Programmers and designers—and nerds in general, really—can be kind of difficult for non-nerdy people to understand. The reverse is also true. Programmer types can get the worst of it, though. Generalizing broadly, the mental world they tend to live in is full of things that make sense because they follow specific rules. Those rules can get infinitely complex; but the basic principles of programming can get you past most of the problems you might encounter. It was probably a misplaced semicolon,...
It’s been quite a year of milestones for Opera. In March, Opera made headlines when it let users block ads natively. Now, Opera is making another huge impact by offering a free VPN (virtual private network) that’s integrated into the browser. In a recent blog post, the company announced that Opera is the first big browser to incorporate an unlimited and free VPN. This means that users won’t have to shell out extra money for VPN subscriptions or download any VPN extensions. The company’s rationale...
There’s good news for everyone who uses stock photos, today: finding the right one just got easier. That is, if you use Shutterstock. Shutterstock is taking a page from the Google Images play-book by implementing a reverse image search. Then, they took it a step further by giving us “visually similar” search. Really, most of what you need to know is right in the names. Anyone who has dragged a photo into Google Images to find the original source knows what I’m talking about. Now, you can do the same...
Toast is a really light-weight fully responsive CSS grid. Toast grid was created by Dan Eden, the man behind animate.css and baseline.js. If you are already using Bootstrap, Foundation or any other CSS framework, You might ask why you should learn a new grid system. The number one reason to use Toast grid system is that, it is very light, no-nonsense grid system, for creating responsive websites quickly and easily. Bootstrap, Foundation and many other CSS framework allow you to create responsive,...
StringBean introduces itself with the slogan, “The 4K featherweight framework”. Now, I wasn’t exactly skeptical. Despite the prevalence of massive CSS and HTML frameworks (you know which two I mean), there are plenty of tiny frameworks about. I’ve seen and tested many, and even used one or two of them for live projects. StringBean has, however, managed to impress me with how much it’s managed to fit into a small space. As always, frameworks stay small by sticking to an incredibly basic set...
With the constant barrage of sites being hacked, security should be of paramount concern to developers. Especially when using a platform such as WordPress, which is constantly under attack from nefarious bots. The thing is, the size and popularity of a website doesn’t matter so much. Bots are looking for any WordPress site, regardless of size. So anyone from enterprise to small business needs to take steps to better secure their website. One of the most common methods bots use are brute-force login...
GitLab—the website that’s an app for coding, testing and deploying code together—recently announced a new feature that should make developers very happy. Users consistently had free access to the site’s programmer toolset, such as GitLab Runner. Now, developers can use GitLab Runner Autoscale, which is the new feature that permits constant code testing at scale. To sweeten the deal for developers, GitLab has partnered with Digital Ocean, the cloud infrastructure provider, to offer...
As a developer, one of the most important decisions you'll make is choosing which content management system (CMS) will power a website. In many cases, clients will state that they want to be able to update the site themselves. They won’t necessarily specify which CMS they want, though. That decision is often left to you, the web professional. Many of us tend to use and recommend a single CMS for our projects (WordPress, in my case). An established platform like WordPress has a great community of resources...