A modular, extendable, and easy-to-use physics engine for javascript.
The post PhysicsJS : Physics engine for JavaScript appeared first on jQuery Rain.
by Admin via jQuery Rain
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Colorbrewer : jQuery Bootstrap Colour Picker
The post Colorbrewer : jQuery Bootstrap Colour Picker appeared first on jQuery Rain.
by Admin via jQuery Rain
Why Your Business Needs to Be Online
According to a Clutch survey, 26 percent of small businesses don't have a website, 9 percent say they have plans to build a website in the near future, and 10 percent say they're unlikely to go online anytime soon. This means that more than one in four businesses are losing online customers to their competitors, as well as losing brick and mortar business generated online.
If you're one of the companies that still hasn't gone online, here are some reasons your business needs to make that move sooner than later.
by Guest Author via Digital Information World
HTTP vs IPFS: is Peer-to-Peer Sharing the Future of the Web?
The Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) is a revolutionary model that could change the way we use the Internet. Unlike the typical server-client model we’re accustomed to, IPFS is something more like BitTorrent. Does that grab your attention? Then read on!
The Problems With Today’s Web
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the backbone of the World Wide Web. We use HTTP to access most of the Internet. Any website we visit, typically, is via HTTP. It’s essentially a server–client mentality, where our computer sends requests to the server hosting a website, and the server sends back responses.
HTTP, though, lends itself naturally to a narrower and narrower subset of services. It’s natural for large services to emerge as the sort of structure of a large portion of the Web, but that sort of centralized environment can be dangerous. If any of the large hosting companies and/or providers of services – such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Rackspace, and the like – were to suddenly falter, the results to the Web would be disastrous in the short term. And herein lies the problem (at least one of them).
In addition to the natural process of centralization that’s occurring, there’s also a troubling reliability issue with today’s web. Most websites and applications are hosted by a single server, or by a redundant array of load balanced servers, or whatever the case may be. If the owner of those servers, or the datacenter’s management, or even a natural disaster, takes those machines out, will the application continue to run? Backups and redundancy can be put into effect by organizations with enough resources, but even those can’t stop a company which simply decides to take down their website or application.
Reliance on Hosts
If and when the server hosting a site goes down, we’re now reliant on the hosting company to have fail safes, redundant systems, backups, etc. They must recognize that your service is out, and assist you in restoring it. If it’s a hardware issue, they should have alternative systems they can port your setup onto. They should have backup networking systems, and they should be keeping at least a backup of your data, whether they advertise it or not, in the event of a data loss situation that is their fault.
What if they don’t?
Reliance on Site Administrators
Now the impetus falls on site administrators to keep a service going and data backed up. If you’ve ever been an avid user of an application that was suddenly removed, you know this feeling.
Movements to open source help tremendously, allowing multiple forks of a project to take off, and allowing things that are more static – like documentation – to be preserved in multiple locations and in multiple formats. But the fact remains that the majority of the Web is controlled by people like you or me, maintaining servers.
Some freelance developers even manage the hosting and maintenance of some of their smaller clients’ sites. What if they forget to pay their bill? Get angry with a client and lock them out of their site? Get hit by a truck? Yes, the site owner may have legal options in any of these cases, but will that help you while your site is completely inaccessible?
Reliance on Users
Yet one more problem is that of the users of any web application. Content often must have a critical mass of users or visitors to even merit hosting. Often low-traffic applications or static sites are shuttered simply because they aren’t cost effective to run. Additionally, the reverse problem is also very real. Users of the modern Internet are still clustering together. Facebook – which is a single social network – has somewhere in the ballpark of one out of every five persons on the face of the Earth reported as active users. There are countless businesses who entirely depend upon Facebook to exist. What if it shut down tomorrow?
Of course, Facebook won’t shut down tomorrow, and neither will most of the apps you love and use. But some may. And the more users that have flocked to them before that happens, the more damage that will cause to everyday workflows, or even to personal and business finances, depending on what kind of applications you use and for what.
The Answer is IPFS
So, you may be asking, how does IPFS solve these problems? IPFS is a relatively new attempt to solve some of these issues using distributed file systems. The IPFS project is still fairly low on documentation, and is perhaps the first of many different solutions.
IPFS Nodes
First and foremost, you should understand a few things about IPFS. IPFS is decentralized. Without a typical server providing web pages for every client that arrives at the website’s domain, a different infrastructure must be imagined. Every machine running IPFS would be a node
as part of a swarm
.
Consider the way torrents currently work. You choose a file to download, and when you use a torrent application to do so, you’re essentially sending out a request to all of the computers attached to the same torrent network as you, and if any of them have the file you’re requesting, and are able to upload at the moment, they begin sending pieces of it to your computer. That’s a condensed version.
So how do IPFS nodes work? Each machine that’s running IPFS is able to select what files they want their node to serve.
Continue reading %HTTP vs IPFS: is Peer-to-Peer Sharing the Future of the Web?%
by Jeff Smith via SitePoint
How I Launched My eCommerce Store in Less than 30 Minutes
I’ll be honest, I tried to launch my first store for 12 months! I followed the usual way to begin with.
I incorporated myself, looked for wholesalers, underestimated my marketing budget need, developed a great looking store, manually added thousands of products, …
… and never made a sale.
Today, after just selling my eCommerce project with $3M annual sales and 7 eCommerce stores in my CV, I understand what I did wrong and found a way to fix it.
[author_more]
I did what most people do — I concentrated too much on creating a great looking store instead of actually trying to make a sale.
People think that if you are launching an eCommerce business that you should do it the hard way. They think that you should never launch a poorly developed store, or that you should try to land a super deal with a wholesaler long before making any actual sales.
But what I have found is that it’s much more productive to learn and create along the way. Your first step is to simply create you store. Once your store is up and running, you can explore ad campaigns and logo designs at a later time.
As my favorite quote says: “Get going, get better”.
Below I’m sharing a detailed tutorial on how you can launch your first eCommerce store in under 30 minutes with dozens of products. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be exactly what you need to get going.
In this example, I will build a full category women’s clothing shop that sells non-branded funky clothes. I strongly suggest that you follow the guide as it is written and try implementing additional features and ideas later after your launch.
Set Up a Store (~5 minutes)
1. Pick a Name
Picking a name shouldn’t be a huge concern right now. Think of something random and simple. For my women’s clothing shop I came up with: Forest Store, Hill Hill Store, MarsIn1999.
I recommend adding ‘store’ or ‘shop’ because you will need to find an available internet address (domain), and it’s easier to find an available one when there are several words in the name.
2. Create a Shopify Account
In the olden days, you had to get a server, upload an eCommerce system to it, hire someone to change it according to your needs, and pay to maintain it. It was expensive, time consuming, and the final result was still a slow and ineffective website.
Thankfully, Shopify and other alternative softwares has simplified the process. You can create your store in just a few clicks and all of the server setup and maintenance is taken care of for you.
Go to Shopify.com, click ‘start your free trial’, enter your store name, and create your shop.
Your store is now ready!
3. Fine Tune Your Settings
3.1. Add Your Store Payment Option
Add your PayPal email address under the Shopify Settings, Payments Section. Later, you can change, remove, or add additional payment options.
If you don’t have a PayPal account, registration at PayPal.com will take about 5 minutes.
3.2. Generate Required Policies
Shopify offers a handy tool for generating terms and conditions, standard privacy, and return policies. Just go to Shopify Settings, Checkout, and scroll down to the Refund, Privacy, and TOS statements section to generate each policy sample.
3.3. Add Free Shipping Rate
The sourcing tool I will recommend to you will offer most of the products with a free delivery option. So I suggest adding a free shipping rate for all of your orders as well.
Go to Shopify Settings, Shipping, and delete all shipping zones that are non-international, and edit the international zone rate to Free.
3.4. Create an Online Store
Shopify allows you to sell your products across multiple channels like Online Store, Facebook Store, Brick and Mortar store, etc.
We want to create an online store now. Go to Shopify Settings, Sales Channels and add Online Store as your sales channel.
3.5. Buy a Domain (Optional)
Buying a domain is optional. Currently, your URL looks like [storename].myshopify.com. But you might want to change it so it will look more normal: [storename].com.
You don’t have to do this right away, and there will be a cost (about $13 per year). You can set this up later once you decide if you want to invest further money into your business.
It is important to note, however, that a custom internet address provides social accountability when you start advertising your site, which can increase your sales significantly.
To buy a domain, go to Shopify Online Store, Domains Section, and click Buy New Domain.
P.S. You’ll need to confirm the domain before it starts working. The confirmation letter is in your email inbox.
Continue reading %How I Launched My eCommerce Store in Less than 30 Minutes%
by Tomas Šlimas via SitePoint
Create a Text-to-Speech Chrome Extension
This article was peer reviewed by Marc Towler and Ralph Mason. Thanks to all of SitePoint’s peer reviewers for making SitePoint content the best it can be! Converting text to speech, also known as Speech Synthesis or TTS (text-to-speech), is an artificial way to produce human speech. It is not something new, as people have […]
Continue reading %Create a Text-to-Speech Chrome Extension%
by Ivan Dimov via SitePoint
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