Cheap Website Design Blog

Open Source Tool To Backup Gmail Accounts: Gmvault

Umut M. — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:54:00 +0000

Gmail is probably the most widely used e-mail provider between creative people. It is always simplistic, modern and always works.

Personally, besides my personal e-mail, I use their "custom domain" feature for handling the e-mails of all my projects.

As expected, the content there is very valuable and hard to risk losing. Gmvault is an open source tool that saves the day by backing up Gmail accounts to your drive smartly.

It can backup the entire Gmail account at once and can synchronize afterwards by only picking the non-backed-up ones (there is also an optional encryption).

If we ever want to restore them, Gmvault can do that as well. They can also be restored to another Gmail address (including labels).

There is a Windows installer and ashell/batch client exists for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

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Calling All Contributors: Community Summit 2012

Jane Wells — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:36:46 +0000

Each year, the WordPress core development team meets in person for a week to work together and discuss the vision for WordPress in the coming year. As annual events go, it’s easily my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I love attending WordCamps and local WordPress meetups (which are awesome and you should try to attend if you are able), but at the core team meetup, the focus on working together and getting things done is unique, as is the experience of every person in the room being so highly qualified. This year, instead of just planning a core team meetup, I’m aiming a little higher and shooting for a full-on contributor/community summit.

Core code isn’t the only way to contribute to the WordPress project. We have an active theme review team, support forum volunteers, people writing documentation, plugin managers, community event organizers, translators, and more. The teams have been siloed for too long, so we’ve recently begun the process of bringing them together by having teams elect representatives to facilitate more communication between the contributor groups. These reps will form the nucleus of the contributor summit now being planned for a long weekend at the end of October in Tybee Island, GA. This is completely different from a WordCamp. It will be a combination of co-working, unconference, and discussions among the project leaders, and participation will be by invitation.

In addition to bringing together the active contributor team reps to work together, I think it’s important to include community members who don’t fall into that category (at least not yet!). Successful WordPress-based business, authors of popular plugins and themes, and people using WordPress in unexpected but intriguing ways should have a place at the table, too. That said, part of the magic of the core team meetup is the small size; it allows every voice not only to be heard, but to engage. Since this is my first attempt at bringing together so many groups and points of view, I want to try and keep it small enough to retain that personal atmosphere while at the same time ensuring that the best possible mix of people and businesses in the WordPress ecosystem is represented. This is where you come in!

Taking a cue from events with limited availability like AdaCamp (attendance) and the jQuery conference (speaker roster), I want you to nominate people and/or WordPress-based businesses to participate in the summit. Yes, you can nominate yourself.* You can nominate up to 10 additional people — be prepared to provide URLs and the reason you think they should participate. You can also nominate up to 10 WordPress-based businesses without naming individual people, so if there’s a theme or hosting company (for example) that you think should be there, you don’t need to go looking for employee names. This nomination process will hopefully ensure that we don’t overlook someone who is making a difference in our community when it comes time to issue invitations.

Nominations will be open for a week, after which the survey will be closed and the process of analyzing the results** will begin. The nominations process will lead to invitations in June, confirmations in July, planning in August and September, and the summit itself in October. Hopefully we can stream and/or record some of the activity to share online at WordPress.tv. Additional invitations may be extended up until the event if there are people/businesses that become more active in the community. If you’re thinking to yourself that maybe now’s the perfect time to start contributing time to the WordPress project, good thinking! In the meantime, if you want to weigh in, fill in the community summit nomination form. Thanks, and wish us luck!

* Nominating yourself: Do nominate yourself if you fall into one of the categories described in the post above, or if you believe that you have a unique point of view. Please do not nominate yourself if you just think it would be cool to hang out with this group. This is a working event, and everyone is expected to bring something special to the table.

** I (and/or a helpful community volunteer) will sift through the nominations and compile a shortlist of the most-nominated people/businesses and the most intriguing underdogs. This list will be reviewed by the summit planning committee (made up of team reps) to create the invitation list.

Infragistics jQuery Controls – Impressive & Professional jQuery Toolset

Umut M. — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:30:05 +0000

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Info: This is a review of a paid resource.

There are lots of jQuery plugins around that handle specific tasks and, for JavaScript-heavy apps, we may end up in using many of them.

Working with such many different resources at the same project is sometimes hard and can be time consuming as they all have their way of coding, different APIs, styling support…

Infragistics, a creative company focused on building user interface development tools, has a professional and complete jQuery Toolset that solves many JavaScript-related tasks beautifully.

The toolset is HTML5-powered and works cross-browser/platform with support for mobile + all of them are optimized for high performance.

What is inside?

Charts

First of all, it has a full-featured charting library with support for 15+ chart types (pie, bar, line, area, bubble, radial) where they can be used side-by-side too.

Charts are interactive, they can respond to events like hover or click and can be zoomed to better see a specific range.

Grid

The Infragistics jQuery Grid is definitely one of the most flexible grids around.

It has all the features expected like pagination, sorting, filtering or search. But, there is more like the ability to rearranging columns by drag 'n' dropping or even hiding them, displaying lengthy data inside tooltips and hierarchical views (grids inside grids). Simply, it is pretty powerful.

WYSIWYG Editor

A complete HTML(5) editor with formatting capabilities, inserting/managing tables/images/links/lists, source view and clipboard support (cut, copy, paste).

HTML5 Video Player

The player uses the HTML5 video tag to play streaming video in major formats including WebM, Ogg Theora and H.264.

Videos can be viewed in full-screen mode, a detailed control bar exists for managing the video and any part of the videos can be bookmarked for sharing a specific second of the content.

The others

Are these all? Definitely not. There are also:

slick tree control with unlimited sub-levels (nodes are searchable)
date picker
mapping control (for easily integrating maps and interacting with them)
specific data type editors (masked inputs, spin-buttoned number entry, currency handlings, etc.)
star ratings
listbox (with filtering)
modal boxes
templating engine

And, thee is a handy DataSource component which is the core behind data operations and manipulation. It allows us to feed any component with formats like oData, WCF, RESTful Domain Data Sources, JSON, XML (with and without namespaces), local arrays or pre-existing static HTML tables.

Conclusion

Infragistics jQuery Controls certainly bring a lot to the table. Not only they are high-quality but also consistent which means each item inside works with similar principles (which is a real time saver).

They can be themed with ThemeRoller. Theme once and all of them are changed (again a real time saver).

Also, there is quick, professional support which is again good to ensure that you'll get a working product.

EU Cookie Law: 2 jQuery Plugins To Not Break It

Umut M. — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:44:37 +0000

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Many of us probably heard the EU Cookie Law already and thinking about "what to do" and many others should be saying: "cookie what?".

What is it?

It is a European Union e-Privacy Directive that will become active on 26th May 2012 and "requires website owners to take the permission of the user before placing anything (cookies, HTML5 local storage..) to their computer for tracking them (cookies exist in analytics apps, many sign-up/login pages, widgets, etc.).

Which websites need to take action?

It binds any EU-located individual and organization's website, no matter where the website is hosted at. Some EU countries are already applying it and UK will begin to enforce it by 26th May 2012 (also, websites breaking the law can be fined up to £500,000).

jQuery Plugins For EU Cookie Law

In order to make our websites compatible with the EU Cookie Law easily and quickly, here are 2 handy jQuery plugins that will help managing cookies + asking user's permissions for storing them:

Cookiecuttr

This is a beautiful plugin that handles many scenarios you may need to obey the EU Cookie Law.

It allows you to hide any given parts of a website (the parts which generates cookies), and display sensitive modal boxes to users with asking for permission to use cookies.

Also, the plugin can show a "reset button" that can delete all the cookies for that website.

cPrompt

The plugin displays a notification to visitors asking "if they let cookies by this site to be enabled".

Depending on the status (the first time user visits the page, cookies are rejected or accepted), the notification bar changes colors.

Learn More About The EU Cookie Law

What do you think about it?

What are your thoughts about this law?

Do you think it is applicable?

Does it fit the nature of internet?

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

If A Single File Gets Hacked, Will Millions Of Websites Be Affected? (Discussion)

Umut M. — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:22:32 +0000

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Info: This is a little different post than you see everyday at WRD. It is a concern that popped up while working on "speeding up stuff" and think/hope it is worth discussing. Please share what you think.

I'm usually a fan of hosting all the files used in websites myself, under the same location with the website itself. When an image or JS file needs to be updated, no need to update it from a remote URL but just change the file hosted under the same website/FTP account.

However, this is not how things work the fastest. In order to speed up websites by distributing requests to multiple hosts and serving them from the fastest location to the end users, keeping stuff in CDNs (content delivery networks) is a very good and widely used solution.

The same logic goes for JavaScript frameworks. To speed up things, hundreds of thousands of websites use hosted JavaScript libraries. Actually, they all use a single hosted platform: Google Libraries API which is the focus of this discussion.

There is a serious speed and bandwidth gain in this structure as the JavaScript frameworks are cached in the user's computer and user won't re-download them each time when visiting a Google Libraries API-powered website.

Today, if we have used jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, Prototype, etc. while developing our websites (almost every website uses one of them -including many WordPress, Joomla, Drupal themes-), there is a high chance that we are calling these frameworks from Google Libraries API.

So, what happens if Google Libraries API gets hacked?

To be more specific, what if the contents of https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/ver.../jquery.min.js is changed?

It gets hacked and the jQuery (or MooTools, Dojo or Prototype) JavaScript file included in our websites now contain malicious code (that includes iframes or posts forms to another URLs, etc.)?

I simply can't think of the damage it can create.

Btw, I'm aware that Google Libraries API is built with very good intentions and it does the job perfectly (thanks to them) and sure that Google's CDN is probably one of the safest places on the web. But, this security concern is worth discussing considering the effect it can create and every datacenter>server>data can possibly be hacked.

So, is this structure totally wrong or benefits are worth the thread? What do you think (really wondering here)?

Credits: Hack The Planet visual.

Social Sharing Buttons Under Control: Socialite.js

Umut M. — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:05 +0000

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Socialite.js is a JavaScript library for having more control over social sharing buttons.

The library is lightweight (2kb minified-gzipped), standalone and helps the social widgets to load when you want them or only when needed/requested to speed up web pages.

It has support for the major players: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Spotify. There is no need to install the widget codes for each library as Socialite.js does that for you.

And, the library is extensible, any new social networks can be added with ease.

Create Desktop Apps With HTML-CSS-JS: AppJS

Umut M. — Sun, 13 May 2012 17:24:23 +0000

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Desktop apps definitely have their own advantages over web apps like speed, ability to reach the filesystem, working in the background, notifications, etc.

However, for us (the web developers), it is a challenge to create one as they need to be coded in a non-web programming language (yes, there are exceptions).

AppJS is an exciting resource that allows us to develop desktop apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

The project uses Chromium as the core (so that the latest HTML5 APIs are supported) and Node.js as the backbone.

P.S. It is in the early stages of development, Linux and Windows ports are functional and Mac part is not available yet.

CSS Browser-Compatibility Search Engine: Browser Support

Umut M. — Fri, 11 May 2012 08:41:32 +0000

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Ok, right now, we can't stop ourselves from using the exciting CSS3 features. But, what about their compatibility? In which browsers they work ok?

Browser Support is a simple search engine to find out which CSS properties are supported in which browsers.

With an auto-complete-powered search, it displays you all possible properties while typing and brings the results for all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE, Opera).

Optionally, you can click the browser icons in the homepage and see the all properties supported for that browser with a breakdown of versions (IE6, IE7, etc..).

Automated Filler Content For Web Documents: Fixie.js

Umut M. — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:24:51 +0000

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When working on a new web project, during the HTML coding process, using Lorem Ipsum as filler content is a common approach (yet, there great Lorem Ipsum alternatives).

Fixie.js is a simple JavaScript library (with no JS framework dependencies) that automatically analyzes your semantic HTML5 tags and adds the right type of content inside the related elements.

It is not limited to simple text but can also add links, sections and images. Just add the fixie class to the element you wish and the matching dummy content will be displayed there.

esoTalk – Simple, Fast & Modern Forum App

Umut M. — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:39:22 +0000

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Previously, a post at WRD had shared the 9 well-known and free forum softwares.

Here is a fresh alternative named esoTalk, which focuses on removing the complexity of forum apps with a simple + modern interface and functionality.

It is built with PHP-MySQL, includes the main features a forum would need and has a plugin system for extending it more.

esoTalk is still in the early stages of its development, not as feature-rich as many other alternatives. But, maybe, something simpler is what you are looking for.