Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Today on Dev Interrupted, we premiere the second and final episode of our two-part series with Tech Executive Consultant and author, Aviv Ben-Yosef.
If you haven't listened to the first episode, I highly recommend checking it out. Aviv is an expert at onboarding new employees, particularly those joining leadership positions.
In one of the most apropos uses of a .blog domain, Refined.blog is a new website that promotes personal blogging with a curated list of software engineering blogs. It’s a simple site with an index of blogs, their Hacker News scores, tags, and a link to each blog’s RSS feed. The search function is very fast and applies to all columns in the index (with the exception of the feed URL). Columns can be ordered alphabetically, by tag, or by HN points.
“Experience is gold,” Refined.blog creator Musa Ünal wrote in the site’s introduction. “There are many different social media platforms on the internet but we need personal blogs again. It’s hard to find blogs so let’s create this blog list together!”
It’s true – discovering new blogs isn’t easy. If you’re not following the right people on Twitter or don’t happen to be around when a person links to their posts on social media, then you are usually out of luck. Personal blogs are often not very well optimized for search and can get lost in the haystack.
Google Search doesn’t provide a way to narrow results to personal blogs. The Wiby search engine is about the closest you can get for searching these types of websites, although it seems to be limited to older style pages that are based on one subject of interest. Wiby uses Microsoft Bing’s search results combined with Wiby.me results without sending your IP and user agent to Microsoft. Wiby’s about page explains the problem that sites like Refined.blog are aiming solve:
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn’t great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today’s web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
Refined.blog brings more exposure to some of these single-person curated websites. Its creator, Musa Ünal, is considering branching out from an index of software engineering blogs to separate indexes for different topics.
“For example, I am big fan of history bloggers, but it’s very hard to find these kinds of blogs,” he said in response to a question on Hacker News. “If you know such of blogs, please contribute to the project. If we have enough bloggers listed, we can create subdomains like history.refined.blog or art.refined.blog.”
Hacker News comments on the project range from people discovering RSS for the first time and looking for reader recommendations, to people returning to RSS to get their news after becoming jaded by news algorithms and social media platforms. Other commenters shared that they, too, maintain their own lists of curated blogs. Refined.blog used some existing Engineering and Security blog lists as sources for the index.
“I love this,” one person commented on Hacker News. “I’m in the ultrarunning community and I love reading everyone’s blog posts/trip reports/race reports/adventures. But everyone stopped updating them over the past 5 years or so. Now that sort of thing is just an Instagram photo with a paragraph or two. The depth and character of those old blog posts have been lost. I wish in depth blog posts would come back, but in reality, I don’t think they are.”
Another commenter echoes the sentiments of others who have given up on promoting their blogs in the age of social media:
I’ve completely given up on promoting my stuff. It used to be very easy and straightforward. Like minded folks could find new stuff without a problem. Nowadays, there’s just way too much content, the vast majority of very low effort, and you get lost in the noise immediately.
For example, I have an old blog post that got featured in podcasts, on dailyjs, HN, is linked to from MDN, etc. When I wrote it in 2014 I pretty much just submitted it to Reddit, that’s it. Nowadays I couldn’t recreate that exposure — or even a tiny fraction of it — if my life depended on it.
Regardless of whether the site takes off or not, I think it’s important to catalog these attempts to restore the magic of that earlier era where websites offered a real window into people’s knowledge and interests. It may not look the same as many of us remember the old school “vintage” internet, but the blogosphere will continue to evolve as long as bloggers at heart keep experimenting with projects like this. So much of this style of writing has gone to email newsletters, but content that lives publicly on the web has a longer life cycle that can be rejuvenated through linked conversations. Writers can and should be able to embrace both methods of distribution.
Refined.blog is hosted on GitHub and is open to feature suggestions and contributions. One person submitted an issue, suggesting the site add one or more OPML feed links so people can subscribe to all or some of the blogs at once. Ünal said he is working on making an OMPL export for selected blogs.
If you’re looking to beef up your RSS reader with active software engineering blogs, Refined.blog might be a good place to search. There are no blogs referencing WordPress development yet, but the site does have several that focus on tooling, JavaScript, React, PHP, and other technologies that WordPress developers use. The index is specifically designated for personal blogs and company blogs are not permitted. Anyone can submit a blog for inclusion by following the instructions on the main Github project repo or by filling out the Google form with the same information.
Earlier this month, TeslaThemes announced that it was rebranding to WPRealEstate. The company wanted to focus its efforts on a single niche in the theming market and cut back on the library of projects it was maintaining.
In 2017, Imagely acquired TeslaThemes. The shop was created in 2013 and had grown its library to 68 themes. Last year, Imagely was acquired, and Nathan Singh was named CEO of the company.
Eric Danzer, the founder and former CEO of Imagely, continued running TeslaThemes and its sister site ShowThemes since the acquisition. He is now ready to turn the page and jump into the next chapter of running a successful WordPress business.
“I’ve decided that, as a business, we’ll do better focusing our energy on a specific niche rather than trying to be all things to all people,” he said.
After several years of running a generic theme shop, the company ran into a brick wall that so many others in the industry I have talked to had hit. It is the realization that maintaining so many disparate projects puts an almost insurmountable burden on the development and support teams.
“TeslaThemes has historically tried hard to serve a lot of small niches,” wrote Danzer in the announcement post. “We’ve had themes for real estate, recipes, musicians, eCommerce stores, photographers, event management, local business listings, and many other use cases. For each of those, we were embedding plugin-level functionality in each separate theme. That created a highly complicated product line that’s difficult to maintain and keep up to date.”
The team had run into the Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none problem. Tightening the focus would allow the company to focus on and become one of the best in a specific niche. Thus, the shift to real estate.
“As I move on from Imagely, I wanted another big project to focus on,” Danzer added in a personal note. “I wanted it to be something I’m passionate about. I’m passionate about nearly every aspect of real estate. I own multiple rental properties, and I’m working toward a real estate license.”
The company had already been doing well in the real estate market with its previous Realtor theme. It was one of its most popular options.
“On the market side, the real estate market is large enough to sustain a great theme shop,” wrote Danzer. “Yet, it’s also a unique niche — real estate professionals have specific, challenging, hard-to-solve needs.”
Existing TeslaThemes customers will continue receiving support and have access to any products purchased in the past. They will also be able to get the new real estate plugin and theme.
The legacy themes, those created before the 2017 acquisition, are no longer under active development. The company replaced those in November 2020 with the Tesla Pro framework, which Danzer said his team plans to maintain and support for at least another year.
The team built the plugin on top of the block editor. They also created it alongside the RESO Web API, a modern standard for transporting data in the real estate world.
While there is no public demo of the backend or even any editor screenshots, a peek under the hood reveals several custom blocks. The theme previews showcase map, search, and listings solutions. They also seem to blend the output with the Kadence Blocks plugin.
Instead of launching multiple themes, the company will focus on building a single project with several design options out of the box. Users can import prebuilt content and data as part of the onboarding process.
Danzer said that the new WPRealEstate theme is still a traditional, customizer-based theme. “We’ll start working on a new FSE theme almost immediately though. Between the work needed and waiting for FSE core functionality to mature, I don’t think we’d release that until sometime in 2022.”
As far as I am aware, there are few, if any, robust block-based real estate solutions for WordPress at the moment. Custom post types and metadata serve as the foundation. However, a well-designed layer of blocks on top of that system could make it far easier for agents to build their sites.
In the past several weeks, GitHub has made two announcements that highlight the company’s dedication to simplified open-source development and governance. These announcements include funding that will support a new GitHub Developer Rights Fellowship and a new Minimum Viable Governance framework.
Unless you are a web professional who is well-acquainted with the WordPress backend, there is no guarantee you would know that you can customize it as per your requirements. Yes, that is right! This practice is called white-labelling, which is basically the process of removing all mentions of WordPress from your backend and modifying it […]
The post Top 6 White Label Branding Plugins For WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.
Hello ,
i am using free 3 of 9 barcode to create a bar code of each student in my DB , the problem that in my card it is not shown as it is supposed to be but as 98777
so any one knows how i can solve that or what could be the problem???
Thanks
While adapting to the current global crisis, businesses had to rapidly transition to a remote workforce to meet customer demands through digital channels. However, this sudden transformation to remote operations presented a whole new challenge of cyber risks. While working remotely, employees may be using home computers to log in to company networks and access confidential information, relying on home internet networks instead of the company's secured network. For remote workers, the importance of cloud infrastructure has increased. They may also be using third-party apps to stay connected with others. And since a work-from-home setup, unlike an office environment, may be slightly more relaxed when it comes to data security, the users are not vigilant enough for cyber risk.
When it comes to protection against security threats while working remotely, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. There are lots of measures organizations need to take to secure their employees. Let’s look more closely at the measures that should be taken to secure remote employees from cyber threats:
The term REST is an abbreviation for Representational State Transfer. It is a software architectural style created to assist the design and development of the World Wide Web architecture. REST defines a set of constraints that define how a distributed hypermedia system, such as the Web, should be architected. Restful Web Services are HTTP-based, simple, lightweight, fast, scalable, and maintainable services that adhere to the REST architectural style.
The REST architectural style views data and functionality as resources accessed via Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Restful architecture is a client-server paradigm that utilizes a stateless communication protocol, often HTTP, for data exchange between server and client. In REST, the clients and servers interact through a defined and standardized interface.
The insurance industry is quite prone to uncertainties as it’s highly dependent on global trends, ever-changing rules and regulations, and dynamic demographics of customers. Leading businesses are leveraging artificial intelligence in insurance for redefining the playing field. AI has undergone a massive transformation in the past few years, to the point that insurers can now capitalize on their AI investments with new applications. Let’s have a look at the market size of artificial intelligence in insurance and its prominent use cases in the industry.
The market size of artificial intelligence in insurance is expected to reach the value of USD 6.92 billion by the year 2028. It is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 24.05% in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028.
Presto has evolved into a unified SQL engine on top of cloud data lakes for both interactive queries as well as batch workloads with multiple data sources. This tutorial will show you how to run SQL queries with Presto (running with Kubernetes) on Google BigQuery.
Presto’s BigQuery connector allows querying the data stored in BigQuery. This can be used to join data between different systems like BigQuery and Hive. The connector uses the BigQuery Storage API to read the data from the tables.
Live Server allows you to see code changes reflected in the browser. It launches a local development server with a live reload feature both for static and dynamic pages.
Every time you save your code, you'll instantly see the changes reflected in the browser. You'll be much faster at spotting errors and it's much easier to do some quick experiments with your code.
If you are a Java developer, engineer, SRE, QA, enthusiast, aficionado, or have any involvement or interest in Java in any capacity, this list is for you.
We scoured the Internet to track down the top Java blogs, Java podcasts, and Java tutorials that you should bookmark. We provide the name, URL, and a brief overview of the resource. In no particular order:
An explanation of those new GitHub social media images:
[…] our custom Open Graph image service is a little Node.js app that uses the GitHub GraphQL API to collect data, generates some HTML from a template, and pipes it to Puppeteer to “take a screenshot” of that HTML.
Jason Etcovich on The GitHub Blog in “A framework for building Open Graph images”
It’s so satisfying to produce templated images from HTML and CSS. It’s the perfect way to do social media images. If you’re doing it at scale like GitHub, there are a couple of nice tricks in here for speeding it up.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
The post GitHub Explains the Open Graph Images appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.
Oh no! You have to rewrite that huge legacy app! You've already argued that you can fix the legacy code and you've sent the managers the Joel Spolsky "never rewrite" article. Management responds by pointing out that both Basecamp and Visual Studio both had famously successful rewrites.
Do you update your CV or do you tuck in and get the job done?
This week, JustDial has had to re-fix an old API vulnerability that they already fixed in 2019. We also have a set of scripts for automated API key validation, and two videos from recent conferences on the OAuth roadmap and GraphQL security.
JustDial had a regression as they accidentally reintroduced the API vulnerability that they had fixed (and we reported) back in 2019. Ironically, it was found and resubmitted to the vendor by the same reporter as last time, Rajshekhar Rajaharia.
TestCafe is a non-selenium-based open-source JavaScript End to End Automation Testing Framework built with NodeJS. TestCafe supports JavaScript, CoffeeScript, and TypeScript.
TestCafe is nowadays very popular since it is very stable and follows an easy setup.TestCafe does not depend on Selenium or other testing software. TestCafe runs on the popular Node.js platform and makes use of the browsers that you already have.
Before we begin, we want to make one thing clear: this is not a sponsored post. We here at 1WD are simply excited about and impressed with this new platform that is a simple and affordable way for anyone to start selling digital products online, so we wanted to help our readers discover this new tool. The people over at Make Lemonade – a small team of makers, creators, movers, and shakers – have done it again, providing us with an easy, fast, and secure way to sell digital downloads, subscriptions, and software licenses. in this article we’re going to take a look at what Lemon Squeezy has to offer.
The concept is simple: easily create a beautiful “lemonade stand” for your digital products in minutes and start selling online. With pricing plans that range from free to $79 per month, anyone can take advantage of the platform and get started relatively quickly. No hosting fees, plugins, or any of the other hassles that typically come with setting up an e-commerce store. Whether you have one or one thousand products, you can get up and running with minimal elbow grease.
The sign up process is quick and painless. Fill out your name, email, desired store URL, and you’re good to go. Yes, it’s really that simple.
Once signed up, you’re greeted with the following screen:
From here you can add products, set up your account and payment details, and design your new store. It’s pretty simple and intuitive to accomplish each of these items, and no coding knowledge is needed. We only played around with the free version, so we don’t have any details or comparisons to offer details on what might be different about paid plans, but based on the feature differences they list on their pricing page (more below), we are guessing they are pretty similar.
The store design features are pretty limited. You’re not going to have a one-of-a-kind, stand out in the crowd lemonade stand, so if that’s a high priority then this may not be the best fit. But if you care more about getting your product(s) online and available for purchase as quickly as possible, then Lemon Squeezy is your answer.
The design capabilities are basically the choice of header image, showing your logo, store description and name, and product details. It looks like the yet-to-be-released “Juicy” plan – at $79 per month – will offer a drag and drop website builder and templates, but that option is not yet available. Still, the minimalist style of a store here is clean, crisp, and user friendly.
Straight out of the gate, Lemon Squeezy accepts credit cards and PayPal when your customers are paying for products. More payment methods are in the pipeline, but these basic methods make it easy for most users. one important note is that Lemon Squeezy acts as the Merchant of Record, meaning the store owner does not have the burden and legal responsibility of collecting and reporting Tax and EU VAT.
One of the features we especially like is the built-in email marketing tools. Your customers and visitors can become email subscribers, which then gives you the ability to reach out to them for future, data-driven campaigns. You can also offer freebies for an email address to grow your mailing list. All of this is built in to the platform, so you don’t have to utilize third-party email platforms like you would in other e-commerce solutions. Unfortunately, the marketing features are currently “coming soon” as of this writing, but whenever they arrive this adds great value to the platform.
Sales, Audience, and Analytics reports are another feature that is showing as “coming soon”. Since this is a common useful element of any e-commerce platform, it is disappointing to see that it has not been offered at launch. In our opinion it may have been wiser to hide these “coming soon” features (along with marketing) until they are actually available.
Compared to other e-commerce platforms, selling your digital products on Lemon Squeezy is extremely affordable. The “Fresh” plan is free and offers many of the same features as paid plans. The biggest difference is in the percentage fee: 8% per transaction vs. 3.5% for the paid plans. The “Sweet” plan is $29 per month and the “Juicy” plan is $79 per month. The most expensive plan is still listed as “coming soon”, but it looks like that plan will include a lot of extra features once it’s available. Both paid plans are even cheaper when you pay annually – they give you 2 months free with this option. Be sure to check out the full features comparison on their pricing page.
This exciting new e-commerce platform is impressive, although there are still a lot of features that will be coming soon to it. While it’s nice to see what will eventually be, we’d prefer those unavailable features to be hidden until we can use them. Otherwise, the platform has a lot of potential and lots of reasons to start using it now if you’re in the market for your own…uh…market!
Be sure to check out our other e-commerce related articles here on 1WD while you’re visiting.