downloads.

Textures at Psdtuts+

Psdtuts+ has released and collected a nice bunch of textures and texture packs for your downloading pleasure.

Other Quality Textures

• 20 High-Resolution Denim Textures (Six Revisions)
• Fabric Texture Pack (Psdtuts+)
• Free High Resolution Wood Textures (Six Revisions)
• 50 Free Fabric Textures (DesignM.ag)
• Free High Res Rough Textures (Six Revisions)

OpenX 2.8–the newest stable release of the open source ad server has just been released. If you haven’t heard of OpenX before, check out the OpenX site to learn more.

With the new version of OpenX, I’m releasing an update to our free icon set (version 2.0) for the OpenX 2.8 admin.

221 Reworked Admin Icons

The release of OpenX 2.8, which brings a lot of performance, functionality and visual changes also includes a lot of new icons and images in the admin section.

Since I was going to add new icons to the set anyway to make it compatible with OpenX 2.8, I decided to rework the entire set. This version moves away from the Silk-based icons used in v1.0 to icons based on the Fugue icon set.

That ended up being 221 newly reworked icons for this set.

What Does This Icon Set Do?

The EsDev OpenX Admin Icon Set (EDOA) is a drop-in replacement for about 98% the images and icons used in the default OpenX 2.8 admin section.

It basically helps the admin section look more professional, and the icons match the rest of the user interface better than do the default icons.

Who Is This Icon Set For?

The EDOA icon set is for anyone running a self-hosted (as opposed to the hosted version on OpenX.org) version of OpenX; version 2.8 and above.

How Do I Use This Icon Set?

To install the new admin icons:

1. Make a backup of your OpenX images folder (and sub folders) located at: [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/
2. Extract the EsDev-OpenX-Admin-Pro-Icons-v2.0 ZIP to your harddrive
3. Copy the images folder (and sub folders) to [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/ — thus replacing the entire images directory (and sub directories)
4. Clear your browser cache and log into the OpenX admin to see the new icons in use

License and Use

EsDev OpenX Admin Icon Set v2.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike license.

Based on a work at OpenX.org and the Fugue Icon Set, Silk, Tango and the Crystal Project icon sets.

Linking Info

All we ask is that you don’t redistribute the zip file on any other site, but rather link to this post.

When providing a link, do not link directly to the icon set–instead, link to this post:
http://esdev.net/free-openx-admin-icon-set-v20/

Show Your Appreciation

If you use this icon set and enjoy it, show your appreciation by giving a small donation. Any amount is appreciated.

I want to thank John Linden, CTO of OpenX for giving me a heads up about the upcoming release of OpenX 2.8 and the encouragment to update the icon set.

With tshirt sites like Threadless, Oddica and others that let designers submit their own designs, I know there are a lot of you out there that are looking to experiment with tshirt design.

Here’s a list of over 10 free downloadable tshirt and clothing templates in Photoshop (PSD) and Illustrator (AI) formats.

DeviantART

Designers can find a lot of useful stuff on DeviantART. Here are a few clothing templates.

Note: Be sure to check licenses and terms of use on the templates below.

Photoshop T-Shirt Template (DeviantArt)

GoSco from DeviantART has released a realistic-looking Photoshop tshirt template (PSD format).

Note: GoSco released this template under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Hoodie Template

Tee Shirt Vector Template

Tshirt templates for men and women in both Illustrator and Photoshop formats.

Tshirt Model by ~NX57

Photoshop vector tshirt template for both front and back.

Tshirt Vector Template

Photoshop and Illustrator tshirt templates.

Customizable T-shirt Template

Nice, simple tshirt templates (front and back) that would be good for a e-commerce/catalog site.

Idee Montabili

A couple weeks ago, I featured Idee Montabili, an Italian website that offers free packaging and box templates. Idee Montabili also has some great free tshirt and clothing templates that you can download from their site in PDF format.

Visit Idee Montabili

Adobe Illustrator T-Shirt Template

Adobe’s Illustrator Exchange community has a free tshirt template (front and back) for Adobe Illustrator.

The template is about 25% of the actual size and comes with both front and back templates.

Visit Adobe Illustrator Exchange–T-Shirt Template

ColorOverload.com

Color Overload has a free blank tshirt template–available in 40 colors!

GoMedia Photorealistic T-Shirt Templates

GoMedia has 7 photorealistic tshirt templates that, while not free, could tempt you into forking over a little green. These are about the nicest shirt templates I’ve seen.

These sets include tshirts (men’s and women’s), hoodies, sleeved shirts.

IconPot

IconPot showcases free icon sets for web designers that are not only free for personal and commercial use, but do not require attribution (credit). We featured this site a couple weeks ago and there have been more free icon sets added since then.

IconDock

This is a newly opened icon site. Usually on a project, you only use a handful of icons—not an entire set. At IconDock, you can either purchase the whole set or  just the icons you want from icon sets, which is great for web designers.

Besides their paid icon sets, IconDock also has a post featuring a huge collection of free icons and free icon collections (which we’re happy to have been featured in).

SEM Labs

David of SEM Labs let me know about 2 free icon sets he just released on his site.

Weblog Icon Pack

Several 48 x 48 icons especially suitable for weblogs.

Free Web Design Icon Set

A set of 133 16 x16 pixel icons that are useful for just about any project.

OpenX Admin Icon Set

OpenX is an open source ad management system that comes in hosted or self-hosted versions (similar to WordPress). The self-hosted version of OpenX allows you to change the icons in the administration backend (which look pretty nasty if you ask me).

We released new icons (from the Silk icon set)  for OpenX a few months ago when we first opened this blog, but a plug now and again never hurts.

Even More Icon Sets

For even more free icon sets that we’ve featured here at the Blog, take a look at some our posts in the Icons tag.

Licenses

As always, even when using free icon sets, always check the license, terms of use and linking policies before using them in designs.

Have you ever sent someone a unique gift, but then put it into a boring square/rectangular box?

Never again!

Stop being a victim of BBS (Boring Box Syndrome)—download a free vector packaging / box template and make your own specialty box.

Idee Montabili

Idee Montabili contains 36 free vector packaging templates available in EPS and PDF formats.

Just Like When You Were a Kid

Remember all those rockets and things you used to cut out of the back of cereal boxes and put together when you were a kid (insert tab A into slot B)?

Well, these vector templates are the same basic concept—only cooler.

Download the template, print it out, use it w/ some posterboard or thin cardboard and fold it to assemble your box.

Unlike the cereal box toys you use to put together, you might actually want to show these off when you’re done.

Imagine making your own:

• Happy Meal-type box
• Beer bottle carrier
• Heart-Shaped box
• A box shaped like a house
• Awesome cake box
• Wine package
• Shopping bag
• etc.

The Idee Montabili site is available in different languages as well:

• Italian
• English
• Spanish
• French

Go Have Some Fun!

What’re you waiting for? Go download some free vector box templates, print them out and have some fun!

Jeff Chandler wrote a post on Web Blog Tools Collection yesterday called Do You Post By Email? In the post, he asked if anyone was actually using the post by email ability that WordPress has had since at least version 1.5.

From the comments on Jeff’s article, most people have not used it because it’s incredibly limited in what can be posted—no images, HTML, video or formatting. So basically, you can only post text.

Also, it’s of limited use since most people who have access to email also have access to a regular computer. Since the blog posts that can posted by email are only text, typing on your cellphone’s keyboard takes forever.

Post by Email With Posterous

However, a free online service called Posterous was also mentioned. This lets you post not only text, but also images, videos, etc by email.

Posterous also allows you to link to your Flickr account, WordPress blogs, Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and more. This means not only can you post via email to those sites, you can post via email to ALL those sites simultaneously. No more making individual posts one by one to every site you have.

Benefits are pretty obvious for those with camera phones and a connection to the internet. Imagine being able to post directly from your phone or BlackBerry.

Posterous also gives you 1GB of space and a free blog on their site.

Posterous Tutorials

I couldn’t find any tutorials for Posterous, so let’s walk through:

• Posting via email with Posterous
• signing up for a Posterous account (optional)
• Linking your Flickr, WordPress, Facebook, etc accounts
• Posting to all account at once

Posting Via Email

This is seriously easy. It could not be simpler. Really.

1. Go to www.posterous.com
2. You don’t have to sign up for an account at this point, so click on Step 2: Email anything to post@posterous.com
   
   
   
3. Your email client will open with post@posterous.com as the recipient. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, etc, just log into your webmail account and create a new email addressed simply to post@posterous.com
   
4. Type your post as you want it. You can use HTML formatting in your posts and drag and drop photos, files or videos into your email. If you add more than 1 image, Posterous will create a simple gallery for you.

2 things to note at this point:

1. If the email address you are sending from attaches a signature, you will want to highlight and remove it or this will be included in your posts.
   
   Edit: If you don’t want to remove your signature by hand each time or are posting from an online service that adds a signature/ad at the end of your emails, type #end where you want your post to end and Posterous will ignore the rest. (Thanks, Alan)
2. Posterous will use the first name in your email address as your name on their site. Make sure the email address you’re sending from contains your name. If you sign up for an account with Posterous, you can change your profile later though, so it’s not really a big deal

After you’ve written your post and attached/added your files, send your email and you’re done!

Editing and Removing Posts

After you send in your post, Posterous will send you a link to your new blog on Posterous.

You also have the option to edit your post or delete it altogether.

You can set a password for your blog as well. This requires signing up for an account though, but it’s free. This also lets you to choose your own username and address for your Posterous account and allows you to link to your blog(s), Flickr, Facebook, etc.

While you don’t have to create a Posterous account to post by email to your Posterous blog, if you want to follow the rest of the tutorial, you will need to sign up for an account.

Signing Up For a Posterous Account

Now, let’s password-protect your new blog and sign up for a Posterous account.

1. In the email that Posterous sent you after your first post, click the link Click here to set a password for this site. This takes you to the Set a Password page.
   
2. Choose a name for your site (ex: yourblog.posterous.com) and a password and click Sign Up
   
3. You’re now at the Manage page where you can change your profile, set up more email addresses or mobile phones to post from, and set up your Autopost accounts.
   

Posting to Other Sites and Blogs With Autopost

Now, we can link other sites to your Posterous account and when you post to Posterous, all those other sites and services will be posted to as well.

Linking WordPress to Posterous

Let’s begin by linking our WordPress blog to Posterous

1. Choose Autopost to Everywhere in the sidebar on the right
   
2. You can now add an account to your Posterous account and link it
3. On the Autopost to Everywhere page, click Add a service
   
4. Let’s choose WordPress by clicking the More Blogs link
   
5. Go to your WordPress blog and make sure XML-RPC is enabled in your WordPress settings
6. Back in Posterous, type in your blog’s address and username/password
   
7. Click the Advanced options link. By default, Posterous adds in a blurb at the bottom of every post. If you want to remove it, just highlight and delete.
   
8. Click Save to complete

You will now see your WordPress blog listed in your linked services.

Link to Your Flickr Account

Now, let’s link a Flickr account to Posterous.

1. Click Add a service and choose Flickr from the next screen
2. Click Click here to authorize Posterous to access your Flickr account
   
3. This takes you to Flickr’s site to sign in and confirm giving access to Posterous
   
4. Click OK, I’ll Allow It and you’ll be returned to Posterous where you’ll see that it’s added to the Autopost to Everywhere page
   

Now you can follow the same basic steps to add more services and sites to Posterous if you want. All the sites that are linked to Posterous will be updated when you post to Posterous.

The neat thing is that when you write a post and send it to Posterous, the complete contents of your post get posted to WordPress, but only the photos will be added to your Flickr account. Neat, huh?

Our post is published to both Flickr and our WordPress site with a single email

WordPress note: The thumbnails and galleries Posterous generates are 500 pixels wide, so make sure that your theme has at least 500px in width in the post area. Otherwise, it may throw off your layout.

Hopefully WordPress will improve their posting by email system soon. It would be nice if something like this was included right in WordPress. I guess we’ll just have to wait. Until then, Posterous seems like a great solution for posting by email.

Previously, I wrote a post about Mozy—a fantastic online backup service for Windows and Mac users. Currently, they’re running a promotion: Sign up for their free plan and start using Mozy before Dec 1, and get 2.5GB of storage—that’s an extra 512MB of space free.

If you haven’t already, you’ve only got about 5 days left (midnight Sunday) to get your extra 512MB. After Sunday, you can still use the link above to get extra storage space, but you’ll only get an extra 256MB.

Earlier I wrote a post showcasing over 12 mega icon sets for designers. Most of those icon sets had over 100 icons per set.

Now I want to touch on 10 other icon sets from DryIcons — one of the sites featured in the previous post. These sets may not have as many icons in them as the others, but they are very useful and unique.

The icon sets below come in 3 formats for Windows, Linux and Macs: ICO, PNG and ICN.

Ruby Extended Icon Set

The Ruby Extended icon set probably should have been included in the earlier post, but I honestly missed it the first time around. The set includes 238 red and white, beautifully polished icons. There is also another multimedia extension set of 13 icons in the same style.

The icons include: hardware, databases, media controls, e-commerce, graphs and more. This is a fantastic icon set if you’re working with a specific color scheme.

Coquette

Coquette is a fun icon set with rounded curves and bright, bold colors. It includes 50 icons — symbols, email, chat and other icons that would be good for general site or blog design.

Coquette Part 2

Coquette Part 2 contains 50 more icons in the same style as the original Coquette set. This set is geared more toward e-commerce icons, with icons for shopping carts, user actions, monetary symbols and more.

Balloonica

If you’re looking for a unique icon set, Balloonica is for you. The monochrome 80 icon set includes e-commerce and various symbols inside speech balloons.

Grunge Icons

If you want some icons that are grungy, rough and dented-in, here are 3 icon sets for you: Distortion, Grungy Asphalt and Olive Grungy.

Distortion icons look like what might happen if you drop-kicked your iPhone a few times, with 68 red rounded corners, but all beaten, bruised and chipped.

Grungy Asphalt and Olive Grungy icon sets feature 56 round icons.

Sticker Icons

If you’re a sucker for stickers, you’ll love the following 2 icon sets.

Social Icons

If the last sets were a bit rough for your tastes, the Socialize set will brighten your day. They include icons for StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Flickr, Furl, YouTube, Yahoo! and RSS.

Stickers

These Stickers icons remind me of the fat, puffy stickers that you just want to poke. The only thing missing is the googly eyes that move when you shake them. The set includes basic internet and monetary symbols in black and white.

License

All the DryIcon icon sets listed above are released under 3 different licenses: free, commercial and extended use. Please read the differences in licenses on their site before using them in any of your projects.

Backups. We love and hate them. We love having backups when something goes terribly wrong—a harddrive fails, you spill a drink on your notebook, fire, flood, tornado, etc. But many of us, myself included, hate the hassle of making regular backups.

In comes Mozy. Mozy is a remote, online backup system that helps Windows and Mac users make automatic backups. It’s so automatic, once you get it set up, you may just forget you’re even doing backups. No, really.

Note: This isn’t a paid post. I just really find Mozy useful and I want to share this great service with you. If you sign up at Mozy and use my referral code – MPED5A , I do get an extra 512MB of storage free, but then again, so do you, so win-win. That means you get 2.5GB of storage free.

Why Use Mozy?

Making backups to another computer via a network, backing up by tape/disc/DVD/external harddrives all work—unless you have a natural disaster or a fire. Whatever you stored your backed up files to may be gone as well.

An off-site backup needs to be done regularly. Mozy gives you an automatic, secure way of doing remote backups.

• 2GB free storage with MozyHome (get 2.5GB storage space free)
• Secure/encrypted transfer
• Automatic/scheduled backups
• Incremental backups
• Backs up open/locked files

Secure

Mozy encrypts your files before it even starts to transfer them. Mozy encrypts your files using 448-bit Blowfish encryption, then transfers them to their servers using 128-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. You can even use your own private key for encryption.

Easily Restore Lost Files

The great thing is that Mozy lets you retrieve a copy of your lost/corrupted files in 3 ways:

1. Their client software lets you browse/restore your backed up files like a virtual harddrive through Windows Explorer
2. Restore online from your browser through your account on Mozy.com
3. Request a DVD be mailed to you

Storage Space

MozyHome offers 2GB of free storage for personal backup. If you want to backup more than 2GB, you can buy unlimited storage space for just $4.95/month. If you sign up for MozyHome and make your first backup before Oct 31 Nov 30 using the referral code MPED5A during registration, you get an extra 512MB of storage free (if you sign up after Oct 31 Nov 30, it’s only 256MB). You can also sign up using this link to get the extra storage.

Mozy also provides Pro and Enterprise packages for businesses and organizations at low monthly rates. MozyPro is currently $3.95/month + $.50 per GB and provides a few more features than MozyHome. This is a very small price to pay for not having to worry about losing files for that project you’ve been working on for the last month.

Automatic Remote Backup

With the free 2GB account (MozyHome), you get their program that installs on Windows (Vista, XP, 2000)/Mac OS X. With this you can:

• Choose your backup based on type of file, directories, or individual files
• Schedule when to run your backup
• Set how much of your bandwidth you want to devote to the backup when it runs
• Restore your files—1 at a time, as directories, or the entire backup set

Incremental Backups

The idea of uploading 2GB worth of files every night is not appealing. Mozy’s backups are incremental, so it monitors which files you used since the last backup, then only uploads the changed files. In fact, it only backs up the parts of the files that have changed.

Running my backup the first time took a while to complete, especially my upload speed stinks. However, once Mozy did its initial backup, even when I make big changes to the files in my backup set, it takes no more than an hour or 2 to upload each night.

Open Files

Mozy will even backup files without you having to close them off first. You may have a file open in an editor, but Mozy will back it up anyway when it runs its backup.

Caveats

There are a few things that MozyHome and Mozy in general can’t do.

• Only 2GB of storage for MozyHome users (but for $4.95/month you get unlimited space).
• Bare metal backups—full system backups/restores are not recommended or supported. This would include operating system files and program settings. Mozy does allow for certain settings to be backed up, such as Firefox bookmarks/profiles.
• MozyHome doesn’t allow network drives to be backed up. Only fixed drives will be backed up, so external drives will be removed from the backup set if unplugged. MozyPro/Enterprise allows network drives to be backed up.
• No filesharing with other people—you can access your own files from anywhere, but you can’t provide links to others.

Special Offer

If you sign up with Mozy before Oct 31 Nov 30 using the following link, you’ll get an extra 512MB of storage space (256MB if you sign up after Oct 31 Nov 30):

Get MozyHome + extra storage

You can also get the extra storage by going to Mozy.com and entering the following code during registration:

MPED5A

What Do You Use?

Do you use any other online backup solutions? Leave us a comment and tell us about them.

I admit it, I have an unhealthy addiction to icons. I collect them like they’re going out of style, and when I find a new set, I almost immediately download it with gleeful anticipation.

Hello, my name is Shawn and I’m an iconoholic.

But addictions aside, having a great arsenal of icons at your beck and call can be a lifesaver for web and graphics projects.

Thankfully, there are several excellent free icons sets available. Here are some of my favorites—in no particular order.

Note: This is by no means a complete list of the free icons out there. This is merely a list of some of the icon sets that have a wide range of icons that would be useful to most web and graphic designers.

Fugue

Everyone probably already knows about Silk from FamFam, since you can find them nearly everywhere. However, if you’re looking for the same type of 16 x 16 pixel goodness, it’s worth looking at Fugue from pinvoke.

Fugue’s latest update brings the number of icons up to 971 16 x 16 pixel icons in PNG format. The look of these icons will go with most any type of design.

Also, from pinvoke is Diagona, which is tailored a bit more toward the UI side of icons (with arrows, checks, bullets, etc), has 400 icons (200 10 x 10 pixel icons + 200 16 x 16 pixel icons).

License

Both Fugue and Diagona are free for personal and commercial use under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Tango

One of my favorite things visually about Linux is Gnome and its Tango icon theme. You’ve probably seen icons from this set used in many places—even if you didn’t realize it was from Linux.

This is a huge collection of icons (hundreds?) for the Linux OS, including icons for applications, actions, devices, symbols, emotes, mime types and more. Icons come in vector format (SVG) and PNG format in sizes from 16 to 32 pixels.

The really impressive part of the Tango project is that many people are contributing to it so there are even more icons available on Tango’s site and other places that match Tango’s visual style.

License

Tango is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Oxygen

Like Tango, Oxygen is linked to Linux. It’s an icon set/theme that works with the KDE desktop.

Oxygen is a ginormous icon set, containing well over 1,000 PNG icons in sizes from 16 pixels to 128 pixels (that’s over 1,000 in 16 pixels, 1,000 in 22 pixels, etc), plus vector versions (SVG).

License

Oxygen is released under both a Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and a GNU Library General Public License. You can choose which license you want go use it under.

Classy Icons

Classy Icons from DryIcons is a nicely designed 300 icon set. The set includes icons dealing with databases, online shopping, charts, media devices and more.

Icons are available in PNG, ICO and ICN in sizes from 16 pixels, to 128 pixels. You can download all the icons as a ZIP or browse and download each icon individually if you only need a few.

License

Classy Icons is available through both a free and a commercial license. You can read more details about the differences on their site.

Aesthetica 2

The Aesthetica 2 icon set (also from DryIcons) is a diverse set with a bright, simple design. Like Classy Icons, the set also includes other icons for some oft missed subjects such as databases, media playback buttons, shopping carts and charts.

Aesthetica 2 comes in 181 icons in PNG, ICO and ICN formats. Sizes are available in 16 pixels up to 128 pixels. You can download the icons as a ZIP or browse and download each icon individually if you only need a few.

DryIcons also offers some other nice free icon sets in their Free Icons section, but that could be a whole other post.

License

Aesthetica 2 is available through both a free and a commercial license. You can read more details about the differences on their site.

Bright!

Another great-looking icon set is Bright! from Min Tran.

Bright! contains 148 beautiful icons in vector (EPS) format. This set is well suited for web applications, multimedia and software, with icons for buttons, video, email and even some nice guitars.

License

Bright! is released free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden. View the license at IconEden’s website.

Milky

Originally released in 9 installments, Milky (also from the makers of Bright!) is a nice icon set for those who are looking for a more relaxed look. With its rounded corners and green color scheme, Milky is great for blog designs.

Milky comes in over 130 PNG and vector formats (EPS and SVG), in both 48 and 64 pixels sizes.

License

Milky is free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden.

Function

Function is a crisp, clean, vibrant icon set, sporting 128 icons. This is a diverse and extremely useful set of icons slanted slightly toward blogs. There are social network icons for Stumble Upon, Digg, and other website icons such as Design Float and Flickr.

License

Function is completely free for whatever you want to use the icons for.

Fresh (Financial)

Yet another icon set from the makers of Bright! comes Fresh Financial Add-On icons. This is a small selection of icons (but still 56) from the full (non-free) Fresh icon set.

The icon set contains 56 financial icons in PNG, TIFF, ICN and ICO formats and in sizes ranging from 16 to 256 pixels.

License

As Bright!, Fresh Financial is free for personal and commercial use under a license from IconEden.

Danish Royalty Free (DRF)

Danish Royalty Free is a brilliant set of icons with a Mac OS feel to it. There are 96 icons (32 x 32 in both PNG and TIFF formats) included in the set.

Finding the link to the correct set is a bit tricky on the site, but look at the slider at the bottom and it’s the one with the keyboard icon.

License

While most of the icons on the site are only for personal use, according to the readme included with the set, this set is free for personal and commercial usage.

DelliPack 1 & DelliPack 2

DelliPack 1 and its big brother DelliPack 2 are both very crisp, clean, rich icon sets released through Smashing Magazine.

While DelliPack 1 only contains 5 icons in PNG format, DelliPack 2 contains 15, more useful icons. Both sets contains icons in sizes from 16 pixels all the way up to 256 pixels.

License

Both DelliPack sets are free for commercial and private use. See the site for more details.

More You Say?

How many did I miss? A bunch. Have any links to other must-have icon sets? Add a comment and share the icon love with us.

OpenX (formerly OpenAds) is a powerful open source ad publishing system that you can install and run on your website. With OpenX, you can serve all kinds of advertisements on your site: Google, Yahoo! Microsoft Ads, etc—even your own in-house ads.

UPDATE: A new version of the OpenX Admin Icon Set (v2.0) has been released. Please use this updated version instead if you’re running OpenX 2.8 and up.

The OpenX administration in the latest version (2.6.1 2.6) is pretty nicely laid out—all except the icons. Being a graphic designer, the icons detract slightly from the look and feel of the admin section for me and look like they’ve been cobbled on from previous versions.

For one of my projects, I decided to go through and replace some of the OpenX admin icons with icons from the, by now, practically standard Silk icon set. I liked how it turned out, so I decided to release the results for download.

OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0

Installation

To install new admin icons:

1. Make a backup of the images folder (and sub folders) located at: [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/
2. Copy the contents of OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0 zip to [openx-directory]/www/admin/assets/images/ — thus replacing the images folder (and subfolders)

Optional: You can replace the OpenX logo that appears at the top left of the admin section with your own logo by replacing the image named logo-wtag.png inside the images/ directory. The dimensions should be 170×56.

License

OpenX Admin Icon Set v1.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Based on work at OpenX.org and the Silk icon set.

As far as attribution goes, if you use the icon set you don’t have to put a link on your site, but an email of thanks or a comment would be appreciated.

Note: If you want to share this, please do not link to the file directly—link to this post. Do not place this file on another site for direct download.