Do you use images to support your social media marketing? Are you looking for an easier way to create strong visual content? You don’t have to be a designer to create quality images. In this article I’ll show you how to create a variety of social media images quickly and affordably. #1: Set Up a [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
“Companies don’t respond fast enough to leads.” — Ken Krogue, forbes.
You don’t even give your real email address to your Tinder matches—why give it to some random site where you buy socks? Protect your personal data—email address included—with Blur. We’ve got two years of access to the online privacy solution for $29 at SitePoint Shop.
Blur lets you created temporary, masked email addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers for online shopping. Don’t worry—the credit cards work wherever normal credit cards do, and the phone numbers and email addresses forward to your real ones, so you won’t miss a thing. Another perk? You don’t have to remember passwords—Blur can create, save, encrypt, and organize your passwords so they’re impossible to crack…without leaving you clicking “forgot my password” on every site you visit.
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Continue reading %Mask Your Personal Info Online with Blur%
If you've been around long enough (i.e. early 2000's), you'll remember a time when all we longed for was decent PNG-32 support.
While PNG-32 had much better transparency support than garden-variety GIF, Internet Explorer rendered the transparent parts as a dirty dishwater gray. As IE6 ruled 90% of the browser market, this was heart-breaking.
Understandably, people gnashed their teeth and spent their nights devising ludicrous IE hacks using JavaScript and obscure Microsoft filters.
Yes, we had much better things to complain about in those days, my friends!
So when the time came that we could finally rely on PNG-32 support, we were all so happy that we've barely looked at PNG closely since.
As nice as PNG-24 transparency is, there has always been a price to pay for it. Large PNGs are big files – usually 4 to 5 times the equivalent JPEG.
[caption id="attachment_125894" align="aligncenter" width="410"]
[caption id="attachment_125893" align="aligncenter" width="410"]
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But if we needed high-quality alpha transparency, we had to suck it up, right?
There's also no flexibility with PNG-32. Where JPEG lets you select the most effective compression, PNG takes a 'like it or lump it' approach.
SVG has two abilities that help us out here.
[caption id="attachment_125895" align="aligncenter" width="410"]
So, if we were to combine these two SVG 'super powers', we could theoretically create a new super-efficient image file format with luscious 32-bit transparency.
But is it worth the effort?
Luckily for us, Mario Klingemann (@Quasimondo) built ZorroSVG to take most of the hard work out it for us.
Simply drag your chunky transparent PNG32s straight into ZorroSVG, choose the JPEG quality/compression setting, and you'll receive a shiny new transparent SVG that should work in almost any modern browser.
It's crazy easy.
As a test-drive, I took the original 878kb PNG-24 image above and threw it at ZorroSVG with the quality set at 80%.
The new SVG weights in 183kB – that's 21% of the original size.
Here's a CodePen showing that SVG in action.
It's a cool concept and it might provide a nice jumping-off point for some other ideas. More on that next week.
Continue reading %Can SVG Save You from Your Fat PNG-32s?%
Have we reached equilibrium point in the browser market? The latest StatCounter statistics indicates little movement…
The following table shows browser usage movements during the past month.
| Browser | January | February | change | relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IE (all) | 14.62% | 13.38% | -1.24% | -8.50% |
| IE11 | 10.19% | 9.78% | -0.41% | -4.00% |
| IE10 | 1.29% | 1.02% | -0.27% | -20.90% |
| IE9 | 1.29% | 1.03% | -0.26% | -20.20% |
| IE6/7/8 | 1.85% | 1.55% | -0.30% | -16.20% |
| Edge | 1.69% | 1.83% | +0.14% | +8.30% |
| Chrome | 54.33% | 55.47% | +1.14% | +2.10% |
| Firefox | 14.58% | 14.66% | +0.08% | +0.50% |
| Safari | 4.17% | 4.20% | +0.03% | +0.70% |
| iPad Safari | 5.27% | 5.24% | -0.03% | -0.60% |
| Opera | 1.92% | 1.97% | +0.05% | +2.60% |
| Others | 3.42% | 3.25% | -0.17% | -5.00% |
Continue reading %Browser Trends March 2016: Operating System Surprises%
