The Feebles

New website for the France-based design studio The Feebles
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14 Microsoft Programs You're Not Using But Should (infographic)

Why is Microsoft so shy? While other operating systems make a big song and dance about the additional software they come with, many people can last the whole lifetime of a Windows version without realizing the extent of the software inside. Never has this been truer than with Windows 10, the...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

How Writers & Bloggers Can Make the Most of Markdown in WordPress

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Markdown is a quick and easy way to add formatting to a document. Most articles on SitePoint (including this one) started life that way. In fact, all submissions must be posted in Markdown format. Why is that?

Consider using Markdown for your own blog or website. You’ve organised some hosting—perhaps through SiteGround, our preferred web host—and installed WordPress. Now you have the task of filling your blog with quality content. Markdown promises to make the process faster and simpler.

I use Markdown a lot, and that use is increasing. There’s something about it that I enjoy, that makes writing easier and faster. I write in it professionally using Ulysses, take notes in it using Bear, and I’m even considering outlining in it using Outlinely. It’s becoming a big part of my online life, and I’m not alone.

What benefits does Markdown bring to writers and bloggers? How can it improve your writing workflow? What does it have to do with WordPress? Read on to find out.

What Is Markdown?

Markdown is not new. It was created by John Gruber way back in 2004. Since then it has really caught on—it’s key feature of many new apps, and is used by default on Reddit, GitHub, StackOverflow and a number of CMSs.

It’s a format for writing for the web. In fact, at its foundation, Markdown is a faster, cleaner way to create HTML. Well, not all of HTML, but the subset of it commonly used when writing posts and articles.

Gruber introduces the concept with these words:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Rather than using complex (and ugly, hard-to-read) markup language, Markdown uses punctuation characters, with the goal of making writing (and reading) easier.

Here are a few examples, and you can learn more from John Gruber’s Syntax page.

# This is a H1 header



## This is a H2 header



### This is a H3 header



This is *emphasized text* and this is **strong text**.



- This is a line from an unordered list.



1. This is a line from an ordered list.



> This is a blockquote.

Further reading:

• John Gruber’s Markdown Project page.
• CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown

How Can Markdown Benefit Writers and Bloggers?

It's good for writers. It's good for editors. It really can make a positive difference to your online writing. Here’s how.

Markdown makes writing for the web faster.

Here’s one thing that writers love: When you write in Markdown you don’t have to move fingers off the keyboard to add formatting. Everything you need is right under your fingers, and they can just keep on flying.

It requires less keystrokes than HTML, and is easier to learn than HTML. And because it’s simpler, there’s less to break—you won’t have missing closing tags or improperly formed HTML. All of those are good things. Your writing will be faster and less distracted.

Markdown makes reading content easier.

Easy-to-read content is great for writers and editors alike. I edited HTML articles for years. The content can get lost in the code, but you do sort of get used to it.

Markdown is much better. In fact, that’s it’s purpose—it’s primarily designed to make reading formatted web documents easier.

John Gruber explains:

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else… To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like *emphasis*. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.

Compare the HTML and Markdown below to see what I mean.

<h2>This Is a Second-Level Heading</h2>

<p>Here is a paragraph with <strong>bold</strong> and <em>italic</em> text.</p>

<p>And here is an ordered list:</p>

<ol>
<li>First item</li>
<li>Second item</li>
<li>Third item</li>
</ol>

##This Is a Second-Level Heading


Here is a paragraph with **bold** and *italic* text.




And here is an ordered list:



1. First item
2. Second item
3. Third item

Markdown improves the writing workflow.

Writers should separate form and content. In other words, you shouldn’t be concerned about the final appearance of your content while you’re still crunching out words. One thing at a time is best practice.

Markdown’s simple syntax really helps with this. Lists, block quotes and emphasis almost write themselves, and you don’t get distracted from the task at hand.

Markdown allows you to use plain text, the most flexible file format that exists. And you can choose from a wide variety of writing software, and Markdown’s simplicity allows all sorts of automation and scripting opportunities.

Markdown is portable and future-proof.

When you write in Markdown, your documents are automatically cross-platform. You can copy from one app and paste into another regardless of the operating system or platform. There is no lock in, and you can convert Markdown to just about any format you like.

And it’s future-proof. Unlike your Word or Pages document, you’ll probably be able to open plain text in a decade or a century. It’s not a proprietary file format that will be discontinued or updated until it’s unrecognisable.

Continue reading %How Writers & Bloggers Can Make the Most of Markdown in WordPress%

by Adrian Try via SitePoint

Web Design Weekly #285

Headlines

How we built Uber’s high performance web app

In this article Angus Croll describes how his team built m.uber and shares the challenges of implementing the native app experience in a super-lightweight web app. (eng.uber.com)

A day without Javascript (sonniesedge.co.uk)

Articles

Maintainable project structure for React/Redux

Matteo Mazzarolo shares some information on his journey to achieving a comfortable Redux project structure. (hackernoon.com)

Styled-Components in Action

In this article Varayut Lerdkanlayanawat walks you through the main concepts of Styled-Components along with some nice coding examples. (medium.com)

Keyboard-Only Focus

Roman Komarov explains how we can go about mak­ing our el­e­ments that have a dis­tinct bright fo­cus state and also look good when users use a mouse, a track­pad etc. (kizu.ru)

My History with Web Development (alexkras.com)

Tools / Resources

Bootstrap to CSS Grid

Natalya Shelburne shares some awesome tips about using CSS Grid today if you happen to work with a biggish team, on an older project, or are faced with some real-world constraints. (medium.com)

Visuals are processed 60K times faster in the brain than text. Find the perfect visuals for your project at iStock.

Easily search millions of powerful images and video clips at iStock and ensure your project truly stands out. Until July 6th new customers can save 15% with code KZKPC46N. Make an impact without breaking the bank. (istockphoto.com)

Write more readable & maintainable components

In this Front End Center episode Glen Maddern looks at how one idea from Object-Oriented — The Single Responsibility Principle can help design and extract more readable, reusable and maintainable React components. Must watch. (youtube.com)

Lightcrawler

Crawl a website and run it through Google lighthouse (npmjs.com)

Frontend Patterns

A good resource. Discover solutions to common design/UX problems. (gov.uk)

Code Daily

Nice tutorials, screencasts, guided courses, and full app rebuilds. (codedaily.io)

The Developer’s Edition of HTML makes a comeback (blog.whatwg.org)

TypeScript 2.4 released (microsoft.com)

Inspiration

Suggestive Drawing Among Human and Artificial Intelligences(nono.ma)

Etsy Lessons (larahogan.me)

Jobs

API/Backend Engineer at ShiftLeft

We are looking for a talented API engineer who can help us continue to grow our front-end services comprised of Go, GraphQL, and React. (shiftleft.io)

Senior Interaction Designer at VMware

VMware’s End User Computing User Experience Team is looking for a talented senior interaction designer to join our team and help us create the next generation of products for our organization. We have lofty plans so you must be up for a challenge! (vmware.com)

Need to find passionate developers or designers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter

Last but not least…

An important thread discussing the downsides to open source (twitter.com)

The post Web Design Weekly #285 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

4 Simple Ways to Add Audio to Your WordPress Site

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Do you have audio files you want to share with your audience? Facebook won’t let you… unless you resort to frustrating trickery like sharing an audio file in Dropbox or converting it to video. But if you’re hosting your own WordPress website, nothing could be easier.

If the mention of adding audio to websites gives you pause, let me explain. I’m not talking about adding cheesy background music to an animated-GIF-laden GeoCities site.

Though it’s not a good idea to add music to your site just for the sake of it, there are some good and valid reasons to include audio in your website. Here are a few:

• A musician sharing samples of her music.
• A podcaster making his shows available.
• Schools, churches and event websites allowing visitors to listen to seminars, sermons or keynotes.
• Teachers, trainers and educators including audio examples in their online lessons.
• Bloggers adding bonus content to their site, for example, interviews.

You may not realise this, but WordPress is capable of handling audio files by default. It’s not hard—if you know how to insert an image in the post, you won’t have any problems inserting audio.

Before HTML5 there was no standard way of playing audio on a web page. Flash was widely used. It wasn’t pretty. WordPress uses HTML5 to embed audio, so it’s compatible with most browsers and devices, including mobile devices.

There are other ways to include audio in your site. These include embeddable players by third parties (including audio library sites), and WordPress plugins. These give the benefit of additional features, and the ability to use audio from library sites.

Of course, only use audio files you can legally use. This would include audio you created yourself, audio you have licensed from others, and royalty free audio. The sample audio used in this article comes from YouTube’s Audio Library of free music.

1. Use the WordPress Audio Player

The easiest way to add audio to your website is with WordPress’ native audio player. Unless you have specific needs, there’s little reason to look elsewhere.

You can add .mp3, .m4a, .ogg, or .wav files to your WordPress media library. From there you can insert it into your post, along with an optional caption.

Here’s how:

1. Click the Add Media button.
2. Drag your audio file onto the library, or click the Upload Files then Select Files to add your audio content to the Media Library.
3. At the right on the screen, fill in the relevant metadata for the audio file, including title, artist, album, caption and description.
4. Make sure the Embed Media Player option is selected to allow your readers to play the audio file from your post.
5. Click Insert into Post.

Here is a screenshot of the Media Player after some audio files have been added. You can fill in the relevant metadata for the file in the panel on the right.

And now a text view of a post after an image has been added (see the second paragraph). The screenshot also demonstrates a few other ways to add code for the audio player manually.

And this is what the post looks like when previewing, or after it is published. A mini player is displayed for the audio file. Note that the player looks the same for all three methods.

Live Example

Try clicking on the audio file below to hear it play.

[audio mp3="http://ift.tt/2tFCW09"][/audio]

You don’t have to store audio files in your WordPress Media Player. Storing them on another server will take the load off your web hosting, saving you storage space, system resources and bandwidth. In that case, use the same audio shortcode, but with the correct URL for the audio file.

The audio file can be looped or autoplayed by adding some options to the code (see the Audio Shortcode page on WordPress.org). To change the color of the media player, you need to use custom CSS like this:

.music-player .wp-playlist-light,
.music-player .wp-playlist-light .wp-playlist-playing {
    background: #999;
    border-color: #999;

Alternatively, if additional functionality or customizing the appearance of the media player is important to you, check out the plugins below.

Continue reading %4 Simple Ways to Add Audio to Your WordPress Site%

by Adrian Try via SitePoint

a-table.js – Simple Table UI for Generating Table Html

a-table.js is a simple table UI for generating table html. It's free to use (MIT license) and supports IE 9 ~, Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

Should Users be Permitted to Disable JavaScript?

I last raised this question back in 2013 when Mozilla decided to remove the "disable JavaScript" setting from the options dialog in Firefox 23. The primary reasoning:

• Much of the modern web can break spectacularly without JavaScript.
• It saves users from themselves. Few people know what JavaScript is and even fewer need to disable it.
• Those that do can find hidden options elsewhere should they really need it.

Disabling JavaScript remains an option for those in the know.

This popular article has been updated to address the seismic shift in the JavaScript landscape since it was originally published in 2013.

Do Users Benefit From Disabling JavaScript?

Possibly: refer to I Turned Off JavaScript for a Whole Week and It Was Glorious. Without JavaScript, a magical web appears without bloat, advertising, pop-ups, cookie warnings, scroll-jacking and many of the other dark patterns we experience today.

There are also people with perceptual problems who disable JavaScript out of necessity. Few sites consider accessibility guidelines so it remains the easiest way to reduce movement and animated effects which can induce disorientation and nausea.

Article content is normally visible, but the downside is that many web applications fail without JavaScript. Some provide a downgraded experience but it can break shops, maps, games and social networking sites. Content sites powered by modern client-side-only application frameworks may show nothing more than a blank page.

Can You Prevent Users Disabling JavaScript?

No!

It is impossible for site owners or developers to force users to download and run JavaScript. Browsers 'pull' files from your server; the user can stop that occurring via browser settings, proxy methods, plug-ins or a range of other interception options.

Your script can also be modified or have specific facilities disabled. Always remember that users are in control: it's their device and connection. They choose to visit your site and can omit anything they don't want.

Can You Support Those Without JavaScript?

Few people actively disable scripting. It's tempting to think those users deserve everything they (don't) get, but the reality is more problematic. JavaScript is fragile; your scripts can break for reasons including:

• the HTTP request fails
• the request did not complete
• a firewall blocked the response
• the service provider blocked or modified the script
• a browser plugin intercepted or modified the script
• the browser didn't support the code or facilities you require
• another script raises an error which stops all scripts executing

These issues are especially prevalent in the mobile world where a user could be travelling, using a less powerful device, connecting via a slow network, using flaky airport wifi, etc.

The solution continues to be Progressive Enhancement. You create the simplest HTML-only experience then enhance it with images, fonts, CSS and JavaScript when those files successfully download and execute. Your JavaScript can detect when APIs/facilities are available to:

• avoid running code which would result in an error, or
• load polyfills which implement identical functionality.

Users can receive a different experience. Those using the latest Chrome on a desktop may get the highest level of functionality. Those running Opera Mini on a two year-old mobile may receive a basic styled page. Importantly, everyone receives something and the site/app remains usable for everyone.

Is Progressive Enhancement Worth the Effort?

That's a decision for you and the application you're building.

Progressive Enhancement makes sense for content sites and online stores which need to reach the widest possible audience. When implemented well, it incurs little development overhead and can save time. You know all browsers will continue to render your site regardless of updates they receive in the past, present or future.

Simpler applications may also benefit. An app which posts messages to a social network requires little more than an HTML5 form and some back-end processing. Progressive Enhancement then improves the experience by removing the page refresh, adding styles, implementing input validation, providing a character count, handling errors, making it work offline and more.

Continue reading %Should Users be Permitted to Disable JavaScript?%

by Craig Buckler via SitePoint