I AM LISTENING TO
|
WHAT I LIKE
  • English
  • German


BLOG FILTER



26. February 2016

Time to get AMP ready

Google’s AMP is here to save us from slow mobile content delivery, by enforcing strict standards and limiting what is allowed within AMP pages. The pages only allow a subset of tags and introduce their own tags for fast prefetching of content (images, videos … AMP Specs)

THIS IS AMP

“The Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”) Project is an open source initiative that came out of discussions between publishers and technology companies about the need to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone – publishers, consumer platforms, creators, and users.

Today, the expectation is that content should load super fast and be easy to explore. The reality is that content can take several seconds to load, or, because the user abandons the slow page, never fully loads at all. Accelerated Mobile Pages are web pages designed to load instantaneously – they are a step towards a better mobile web for all.”

AMP CACHE & VALIDATION

AMP pages are cached within the AMP Cache, providing even faster delivery of your content. The core libs validate your implementation and highlight any problems by pushing errors to the console.

INTEGRATION

The documentation lists all components currently supported within a page and experimental components in development as well.

  1. Introduction to AMP
  2. Video Introduction
  3. AMP for WordPress
  4. AMP Docs
  5. Q&A Video

I have already added AMP support to our blog posts:

  1. Standard page
  2. AMP page

Google’s Webmaster Tools also integrates a new section for AMP, to see how they perform.

WHAT AMP IS NOT

AMP is not supposed to replace your webpage, but offer a faster access point to presented content. It will not solve all use cases, but offer better performance for your simple reading pleasure for now. Its a start and lets see how it evolves ;)

Enjoy coding …

readmore
13. February 2016

Markdown editors

As I mentioned the usage of Markdown for the Slate documentation builder, here some Markdown editors:

ULYSSES FOR MAC/ IPAD

Highly customizable editor.

http://www.ulyssesapp.com/

STACKEDIT INBROWSER SOLUTION

Use it anywhere and sync to dropbox if you like.

https://stackedit.io/

MARKDOWN PAD FOR WINDOWS

Nice split-screen setup, that shows you how the html conversion looks like.

http://markdownpad.com/

MARKMYWORDS FOR LINUX

A nice minimal editor that was developed for Elementary OS.

https://github.com/voldyman/MarkMyWords

Enjoy coding …

readmore

Slate helps you create beautiful, intelligent, responsive API documentation. All documentation is written in Markdown and than converted into a responsive layout.

Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats.

Slate @ Github

Have used it on multiple projects and I love it.

Enjoy coding …

readmore

Alertify.js is a small library which provides light-weight, high performance browser dialogs.

Alertify @Github

readmore

jQuery.sheet is spreadsheet plugin, that offers creation, viewing and editing. All combined with a nice API.

jQuery.sheet

readmore
2. February 2016

LMS meets SaaS

As I said before, Learning Management is really taking off and I get many client requests to do some kind of  integration or custom solution for them.

In one of my latest articles I started listing solutions for WordPress, WordPress and the LMS universe.

But those solutions might not always be the best fit for your project. Many of them actually try too hard to be everything. The amount of cross linked functionality is getting insane and increases the point of failure.

In some cases a trimmed down solid solution might be the better way to go. SaaS (Software as a Service), part of the cloud trend, is providing more and more options, this includes the LMS arena. Stop worrying about the software and concentrate on your content again. The SaaS provider takes care of functionality, support, updates and delivery. This is nothing new, solutions like TalentLMS or Litmos LMS offer this for some time now.

Modern SaaS solutions provide Public APIs, that allow you to seamlessly integrate them with your current solution. So in case of a LMS, that part of your project could be handled by the SaaS provider, while e-commerce, social and other content areas remain under your full control.

One solution I am currently looking at is Intuo, which is a fresh startup out of Gent / Belgium. They provide a solid set of features and a clean API to handle single signons and content access. That would allow a seamless integration into WordPress for example :)

We are looking at a very crowded LMS market, but always nice to have options :)

Enjoy coding …

readmore
1. February 2016

Parse Alternatives

Now that Parse is phasing out (01/2017), people are looking for alternatives that offer:

  • Data Storage
  • Push Notifications
  • Usage Analytics
  • Dashboard
  • Social Integration
  • User Administration
  • Cloud Code Integration
  • Multiple Mobile Platform SDKs
  • Background Jobs
  • Crash Report

Collaborative list of Parse alternative backend service providers @ GitHub

readmore

Nice set of Google Analytics helper plugins.

Riveted is measuring the amount of time users are actively engaged (e.g., clicking, scrolling, using the keyboard) and then reporting the data to Google Analytics in frequent intervals. GitHub

Scroll Depth is a small Google Analytics plugin that lets you measure how far users are scrolling. GitHub

Screentime is a small tool that helps you start thinking of your website traffic in terms of time instead of hits (pageviews, visits, etc). You can define areas of the page, called Fields, and then Screentime will keep track of how much time each Field is on screen for. GitHub

readmore

PNotify is a JavaScript notification plugin, developed by SciActive. PNotify can also provide desktop notifications based on the Web Notifications spec. If desktop notifications are not available or not allowed, PNotify will fall back to displaying the notice as a regular, in-browser notice.”

PNotify @ GitHub

readmore

  • All PayPal IPN data is saved and available in your WordPress admin panel.
  • Developer hooks are provided for triggering events based on the transaction type or payment status of the IPN.
  • Extend the plugin with your own plugins or theme functions

Author: Andrew Angell

BitBucket Repo

readmore