Marie Morelle - Illustrator

Marie Morelle's portfolio. French press illustrator based in Paris.
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How Often Do Smartphone Send Information To Manufacturers? — Apple iPhone vs. Google Android

By this point pretty much everyone knows that smartphones collect data and send it back to their manufacturers. Apple and Google collect user data every day, and they are reasonably upfront about it. However, you would be surprised to know just how often your smartphone touches base with the...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

4 Common Problems When Recording Videos And How to Avoid Them

Although starting to record videos is easier than ever nowadays, you’re still likely to face your fair share of problems. The fact of the matter is that there are many common problems that people tend to face when recording videos, but if you’re aware of what they are then you can take steps to...

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

YouTube's Comment Section Makes Progress

YouTube is a pillar of the internet, one of the most exciting things to come out of what is now perhaps the single greatest technological innovation in human history. It has made it exponentially easier for content creators to find an audience, and perhaps its most understated success is in how it...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

How to Deploy Apps Effortlessly with Packer and Terraform

This article was originally published on Alibaba Cloud. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

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Alibaba Cloud published a very neat white paper about DevOps that is very interesting to read. It shows how "DevOps is a model that goes beyond simple implementation of agile principles to manage the infrastructure. John Willis and Damon Edwards defined DevOps using the term CAMS: Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing. DevOps seeks to promote collaboration between the development and operations teams".

This means, roughly, that there is a new role or mindset in a team that aims to connect both software development and infrastructure management. This role requires knowledge of both worlds and takes advantage of the cloud paradigm that nowadays grows in importance. But DevOps practices are not limited to large enterprises. As developers, we can easily incorporate DevOps in our daily tasks. With this tutorial you will see how easy is to orchestrate a whole deployment with just a couple of config files. We will be running our application on an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance.

What Is Packer?

Packer is an open source DevOps tool made by Hashicorp to create images from a single JSON config file, which helps in keeping track of its changes in the long run. This software is cross-platform compatible and can create multiple images in parallel.

If you have Homebrew, just type brew install packer to install it.

It basically creates ready-to-use images with the Operating System and some extra software ready to use for your applications, like creating your own distribution. Imagine you want Debian but with some custom PHP application you made built-in by default. Well, with Packer this is very easy to do, and in this how-to, we will create one.

What Is Terraform?

When deploying we have two big tasks to complete. One is to pack the actual application in a suitable environment, creating an image. The other big task is to create the underlying infrastructure in where the application is going to live, this is, the actual server to host it.

For this, Terraform, made by the same company as Packer, Hashicorp, came to existence as a very interesting and powerful tool. Based in the same principles as Packer, Terraform lets you build infrastructure in Alibaba Cloud by just using a single config file, in the TF format this time, also helping with versioning and a clear understanding of how all the bits are working beneath your application.

To install Terraform and the Alibaba Cloud Official provider, please follow the instructions in this other article.

What We Want to Achieve

As mentioned at the top of the article, we are going to create and deploy a simple PHP application in a pure DevOps way — that is, taking care of every part of the deployment, from the software running it to the subjacent infrastructure supporting it.

Steps

For the sake of KISS principle, we will create a docker-compose based application to retrieve the METAR weather data from airports, using its ICAO airport code and pulling the data from the National US Weather Service. Then we will create the image with Packer using Ubuntu and deploy the infrastructure using the image with Terraform.

PHP Application

For the sake of simplicity I created the application ready to use. You can find the source code here to have a look, which includes an index.php, 2 JavaScript files to decode the METAR data and a bit of CSS and a PNG image to make it less boring. It even indicates the direction of wind! But don't worry, you won't need to clone the repository at this point.

The application is based in docker-compose and is something we will install as a dependency with Packer later.

Building the Image with Packer

Let's get our hands dirty! For this, we need to create a folder somewhere in our computer, lets say ~/metar-app. Then lets cd in and create a file named metar-build.json with the following contents:

{
  "variables": {
    "access_key": "",
    "region": "",
    "secret_key": ""
  },
  "builders": [
    {
      "type": "alicloud-ecs",
      "access_key": "",
      "secret_key": "",
      "region":"",
      "image_name": "metar_app",
      "source_image": "ubuntu_16_0402_64_20G_alibase_20180409.vhd",
      "ssh_username": "root",
      "instance_type": "ecs.t5-lc1m1.small",
      "internet_charge_type": "PayByTraffic",
      "io_optimized": "true"
    }
  ],
  "provisioners": [
    {
      "type": "shell",
      "script": "base-setup"
    }
  ]
}

And right next to it, a file named base-setup with the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

apt-get update && apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl git-core software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | apt-key add -
add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
apt-get update && apt-get install -y docker-ce docker-compose
curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.21.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/bin/docker-compose

mkdir /var/docker
git clone https://github.com/roura356a/metar.git /var/docker/metar

Once you have these two files ready, you can run packer build metar-build.json and wait for it to finish. Please note that, for this to work, you need to have 3 environment variables in your machine with the relevant values for you: ALICLOUD_REGION, ALICLOUD_ACCESS_KEY and ALICLOUD_SECRET_KEY. This step will take a while, as it creates an ECS, installs all the software in it, then stops the instance, creates a snapshot of it, and finally creates the image of the whole system.

After the image is completed, packer will output ==> Builds finished. Good, we have an image ready to use! We are ready to continue to the next step.

Deploying the Infrastructure with Terraform

It's time to create the ECS Instance. For this, in the same folder, we will create a file named main.tf with the following content:

The post How to Deploy Apps Effortlessly with Packer and Terraform appeared first on SitePoint.

by Alberto Roura via SitePoint

Deft

‘Deft’ is a multipurpose One Page WordPress theme catering for several industries. The 1-click setup demos include restaurants, apps, agencies, resumes, events, architecture, exhibitions, fashion, photography and even a minimal launching soon layout. The common design element is the centrally-divided layout with the left panel introducing your brand and the right panel expanding for more information. Slick load transitions, clear typography, unique content area and multiple layout options make ‘Deft’ a good choice for a modern One Page WordPress theme.

Full Review | Direct Link

by Rob Hope @robhope via One Page Love

How to Create Printer-friendly Pages with CSS

In this article, we review the art of creating printer-friendly web pages with CSS.

“Who prints web pages?” I hear you cry! Relatively few pages will ever be reproduced on paper. But consider:

• printing travel or concert tickets
• reproducing route directions or timetables
• saving a PDF for offline reading
• accessing information in an area with poor connectivity
• using data in dangerous or dirty conditions — for example, a kitchen or factory
• outputting draft content for pen annotations
• printing web receipts for bookkeeping purposes
• providing documents to those with disabilities who find it difficult to use a screen
• printing a page for your colleague who refuses to use this newfangled t’internet nonsense.

The Web and apps can’t cover all situations, but printing pages can be a frustrating experience:

• text can be too small, too large, or too faint
• columns can be too narrow or overflow page margins
• sections are cropped or disappear entirely
• ink is wasted on unnecessary colored backgrounds and images
• link URLs can’t be seen
• advertisements are shown which could never be clicked!

Developers may advocate web accessibility, yet few remember to make the printed web accessible.

Converting responsive, continuous media to paged paper of any size and orientation can be challenging. However, CSS print control has been possible for many years, and a basic stylesheet can be completed within hours. The following sections describe well-supported and practical options for making your pages printer-friendly.

Print Stylesheets

Print CSS can either be:

1. Applied in addition to screen styling. Taking your screen styles as a base, the printer styles override those defaults as necessary.
2. Applied as separate styles. The screen and print styles are entirely separate; both start from the browser’s default styles.

The choice will depend on your site/app. Personally, I use screen styles as a print base for most websites. However, I have used separate styles for applications with radically different outputs — for example, a conference session booking system which displayed a timetable grid on-screen but a chronological schedule on paper.

A print stylesheet can be added to the HTML <head> after the standard stylesheet:

<link href="main.css" />
<link media="print" href="print.css" />

The print.css styles will be applied in addition to screen styles when the page is printed.

To separate screen and print media, main.css should target the screen only:

<link media="screen" href="main.css" />
<link media="print" href="print.css" />

Alternatively, print styles can be included within an existing CSS file using @media rules. For example:

/* main.css */
body {
  margin: 2em;
  color: #fff;
  background-color: #000;
}

/* override styles when printing */
@media print {

  body {
    margin: 0;
    color: #000;
    background-color: #fff;
  }

}

Any number of @media print rules can be added, so this may be practical for keeping associated styles together. Screen and print rules can also be separated, but it’s a little more cumbersome:

/* main.css */

/* on-screen styles */
@media screen {

  body {
    margin: 2em;
    color: #fff;
    background-color: #000;
  }

}

/* print styles */
@media print {

  body {
    margin: 0;
    color: #000;
    background-color: #fff;
  }

}

Testing Printer Output

It’s not necessary to kill trees and use horrendously expensive ink every time you want to test your print layout! The following options replicate print styles on-screen.

Print Preview

The most reliable option is the print preview option in your browser. This shows how page breaks will be handled using your default paper size.

Alternatively, you may be able to save or preview the page by exporting to a PDF.

Developer Tools

The DevTools can emulate print styles, although page breaks won’t be shown.

In Chrome, open the Developer Tools and select More Tools, then Rendering from the three-dot icon menu. Change the Emulate CSS Media to print at the bottom of that panel.

In Firefox, open the Developer Toolbar (Shift + F2) and enter media emulate print. Print emulation doesn’t remain active between page refreshes, but press the up cursor key followed by enter to re-execute the command.

Hack Your Media

Presuming you’re using a <link> tag to load printer CSS, you could temporarily change the media attribute to screen:

<link href="main.css" />
<link media="screen" href="print.css" />

Again, this will not reveal page breaks. Don’t forget to restore the attribute to media="print" once you finish testing.

The post How to Create Printer-friendly Pages with CSS appeared first on SitePoint.

by Craig Buckler via SitePoint