Welcome To Devils Workshop!!!

Introducing WpNginx – our new service to put your WordPress on steroids

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 02:16 PM PDT

Before I tell you more about WpNginx, our new service, let me ask you one simple question!

When was the last time you have seen Devils Workshop down?

If you are one of our reader who frequently visits Devils Workshop, chances are seeing this site down are almost nil. Downtime you might have seen here was for scheduled maintenance few months back. In fact that can be prevented also, had we more time to invest in playing with our servers.

WpNginx – The magic behind our great uptime!

Every time, fellow bloggers contact me, wondering about which hosting we are using for such great uptime, I can’t stop myself from thanking Igor Sysoev, the man who created Nginx webserver. Nginx worked for us like a charm.

You may be get a shock to know that, we now run more than 30-sites with 50K total pageviews daily from one single VPS and going through analysis of our server logs, it seems that we can handle another 50K hits daily without upgrading our VPS plan further.

On top of Nginx, we have explored many more ways to optimize websites’ performance to the level where our rtCamp.com homepage beats Google.com homepage in YSlow as well as PageSpeed like performance metrics.

To get this kind of performance, we have worked very hard for months. All our efforts pulled together are now available as a service which every blogger running high-traffic blog/site can avail. Two of Devils Workshop’s contributors, Bapun (from SolidBlogger) and Sri Ganesh (from Symposiumz), already managed avail our service while we were in close-beta. You can read about their experience here.

You can read more about our new service here. More about why we love Nginx can be found here.

Link: WpNginx

p.s. just noticed this is my 600th post on DW!

-- This Post Introducing WpNginx – our new service to put your WordPress on steroids is Published on Devils Workshop .

How to create the Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with Photoshop

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 08:10 AM PDT

In this post we are going to see how to create a Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with using filter. We can see so many of Border Styles in Photoshop. I thought I will write on how to create Grunge Border Effect in a few simple steps.

First create a new file in Photoshop. Give background color like below image.

Then draw the box on the new layer. Go to Toolbar and select the Rectangle Tool (U)

This way we have finished creating a box. Here I given it a Lemon Yellow color. (see image below)

After that give it stroke of a dark shade of yellow. Just go to Layer Pallet >Layer Style > Stroke.

As you click on stroke you can see Layer Style pallet on your screen. Now keep your Stroke setting as shown in image below. Keep stroke size-1px, Inside.

You can see the solid color border to the box.

Now let’s see how to convert it into Grunge Border Effect.

Just go to Filter >> Stylize >> Diffuse. Click OK.
Now you can see the Diffuse box displayed on your screen. Just select the Normal option and click Ok.

Here we get the Grunge Border Effect Box. We create this effect by using the Diffuse Filter.

Now for some more finishing touches.

I applied Outer Glow to the image. Go to Layer Style and select the Outer glow option and keep your setting similar to the image below.

Now we have the Grunge Border Effect to a Solid Color Box with Photoshop.

In this way you can give a Grunge Border effect to the Solid Box within a couple of minutes. Do you have any alternative steps or methods with Photoshop? Do drop in your comments.

-- This Post How to create the Grunge Border Effect to Solid Color Box with Photoshop is Published on Devils Workshop .