Thursday, November 28, 2019

Some HP Hard Drives Will Stop Working After 32,768 Hours of Use

When you get some kind of a hard drive, you expect to be able to continuously use that drive for about five years. This is a reasonable amount of time to make it seem like you are getting your money’s worth as far as your usage of this particular piece of hardware is concerned. However, what you...

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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World
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Using Bootstrap to Create Material Design Web Apps

Google's Material Design is ubiquitous in modern mobile apps. Perhaps it's because most people today have come to love its bold colors, subtle shadows, and minimalist layouts. Wouldn't it be great if you could easily apply the same design language to your websites and offer visitors a user experience they're are well accustomed to? Well, with MDBootstrap, you can.

MDBootstrap, also known as Material Design for Bootstrap 4, is an opensource UI kit that allows you to use Bootstrap 4, a CSS framework you might already be familiar with, to create fully responsive websites that have a Material Design look and feel. It comes with over 500 components, dozens of animations, and support for several JavaScript frameworks, including jQuery, Vue, and React.

In this step-by-step tutorial, I'll show you how to add the MDBootstrap UI kit to your web projects and use some of its components.

Or, if you want to get started right away with a professional Bootstrap theme, check out some of our ready-to-go templates.

1. Setup

MDBootstrap is available on cdnjs, and several other CDNs. Therefore, you don't need to download it to your computer to be able to use it. But adding it to a web page—along with all its dependencies—does only take a few minutes.

Start by creating a new HTML document and opening it using your favorite text editor. Then add the following HTML5 boilerplate code to it:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>My Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  
  </body>
</html>

The MDBootstrap UI kit consists of just two minified files: mdb.min.css and mdb.min.js. It does, however, depend on Bootstrap, jQuery, and Font Awesome to provide several features.

So, inside the head tag of the HTML5 document, add the following link tags:

<link rel="stylesheet"
   href="https://use.fontawesome.com/releases/v5.8.2/css/all.css">
<link rel="stylesheet"
   href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/4.3.1/css/bootstrap.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet"
   href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mdbootstrap/4.8.10/css/mdb.min.css">

Next, towards the end of the body of the document, add the following script tags:

<script type="text/javascript" 
    src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.4.1/jquery.min.js">    
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" 
    src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/twitter-bootstrap/4.3.1/js/bootstrap.min.js">    
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" 
    src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mdbootstrap/4.8.10/js/mdb.min.js">    
</script>

At this point, the web page is ready to display Material Design components.

2. Creating a Header

The first component of a Material Design web page is usually a header. It acts as a container for the navigation bar, in which you can not only display your company's logo and name, but also add links to other important pages of your website. In the Material Design spec, the navigation bar is often referred to as the top app bar.

To create a header, all you need to do is use the header tag. Creating a navigation bar, however, is a little more involved.

First, you must create a nav tag and assign the navbar class to it. This creates a basic navigation bar with a white background. If you want to give it a color from the Material palette, you can use one of the many color classes available. They have intuitive names such as purple, red, and blue-grey.

Inside the tag, you can then use the navbar-brand class while specifying your company's name or logo.

<header>
    <nav class="navbar purple navbar-dark navbar-expand-md">
       <a class="navbar-brand" href="https://example.com">
        Bob's Store
       </a>
       <!-- More code here-->
    </nav>
</header>

Note that when you're using dark colors for the navigation bar, you should add the navbar-dark class to it to ensure that the text inside is readable.

Including links to other pages of your website is as easy as creating an unordered list having the navbar-nav class, with its items having the nav-item class.

<ul class="navbar-nav ml-auto">
    <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Home</a>
    </li>
    <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Products</a>
    </li>
    <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">Offers</a>
    </li>
    <li class="nav-item">
        <a class="nav-link" href="#">About Us</a>
    </li>
</ul>

In the above code, the ml-auto class pushes the links to the opposite end of the navigation bar.

If you try looking at the web page in a browser now, you should see a header that looks like this:

A purple navigation bar

3. Using the Grid

To add actual content to the web page, you'll want to use the responsive grid system that Bootstrap offers. For the sake of a realistic example, let's add two cards to the page, placed in a single row having two columns.

Start by creating a div element with the container class. It will serve as a container for all the rows and columns we add to this document. Inside it you can create rows and columns using the row  and col-md classes. Because all of this is going to be the main content of the page, it's a good idea to wrap it in a main tag.

<main>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="row">
            <div class="col-md">
                
            </div>
            <div class="col-md">
            
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</main>

The col-md class ensures that both the columns have the same width and fit inside the row on screens whose width is at least 768 px. To target smaller or larger screens, feel free to experiment with the col-sm and col-lg classes.

You can now create cards inside both the columns using the card class. With MDBootstrap, your cards can have images, titles, buttons, and text. Here's the code for a sample card that has all of them:

<div class="card">

  <img class="card-img-top" src="tomatoes.jpg">
  
  <div class="card-body">
    <h4 class="card-title"><a>Cherry tomatoes to get costlier</a></h4>
    <p class="card-text">With a no-deal Brexit, you're likely to 
    pay 10% more for cherry tomatoes next month.</p>
    <a href="#" class="btn btn-primary">More</a>
  </div>

</div>

Similarly, go ahead and add another card to the page, this time in the second column. For best results, I suggest you use images that have the same dimensions.

<div class="card">

  <img class="card-img-top" src="raw.jpg">
  
  <div class="card-body">
    <h4 class="card-title"><a>Raw fruits and vegetables for breakfast?</a></h4>
    <p class="card-text">Raw fruits and vegetables that have been thinly sliced are great way to start your day.</p>
    <a href="#" class="btn btn-primary">More</a>
  </div>

</div>

As you may have noticed, the kit has intuitively-named classes, such as card-title and card-text, that help you quickly style the contents of your cards. Similarly, the btn and btn-primary classes help you give Material styles to your buttons.

With all the above changes, your web page should look like this:

Page displaying two cards

4. Creating a Form

Material Design forms have a very distinct look and feel. The design language goes into exhaustive detail about what each form element should look like, when it should be used, and where it should be placed.

MDBootstrap has styles for several HTML5 form elements. By using them, you can be sure that your forms conform to most of the guidelines of Material Design.

Let us now create a simple form your visitors can use to sign up for a newsletter. It shall have two text fields, one for a name and one for an email address. Additionally, it shall have a submit button.

The form will need its own row and column, so you must create them first. Because it's alone, the column will stretch to fill the entire row by default. By qualifying the col-md class with a number, and by using the offset-md class, you can control the size and the position of the column in the row.

<div class="row mt-4 mb-4">
    <div class="col-md-8 offset-md-2">
        <!-- more code here -->                                    
    </div>
</div>

In the above code, the mt-4 and mb-4 classes give the row appropriate top and bottom margins.

Inside the column, create another card. It'll serve as a container for the form and all the text associated with it. Optionally, you can use the card-header class to give a header to the the card, and thus the form too.

<div class="card">
    <h4 class="card-header white-text purple">Subscribe to us</h4>                        
    <div class="card-body">
        <!-- more code here -->
    </div>
</div>

To create the form, all you need is the form tag. But you must remember to add the form-control class to each text field you add to the form. If you have a label associated with it, you must also wrap them both inside a div  element whose class is md-form. The following code shows you how:

<form>
    <p class="h6 grey-text">Stay updated and get the latest 
        information about all our offers and discounts right
        into your inbox.</p>
        
    <div class="md-form">
        <input type="text" id="fname" class="form-control"/>
        <label for="fname">Your full name</label>
    </div>
    
    <div class="md-form">
        <input type="email" id="email" class="form-control"/>
        <label for="email">Your email address</label>
    </div>
    
    <div class="d-flex justify-content-around">
        <input type="submit" 
            class="btn purple white-text" value="Submit"/>
    </div>
</form>

Here's what the form should look like now:

The completed form

Conclusion

You now know how to create simple web pages using the Material Design for Bootstrap 4 UI kit. In this introductory tutorial, you learned how to use several important components offered by the kit, such as navigation bars, cards, and form controls. You also learned the basics of positioning the components using Bootstrap 4's grid system.

To know more about MDBootstrap, do refer to the official documentation. 


by Ashraff Hathibelagal via Envato Tuts+ Code
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How To Create a Company Timeline With a WordPress Plugin

When running a business creating an emotional connection with your audience is key. This emotional connection will allow you to communicate with your audience on a deeper level and makes them more likely to make a purchase on your website. 

While there are many ways that you can create this emotional connection, one method that stands out is to add a timeline to your About Us page on your WordPress website. This timeline allows you to take your audience inside the business and make them feel like they were and will continue to be apart of the journey. This type of connection with your audience will not only create this emotional connection, but it will help them understand your business better and they will have a clearer picture of whether or not your products or services are right for them. 

There are many WordPress timeline plugins on the market today, but one stands out above them all. With over six thousand sales on CodeCanyon, the Cool Timeline WordPress plugin is the most advanced WordPress timeline plugin and can showcase your life history timeline or your company’s story timeline in a responsive horizontal or vertical chronological order.

In this article, we are going to use the Cool Timeline WordPress plugin to present our company’s life history in an About Us page.

 

What We Will Be Building 

In our example, we are the owner of Mugs Coffee. We would like to create an emotional connection with our website viewers by detailing our company’s history in a timeline. This emotional connection will help us get more people into our coffee shop and buy coffee on the website. Our timeline will be placed on our website’s about page and contain six different dates, a header, descriptions of what happened in each year, and images to go along with the text. Here is what part of our timeline will look like. 

Cool Timeline Muggs Coffee Timeline

Creating the Timeline

To begin creating our Mugs Coffee company timeline, we will install the Cool Timeline WordPress plugin. Once the plugin is installed we will head on over to Timeline Stories > Add New from the WordPress admin section. The new story builder will now pop up. From here we can begin adding our specific timeline dates and begin adding all our information and media to them.

 We will begin with our very first entry into the timeline. This very first entry will be labeled Inspiration so we will type that into the Add title field. This title will be present on the top of the timeline entry.

Next, we will add in the text that will be displayed on the timeline entry in the WordPress visual editor below the title field. This entry is meant to let our audience know what inspired us to start Mugs Coffee. 

When you are adding in your text descriptions for a specific timeline date for your company, try and keep them short. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too much information. You just want to provide a short little emotional jolt here. 

Cool Timeline inspiration
Filling out title and description of the timeline entry

Next, we will scroll down to the Timeline Story Settings. We'll now add in the date for this entry in the Story Date / Year field. Click the field and a calendar will pop up. Our "inspiration” entry will be for January 1st, 2000, so we will insert this into the calendar. We aren't worried about the exact time for our example, but if you do require a specific time in the day, you can always set that at the bottom of the popup calendar. 

Next, we are going to change the Story Color. Our website’s theme makes use of the colors blue and red. We will make this first entry blue. This will color the banner header, month, and day blue for the particular entry.  

Finally, we are going to add this timeline entry to the categories in the plugin. By default, a Timeline Stories category is created upon installation of the plugin. If we scroll to the top of the timeline entry editor and look on the right-hand side of the screen, you can see the Categories section with one category labeled Timeline Stories in it. Click the checkbox next to Timeline Stories.

Each timeline story that you add needs to be under a specific category in order for the entire timeline to show up on your webpage. Each category is essentially a new timeline. If you would like to create a new category or timeline, head on over to WP Dashboard > Timeline Stories > Categories > Add New Item and label it accordingly.

We have now created our first entry into Mugs Coffee timeline and added it to a specific category. We are going to repeat this process for the other five timeline entries so we will have six total timeline entries ready to be displayed on our about page. Below you can take a look at what our first timeline entry looks like. 

Cool Timeline Date Entry

Adding the Timeline to the About Page

Now that we have finished adding all six of our stories to our company timeline, we can insert the actual timeline into our about page. To do this, go to Pages > Add New from the WordPress admin dashboard. We will title the page About Us. 

From the visual page editor, we will add the timeline. Click on the Cool Timeline icon on the far right of the header of the visual editor. Here is an image of the icon you should click. 

Adding Cool Timeline To Your WordPress Page

Once you click on the icon, a pop up will appear with four different options for the type of timeline to add. We would like to have our website visitors view our timeline vertically so they have to scroll down to see the entire timeline, we'll choose the Vertical Timeline option. From here, we will be brought to another menu that will give us a range of options on how we would like our timeline to be displayed. 

The first option we are going to change is the Story Order. We are going to change this to DESC, so the timeline will be displayed in descending order starting at year 2000 in our case. 

Next, we will change the Timeline Design. We will choose the Elegant option from the dropdown menu as this design fits best with our website's theme. Make sure to experiment with the different designs to find one that works best for your website's theme. 

Finally, we will change the Animation Effects. We want our timeline to fade in to give the timeline a more polished look, so we will choose the fade option. Click the okay button and the timeline shortcode will now be created and ready to go. You can now view your webpage with our Mugs Coffee company timeline for everyone to see on our about page. For a detailed tutorial on how we created this timeline, you can view the video below. 


 

Getting the Most Out of the Cool Timeline Plugin

In this article, we just went over one way that you could use the Cool Timeline plugin. There are many more uses for this timeline than just creating a company story timeline though. Here are a few ways that you could use this plugin.

Team Page

If you are running a business, you might want to let your audience know who the team members are. The Cool Timeline plugin allows you to replace the dates with custom text. Under the Timeline Story Settings, you can click the button Custom Order Based and you will be given the option to add in a custom label and a custom secondary label to be displayed under the main label. If you are creating a team page, you can use the main label to write the name of the person on the team and the secondary label to write the position they have in the business. From there, you can add a short bio in the description and an image of the team member. 

Timeline Story Settings Custom Order Based

Converting Your Blog Into a Timeline

The Cool Timeline plugin also allows you to turn existing blog posts into a timeline. To accomplish this all you need to do is choose the blog post timelines from the drop-down menu when you click the cool timeline icon in the page visual editor header. Choose either the Vertical Content Timeline (Blog) option or the Horizontal Content Timeline (Blog). The timeline menu will pop up and you can then choose the specific posts that you would like displayed in the timeline.

Guide or Step-by-Step Instructions

The layout of the timeline allows you to display text, images, and links in a clutter-free way. This allows you to systematically display a detailed set of steps on instructions that you want to show your audience. Again, by selecting the Custom Order Based option in the timeline story editor, you can replace the dates with text and links and create a step-by-step visual guide.

Conclusion

When communicating with your customers, you should strive to create an emotional connection with them. This will help your customers relate to your brand and want to make a purchase on your website. By using the Cool Timeline WordPress plugin, you can easily create an eye-catching timeline that will help you create this emotional connection with your audience. In addition to creating a traditional timeline with this plugin, you can also create other visually appealing timelines that include step by step instructions, your website's blog posts, or display your team members. 

To give this plugin a try, head over to CodeCanyon and check out the Cool Timeline WordPress plugin. And while you're here, check out some of the other great WordPress plugins available from CodeCanyon.


by Daniel Strongin via Envato Tuts+ Code
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Instagram’s Spark AR Now Has Tracking Effect And Slider Controls To Give Tough Time To Snapchat

Facebook is all set to give Snapchat a tough time, especially after launching a Spark AR platform for all creators on Instagram. On 25th Nov, Spark AR's version 76 has been released by the company that has support for two new AR effect options for developers. There are also some other changes in...

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CSS Text Effect Style 57

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Email Signature Style 47

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Facebook Experiments With Shop Style Feeds

One thing that Facebook has been working on recently has been a move into the world of eCommerce. Looking to compete with the likes of Amazon, the social media platform has been trying to take advantage of its immense user base by attempting to entice them into buying products while in the midst of...

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