Hi everyone, I need ideas on how to initialize a new program in which a class GeometricSequence will extends Sequence. It has to implement public void generate ( ), which generates the sequence via
= 0generator ( = 0, 1, , numTerms1) and puts it into a double []. In java, is
programmed via Math.pow ( a, b ). So once the sequence is generated, public void generate ( ) should call public void setTermArray ( double [] dA ).
For example, when SequenceTest is run using 0 = 3, generator = 4 and numTerms = 9, the output of
the program will look like what is shown below.
The WordPress Photo Directory is taking off, growing to more than 1,400 approved free photos in under two months. After a successful call for testers and volunteer photo moderators, the directory has an enthusiastic team of contributors ready to move the project forward.
Angela Jin’s pitch for photo moderators resonated with a lot of people for a couple reasons – it outlined an approachable time commitment (1-2 hrs/wk) and didn’t require any special skills beyond appreciation of photography:
Photo Directory Moderators can expect to spend 1-2 hours in coming weeks learning about the Photo Directory and current moderation tools, and discussing future best practices. To keep the Photo Directory a thriving resource, Moderators are needed for the foreseeable future, perhaps dedicating up to an hour of their time each week.
Nearly two dozen people responded to this call. It was a good strategy for building a wide base of contributors instead of depending on a smaller team that would be required to devote more hours.
This week Jin formalized the new contributor group, announcing the Photo Directory as a new WordPress Make team. Collaboration is now happening at the new #photos channel in WordPress Slack and the team will begin publishing at make.wordpress.org/photos. They will be working on two handbooks – a public one and a private one that will outline processes for moderators handling topics like curation and inappropriate content.
There has been some confusion about the difference between the WordPress Photo Directory and the Openverse project, which hosts 600 million Creative Commons licensed and public domain image and audio files. Openverse pulls from many different sources, and the WordPress Photo Directory is a new source that will be included with all images licensed under the CC0 license.
Automattic-sponsored Openverse contributor Zack Krida explained the difference between the WordPress Photo Directory and Openverse:
The WordPress Photo Directoryis both a new curated source of free, high-quality photographs and a new submission tool for Openverse, powered by the WordPress community. Without it, you’d need to use Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, or other sources to submit your work to Openverse.
Another way to contribute to the Photo Directory is by submitting photos. I am quite fond of making steel-cut oats for breakfast, so I decided to test out the submission process with a photograph of my oatmeal. The process is simple and takes less than a minute once you have already selected the image you want submit. Pending photographs are listed in a table after you submit, and the moderation queue for each account is limited to five at this time.
I was surprised by one of the agreements before sending my photograph: “Photo must not contain any human faces.” The guidelines state that submissions cannot contain faces of people at this time for legal reasons. Hopefully, this limitation is being worked out before launch, because the directory needs faces to have the best chance at becoming a world class resource for free images.
No attribution is required for CC0 photos, but it would be nice to have an easy way to copy attribution info and credit the photographer with a link back to the individual photo listing. This would also be helpful for furthering adoption of the photo directory, with links back coming from around the web. I filed a meta trac ticket requesting the feature, as it looks like this is the best way to request an addition to the directory’s roadmap.
The Photo Directory has so much momentum right now and offers a good opportunity to contribute back to the WordPress world without having to know how to code. Meetings have not yet started for the project, but contributors can jump in on the new Slack channel and subscribe to the new Photo Directory blog on the Make network once it launches.
Ellen Bauer, developer and co-owner of ElmaStudio, posed the question on Twitter last week that many have been asking. What do we call these new types of WordPress themes made from blocks? She was not the first to ask. The question also came up via the Post Status Slack chat earlier this week.
Naming is still so confusing Is it block themes, FSE themes, block-based themes or better FSE block themes? I see all of them being used for the same thing, let’s change that asap!!! #WordPress#Community#FullSiteEditing#FSE#Gutenberg
The short answer is that these new themes are “block themes.”
The WordPress Themes Team decided to use this terminology in December 2021. The consensus during their meeting was to clarify the difference between block and classic themes.
The terminology has also grown organically as the new theming system has emerged. Block themes are themes that are literally made from blocks. The long-term goal should be to simply call them “themes,” but the “block” prefix will stick with us for a while.
The long answer is more nuanced. As Anne McCarthy noted in the Post Status discussion, there are four types of themes now:
Block
Classic
Hybrid
Universal
Technically, developers can create an entirely custom theming system. That is just how flexible WordPress is, but we will stick to the somewhat more official definitions. There are enough terms for our own little mini dictionary of theming as it is.
Block Themes
Editing a block theme via the site editor.
Block themes have been officially supported since WordPress 5.9’s release last month. They provide users access to new tools such as the site editor and global styles interfaces. These features have replaced many past settings pages, such as the customizer and widgets screens.
Twenty Twenty-Two is the first default to support this new set of tools. There is also a small but growing number of other block themes.
Why do we not call them FSE themes? Full Site Editing is a collection of components and not a single thing. WordPress has released several of these components before version 5.9, such as the template editor, block-based widgets, and theme.json support. In a sense, a classic theme with any level of feature support is also an FSE theme.
The thing that makes block themes different from classic themes is that they are built from HTML templates made entirely of blocks. This automatically enables the site editor, template editor, global styles interface, and more.
Classic and Hybrid Themes
Customizing Twenty Twenty, a classic theme.
I have grouped classic and hybrid themes together because there is no need to differentiate the two.
Classic WordPress themes are those that we have known and loved all of these years. They feature PHP-based templates in most cases. There are some, like Foxhound, that are primarily made of JavaScript. However, none have the necessary block HTML templates to qualify as a block theme.
Hybrid themes are classic themes that have adopted one or more FSE components, such as the template editor or theme.json.
I do not separate the two theme types because we have never done so before when themes adopt new features. For example, when the nav menus system was first introduced, there was no need to call themes something different based on whether they supported the new menu system. The same can be said for most other features in the past.
If anything, the official theme directory may need to expand its tags to include additional features as they arise. Filters allow users to search for the things they want from a theme.
Universal Themes
Universal themes work in both a classic and site editor context. Ben Dwyer offered a more thorough explanation via the Theme Shaper blog last year:
Universal themes are an attempt to bridge the gap between the classic themes and block themes, by adding some layers to a block theme to make it work.
A Universal theme is a block theme that can use the Full Site Editor but can also be configured in a more classic way. That means that you can use classic WordPress tools, like the Customizer, Menus and Widgets dashboards as well as the Site Editor.
I have not seen much appetite from developers for creating universal themes. I am not sure if any exist, at least not in the official directory.
It is too early to tell if they will eventually catch on with theme authors. Supporting both classic and modern WordPress tools likely only makes sense for the most popular themes. Their authors may need to rework their codebase, opting into more FSE features and transitioning from a classic/hybrid state to universal support. If the demand is there, some will undoubtedly meet it.
The support and maintenance burden would be unappealing for most. A clean break from classic is probably the best route for developers building with the latest WordPress features.
Naming things is hard, but it is crucial to have equal footing among participants in discussions. The distinction between classic and block themes will likely be the most useful.
I doubt the terms matter much for the average WordPress user. They need to know whether a theme supports Feature X or Feature Y. It has been a while since theme tags (filters) were overhauled, and many are outdated. They might be worth revisiting to ensure that we are meeting user needs today.
[…] Mobile Safari increases the default font-size when you switch a website from portrait to landscape. On phones that is, it doesn’t do it on iPad. Safari has been doing this for a long time, as a way to improve readability on non-mobile optimized websites. While undoubtedly useful in a time when literally no website was optimized for mobile, it’s significantly less helpful nowadays. […] Text size increasing randomly in a single situation is exactly the type of thing you want to guard for with a CSS reset.
This is very literally what text-size-adjust does. MDN:
When an element containing text uses 100% of the screen’s width, the algorithm increases its text size, but without modifying the layout. The text-size-adjust property allows web authors to disable or modify this behavior, as web pages designed with small screens in mind do not need it.
You can see Apple’s own docs showing off this is exactly what they do (on iPhones). There is an ancient bug where this would prevent zooming, but probably not a huge concern anymore.
Kilian’s recommendation:
html {
-moz-text-size-adjust: none;
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none;
text-size-adjust: none;
}
Firefox doesn’t even support it, so I’d maybe lose that vendor prefix, but otherwise I’d say I’m on board. I’d like to think I can handle my own text sizing.
Google has announced the release of the v10 Google Ad API, and along with this announcement comes a stern reminder that developers need to migrate away from the legacy AdWords API immediately. Support for the legacy API will end on Apr 22, 2022.
Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Like React and JavaScript! Here’s a list of nine links to other articles about them that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.
Seed Funding for Remix Remix went open source after taking funding which seems like a solid move. It’s a for-now-React-only framework, so I think it’s fair that everyone asks how does it compare to Next.js. Which they answered. Probably worth noting again for us CSS folks, Kent mentioned: “Because Remix allows me to easily control which of my CSS files is on the page at any given time, I don’t have all the problems that triggered the JavaScript community to invent workarounds like CSS-in-JS.”
React Router v6 Speaking of that gang, they released React Router v6, which looks like a positive move — all hooks based, 50% smaller than v5 — but is yet another major version with API changes. React Router has a history of API changes like this and they trigger plenty of grumbling in the community. There is plenty of that again.
React Aria “A library of React Hooks that provides accessible UI primitives for your design system”from… Adobe. Interesting. Looks like some pretty hard problems being solved here, like FocusScope (“When the contain prop is set, focus is contained within the scope.”) and interesting color inputs, like useColorField, useColorSlider, and useColorWheel. There are 59 hooks in all, ranging from interactions and forms to overlays and internationalization, with plenty of others in between.
Front End Tables: Sorting, Filtering, and Pagination Tania Rascia: “One thing I’ve had to do at every job I’ve had is implement a table on the front end of an application that has sorting, filtering, and pagination.” No shame in reaching for a big library with all these features, but sometimes it’s best to DIY.
Good advice on JSX conditionals Vladimir Klepov covers the (weirdly) many ways fairly simple conditionals can go wrong, like the number 0 leaking into your markup, and how to manage update versus remount in conditionals.
useProseMirror I’ve found ProseMirror to be a pretty nice rich text editor in the past. The library itself isn’t actually in React, so I think it’s a smart call here to make a modern React wrapper for it.
Spead up sluggish inputs with useDeferredValue You can introduce gnarly input delay the more work that an onChange function has to do on a text input. “useDeferredValue gives us a way to separate high priority updates from low priority updates for cases like this.”
🎥 A Cartoon Intro to WebAssembly If you don’t have a good understanding of what WebAssembly is, then Lin Clark will get you there in this video from JSConf EU 2017. So, no, not a new link or anything, but it’s new to me!
🎥 Turborepo Demo and Walkthrough Vercel bought Turborepo. Turborepo is specifically focused on making monorepos better. As someone who’s main codebase is a monorepo with Lerna and Yarn Workspaces such that we can have multiple different sites all share things like a design system, this is right up our alley. This video is with the Turborepo creator Jared Palmer and Lee Robinson, head of developer relations at Vercel. In this video, you get to see it all work.
Everybody knows how trendy t-shirts are. There are some really creative and fun designs out there. Last November I wrote a post about t-shirt designs titled: T-shirt Design: 50+ Awesome Examples. When coming up with this post, I said to myself why not create a post that focuses on both the design of the website...
Software engineering is one of the most talked-about and sought-after career paths in the current world.
During my journey as a software engineer, I have worked with some wonderful people, the latest technologies, and great projects. As I reflect on my humble beginnings and the gradual progression to my current role as an engineering manager, I wish I knew some key aspects of the craft of software engineering back then.
Syncfusion Angular can help develop angular applications faster with many featured components that look like TreeGrid.
According to the documentation, "Syncfusion Angular UI (Essential JS 2) is a collection of modern TypeScript based true Angular Components. It has support for Ahead Of Time (AOT) compilation and Tree-Shaking. All the components are developed from the ground up to be lightweight, responsive, modular, and touch-friendly."
Joel Spolsky’s once prolific blogging output dried up years ago, but Things You Should Never Do, Part I is still a classic after 22 years. He wrote it as an outsider’s postmortem following the first beta release (6) of Netscape’s browser, three years after the previous major release 4. There never was a version 5. The team had decided on a full rewrite, and the resulting delay probably cost them their competitive advantage over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
“If Netscape actually had some adult supervision with software industry experience, they might not have shot themselves in the foot so badly”, he closes.
Now imagine you don’t always want all the transform values to be applied, so some are optional. You might think of CSS optional custom property values:
But surprisingly using optional custom property values like this does not work as intended. If the --transform variable is not defined the whole property will not be applied. I’ve got a little “trick” to fix this and it looks like this:
Notice the difference? There is a fallback defined in there that is set to an empty value: (, )
That’s the trick, and it’s very useful! Here’s what the specification has to say:
In an exception to the usual comma elision rules, which require commas to be omitted when they’re not separating values, a bare comma, with nothing following it, must be treated as valid in var(), indicating an empty fallback value.
This is somewhat spiritually related to the The CSS Custom Property Toggle Trick that takes advantage of a custom property having the value of an empty space.
Demo
Like I said, this is useful and works for any multi-value CSS property. The following demo shows it using text-shadow, background, and filter in addition to the transform example we just discussed.
Some properties that accept multiple values, like text-shadow, require special treatment because they only work with a comma delimiter. In those cases, when the CSS custom property is defined, you (as the code author) know it is only to be used in a situation where a value is already defined where the custom property is used. Then a comma should be inserted directly in the custom property before the first value, like this:
--text-shadow: ,0 0 5px black;
This, of course, inhibits the ability to use this variable in places where it’s the only value of some property. That can be solved, though, by creating “layers” of variables for abstraction purposes, i.e. the custom property is pointing to lower level custom properties.
Beware of Sass compiler
While exploring this trick, uncovered a bug in the Sass compiler that strips away the empty value (,) fallback, which goes against the spec. I’ve reported the bug and hope it will be fixed up soon.
As a temporary workaround, a fallback that causes no rendering can be used, such as:
Apple’s Macs are more powerful than ever before, which means more and more professionals are turning to them to manage their businesses and information. Data room providers have been actively developing their applications to run...
Since you’re here, it means that you are considering using Wix for building your next website. It also means that you’re still undecided and want to learn more about this website platform before making the final decision. We are here to shed some light on what you should expect when you choose Wix to be your tool. This is a comprehensive Wix review that will highlight all you need to know about this platform.
Are you a marketer trying to make the most out of WordPress?
WordPress plugins can help marketers achieve their goals, like increasing sales and attracting more traffic to the website. You can also use plugins to automate marketing workflows and optimize your site for search engines.
In this article, we have hand-picked some of the best WordPress plugins for marketers.
Why Should Marketers Use WordPress Plugins?
WordPress is the most popular website builder in the world that powers over 43% of all websites on the internet.
A big reason for that is that marketers have access to over 59,000 WordPress plugins.
As a marketer, you can use these plugins to improve your workflow and grow your business.
For instance, some plugins help you optimize your website for search engines. Using them, you can improve your keyword rankings and attract more visitors from organic search.
Using the right WordPress plugins can also help improve your site’s conversions. You can create different campaigns to get people to buy your product or enter their emails.
WordPress plugins can also help you to automate different tasks. This helps save time so you can focus on other things to improve your business. For instance, you can automatically share WordPress blog posts on social media using the right plugin.
That said, let’s look at some of the best WordPress plugins for marketers.
You can add beautiful signup forms without hiring developers. OptinMonster allows you to add signup forms in the sidebar, after content, slide-in forms, lightbox popups, display a floating bar, and add countdown timer widgets.
It also comes with built-in analytics and A/B testing to optimize your lead generation efforts. Its signature Exit-Intent technology helps you convert visitors just before they are about to leave your website.
The plugin lets you optimize your site for search engines without technical knowledge or hiring an expert. It allows you to add meta tags, open graph tags, XML sitemaps, breadcrumb navigation, and more.
It also has all the advanced features like smart schema markup (featured snippets), local SEO module, image SEO module, news & video sitemaps, IndexNow integration for faster content indexing, smart link assistant, and more.
Besides that, AIOSEO provides a tool to conduct an SEO audit of your website and analyze your competitors. The plugin also offers a powerful redirection manager that you can use to fix broken links on your site and boost your SEO.
You can build a landing page for your marketing campaign in just a few clicks using the drag and drop builder. SeedProd also offers prebuilt landing page templates to get started and multiple customization options. It lets you add an optin form, countdown timer, images, videos, and more to the landing page.
SeedProd easily integrates with some of the best email marketing services. You can connect your favorite service to the landing page and grow your email list.
Besides, the plugin also lets you set up a coming soon page for a new website or a new product launch, maintenance mode page, 404 pages, and more.
With their new theme builder feature, you can now use SeedProd to create completely custom WordPress themes without any code.
You can send push notifications when a new blog post is published or a new product is launched. It also helps promote sales offers and get more conversions. If you have an eCommerce store, then PushEngage helps recover abandoned carts with personalized messages.
With PushEngage, it’s very easy to send targeted push notifications. You can create different audience segments and send marketing messages based on their action.
Other features offered by the software include A/B testing, automatic drip campaigns, custom campaigns, campaign tracking, and more.
WPForms comes with an easy drag and drop form builder and ready-to-use templates. You can create any type of form with just a few clicks and don’t have to touch a single line of code.
Over 5 million websites use WPForms because it contains advanced features that marketers love such as form abandonment detection, conversational forms, user journey reports, geolocation insights, smart data routing, user segmentation, conditional logic, and more.
As a marketer, you can use WPForms to stay in touch with your visitors. You can create forms to get their feedback, conduct surveys, and help them resolve their queries.
Another benefit of using WPForms is that it’s mobile-friendly and highly optimized for speed. For more details, see our article on how to create a contact form in WordPress.
Uncanny Automator works seamlessly with over 70 different WordPress plugins and third-party tools. This allows you to create automation recipes on your WordPress website.
MonsterInsights is the best analytics solution for WordPress, and it helps you track your site’s performance. As a marketer, you can see which campaigns are working the best by finding out where your visitors are coming from.
You no longer have to rely on your best guess to see what’s working and what’s not. With MonsterInsights, you can uncover insights to grow your business by connecting Google Analytics with WordPress.
For instance, it automatically tracks outbound links clicks, affiliate link clicks, and file downloads. This shows how people are interacting with your website. Plus, it will also help track form conversions, eCommerce performance, and more.
Using the plugin, you can also see stats inside your WordPress dashboard. It helps in quickly glancing at your site’s performance without having to leave your website.
MonsterInsights also offers a Popular Post feature, which lets you display your best content and top products within your content, in the sidebar, or at the end of an article.
Revive Old Posts allows you to engage users on social media by sharing your old content. Social media is an important source of traffic for any website.
The plugin automatically shares links to your old posts on your social profiles. You can choose a time interval between posts, use hashtags, exclude specific categories or posts, and more.
But by default, once a user has added their comment, there is no way to remind them to come back and check out any replies or future discussion.
Using the plugin, users will get notification emails whenever there is a new comment on the post. It not only helps you gain more page views, but it also helps users keep up with the conversation.
You can create as many ad units as you want and then rotate them, group them, or schedule them to maximize your earning potential. You can use it with advertising programs like Google AdSense or sell your own ads directly.
The plugin helps create Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram feeds in WordPress. This way, you get to showcase your social media posts on your website and boost your followers. The plugin also lets you create a social wall and display content from multiple social platforms in one place.
Smash Balloon offers multiple options for customizing the social feed to match your WordPress theme. Besides that, the plugin is SEO-friendly and ensures that your site’s speed isn’t compromised.
Envira Gallery is the best WordPress photo gallery plugin in the market. It allows you to create mobile responsive, SEO friendly, and faster loading image galleries in minutes. You can open up gallery images in beautiful lightbox popups with thumbnail navigations.
Images are the most engaging form of content on the web. You can easily add images to your WordPress posts without any plugin. However, if you are going to share a lot of photos, then you need Envira Gallery. Its drag and drop builder lets you create stunning photo galleries.
If your business requires customers to contact you for quotes, information, or support, then adding a click to call button is beneficial. With rising mobile traffic, users can simply click on the button and instantly reach out to your business phone number.
WP Call Button is a user-friendly plugin and all you have to do is enable the plugin, enter your phone number, and that’s it. The plugin also offers options to change the button text, color, call button position, and more.
You can display the latest customer interactions on your website as social proof, like buying a product or subscribing to your newsletter. This helps you leverage FOMO (fear of missing out) and get more sales.
The plugin is super easy to use, and you can customize the notifications for your audience. It also comes with smart targeting, which allows you to control when and to whom the notifications will be shown.
Is it block themes, FSE themes, block-based themes or better FSE block themes? I see all of them being used for the same thing, let’s change that asap!!! 
