On Thursday the 18th of June I’ll be joining more than 1,000 CEOs from businesses across Australia, to get a small (and I know not wholly representative) understanding of what life on the streets must be like for thousands of Australians. This year, the Vinnies CEO Sleepout is celebrating its 10th anniversary, a milestone that […]
Continue reading %Vinnies CEO Sleepout for charity%
A great post by Joel Califa that reminds us that the :visted state is very underutilized. Joel shares lots of great examples and his simple localStorage code which looks handy. (joelcalifa.com)
Say goodbye to email, calendars, notepads, status updates, and sticky notes. And say hello to Asana. Sign up for free with your team. (asana.com)
Luke Jones reinforces in this awesome article that we shouldn’t rely on computers to do all the thinking for us; that we should rely on our eyes and our instincts. (medium.com)
Mike Pennisi from Bocoup explains why they decided to use Backbone for a recent workshop. I highly reccomend taking the time to read this if you don’t have stong opinions when it comes to using a particular framework. (bocoup.com)
Allison Wagner shares her recent experience with integrating Pattern Lab into an existing project and passes on some handy tips for first time users. (cognition.happycog.com)
Jaime Caballero writes about his latest project and how he took it to the next level in terms of speed. (jaicab.com)
Over the last month Mark Dalgleish, Tobias Koppers and Glen Maddern have been exploring ideas to take CSS to the next level. This is the place to see it all evolve. (github.com)
Harpoon is a financial planning app for freelance web designers and developers. Set financial goals, track time, invoice your clients, track your revenue and take more vacations. It’s the financial decision‑making tool you’ve been missing. Try it for free! (harpoonapp.com)
Scally is a Sass-based, BEM, OOCSS, responsive ready, CSS framework that provides you with a solid foundation for building reusable UIs quickly (github.com)
This repo serves as an extremely minimal starter for anyone looking to get up and running with Angular 2 and TypeScript tied together with Webpack. (github.com),
The guys at Envato have really risen the bar with their recent Made By series. This particular feature of Glen Jones is another must read/watch. (inside.envato.com)
As a Front-End Engineer, you’ll help hone our growing self-service distribution and viewing platform to compete with other prominent video content providers that shall not be named. Given the crazy amount of rad stuff we’re dying to make, we’ll rely on you to take ownership of projects and to, you know, crush them. (vimeo.com)
Bilue is after someone who’s passionate about making fantastic products and can hit the ground running. If that sounds like you, please get in touch. (bilue.com.au)
A modern, RESTful, scalable solution to the common problem of telling people you don’t like them. Gold. (foaas.com)
The post Web Design Weekly #188 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.
Transloadit is a file-processing service primarily designed for processing images, videos and audio.
It allows you to perform various operations — conducted by what it calls “robots” — on these files; for example resizing and optimizing images, extracting thumbnails from videos or converting files from one format to another.
TransloadIt also allows you to upload files directly to their servers for processing rather than via your application. Indeed you can bypass your server altogether, transferring the processed files straight to an Amazon S3 bucket, a Rackspace Cloud Files account or to your own server via (S)FTP. So in other words, your application need only be concerned with where to find the resulting files, without having to process or store them directly — great for running distributed applications or for those on clusters.
In this tutorial we’re going to take a detailed look at Transloadit, and in particular using it to handle images. We’ll look at some of the key concepts, such as constructing “assembly instructions” to tell it what we want to happen to our uploaded image files. We’ll “hijack” a file upload form to send a file directly to TransloadIt, run a set of instructions to generate a number of “derivatives” — different-sized images — and then save them to an Amazon S3 bucket. Finally, we’ll look at how we can use the results of these operations to notify our application about the newly generated files, so that we can update our database accordingly.
Before we look in detail at Transloadit, it’s worth taking a step back and discussing why you’d want to use a third-party service for something like this in the first place, rather than implement it all yourself.
Image handling isn’t all that difficult to implement yourself, and there are all sorts of libraries out there for just that. So why would you want to use a third-party service to handle it at all?
For one thing, it allows you to concentrate on what your application is really all about. Why spend additional time and effort on, say, user profile photo functionality when you could be concentrating your development efforts on mission-critical functionality?
Image processing can be quite resource intensive. In particular, resizing large images can eat up a lot of memory. Using a service such as Transloadit eases the load on your servers.
Processing files usually requires additional libraries or programs to be installed on your server; for example gd or Imagemagick for images or ffmpeg for videos and audio. By using a third-party service, there’s no need to worry about installing, configuring or maintaining them.
Transloadit “jobs” can be run in the background, rather than hold up execution of your application. While there are solutions to get around this in your own application — for example queues such as RabbitMQ or Beanstalkd, or job servers such as Gearman, using TransloadIt frees you from the additional development effort and installation steps required to implement them.
The Transloadit servers are highly optimized to handle file uploads, so performance may well be much better than if you implement them yourself.
Permitting files to be uploaded to your web server also has all sorts of security implications which you must take into consideration. By using a third-party service, these risks are somewhat mitigated.
It’s decentralized. You can set it up such that uploaded files go via the service and straight to an external storage solution such as S3, without ever having to be stored on your web server. Whilst this might not seem a huge advantage in a small-scale application, you’ll reap the benefits as soon as it grows to the point where you have multiple services, for example a cluster.
Depending on your application, your preferred hosting solution, your expertise or the amount of time you happen to have on your hands, chances are not all of these will apply. Perhaps none; it’s not the optimum solution for all cases.
Naturally, there are disadvantages. Here are a few:
Bearing all of those pros and cons in mind, let’s start taking a detailed look at the service. Then, in part two, we’ll run through a practical example of how to use it.
Continue reading %Getting Started with TransloadIt – Key Concepts%
Have you ever wished your lights would turn off on their own when you went to sleep? Or that they'd change color when your favorite sporting team scored? With LIFX smart light bulbs and IFTTT, we're pretty close to that ideal and magical connected light bulb reality.
LIFX smart light bulbs are energy efficient LED bulbs that can change color and be controlled via smartphones and smartwatches. They are quite entertaining and rather easy to set up on your home Wi-Fi network.
To give our lights some autonomy, we'll be using a service called IFTTT (short for "If This Then That") which allows you to set rules based upon different internet connected devices and/or services. These rules can then trigger responses like your smart light bulbs changing color.
In this article, we'll explore how to set up a LIFX smart bulb and then we'll explore connecting it to IFTTT. Within IFTTT, we will set our lights to turn off when our Jawbone UP24 is in sleep mode. Afterwards we will look at how to set the bulb to change color if our favourite sporting team is playing.
To get started, you'll need to ensure your light bulbs are connected to your home network. You'll need to run the iOS or Android LIFX app to set this up.
I'm on Android, so I've installed the LIFX Android app:
Open the app and click "Add Bulbs" to set up your LIFX light bulb. Make sure your LIFX light bulb is turned on otherwise it may not appear!
Choose your bulb and your home Wi-Fi connection, then you'll be greeted with this wonderful screen allowing you to name the location of your LIFX light bulb, assign it to a group and give it a name:
Once it assigns all of those settings, you'll see your new location and group in the LIFX menu with your bulb inside it. If you press the power button next to the location, group or individual LIFX light bulb, the light will turn off. If it turns off successfully, then you are ready to go!
You can click on the bulb name in the menu to open up the controls for your bulb. Here you can change the color of the light (either different shades of white or completely new colors like purple from the "Colors" button on the bottom left). You can also set up effects like a strobe light via the "Effects" button.
Now you've had a bit of fun with those settings, let's look into how to connect up the LIFX light bulb to other web triggers via IFTTT.
To create a new recipe, create an account on IFTTT and log in. Then, click your username in the top right and choose "Create". This takes you to your New IFTTT Recipe Page.
Continue reading %Connecting LIFX Light Bulbs to the IoT Using IFTTT%
AspireMax is a custom software and web application development company with a award winning team of software experts. AspireMax outsourcing services include Software development, Internet marketing, Mobile app development, PHP and .NET development
SEO copywriter Glenn Murray had written a great ebook about search engine optimization – 215 pages of hard-earned expertise. But it looked terrible. And he had no site to sell it from. So he engaged Australian agency, MC3, to design a sales page th
Website for San Diego web design agency AshWebStudio
