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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)
“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 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.
The documentation lists all components currently supported within a page and experimental components in development as well.
I have already added AMP support to our blog posts:
Google’s Webmaster Tools also integrates a new section for AMP, to see how they perform.
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 ;)
As I mentioned the usage of Markdown for the Slate documentation builder, here some Markdown editors:
Highly customizable editor.
http://www.ulyssesapp.com/
Use it anywhere and sync to dropbox if you like.
https://stackedit.io/
Nice split-screen setup, that shows you how the html conversion looks like.
http://markdownpad.com/
A nice minimal editor that was developed for Elementary OS.
https://github.com/voldyman/MarkMyWords
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.
Alertify.js is a small library which provides light-weight, high performance browser dialogs.
Alertify @Github
jQuery.sheet is spreadsheet plugin, that offers creation, viewing and editing. All combined with a nice API.
jQuery.sheet
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 :)
Now that Parse is phasing out (01/2017), people are looking for alternatives that offer:
Collaborative list of Parse alternative backend service providers @ GitHub
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
“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
Author: Andrew Angell
BitBucket Repo
