Code Clarity (TM) offers handcrafted and elegant Small Business Websites and Web Applications. We ar Web Development and Design firm based out of Boulder, Colorado. We specialize in W3C Standard complaint websites, SEO Marketing, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and much more. We also contribute to many open-source projects with interest and passion for Linux and Android.
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.
Visit us on Twitter Visit our RSS Feed
And with our further adieu, this Weeks Shared Articles for Web Developers and Designers.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
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)
As always we appreciate you reading Simplified Source’s Weekly Web Developer Resources and please do visit us on Twitter or Subscribe to our RSS Feed for your viewing pleasure.
(This blog post originated from a post that I made earlier on Forrst.)
Wordpress 3.x has a lot to offer us Developers. We should take advantage of it. I’ve been developing a lot of custom plugins and custom widgets for my Clients who use Wordpress as their CMS. Now there are a ton of tutorials and code snippets of how to create a custom Plugin or a custom Widget for your Wordpress Installation but I kept running into issues with my Widgets not being able to be reused. So, I created a basic template for a Custom Plugin that creates a Widget Class that can be reused and is more than customizable.
View on PasteBin View on Forrst
Every Wordpress Developer has their own methods and own opinions on how to create Widgets and Plugins and I just wanted to share my method. This is my basic template which creates a Plugin for a Client, and wrapped in this Plugin is a custom Widget that shoots back some text. Of course you can get nice and complex and do what ever you want here. (My code is a compilation of research and publicly available information).
Constructive criticism and feedback is welcome, as always.
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: ClientName Custom Widget
Description: Displays a custom feature for your Client in the form of a Widget.
*/
class customClientWidget extends WP_Widget {
function custom_clientWidget() {
// Declare your Widget name, the class name and a Description for the Dashboard
$widget_ops = array('classname' => 'customClientWidget', 'description' => 'Displays something that you specify in the code below.' );
$this->WP_Widget('customClientWidget', 'Your Custom Widget', $widget_ops);
}
function widget( $args, $instance ) {
// Very basic code that takes the Title from the form function and then displays your code
extract($args, EXTR_SKIP);
echo $before_widget;
$title = empty($instance['title']) ? ' ' : apply_filters('widget_title', $instance['title']);
if (!empty($title))
echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
// Content to be displayed on page goes here
echo 'Displaying some data here.';
runThisFunctionNow();
echo $after_widget;
}
function update( $new_instance, $old_instance ) {
// Allows for the Widget to be reused
$instance = $old_instance;
$instance['title'] = $new_instance['title'];
return $instance;
}
function form( $instance ) {
// Creates a very simple form so that you can Title your Widget.
$instance = wp_parse_args( (array) $instance, array( 'title' => '' ) );
$title = $instance['title'];
?>
<p><label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>">Title: <input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title'); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo attribute_escape($title); ?>" /></label></p>
<?php
}
} // End of Widget Class
function customClient_widgets() {
// Register the Widget
register_widget( 'notable_pressWidget' );
}
// Quick WP Action to register the Widget
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'customClient_widgets' );
// From here you can upload the file and directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory, then goto Admin Dashboard and Plugins and Activate the Plugin. Afterwords you can goto your Widgets and add the Widget to a Sidebar. Simple stuff.
?>
When it comes down to it, that’s a pretty easy setup.
You know, it’s amazing to me that as Developers some of us do not realize all of that power that we have under-the-hoods of our computers. It is already built-in and ready to roll we just need to use it. GNU Wget is among many common *nix/Linux Applications that comes installed with the common Linux Disto and easy to install elsewhere. Plus, it’s GNU Open Source which you cannot beat. Well, at this point, you are probably asking why the heck I am writing an article on GNU Wget, right? I had to pull some images from a clients website but only from certain folders with certain extensions. I thought about it quickly and it made more sense for me to do so with GNU Wget instead of going through their very crazy FTP site and downloading each image. GNU Wget is powerful, open-source and a standard. Please note, that I use CURL as-well and I believe they each have their Pro’s and their Con’s. I’m going to give a few simple and then powerful usages of GNU Wget. These examples are a combination of either basic documentation examples to examples that I worked on and examples I discovered during my brief research of ways to use GNU Wget.
Basic Syntax
This is your very basic usage for Wget.
wget [option]... [URL]...
Download File
Simple and basic way to download a file.
wget http://www.somewebsite.com/thefile.png
Download File with Quotes
Download a file whose URL contains a “&” (note quotes).
wget "http://www.somewebsite.com/index.php?page=demo&user=janetreno"
Download File and All Related
Download a file and all related files for optimum viewing.
wget -p http://www.somewebsite.com/index.html
Download an Entire Website
Download an entire website using the recursive option.
wget -r http://www.somewebsite.com/
Mirror an Entire Website
Download or Mirror an Entire Website and Follow all symbolic links.
wget --mirror -p --convert-links -P ./nameofsite http://www.somewebsite.com/
Ignore File Type Specifics
Reject a specific file type during download of an entire website or folder.
wget --reject=gif http://www.somewebsite.com/
Resume a Download
Resume your downloaded file. (The server should support this method).
wget -c http://www.somewebsite.com/largefile.ogg
Specify the Name of a file after Download
Specify or Rename your downloaded file after it’s complete.
wget -O downloaded-filename.zip http://www.somewebsite.com/downloads/archived?id_232221
Mask User-Agent to Download
Mask your User Agent while downloading a file or folder
wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092416 Firefox/3.0.3" http://www.somewebsite.com/index.html
Limit Download Speed
Limit your download speed
wget –limit-rate=30k http://www.somewebsite.com/demo.jpg
Stop Download After Certain Size
This command will stop your download at a specific file size, ie. 5MB. (This quota will not get effect when you do a download a single URL. That is irrespective of the quota size everything will get downloaded when you specify a single file. This quota is applicable only for recursive downloads).
wget -Q5m -i http://www.somewebsite.com/
Use a file containing download addresses
This can come in handy, use a file that contains a list of addresses to download
wget -i download-list.txt
Download MP3s or Specified File Types from Download List
Another handy snippet which allows you to specify a file type to download from your download list.
wget -r-l1-H-t1-nd-N-np-a.mp3 erobots=download-list.txt
Test Your Download
Test your download with the Spider option.
wget --spider http://www.somewebsite.com/demo.jpg
Increase Download Retries
Up the amount of retries Wget does when downloading.
wget --tries=75 http://www.somewebsite.com/demo.zip
Make Links automatically convert to support pages
Links automatically convert to a local consultation pages.
wget -k http://www.somewebsite.com/
Use FTP Authentication to Download
Download via ftp (With authentication).
wget -r l4 ftp://username:password@somewebsite.com/
Backup Your Delicious Bookmarks
Create a Backup of your Delicious Bookmarks. (Downloads Public Links only!)
wget http://delicious.com/username/
Download in Background
Download a file or directory in the background with a log output.
wget -b http://www.somewebsite.com/index.html
Log Wget to a Specific File
Log messages to a log file instead of stderr Using wget -o.
wget -o download.log http://www.somewebsite.com/
Create a Simple Bash Script to Download an Entire Website
Create a simple bash script, such as downloadsite.sh, make the script executable and then either use a symbolic link or copy/move to your /usr/local/sbin folder.
#!/bin/bash echo "Downloading $1 ..." wget --mirror -p --convert-links -P ./$2 $1 echo "Downloading Complete."
USAGE- /usr/local/sbin/downloadsite.sh http://www.downloadthissite.com/ /download/to/this/directory
Well, that’s that. These commands will help Developers a-like. Wget and CURL are very helpful commands and if you know how to use them— that is one way to improve productivity. Simple way to increase your productivity.
Introduction to GNU Wget
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.
GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, including:
- Can resume aborted downloads, using REST and RANGE
- Can use filename wild cards and recursively mirror directories
- NLS-based message files for many different languages
- Optionally converts absolute links in downloaded documents to relative, so that downloaded documents may link to each other locally
- Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows
- Supports HTTP proxies
- Supports HTTP cookies
- Supports persistent HTTP connections
- Unattended / background operation
- Uses local file timestamps to determine whether documents need to be re-downloaded when mirroring
- GNU Wget is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Downloading GNU Wget
The source code for GNU Wget can be found on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/ [via http] and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/ [via FTP]. It can also be found on one of our FTP mirrors. For more download options, see the download information on the Wget Wgiki.
Documentation
GNU Wget documentation can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/. For manuals of other GNU packages, please see http://www.gnu.org/manual/
Additional Information
Additional information is at the Wget Wgiki, including frequently asked questions, and how you can help us to improve Wget!
Maintainer
GNU Wget is currently being maintained by Giuseppe Scrivano. The original author of GNU Wget is Hrvoje Nikšić. Please do not directly contact either of these individuals with bug reports, or requests for help with Wget: that is what the mailing list is for; please use it instead. Micah also tries to make himself available on IRC during Pacific daytime hours; asking for help there is welcome.
