DevOps has fundamentally changed the way software is developed. It has further paved the way for creating faster, flexible, and more collaborative development and delivery processes. Thus, new and exciting DevOps tools emerge each year to improve existing workflows or introduce new functionality to the DevOps process. In this article, let’s have a look at five DevOps tools you can add to your tech stack in 2022.
Anthos
Modern workloads are becoming more complex than ever. Therefore, these workloads need to be distributed in different environments from the cloud, on-premise, and edge, depending on the requirement. Managing multiple different environments has become commonplace, with multi-cloud being a popular option to distribute workloads while maintaining flexibility. However, it will add increased management overhead to the DevOps process. Anthos aims to solve this issue by providing a unified platform to manage applications in on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud platforms.
In this article, we will explore how RAML specifications can be defined for the XML representation of resources. This will be explained with the help of JOB API. Consider this API for the purpose of getting a list of all jobs published by different companies. A job can also be posted using this JOB API.
Cloudentity, an identity and authorization infrastructure company, has announced that its platform now supports the capability to secure GraphQL APIs. The company believes that pairing GraphQL with its automated authorization infrastructure allows developers to accelerate development while also ensuring uniform security protocols.
Ridding your site of Spam comments and registrations is an on-going battle. But if you arm yourself with the best defenses, you’ll be much better poised to win the war.
Forminator is a free, easy-to-use WordPress form builder plugin that protects your forms from bogus comments and registrations at all times, using a combination of industry-leading anti-spam tools.
Preventing form and comment spam in WordPress starts by zeroing in on how it gets through. With spammers and bots growing by the day, tools that recognize (and stop) them with a high degree of accuracy is vital.
When creating a form in Forminator, like a new user registration, you can enable a combination of the most successful methods for eliminating spam.
In this article, we’re going to look at what the top tools of the trade are when it comes to the prevention of form and comment spam. Then we’ll see how to put each one into action in Forminator’s settings.
It won’t be long until you see that Forminator’s spam protections are fastidious and formidable.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
Let’s look at the tools in Forminator that help to keep spam at bay.
Triple Threat (Protection)
As the cunning moves spammers & bots use continue to rise, so do (thankfully) the tools to outsmart them.
Forminator takes full advantage of the most solid contenders available. The top three–while not foolproof—are highly popular and effective in their own right.
Captcha
Forminator has two different CAPTCHA options available for you to implement: reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha.
ReCAPTCHA Banner
Google’s reCAPTCHAhas been at the forefront of bot mitigation for over a decade. Applying continuous machine learning to overcome the binary logic of traditional challenge-based detection technologies, it actively protects the data of five million sites.
Using an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges, reCAPTCHA keeps malicious software from engaging in abusive activities on your website. Meanwhile, legitimate users will be able to login, view pages, create accounts, and complete transactions with little to no fuss–especially with reCAPTCHA v3.
reCAPTCHA is free, even for Enterprise accounts–for up to 1 million Assessments per month.
hCaptcha Banner
hCaptcha is a privacy focused company, providing reliable bot detection while being simple for humans to solve. They present CAPTCHA challenges that are difficult for bots but easy for people by collecting difficult-to-label data from machine learning problems, and using it to distinguish whether a website or app visitor is human.
Both reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha come with visible or invisible options in Forminator. Sign-up is required for both, but is easy and free. You can use either one throughout your site on different forms, but only one per each form. And, each form requires its own set of API keys.
Akismet
Akismet Banner
The brainchild of Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Akismet is one of the most popular WordPress plugins on the WP.org repository, and has been leading the crusade against spam since 2005.
Automatically checking site comments and contact form submissions against their global database of spam, Akismet allows you to review the filtered comment spam it catches for any false positives you’d want to let through.
API keys are also needed to activate this tool, and are free for personal use. There are paid subscriptions available for Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus, with different features and price points for each.
Akismet is integrated into many of the most used plugins, making for a smooth user experience.
Honeypot
Whereas the two options we just discussed are specific products, Honeypot is a method. In computer terminology, a honeypot is a computer security mechanism set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.
Honeypot uses a decoy operation to ward off spam, set up purely to attract and detect potential attackers. By monitoring the decoy, the owner of the system can detect if they are being targeted by cyber threats.
The process involves placing a hidden field using JavaScript, CSS (or similar). Spambots automatically search and fill every form, so if this form gets filled in, chances are very good that it was a spam submission.
By employing this simple coding strategy, bots landing on your website will reveal themselves; a simple and effective way to ensure that you only send messages to genuine subscribers/customers, protecting their privacy and your company’s reputation.
Forminator Banner
Set Up Spam Protections in Forminator
Now that we know the tools at our disposal in the Forminator plugin, let’s look at how we can implement each one.
You’ll need to create a form first, so we’ll have something to attach spam protections to.
This is an easy task that takes only seconds. First, make sure to install & activate Forminator, if you haven’t already.
Create a Form
Navigate to the WordPress Dashboard > Forminator > Forms, then click on the blue + Create button.
Select Registration (it will turn blue and add a checkmark in the corner), then click the Continue button.
Type in a name, then click the + Create button.
Form created! That simple. The default template added a few fields for you, which you can add to, or remove from.
Creating a Registration Form with a template… done with a few clicks!
There are a stunning array of options and personalizations in Forminator, so making it your own is a lot of fun. For now, we’ll turn our focus back to the anti spam tools.
Enable a Captcha
From the Edit Form page, click the Edit button next to your form.
Click the purple + Insert Fields button.
Select Captcha (it will turn blue and add a checkmark in the corner), then click the Insert Fields button.
Next, you’ll select which Captcha type/version n you want to use, a threshold tolerance, and more. Of importance here, we need to input the API keys for it.
API keys need to be entered to use reCAPTCHA in forms.
Note: Each different Captcha type will require its own keys in your global settings. If you haven’t yet created APIs for your site, head over to your Google reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha and set them up (takes less than a minute), then return to Forminator to finish the configurations.
Enter both of your API keys, then click the blue Save Settings button.
Setup complete. You can now check out a preview of what your form reCAPTCHA looks like.
Looks nice! We chose the v3 reCAPTCHA.
Enable Honeypot and Akismet
In order to use Akismet’s features in Forminator, you will need to install & activate the plugin, so make sure to do that first.
Navigate to Forminator’s Dashboard, then open the form you created.
From the Edit Form page, click Behavior from the left sidebar menu, then scroll down to Security.
Honeypot & Akismet one-click settings in Forminator.
Toggle the Enable Honeypot protection button ON (it will go from gray to blue).
Toggle the Enable Akismet spam protection button ON (it will go from gray to blue).
In the Akismet section, you will see two options for how Forminator should handle spam submissions:
Fail Submission – This is the message visitors will see if they fail the spam check. You can customize this to say whatever you like; just type your desired text in the corresponding field.
Mark as Spam – Entries marked as spam will be captured in the database, but not shown in Submissions. Additionally, Payments, Notification emails, and other automatic processes will be blocked.
Enable logged in submission only – Toggle this feature ON, if you want to allow only registered users to submit forms.
Additional Settings
There is an abundance of options available for your form.
So many, in fact, it would require another tutorial completely—and we already have several great ones—so I won’t go into further detail here.
I will however, quickly list some of the many other features, so you can get an idea just how robust forms in Forminator can be.
Lifespan – choose your form’s expiry (never, by date, or by number of submissions)
After Submission Behaviors – use AJAX, or reload the page
Email Notifications – send customized emails to post form submission (includes advanced features)
Third-party Integrations – connect to apps via their APIs (Zapier, MailChimp, Google Sheets, Slack, & more)
Database Storage – set auto-deletion time; multiple option values
Submissions Privacy – choose retention length; handling of erasure requests
Fields – 25 (and growing!); plus e-signatures* (*Pro version only)
Forminator is more than just a great form builder with powerful spam tools baked in.
It also comes loaded with capabilities to create interactive polls, fun quizzes, feedback widgets, and some popular payment options. Truly, something for everyone.
Spam Distress? Try Forms with Finesse
While there’s no way to completely eradicate spam from the web, at least not that we know of presently, there are some incredibly effective tools that you can use.
One great option is to use a robust security plugin—Defender, for example, which uses IP Banning.
Another is to use a Web Application Firewall, which most good hosts nowadays will provide. WAFs often have country lock-out capabilities, so known locations of spammers and bots can be completely cut off.
And of course, as showcased in this post, you can use a plugin that enables a Captcha, Akismet, or Honeypot. With Forminator, you get all three of these top-of-their-game tools, along with easy options to implement them.
Forminator will make a big difference in shoring up your defenses against the nuisance of comment & registration spam, providing a strong—and free—resource, right at your fingertips.
You can use the filetype: operator in Google to search for Office files of specific types. For instance, a query like invoice template filetype:xls will find public Excel spreadsheets that match the search query. Similarly, you can find Word documents and PowerPoint presentations on the Internet by appending filetype:doc or filetype:ppt to the search query.
How do you view a file that you found on the Internet in the browser itself?
All modern browsers have built-in support for PDF files so you can view them directly in the browser without downloading the file to your computer. However, if you are working with Office files, you can use simple URL hacks to view the file inside Google Docs or Microsoft Office Viewer.
View Office Files in Browser
We’ve two sample files, an Excel spreadsheet and a Word file, hosted on the Internet. The file URLs are provided below and the requirement is to view these files directly in the browser.
Google Drive includes a built-in viewer feature that allows you to view Office files directly in the browser without downloading them. The files are streamed from the hosting website and not uploaded to your Google Drive either.
To view the file, replace FILE_URL with the link of the file you want to view (see example)
https://drive.google.com/viewer?url=FILE_URL
If you would like to embed an Office file in your website with the Google Drive viewer, the HTMl would be as below.
You would need to replace the actual URL of the document and may also adjust the height and width attributes of the IFRAME tag.
Similar to Google Drive Viewer, Microsoft Office also offers a online document viewer to help you to view Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks directly in the browser without downloading them.
Simply replace FILE_URL with the URL of the Office file. (see example)
In addition to previewing Office files, the Office Web Apps Viewer tool can also be used for embedding Microsoft Office documents into your website or blog. The embed code would be something like this:
While Office Web Apps viewer is definitely a better option that Google Docs Viewer, a limitation is that it only works with Office Files, Google Drive Viewer can also handle PDFs, Photoshop files and even AutoCAD drawings.
This quick tutorial will walk you through the steps to create your own custom stickers from photos in Canva. The basic idea is that you remove the background from the photo, add a thick white border around the cut out image and save it as a PNG file with a transparent background.
Here are the steps:
Step 1: Add the Photo to Canvas
Create a new design in Canva and drag the photo from your desktop to the canvas.
Step 2: Remove the Image Background
Select the image, click the Edit Image button and choose the BG Remover option to instantly remove the background. Click Apply to save the changes.
Step 3: Add a White Outline
While the photo is selected, go to Shadows and choose the Glow option. Set the background color of the glow to white, set the blur to 0 and the transparency to 100%. You can now play around with the Size slider to get the desired thickness of the outline.
These steps were performed on the Canva website but you can also do them inside the Canva app on your iPad or Android phone.
Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs, clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples.
In this article you’ll learn all about the File System Access API, the web API that allows read and write access to a user’s local files. By Charlie Gerard.
Minze lets you rapidly build native web components. Create encapsulated, reusable, cross-framework web components and scale your component library with ease.
Free PSD files can be very useful and save you lots of time with your design projects. In this post I have assembled an amazing collection of high quality “call to action” buttons from around the web. Please feel free to download them and use them on your blog or website. I am confident that...
What is a blog? What is blogging? Should you become a blogger? These are common questions nowadays when it seems like everyone and their dog has their own blog. But if you haven’t joined the blogging revolution yet, you might not be familiar with what a blog is and why so many people are blogging right now.
Contents The benefits of becoming a VIP as well as the awards Tangiers Casino Protection and governing norms Gambling in a responsible manner The Best Bonus for New Players Are you interested in playing casino games online but want to find a reputable and fun venue in which to do it in Australia? Tangiers Casino, […]
Do you want to build your email list with OptinMonster?
OptinMonster is a well-known popup and lead generation plugin that makes it easy to grow your email list in WordPress and convert website visitors into subscribers.
In this article, we’ll show you how to build your email list in WordPress by using OptinMonster.
Note: OptinMonster is the plugin that we use to grow our email list on WPBeginner, and it was created by WPBeginner founder, Syed Balkhi to help us get more email subscribers.
What is OptinMonster and Why Use it to Build Your Email List?
More than 70% of the people visiting your website will never return again. That’s why it’s important to build anemail list so you can stay in touch with your visitors and bring them back to your website.
But getting website visitors to sign up for your email list can be a challenge.
OptinMonster is a tool for creating email signup forms including popups, floating bars, full screen welcome mats, slide-in scroll boxes, inline personalized lead forms, gamified spin to win optins, and more.
It includes a template library of 400+ high converting templates you can fully customize with the drag and drop builder.
There’s a lot of useful features like the Exit-Intent technology which lets you show a popup the exact moment when someone is about to leave your site. This helps convert your abandoning website visitors into email subscribers.
Plus, it’s incredibly beginner friendly, so you can create high converting optin forms to grow your email newsletter without writing any code.
Unlike other WordPress popup plugins, OptinMonster will NOT slow down your website, and features like A/B testing and conversion analytics will actually work.
This sounds crazy, but unfortunately most WordPress lead generation plugins don’t work properly when caching plugins are active, so as a website owner you’re forced to choose between faster website or more subscribers. With OptinMonster, you don’t.
With that said, let’s take a look at how you can build your email list in WordPress using OptinMonster, step by step.
Building Your Email List in WordPress with OptinMonster
First thing you need to do is head over to the OptinMonster website and click the ‘Get OptinMonster Now’ button.
This brings you to the pricing page, where you need to click the ‘Get Started’ button under the plan that’s best for your needs.
We recommend the Pro plan, which is the most popular and includes Exit Intent. You can get an additional 10% off with our exclusive OptinMonster coupon code.
After that, you need to enter your payment details and complete your purchase.
This plugin connects your WordPress website to the OptinMonster software.
Upon activation, you need to connect your account. To start, simply head over to OptinMonster » Settings in your WordPress admin panel.
Then, click the ‘Connect an Existing Account’ button.
If you want to create a free account to test out the software, then simply click the ‘Create a Free Account to Get Started’ button.
Now, you’ll see a popup that will ask you to enter your email address.
Simply enter the email address you used to create your account and click the ‘Connect to WordPress’ button.
Next, there are a series of on screen prompts to finish connecting your website with OptinMonster.
Once you complete the steps, your WordPress site and OptinMonster will be connected, and you can create your first campaign.
Creating an Optin Form in WordPress With OptinMonster
To create your first campaign go to OptinMonster » Campaigns in your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Create Your First Campaign’ button.
First, you need to choose your campaign type. There are all kinds of campaigns to choose from, including popups, full screen welcome mats, inline optins, and more.
For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll select the ‘Popup’ campaign type that allows you to display a high converting popup on your site.
To choose a campaign type, simply click on it.
Below this, there’s a list of templates that will form the foundation for your popup campaign. You can choose any template you’d like.
To choose a template, simply hover over it and click the ‘Use Template’ button.
Next, you need to enter a name for your campaign. This won’t appear on your website, but is to help you remember what the campaign is for.
Then, click the ’Start Building’ button.
This launches the OptinMonster campaign builder that shows a live preview of your campaign in the right panel.
You can simply point and click on any item in the preview section to make changes, move it, or delete it.
For this tutorial, we’ll keep the default design but change the text.
To do this, simply click on the existing text, and then you can make changes directly in the popup preview.
The left hand menu controls the font colors, spacing, and more.
You can also add new features to your popup with the included blocks.
Simply drag blocks from the left hand ‘Blocks’ menu to your popup to add new features.
Once you’re finished customizing how your popup looks, you need to set the rules for how it will display.
To do this, simply click the ‘Display Rules’ tab at the top of the screen. Here, you can set the conditions for when the popup will appear. You can completely customize these display rules so you can show the right message to the right person at the right time.
For this tutorial, we’ll create a simple display rule so the popup shows up after the user spends a certain amount of time on your site.
To do this, you need to select ‘time on page’ and set the number of seconds you want to pass before the popup displays.
Then, to have your popup display on every page make sure the ‘current URL path’ is set to ‘is any page’.
After that, click the ‘Next Step’ button.
This brings you to the ‘Actions’ screen where you’ll set what happens after the time has passed.
First, make sure ‘Optin’ is selected in the ‘show the campaign view’ box, then you can add effects and sound effects if you’d like.
Then, click the ‘Next’ button.
After that, you can review your display rules to make sure they’re correct.
Then, click the ‘Save’ button to save your campaign so far.
Connecting Your WordPress Popup to an Email Marketing Service
Next, you can connect your popup to an email marketing service. That way, when a visitor enters their email address, it will automatically get added to your email list.
OptinMonster also includes a feature called Monster Leads. This will independently store your leads, so you can always import these to your email marketing provider later on if you’d like.
If you don’t have an email marketing service yet, then we recommend using Constant Contact. It’s one of the most popular email marketing services in the world and offers great support for those just getting started.
To connect your email marketing provider to your popup, simply click the ‘Integrations’ tab at the top of the page.
Then click the ‘Add New Integration’ button.
Next, scroll down until you find your email marketing provider and click it.
OptinMonster will walk you through the steps of connecting the two together. For most email marketing providers, all you need to do is copy over your API key.
After that, you’re ready to launch your campaign.
Launching Your OptinMonster Popup Campaign in WordPress
To get started setting your campaign live, click the ‘Publish’ button at the top of the page.
This brings you to a screen where you can review your campaign before making it live.
If you’re satisfied with how your campaign looks, then switch the status in the ‘Publish Status’ box from ‘Draft’ to ‘Publish’.
Now, your campaign is running and live on your website. Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button before leaving the page.
You may also want to verify that your campaign is active by going to OptinMonster » Campaigns in your WordPress admin panel.
Then, make sure your campaign is switched to ‘Publish’ in the ‘Status’ column.
This screen also shows all of the campaigns you’ve created and which ones are active or paused on your website.
A/B Split Testing For Optins in WordPress
Once your campaign has been running for a while and you’re growing your email list, you might want to improve your campaign by doing A/B split testing.
A/B split testing is when you make slights changes to the appearance, text, and even colors in your popup campaigns. These slight tweaks can lead to huge improvements in conversions.
OptinMonster comes with an easy-to-use A/B split testing feature that eliminates the guesswork for you.
Note: You’ll need to be using the Plus or higher plan to use the split testing feature.
To start, go to OptinMonster » Campaigns, then click on the ‘Create Test’ link to create a new split test.
This brings up a popup window where you can add notes about the campaign.
Then, click the ‘Create Split Test’ button.
This brings you back to the same campaign builder screen, where you can make changes.
Once you’re finished, click the ‘Save’ button, and the OptinMonster will automatically run the split test for you.
Over time, you’ll be able to see which campaign leads to a better conversion rate.
To view your campaign data, simply navigate back to OptinMonster » Campaigns and it will show your results over time.
Next, you might want to experiment with adding content upgrades or a simple yes/no campaign to increase your conversions and get even more email subscribers.
Final Thoughts
Over the years, we have tested just about every WordPress popup and lead generation plugin, and we continue to use OptinMonster for a good reason.
Most other WordPress lead generation plugins have two major flaws:
They slow down your website because by design they have to store analytics data in your website’s database. This is really resource intensive and may get your WordPress hosting account suspended.
Powerful features like A/B testing and page level targeting do not work properly with WordPress caching plugins. But you can’t not use caching on your site because that will significantly slow down your site.
Since OptinMonster started out as a standard WordPress plugin, it also had these issues in the early days, but the team adapted and converted the plugin into a proper SaaS application in 2015.
Now OptinMonster can work independently of WordPress which means you can use it on any website builder, but more importantly it has a robust code architecture that overcomes the above issues which no other WordPress plugin has been able to do thus far.
This is why over 1.2 million websites are using OptinMonster and it’s the market leader when it comes to lead generation and conversion optimization.
In my hometown, I'm a budding entrepreneur with a cab business that I'd want to develop to meet current market demands. It would be more expensive to create a mobile app for both iOS and Android. As a result, I resorted to Android to build my own taxi booking application. Is there anyone who can help me come up with a nice idea for it? Should I rely on ready-made mobile apps on the market?
I'm simply looking for the most basic essential features right now, with the goal of eventually updating my app solution to include additional critical functions and a more appealing user experience.
I am a video news publisher and news anchor at Okaat. Okaat is a platform where people get the latest news video about leaked videos, scandals, showbiz, celebrities, politicians, [talk shows], etc from all around the world.
Millions of users can be accessing your web application from myriad corners of the world. As a business owner, one would always wish that their online systems work as smoothly as possible. Glitches in the online user experience can cause loss of potential customers.
JavaScript backend is widely used all over the world when it comes to web programming. Earlier, it was only considered a tool for front-end development. But now the same has become a major cross-platform tool for cross-platform techs such as PhoneGap, React Native, Native Script, and more. But there were a lot of problems when it came to back-end projects. Here’s where Node.js made the news.
One of the most important concepts in JavaScript, as with most programming languages, is the ability to define variables. A variable is a container of a value or data. Some types of variables can later be changed, based on the logic we use in our code. Let's take a look at how variables work in Javascript.
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