If you're like us, you certainly have to work on international projects, or projects involving foreign languages and character sets. Handling many of these can be quite a nightmare, if you don't have the right tools. Hopefully, from time to time, you find on the web some fine gems that make your life easier...

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We got selected to be featured in CSS Nature's showcase. CSS Nature is maintained by the guys from Studio 7 Designs, a well-known brand and identity development agency.

You can see our page and vote for us here. Thanks in advance!

When you look at the general tendencies in web design those days, it appears that Flash-powered websites have lost points, as more and more web developers use technologies like (X)HTML, AJAX, Javascript and CSS to propose clean, feature-rich and effective websites to the world.

However, there's still one field where Flash has its word to say: media handling. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen (yet) a 100% javascript framework capable of properly handling audio and video files. So let's face it: we need Flash to handle media files, even if we don't like it (well, at least I don't like it, mainly because it makes SEO optimization a real nightmare, but that's another story).

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This morning, I was setting up a couple of new websites on my development server. The way I do this is very simple: since I use IIS7 on my development box, I change the default binding and map each new website to its new port — easy, quick and clean.

But today I encountered a small glitch: after I mapped port 87, I couldn't manage to access it from Firefox, no matter what I tried. Mozilla's browser wouldn't simply open the pages, and constantly kept to return the same error message.

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Today, the blog went down during a couple of hours — we'd like to apologize for that. According to our hosting provider, there were some issues with the MySQL databases, but they fixed it quite fast. So here we are again, ready to roll!

Don't miss the next updates, we've got plenty of exciting stuff coming your way...

Today, The Art Company showed up as #1 in the "Professional on the Web" directory, which features more than 2,000 web agencies and freelancers from around the world. Thanks to you!

» Professional on the Web

You know that one browser that has only a vague association with modern web standards? Yeah, Internet Explorer. Wouldn't it be great if it supported stuff like translucent PNGs? Well, now you can add decent PNG support to IE5.5+ on Windows with no changes to your website HTML source code.

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The Art Company Blog just got listed into two popular CSS & Design dexes: CSS Clip and CSS Based. Click on the logos below and vote for us!

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a delicate science that requires many things to work together ir order to be effective. One of those things is the sitemap, which you can think of as an "index" of your site: it's a document that will tell the search engines where to find the different parts of your website, and that makes sure that the engines don't forget to parse the latest data you have uploaded in your pages.

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RSS feeds and XML are great things. Through the use of standard APIs, they allow you to pull out data from any website that supports these protocols, and reuse the collected material in your own applications. But what if you want to do the same with a website that has neither RSS feeds, XML, nor a dedicated API ? Well, you use dapper!

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