Weekly Web Developer Resources (Week #4)
Try to get back on track here. As we are currently developing Simplified Source and the new Blog— we will continue to publish Web Design & Development related articles. You are always welcome to join us on our other Social Network and RSS Feeds for information.
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And with our further adieu, this Weeks Shared Articles for Web Developers and Designers.
When’s the Best Time to Blog & Share?
Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they’re on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Shareaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time.
Shareaholic looked at two metrics: social shares and traffic. For some, getting the highest number of shares is the goal; for others, increased traffic is where it’s at. Please remember that this data all comes from Shareaholic, so it’s specific to those users, though it’s possible to infer more from the results.
(Author: Alicia Eler @ ReadWriteWeb)
Better Bookmarks With Grazely
Bookmarking apps are not exactly the rare breed they used to be. A lot has changed over a couple of years. In fact, there is too much supply than demand in the marketplace. On the other hand, the volume of bookmarks are going up exponentially and in nine out of ten cases users are locked into the service they first sign up with.
That probably explains the torrent of new wave bookmarking apps. Grazely is a next generation social bookmarking tool that helps you discover, save, organize and share exciting content on the web, privately or publicly. Is this web app as exceptional as it clams to be? Let us go find out!
Overview
Grazely strives to not be the garden variety bookmarking apps that we know already. The web app works by letting you create a single user account to manage all your bookmarks. Sign in from any Internet connected device and you can instantly access all your bookmarks and find the content you need, without hassles.
(Author: Justin Stravarius @ AppStorm)
What You Should Know About ACTA and Your Rights
The most controversial measures of concern to Internet users in the final version of the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) for most Internet users are 1) that signing governments pledge to allow copyright holders a way to request, under court warrant, personal information about a suspected infringer from that person’s ISP; 2) that means will be provided for a rights holder to legally pursue someone suspected of circumventing rights management technologies; 3) that goods crossing countries’ borders may be made subject to search and seizure if they’re suspected to contain infringing material, with exceptions provided for things like personal luggage.
President Obama signed this treaty on October 1, 2011, effectively ratifying it on behalf of the United States.
(Author: Scott M. Fulton, III @ ReadWriteWeb)
Pancake: A new project from Mozilla Labs
What is Pancake?
Pancake is a new Mozilla Labs project focused on exploring, evolving and expanding how we search, browse, navigate, organize and discover amazing things on the Web. To do this, we’re creating an app — a usable prototype that we’ll share and iterate on rapidly through an ongoing series of experiments. We want to better understand what people do on the Web, why and how they do those things, and how we can make those things easier and more efficient.
We’re playing with some huge concepts, monumental problems and occasionally crazy ideas. We’ll be looking at what tools and systems we can create to put more of the Web at users’ fingertips. We hope to devise new metaphors and new systems that give users greater power and control within the modern Web.
We want to address questions that go to the core of how users experience the Web. Some examples of the questions we are asking include: How can we make it easier for people to find what they’re really looking for on the Web? Do URLs still need to be something users care about? Can we make it easier for people to discover new and interesting things on the Web? What impact does social play in discovery on the Web?
The prototype app we are building is really only the surface of Pancake. We’re also pushing the envelope — using the latest and greatest Web technologies — to build an amazing, portable experience for users. The back-end of Pancake will live in the cloud, where we’re creating an extensive Web service that will allow you to carry your data and experience across many devices. Our initial focus is on iOS and Android tablets and phones, but our long-term goal is to help people live their online lives on their own terms, across all devices and platforms.
The project will operate as a typical open-source project — allowing open collaboration so everyone can test our ideas, give us feedback, conduct usability testing, and with us to discover new avenues of experimentation and exploration. We are working hard to release our first prototype in the next few months.
(Author: Stuart Parmenter @ Mozilla Labs)
Use Join.Me to Train Staff and Collaborate with Customers
Do you manage a website or a blog? Do you build websites for customers? If so, then you know all that’s involved in getting your staff up to speed with tasks that need to be accomplished for the website. You know what’s involved in showing customers how their project is coming along. It’s a lot of work… especially when most of the time your staff is working remotely and your clients are miles away. In this article we are going to show you an online tool that can help make your life much easier. We will go over what it is and what it does, its benefits, how you can use it to make your life easier, and show you how to use it!
What is Join.Me?
Join.me is a screen sharing tool. Join.me easily allows users to share what’s being done on their screen with others. Screen sharing tactics help your listeners understand what you’re talking about by providing visual support to back up what’s being discussed. It’s a great tool for collaborating with staff or freelancers. Need to train a client on a new piece of software or show them progress on the website you’re developing for them? Done. Join.me is a quick and dirty tool that allows you to share your screen with anyone at any time. It’s definitely worthwhile to know about, especially for those situations where you didn’t take time to set up some of the more complex screen sharing software programs and you just need to quickly share your screen with someone. Hop on join.me within seconds.
(Author: Ryan Taft @ 1stWebDesigner)
Colour Combination Makes a Better Impact in Logo Designing
It’s undeniable. Branding is the life blood of any business. Even for small businesses, you’ve gotta build brand identity, or be ready for your company to go belly up.
A big part of many company’s brand identity is the logo. It’s like the face of your company. You need one that’s good looking and instantly recognizable. To that end, colour can make a big impact on not just how your logo looks, but as a result how your company’s perceived.
In the following article, we discuss the impact that colour combinations can make in the design of your company’s logo and the power that logo’s going to have for your brand.
How Colour Combination Makes a Better Impact in Logo Designing
Any person who owns a small business or is otherwise involved with logo designing should have a crystal clear concept of how colour combination makes a better impact in logo designing. The logo of a company is a big part of what attracts customers to its products. Thus, since a simple logo can decide the fate of a business or its popularity, every aspect of the design should be carefully explored. Especially, how the colour combination makes a better impact on the logo.
(Author: WizKraft @ SpeckyBoy Design Magazine)
slabText – A jQuery plugin for creating big, bold & responsive headlines
slabText is a jQuery plugin that splits headlines into rows before resizing each row to fill the available horizontal space. The ideal number of characters to set on each row is calculated by dividing the available width by the CSS font-size – the script then uses this ideal character count to split the headline into word combinations that are displayed as separate rows of text.
(Author: CodeVisually)
Semantic CSS Buttons Powered With @font-face Icons – Zocial
Zocial is a semantic set of CSS buttons (no images used) that are beautified with @font-face icons. There are buttons for 40+ services including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, PayPal, LinkedIn and much more. Each button can be displayed with or without text (only icons) and the HTML element wrapping them can be anything (which is nice for flexibility). Demo is available at http://zocial.smcllns.com/sample.html#.
(Author: WebResourcesDepot)
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Becoming a Blogger
For the most part, being a professional blogger is a freelance position. It doesn’t matter how many different blog sites you are loyal to, even if it is your own, a blogger still has the option to have work published anywhere they feel. Unless you’re a corporate blogger who signed a contract with your company of employment stating you would not do so, but then again that technically might make you more of a copywriter. Moving on, being a full-time or part-time blogger means you’re freelancing on some level. As the typical freelancer asked themselves many questions before taking the big leap, you would think the same would go for bloggers.
In the same fashion as any other occupation, there are certain skill requirements that must be met. Almost every industry blog site has published an article about how blogging can improve your career, and then proceeds to convince the majority of readers that being a blogger is the way to go for them. However these articles, for the most part, are all missing one key aspect to them. Somewhere before, or after, informing the readers about the benefits of being a blogger, there needs to be time to reflect on why one shouldn’t be one.
(Author: Jamal @ 1stWebDesigner)
Outsmarting Your Competition in High-Stakes PPC Markets
Are you competing in a high-stakes PPC market with bids in the $25 to $40 range? If you are, don’t simply fight your competition head on; if you do, you’ll end up paying premium prices for clicks you might capture for far less. There are several shrewd approaches you can employ to side-step your less-vigilant competitors. We’ve learned a few valuable tricks that can earn you valuable clicks for less-than-premium prices. The techniques begin with carefully monitoring PPC activity throughout the day to discover low-competition time slots in the PPC bidding and striking while your competition snoozes.
Getting Started
The types of campaigns for which these techniques will work will be high bid environments with smaller but determined competitors. You want to look for competitors bidding for terms in the $20-and-up range, but whose campaigns are not fully budgeted to run at the maximum number of available clicks. Specifically, we want to look for competitors’ ads that don’t appear consistently or whose ads disappear later in the day. Smaller competitors tend to fit this model fairly often. An illustrative keyword example we see in our local market of Austin Texas is “Personal Injury Lawyer”. We know the bids in that space are $24 to $30 depending on the time of the day—but we see some advertisers drop out at various times of the day. For illustration, we’ll examine Google’s Adwords system, but these principles will apply to any PPC program.
(Author: TastyPlacement @ SEOMoz)
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Ten Best Collaborative Sites For Quick Code Sharing
When you are running a small (or large) team of Web Developers and Coders, collaboration is one of the most important items on your list to allow you to be successful. My company uses GIT alongside of a Web-based GIT Viewer to collaborate on websites, web applications and mobile application. I’ve also been using Snipplr to share snippets of code that we use in our daily routine. Smashing Apps lists 10 Code Sharing sites that can assist you on your way to collaboration as a team. Enjoy.
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There are many apps that can make developer and designer lives easier, but getting by good ones is not that easy. That is why I am sharing Ten Best Collaborative Sites For Quick Code Sharing. Read each entry in the list and see which one suits your needs best.
You are welcome if you want to share more online code sharing and management tool that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
Pastebin
Pastebin is a website were you can store a piece of text for a certain amount of time. The site is mainly used by IT professionals to store pieces of programming code and configuration information. You can however store any type of text that you like. Many twitter users use Pastebin to store tweets which are over 160 characters and normally wouldn’t fit in a Twitter message.
Chop
Chop is a quick and easy way to let the offending engineer know the error of their ways. Just copy and paste the lines in question, add your notes and share
them with a unique URL.Gist
Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as
a git repository.ideone
It’s an online compiler and debugging tool which allows to compile and run code online in more than 40 programming languages.
Copy Paste Code
Copy Paste Code allows you to publish your code with colored syntax for most popular programming languages out there. After publishing you can share your
code to colleagues and friends, and they can debug and use your code snippets. You and others can also download the snippets, password-protect and publish
revisions to snippets.Slexy
Slexy.org is a powerful, slick, and sexy pastebin designed with the user in mind. You can use Slexy.org to paste errors for debugging, show off your code
or your tech specs, or share anything else with other Internet users worldwide.Smipple
Smipple is a social service for saving, storing, organizing, and sharing snippets of code with your friends and coworkers. With Smipple, you can make friends
and Improve your coding skills too.Snipt
Snipt.org is a free tool for the community so developer or alike can save and share their code snippets with their web family.
Pastie
This is one of the simple code management tool for developers. It has a clean user interface with sensible defaults and strong syntax highlighter.
Friendpaste
A fast service where you can copy/paste your code, recipe, anything else and give the link to your friend. You can select your preferred languages and possibility
to edit pastes. This service support for a large number of syntax that you would need.
Best of the Web, File and Data Sharing, Tools, Web ApplicationsRelated Articles You Will Definitely Find Worth Checking Out
11 Robust Web Based Editors To Code Directly From Your Browser
Pastebin Lifetime PRO Accounts Giveaway(Published by AN Jay via Smashing Apps)
Use Dropbox for Project Collaboration with Chatbox
For my business and private use, I use a combination of Rsync, GIT and Dropbox. Between the three I am able to work with my team on project collaboration, store and backup personal and important files, and keep revisions of just about every document, music file, video, project, .. well anything. Here is a quick and simple article courtesy of Read Write Web on using Dropbox for Project Collaboration with Chatbox.
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the white paper about how Intel Xeon processors help organizations get unprecedented levels of performance.
Chatbox is a free OSX application that adds project collaboration features to Dropbox. It adds the ability to leave comments on or chat in real-time about about particular files and folders in Dropbox. Everything is stored in Dropbox, so you don’t need to register an account with Chatbox.
Chatbox was created by the team atPandaDesk, which offers a more featured collaboration platform, including status updates and tasks and milestones. PandaDesk integrates with Dropbox.
If you need something more cross-platform and business ready, Box and Huddle are enterprise-grade file storage and document collaboration services. Huddle has a special emphasis on project management. You can read our story on AKQA’s Huddle deployment here.
Also, Google Docs recently revamped its comments to improve collaboration.
See Also
(Published by Klint Finley via Read Write Web)
