#SocialMedia Study: Why Instagram's Audience Matters To Brands - infographic

"With Instagram claiming to have passed the 400 Million user mark, this Chart of the Day examines why its audience is so attractive to brands.

With about 70% of Instagrammers being under 35, the photo-sharing site has a younger audience than any of the other major networks. What’s more, over 60% are logging in daily, giving Instagram better engagement figures than any network except for Facebook.

But it’s not just their age and visit frequency which is important here, it’s also their tendency to interact with brands that has catapulted Instagram to the attention of marketers. For a start, just over half of them say they follow their favorite brands via social networks – a figure which is almost 10 points ahead of the equivalent metric among Facebookers.

by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

5 Games That Teach You How to Code

These Web games will give you a fun and engaging introduction to the world of programming.

CodeCombat

CodeCombat is an HTML5 role-playing game (RPG) that teaches you fundamental programming concepts.

In CodeCombat, you play a hero adventuring through the game’s levels. The first level is Kithard Dungeon, which covers basic programming concepts. You’re faced with coding challenges throughout your journey, and if you overcome them, you’ll unlock the next level and earn experience points (XP) that you can use to improve your hero.

CodeCombat is appealing to young, aspiring programmers. According to an in-game survey, 62% of CodeCombat’s users are under 18 years old.

CodeCombat supports five programming languages: JavaScript, CoffeeScript, Lua, and Python. The game covers a wide range of programming topics — strings, variables, method invocation, vector drawing, and much more.

Code Hunt

Code Hunt is a Sci-Fi-themed HTML5 game developed by Microsoft Research.

In this game, you play as a code hunter tasked with repairing code so that it returns the expected result. There are 14 levels, called Sectors in the Code Hunt nomenclature, for you to complete.

Code Hunt supports either Java or C#. Programming concepts you’ll learn include arithmetic, loops, and conditions.

Teachers who would like to extend the game with additional Sectors can do so by first reading the Code Hunt Designer Manual.

CodinGame

CodinGame is a huge suite of challenging games for programmers. If you want to improve your coding skills, playing CodinGame is a fun way to do so.

Over 20 programming languages including PHP, C, and JavaScript are supported by CodinGame. The user interface is feature-packed and can be customized. For example, you can choose your code editor’s style: "Emacs", "Vim", or "Classic" (the default theme).

The game can be played on single player mode or multiplayer mode. In multiplayer mode, you can solve CodinGame challenges with other users.

Screeps

Screeps is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) for JavaScript programmers.

The game is an open-world strategy game where you control units, called creeps, that will help you mine resources, establish your territory, and so forth. Being a multiplayer online game means your creeps will be alongside the creeps of other players.

Controlling your creeps involves writing JavaScript. (Screeps = scripting your creeps.) To learn how to play the game, hit up the docs.

FightCode

In FightCode, the objective is simple: Create a robot that will defeat the robots of other players.

How do you create a robot? By writing some JavaScript. For example, you can use the .rotateCannon() method to rotate your robot’s cannon by a certain number of degrees when a certain event happens.

Before building your indestructible, world-dominating robot, the first step you’ll need to take is to read the docs to learn how to code a robot.

Read Next

10 Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills

15 Free Books for People Who Code

5 Good Habits That Will Make You a Better Coder

Jacob Gube is the founder of Six Revisions. He’s a front-end developer. Connect with him on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 5 Games That Teach You How to Code appeared first on Six Revisions.

by Jacob Gube via Six Revisions

Creating PDFs from Markdown with Pandoc and LaTeX

If you've read some of my previous posts on SitePoint or elsewhere, you may know that I'm working on a board game. In the game, called Chip Shop, you get to run a computer company in 1980s America.

As part of the project, I'm attempting to open source the entire game as much as possible. After several false starts, I've decided on a basic framework of Markdown for most of the game components—especially cards and the manual.

As the game's website uses Jekyll, the website for the game is generated from the Markdown files. I intend to have premium pre-boxed and print-yourself versions of the game, and to achieve this I need to generate PDFs from the Markdown files.

What I'm Trying to Accomplish

My ideal workflow is to generate the PDF files at the same time as generating the website, rather than generate the files as visitors request them. This rules out my usual option for PDF generation, wkhtmltopdf, as it generates PDFs from already generated HTML. Another reason it's not an option is that I want the PDF card versions to look different from the HTML pages, and Jekyll lacks any kind of view mode feature to accomplish this without resorting to complex CSS rules.

The Markdown template file for cards in the Chip Shop game contains a lot of Markdown front matter fields for game mechanics. Not all are used on every card. For convenience during printing, I need to fit as many cards on an A4 page as possible—in this case, a 3x3 grid. Eventually the pages will need to be double-sided, but I haven't implemented that yet.

Enter Pandoc and LaTeX

[author_more]

Any internet search looking for solutions to generating PDFs from Markdown will lead you down the Pandoc path. Pandoc is an open-source, Swiss Army knife markup conversion tool that supports a wide and growing variety of input and output markup formats.

To generate PDFs with Pandoc, LaTeX is needed. LaTeX has its roots in the scientific research community, and is a document declaration and layout system. Combining Pandoc and LaTeX allows us to use variables, and thus to generate PDFs from a series of Markdown files and support Markdown front matter.

Despite the power of Pandoc and LaTeX, I couldn't find any way of combining multiple PDFs (cards) onto one page, especially when using variables from Markdown files. After much research, I settled on PDFJam, a simple command line tool for this requirement.

Installing Dependencies

Markdown

You need no extra software for Markdown, except maybe an editor and there are so many of those, I suggest you read a few SitePoint posts to make your choice.

Jekyll

I'll continue to use Jekyll in my examples taken from my game to illustrate the build process, but it isn't an essential part of PDF generation if you don't need a website.

Pandoc

On my Mac, I installed Pandoc with Homebrew, but there are options for all operating systems.

LaTeX

There are lots of opinions on the best way to install LaTeX, depending on what you need or intend to do with it. A full installation of its common tools and libraries can near 2GB, but for most purposes a minimal installation will be enough. Read the project's download page to find the best option for you.

For this tutorial, we'll be using the xelatex engine, as I use custom fonts. But you can select any engine that supplies specific features you require.

PDFJam

Depending on how you installed LaTeX, you may have PDFJam installed already. (Check by typing which pdfjam in the terminal.) If you haven't, then find details on installation here.

Continue reading %Creating PDFs from Markdown with Pandoc and LaTeX%

by Chris Ward via SitePoint

Responsive jQuery Pop Up Gallery

In this tutorial you will lean how to create a an awesome popup gallery. Each gallery will have a small preview animation. This tutorial will provide you with five different popup galleries.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

React Data Fetching with Relay

React is ushering a new era in front end. Published by Facebook, it has rapidly become a popular library used in production by many technology companies. In this article, we’re going to discuss a new complementary React framework called Relay.

The Problem With Data Fetching In React

As React has grown in popularity, the scale and complexity of the projects built with React has grown along with it. React is primarily a view layer library. This has caused some teams to hit unknown territory or limitations while building projects that require a different infrastructure. Facebook has been proactive in offering support and guidance during these growing pains.

Flux

One of the early growing pains for developers using React was event handling. Facebook responded to this issue by publishing Flux, which is an abstract pattern that encouraged unidirectional data flow for handling events in React.

I’ll assume some familiarity with Flux, so I won’t discuss the details of it in this article. In case you aren’t familiar with this topic, you can give a reading to this article by Sandeep Panda or take a look at this page about Flux.

Flux has taken the React ecosystem to the next level. As developers started to get more familiar with Flux, some issues emerged. Flux has been great for managing data as application state, but populating the initial state into an application has been a source of friction.

Continue reading %React Data Fetching with Relay%

by Kevin Zettler via SitePoint

Shreyans Chandak Resume

Interactive resume of Shreyans Chandak. Shreyans Chandak is a Computer Programmer, Web Developer, Electronics hobbyist, Graphic Designer.

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Tondero

Tondero has produced films, productions, and the most successful shows in the Peruvian market. On 2015 commissioned Albor to build a site that reflected their works in an informative, stylish and professional way..

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

Zooya Web Agency

Zooya is professional thinking

by csreladm via CSSREEL | CSS Website Awards | World best websites | website design awards | CSS Gallery

PHP Channel’s 3rd 2015 Trimester Update

Another three months have gone by, and we’ve got some news to share.

First, let’s introduce our newest authors!

New Authors

Jeff Smith, USA

Jeff Smith is a full-stack web developer who enjoys writing and reading of all types, and is interested in the Internet, business and entrepreneurship, technology, and learning new stuff. Jeff has been a very active member of our forums for a while now, and decided to chime in with his opinions by writing about defensive programming in PHP.

His debut post was well received, and part two is coming soon. In fact, it’s already in our peer review queue, so if you’d like to take an early look and give us your opinion on it, our doors are wide open!

Continue reading %PHP Channel’s 3rd 2015 Trimester Update%

by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint

How to Write a Winning Pitch Deck

It’s tough enough to get a meeting with a VC. But once you’ve stolen their attention, how do you get their financial support?

VCs look for the valuable product, great team and exciting mission trifecta. But even if you have those three things, you’re not guaranteed to score an investment—you also need a compelling pitch deck that sums those elements up and makes it very clear to investors why this is one opportunity they shouldn’t pass up.

Wondering how to create a pitch deck worthy of your startup? Read on for tips from VCs, founders and Silicon Valley insiders.

Continue reading %How to Write a Winning Pitch Deck%

by Aja Frost via SitePoint

Create a Mobile Application Using WordPress, Ionic, and AngularJS

An Interview With Tuts+ Reader Lucy Stanford

Jenkins Workflow: Scripting Out Complex Builds

This Week in Mobile Web Development (#76)

Read this on the Web Mobile Web Weekly September 30, 2015   #76 Holly Schinsky recommends How to make web forms work better on mobile — Taking time to consider the device you’re targeting can make a huge difference in the usability of your web forms over simply making them responsive. Creative Bloq Brian Rinaldi recommends Mobile Web Is Top Of Funnel, Mobile App Is Bottom Of Funnel — Data shows that mobile web unique visitor growth is faster than mobile app visitor growth and Fred Wilson says that this is because mobile web is “top of funnel” for user acquisition. AVC Holly Schinsky recommends Visual Studio Emulators: Debug WebGL and HTML5 Mobile Experiences — Microsoft announces new emulators for debugging WebGL and HTML5 mobile apps. SitePoint - David Rousset This issue is sponsored by Tabris.JS Native mobile UIs in JavaScript with Tabris.js - iOS 9 ready — Tabris.js is a great way to develop apps with native UIs for Android and iOS in JavaScript. Jump in and give it a try! Tabris.JS Brian Rinaldi recommends Patterns — Responsive Web Design — A series of patterns for building responsive website designs. Responsive Design.is Holly Schinsky recommends Getting Started Building Apps with Ionic and Parse — A set of lessons to help you get started building mobile apps with Angular/Ionic and Parse.com. Aaron K Saunders Holly Schinsky recommends Hello Backend: Your Second Ionic Framework App — Part 2 in a series on building a hybrid app with Ionic. In this post, learn how to add the backend to your Ionic hybrid app with a factory talking to a Random User Generator API. McGivery.com Holly Schinsky recommends How To Use LokiJS For Local Storage In Your Ionic App — A tutorial on using the LokiJS in-memory database solution for local storage in your hybrid apps. Gone Hybrid Holly Schinsky recommends PhoneGap Day 2016 — The PhoneGap Day 2016 website has been launched with links for early bird tickets, call for speakers and more details around the scheduling and venue. PhoneGap Day 2016 Holly Schinsky recommends Android Builds Now Using Gradle on PhoneGap Build By Default — PhoneGap Build is now using Gradle for all Android builds by default. Read on for details. PhoneGap Build Blog Peter Cooper recommends What I Learned While Publishing An HTML5 Mobile App Thomas Hunter II Brian Rinaldi recommends PSA: Safari on iOS9 has a media query bug — The viewport size is set incorrectly when the viewport meta tag contains “initial-scale=1” or “width=device-width”, and the page contains an element that is wider than the desired viewport’s boundary. Reddit Brian Rinaldi recommends A note on weird font size changes in mobile Chrome — An unusual test case that causes text to automatically change size despite the CSS. QuirksMode Brian Rinaldi recommends A Glimpse of Latest Mobile App Development Trends — 15 development trends in the mobile app market according to Katie Stanfield. InfoQ Holly Schinsky recommends Tutorial: Create an Instagram Gallery App with Onsen UI + React — How to use Onsen UI with React to develop a simple Instagram app. Onsen.io Holly Schinsky recommends A Beginner’s Guide to Performant Design Decisions — Tips to implement good design practices to achieve the best 'perceived performance' in your design. Sparkbox Brian Rinaldi recommends Integrating the Calendar into your Ionic App — An example of integrating an app with the device’s calendar. Raymond Camden Brian Rinaldi recommends Rapid Cross-OS Mobile App Development: Lessons Learned — A discussion of the process of planning, developing and testing a cross-platform hybrid app by Jordan Crone. Smashing Magazine Brian Rinaldi recommends Another Cordova Mashup – Pixelatize — A sample hybrid mobile app integrating Jenn Schiffer’s pixelatize to create pixelated images. Raymond Camden Holly Schinsky recommends Weigh - A command line tool for checking the weight of browserifiable modules — A command line tool to check the weight (in bytes) of any browserifiable module. Bjørge Næss Curated by Brian Rinaldi and Holly Schinsky for Cooper Press. Cooper Press is located at Office 30, Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, UK Update your email address or stop receiving MWW here

by via Mobile Web Weekly

This Week's HTML5 and Browser Technology News (Issue 208)

Read this e-mail on the Web HTML Weekly Issue 208 — September 30, 2015 How To Make An SVG Lava Lamp Chris Gannon A well written and thorough tutorial that goes from doing illustrative work in Adobe Illustrator through to exporting to SVG and writing code to make the lamp ‘work’. US Government Releases Official 'Web Design Standards' US Digital Service Open source UI components and a visual style guide to create consistency and beautiful user experiences across U.S. federal government websites. They recommend using Sass, Bourbon and Neat throughout. Easy Content Organisation with HTML5 Steve Faulkner With just 5 elements (aside, footer, header, main and nav) you can provide the understanding and navigation benefits of content organisation to users who would otherwise not be able to perceive it from visual cues alone. Send email using the Mailgun API Mailgun  Sponsored Easy SMTP integration and a simple, RESTful API abstracts away the messy details of sending transactional or bulk email. Scale quickly, whether you need to send 10 or 10 million emails. Start sending email now with Mailgun PostCSS Deep Dive: What You Need to Know Kezz Bracey “You should learn what [PostCSS] is and how to use it ASAP,” says Kezz Bracey. PostCSS is a tool that transforms CSS via JavaScript plugins and offers a lot of interesting functionality. New HTML5 Player Beta Trial for BBC iPlayer BBC - James East BBC iPlayer is one the most heavily used video on demand services in the world and they’re using the new open MPEG-DASH standard and Media Source Extensions to stream video to an HTML5 video player. Image Diffing using CSS Franklin Ta A CSS3 filter trick where you invert the colors and set opacity to 50%. Don't Let Your CDN Betray You: Use Subresource Integrity Mozilla Hacks “Using a new specification called Subresource Integrity, a website can include JavaScript that will stop working if it has been modified.” Jobs Join The Top 3% of Freelance HTML5 Developers WorldwideToptal is an exclusive network of elite freelance software engineers. Apply today to work with top clients, set your own rates, and collaborate with other top HTML5 developers. Toptal In brief Accessibility: Towards an Inclusive Web with Edge and Windows 10 news  Microsoft Edge Dev Blog Give back to the developer community - apply to teach today. news Actively seeking web developers to join our tight knit family of passionate teachers and earn royalties.   Pluralsight SPONSOR A Look at Firefox 41's Improvements for Developers news tools  Mozilla Hacks World’s First Conference Calls Between Chrome, Firefox, and Edge news Notes on continued developments of cross-browser WebRTC interoperability.   Peter Saint-Andre 6 Use Cases For CSS's calc() tutorial  Vincent Pickering CSS Stacking Contexts: What They Are and How They Work tutorial  Tiffany B Brown Modern Web Layout with Flexbox tutorial  Webdesigner Depot How To Do Knockout Text on the Web tutorial  Chris Coyier My Current HTML Email Development Workflow tutorial  Massimo Cassandro Exploring the 'crossorigin' Media Attribute in HTML5 tutorial  Schalk Neethling Easier HTML Refactors Through Better Selectors opinion  Daniel O'Connor What I Learned While Publishing An HTML5 Mobile App opinion  Thomas Hunter II Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web opinion “Your site may soon be collateral damage in a war between Silicon Valley superpowers.” (i.e. Google and Apple)   Jeffrey Zeldman Bootstrap Form Builder + Processing tools Easily create beautiful HTML forms styled with Bootstrap. Let our server validate and email the submissions.  Formden SPONSOR Visual Studio Emulators: Debug WebGL and HTML5 Mobile Experiences tools  SitePoint The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Logger Extension tools A Chrome extension that logs EME events and calls to the DevTools console along with debugging information.   Sam Dutton HTML5 Background Videos: Stock HTML5 Background Video tools video  BG Stock animate.css: A Cross-Browser Library of CSS Animations code  Daniel Eden Sheets of Paper: Emulating Sheets of Paper in Web Documents code Before you get too excited, it’s mostly about the overall look and size - no effects.   delight.im postcss-write-svg: Write SVGs Directly in CSS code  Jonathan Neal Family Guy's Brian Griffin in Pure CSS demo  CodePen Curated by Peter Cooper and published by Cooper Press. Want to post a job? E-mail us or use our self-serve system. Unsubscribe : Change email address : Read this issue on the Web Published by Cooper Press Ltd. Office 30, Lincoln Way, Louth, LN11 0LS, UK

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