Lozad.js is advanced performant Lazy Loader using Intersection Observer API.
It is written with an aim to lazy load images, ads, videos or any other element using the recently added Intersection Observer API with tremendous performance benefits.
There's a source of inspiration for every type of design you can think of. Struggling to create the perfect font pairing? Head to Typewolf. Searching for ideas for your website redesign, or a specific webpage? Browse Crayon. Looking for all-around epic sources of design inspiration? Check out the latest crop of Webby Award winners.
But as awesome as these collections are, it's dangerous to rely on them exclusively. If all designers are referencing the same ideas, concepts and templates from the same websites for design inspiration, every design then sort-of becomes a variation of an existing one. It's almost impossible to create something novel or unique, when all designers are basing their ideas on the same inspiration sources.
Luckily, there's a solution for that...
Throw some new sources of design inspiration into the mix, alongside your regular sources! These 10 websites will keep you inspired in unexpected ways.
99% Invisible is a blog and radio show hosted by Roman Mars. It delves into the unnoticed yet beautiful, intriguing and significant forces that shape our world.
In other words…the 99%.
Each episode is approximately 15-25 minutes long and covers a single topic related to architecture, objects, visuals, history, technology, society, cities, sounds and infrastructure. Not only will it help you look at your surroundings with fresh eyes, but it'll help you hone your attention to detail. It's the "little things" that often make or break a design, so an enhanced focus on little details is definitely a skill worth mastering.
My grocery trips have been taking twice as long since I discovered The Dieline. This epic website features at least one innovative packaging design per day, but often shares two or three. You'll be both surprised and delighted to see how the most mundane items (like pencils) can be elevated by logo design and clever packaging.
The fundamentals of design apply to packaging like any other aspect of design. For example, if there's not enough white space in the design on a bag of coffee, it'll look crowded and strain the consumer's eyes when they're trying to read it in the supermarket, resulting in a loss of sale. Because these design concepts carry over in many ways, scrolling through The Dieline will reinforce your existing design knowledge regardless of whether you're you're a logo, web or user interface designer.
The Great Discontent is a print and digital magazine showcasing all types of creatives from photographers and graphic designers to illustrators and filmmakers. Unlike many other design inspiration sources, TGD features the astonishing designers behind the work, not the only works themselves.
Sometimes it can be even more inspiring to read about an artist's beginnings, their current projects, and the biggest challenges they've faced, than to see the work itself.
After all, creative work can be emotionally draining, since you're not using up both your physical and mental strength equally, but rather 100% (and sometimes more!) of your mental strength. Knowing that others can relate often rejuvenates you and inspires you to carry on. You'll also learn how other creatives generate their amazing ideas.
Design Milk never lets me down when I need straight-up visual eye-candy. This online magazine curates the best art, interior design, furniture, fashion, technology and architecture from around the world. The photographs are stunning, the cultures and aesthetics are stylistically varied but universally interesting, and the writing is solid. If you need bursts of inspiration from a variety of different art concepts, Design Milk is definitely for you.
And, if you're only interested in a specific vertical—say, architecture—it's easy to filter out other content and narrow down your search.
Nothing fuses the creative and the orderly together like a style guide. Brad Frost, well-known front-end designer and author of Atomic Design, created Style Guides to house an ever-growing collection of resources on the topic. The Talks and Tools sections are certainly worth scrolling through, although my favorite is Examples. You'll find some of the most well-crafted style guides in existence, from the biggest brands today.
Better yet, you can sort through them by their content.
Counterintuitively, rules and restrictions often inspire some of the most inventive designs. After all, they force you to find unexpected solutions and workarounds, where a "no-limits" approach has the tendency to make designers feel lazy.
This explains why business cards are a reliable source of inspiration. A business card designer has a tiny medium for a big task: communicating someone's professional identity. Whenever you're struggling to pare down your copy to the essentials, or make a design feel less busy, use Card Nerd. This gallery is updated several times a day with new business cards, ranging from minimalist to bold and colorful.
Continue reading %10 Unexpected Sources of Design Inspiration%
Should I choose Angular, or React? Today's bipolar landscape of JavaScript frameworks has left many of developers struggling to pick a side in this debate. Whether you're a newcomer trying to figure out where to start, a freelancer picking a framework for your next project or an enterprise-grade architect planning a strategic vision for your company, you're likely to benefit from having an educated view on this topic.
To save you some time, let me tell you something up front: this article won't give a clear answer on which framework is better. But neither will hundreds of other articles with similar titles. I can't tell you that because the answer depends on a wide range of factors which make a particular technology more or less suitable for your environment and use case.
Since we can't answer the question directly, we'll attempt something else. We'll compare Angular (2+, not the old AngularJS) and React to demonstrate how you can approach the problem of comparing any two frameworks in a structured manner on your own and tailor it to your environment. You know, the old "teach a man to fish" approach. That way, when both are replaced by a BetterFramework.js in a year's time, you will be able to re-create the same train of thought once more.
Before you pick any tool you need to answer two simple questions: "Is this a good tool per se?" and "Will it work well for my use case?" None of them mean anything on their own, so you always need to keep both of them in mind. All right, the questions might not be that simple, so we'll try to break them down into smaller ones.
Questions on the tool itself:
Questions for self-reflection:
Using this set of questions you can start your assessment of any tool and we'll base our comparison of React and Angular on them as well.
There's another thing we need to take into account. Strictly speaking, it's not exactly fair to compare Angular to React, since Angular is a full-blown feature-rich framework, and React just a UI component library. To even the odds, we'll talk about React in conjunction with some of the libraries often used with it.
An important part of being a skilled developer is being able to keep the balance between established, time-proven approaches and evaluating new bleeding-edge tech. As a general rule, you should be careful when adopting tools which have not yet matured due to certain risks:
Both React and Angular come from good families, so it seems that we can be confident in this regard.
React is developed and maintained by Facebook and used in their own products, including Instagram and WhatsApp. It has been around for roughly three and a half years now, so it's not exactly new. It's also one of the most popular projects on GitHub with about 60,000 stars at the time of writing. Sounds good to me.
Angular (version 2 and above) has been around less then React, but if you count in the history of its predecessor, AngularJS, the picture evens out. It's maintained by Google and used in AdWords and Google Fiber. Since AdWords is one of the key projects in Google, it is clear they have made a big bet on it and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Like I mentioned earlier, Angular has more features out of the box than React. This can be both a good and a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.
Both frameworks share some key features in common: components, data binding, and platform-agnostic rendering.
Angular provides a lot of the features required for a modern web application out of the box. Some of the standard features are:
Having all of these features available out of the box is highly convenient when you don't want to spend time picking the libraries yourself. However, it also means that you're stuck with some of them, even if you don't need them. And replacing them will usually require additional effort. For instance, we believe that for small projects having a DI system creates more overhead than benefit, considering it can be effectively replaced by imports.
With React, you're starting off with a more minimalistic approach. If we're looking at just React, here's what we have:
Not much. And this can be a good thing. It means that you have the freedom to choose whatever additional libraries to add based on your needs. The bad thing is that you actually have to make those choices yourself. Some of the popular libraries that are often used together with React are:
We've found the freedom of choosing your own libraries liberating. This gives us the ability to tailor our stack to particular requirements of each project and we didn't find the cost of learning new libraries that high.
Taking a step back from the features of each framework, let's see what kind higher-level concepts are popular with both frameworks.
There are several important things that come to mind when thinking about React: JSX, Flow, and Redux.
JSX is a controversial topic for many developers: some enjoy it, and others think that it's a huge step back. Instead of following a classical approach of separating markup and logic, React decided to combine them within components using an XML-like language that allows you to write markup directly in your JavaScript code.
While the topic of mixing markup with JavaScript might be debatable, it has an indisputable benefit: static analysis. If you make an error in your JSX markup, the compiler will emit an error instead of continuing in silence. This helps by instantly catching typos and other silly errors. This is something we really miss in Angular.
Continue reading %React vs Angular: An In-depth Comparison%
In recent years, there's been a strong push by Google and others to make the web more secure by encouraging the use of TLS/SSL (transport layer security/secure sockets layer) on every website.
Google has added extra encouragement for using HTTPS by giving a ranking boost to sites, and, like other browser makers, is gradually turning up the heat in Chrome by introducing increasingly alarming alerts on sites without encryption.
Until recently, SSL certificates were quite costly. Let's Encrypt changed that by offering free certificates.
There are lots of online tutorials showing how to install Let's Encrypt certificates, but they tend to require quite a bit of technical expertise (knowledge of how to operate a Linux web server and manage root access) and rarely guide you on how to install it through a common shared hosting control panel. If your cPanel or other control panel instance doesn't provide a feature like One Click Install for Let's Encrypt SSL (and many don't), then you may feel there's no option but to fork out money for a certificate through your web hosting provider.
However, in this article I'll show you how to install a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate on your shared web hosting server using the services from SSL For Free. SSL For Free allows you to install a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate without having to have root access and a VPS, but just a regular shared web hosting server.
Step 1: Head over to the SSL For Free website.
Step 2: In the enter your website to secure input box, type your website domain address (for example: yourdomain.com).
Step 3: SSL For Free will provide SSL certificates for yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com automatically.
Step 4: If you want to add another subdomain (for example: sub.yourdomain.com), click the Add / Edit Domains link, and you'll be returned to the domain address input page.
Step 5: Add the subdomain you desire in the input box.
There are three ways to verify your domain by SSL For Free (you can choose any one of them).
Let's take a look at each of the verification steps.
Step 1: Click the Automatic FTP Verification button.
Step 2: Below this, you'll be prompted to input data from your web hosting FTP account. Input the data completely:
If you feel uncomfortable with this way (giving your FTP account access data), then you can choose the second way (which I highly recommend) below.
Step 1: You'll be prompted to download two files generated by SSL For Free, which you'll then upload to your web hosting server. Click Manual Verification. (Note: don't close this tab/page!)
Step 2: Below, you'll be prompted to download two files generated by SSL For Free. Download both files, saving them on your local computer.
Step 3: In accordance with the instructions of this SSL For Free page, create a new folder/directory called .well-known. (If you're in a Windows environment, name it .well-known. --- that is, with an extra dot at the end.) Inside that directory, create a new directory called acme-challenge. Copy-paste the two downloaded files into the acme-challenge directory.
Step 4: Now upload both files to your web hosting server using your preferred FTP application (such as FileZilla).
Step 5: Upload the .well-known directory from your local computer to the root directory of your web hosting server (its directory, not the contents in it).
Step 6: Now open a new tab/page in your browser and enter your domain URL, along with the location of the two files. Make sure you see the random numbers and letters:
Step 7: Go back to the SSL For Free tab/page (page at Step 1) and click Download SSL Certificate. Make sure you don’t get a reply like this:
Step 8: If you get an error reply, please repeat Step 1 above, until SSL For Free loads the Loading SSL Certificate Account page. It will then proceed to the Generating SSL Certificate Securely page:
In this last verification method option, you'll be prompted to create a new TXT record in your web hosting control panel.
Here's what the steps look like in cPanel:
Step 1: Click the Manual Verification (DNS) button on the SSL For Free site.
Step 2: You'll then be prompted to create a new TXT record according to the data on that page:
Step 3: Open a new tab/page in your browser and log in to CPanel on your server. Go to Zone Editor, and add a record with the following data:
Click Add Record:
Step 4: Then add the second new TXT record with the following data:
Once again, click Add Record.
Step 5: The final result will look something like this:
Step 6: Go back to the SSL For Free tab/page (page at Step 1) and click the Download SSL Certificate. If you've set up the TXT records correctly, you should get a couple of results like this:
Step 7: You'll be taken to the Loading SSL Certificate Account page, and then to the Generating SSL Certificate Securely page:
Continue reading %A Guide to Setting Up Let’s Encrypt SSL on Shared Hosting%
