Welcoming New Authors: January – March 2015

With a new schedule and regime, we changed the author introduction post to a once per three months frequency rather than every other month like it was. As March is drawing to an end (already?!), let’s see which new souls joined us in this era of peer review. We’ll also use this opportunity to mention our newest regular authors .

Regular Authors

We’ve seen an influx of increased enthusiasm from our most prolific members. The first two who get to pin this medal to their chest are as follows:

Younes Rafie, Morocco

Younes has been with us for a while, and has been aiming for the regular author position since Q3 2014. When a man knows what he wants, there’s little that will stand in his way, and Younes grabbed the opportunity by the throat. In 2014, he was one of our most prolific authors and in 2015 he only increased his output, always keeping quality and interesting topics in mind. I take great pride in being able to welcome him into the regulars circle, and I feel like he’s just getting started.

So far (in 2015), Younes published a whopping six posts and two quick tips. Keep up the great work!

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Daniel Sipos, Belgium

Danny has been our Drupal expert since the day he joined. If anything was going on in the Drupal world we should know about, he was right on top of it, keeping everyone up to date and preparing the readership for Drupal 8’s imminent release. Danny earned his “R” badge in March, and starting with April, he’ll be a part of the regular circle.

Danny’s contributions not only to our Drupal corprus but also to the peer review process have been invaluable. He reviewed countless articles, shot pull requests left and right, and even made important suggestions for improving the entire workflow.

Danny’s 2015 portfolio counts five posts with more incoming. Excellent work!

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New Authors

Apart from the regulars increasing their output, we’ve also had room to welcome some new souls on board. They are, in order:

Continue reading %Welcoming New Authors: January – March 2015%

by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint

How to Separate the Good WordPress Hosts from the Bad

WordPress hosts are a dime a dozen, and unfortunately even for a technically savvy person, it can be difficult to differentiate between a reputable host which is attentive to their customers, and a reseller who doesn’t own the servers and is simply marking up existing services. Additionally when it comes to pricing and support, it can be difficult figuring out who can provide the best service for you.

Rather than focusing on the basics of web hosting as this article from SitePoint discusses, in this guide we are going to focus on how to ensure that you are choosing a quality host over a fly by night company.

Most of this article applies to any type of web hosting, even if you’re not using WordPress. I’m also keeping the advice very general, however it still applies to growing number of WordPress specialized hosting services.

You Get What You Pay For

While pricing varies greatly from host to host, you should always be wary of any host promising “unlimited” storage or bandwidth on budget plans, especially when using a shared server. While the packages might sound great on the surface, hosting companies aren’t offering these rock bottom prices to be charitable. In fact, the “unlimited” claims come with caveats which are only found in the fine print of the hosting agreement. Typically hosts will use ambiguous language such as “unlimited usage as long as it is reasonable,” or they will limit you to a certain number of files on the server. Other common caps include suspending your site after using a certain number of CPU cycles or only letting you upload website components.

Continue reading %How to Separate the Good WordPress Hosts from the Bad%

by Charles Costa via SitePoint

RethinkDB in Ruby

You've probably heard of a bunch of NoSQL databases: Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, etc., all of which offer a variety of different advantages and come with a set of disadvantages. If you're building a new application, it's pretty important to select a database that meets your needs. In this article, we'll cover RethinkDB, taking a look at how to set up RethinkDB, how it fits into the landscape of NoSQL, and how to use it from Ruby.

Why RethinkDB?

RethinkDB is a JSON document store. That means that it allows you store a bunch of JSON documents and then query them later on. Turns out that RethinkDB isn't the only document store available. Not even close. Even when the RethinkDB project was started, there were already tons of options available for someone looking for a NoSQL database. So, what's the point of learning yet another database? To put it simply, RethinkDB combines some of the best features of its competitors and presents a pretty compelling set of advantages.

One of its closest relatives is MongoDB. Mongo quickly grew in popularity because of its focus on developer productivity: creating documents and querying them is incredibly easy to get started with in Mongo. Unfortunately, Mongo has had pretty significant problems with scaling. Granted, some of these problems arise from poor deployment practices but not all the issues raised are unfounded. But, Mongo definitely nailed developer productivity. On the other hand, we have databases like Riak that aren't as much fun to write code for, but generally scales pretty well without a ton of effort on the part of the Dev Ops team. RethinkDB tries to sit in the middle of this "tradeoff" (there doesn't seem to be a real reason for this to be a tradeoff): it attempts to provide Mongo-like ease-of-use while still keeping the Dev Ops people happy.

Continue reading %RethinkDB in Ruby%

by Dhaivat Pandya via SitePoint

microStore

'microStore' is a One Page HTML template built specifically to sell 1-3 products in a single page. Great to see theme authors creating niche landing pages for products. The $10 template is responsive and was built on the popular Bootstrap Framework. Other features include a big slideshow, 300 icon options, a countdown timer and testimonials to help increase conversions.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Yenue

One Pager for London-based independent designer 'Yenue' featuring a hover-sensitive slider to browse the scattered portfolio items. Kind of a difficult pronunciation but nice one on the 5-letter .com domain.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

fbPhotoStream : jQuery plugin to pull Facebook Photos

fbPhotoStream is a simple, light-weight jQuery plugin that allows you to display Facebook photos from a public album. Just set the album id, and the rest is optional.

It has a a few design options like grid, collage, or circle mode, but you can customize the look to match your needs by adding your own CSS. You can pass several formatting options including width, height, etc., as well as setting whether you want to show captions or link back to Facebook

The post fbPhotoStream : jQuery plugin to pull Facebook Photos appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

Animatrix Creative – Drawing SVG Animations Plugin

Animatrix Creative allows you to draw and animate SVG images.Professional SVG Image WYSIWYG Editor is included in this plugin, and can be accessed from the admin area. You can draw with the default Pencil tool or create shapes out of the rich Shapes library.

All SVG images are animated on the front-side, by mimicking the drawing process. You can also export and save the SVG image as well.

The post Animatrix Creative – Drawing SVG Animations Plugin appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain