WebDev3000 » CC License

phpA/B

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:17:11 +0000

While some say content is the king, I must somehow disagree. Content may be the king, but it’s all about delivery. No matter how brilliant and useful may be your writing, for example, users visiting your blog won’t look for those Google ads placed in a corner, or somewhere below the copyright information. Even more, colors and placement of page elements may turn interesting content into boring one, but – usually – not the other way around, so instead of finding about what’s good and bad the hard way, it would be a good idea to do some A/B testing…

Since I told you about this, I will tell you about a free tool for quickly setting up A/B tests on your website, namely phpA/B. Covered by the terms of the Creative Commons License, phpA/B integrates automatically into Google Analytics and can be run in both trial and live mode. After all, going for live testing with a popular website can hurt your finances a lot, in some cases.

Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about testing your work a bit, because phpA/B is able to automatically keep out search engine bots of your tests, allowing you to get some clean results and minimize risks. If you got “PHP version 5 or above, Google Analytics, and a thirst for knowledge,” you should go ahead and give phpA/B a try, don’t you think? Good luck!

Toucan

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:18:38 +0000

If you ever feel down, just think about people who struggle daily with more than you ever had to face your entire life. If that doesn’t help you move on… I honestly don’t what will. Think about colors and the world around you, for example. Ever felt that you’re living in a grey, sad city? Think about people who are color blind! Today, it’s not about making your life better, but about colors, and Toucan can really help you bring a lot of color into your projects…

… and, best of all, we’re talking about a completely free online resource, capable of providing up to 20 colors per palette, offering advanced sharing and importing features, all being done carefully following color theory. It even includes color deficiency previews, and to save your creations, you only need to create a free account. Unfortunately, I didn’t create an account, so I can’t tell you more about the formats available for saving your work, but I am sure you can discover that for yourselves, right?

All you have to do is go to this page and press the yellow Launch Toucan button. Oh, yeah, one more thing – Toucan seems to work properly with all popular browsers, and you will also find a great tutorial movie on the page that I just mentioned, so nobody’s asking you to create an account before seeing what you’ll get. That’s all, folks, enjoy Toucan and be sure to have a colorful day!

Tiny Fluid Grid

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:04:03 +0000

A few years ago, resolutions used by people going online were only a few, so designing sites using fluid layouts wasn’t something you had to do to be sure everyone’s happy. With the large scale introduction of wide resolution monitors, mobile devices like the iPad or the netbooks, fluid design became much more important, and so happened with tools created to help you get this job done. Today, we’ll talk about Tiny Fluid Grid, pictured below.

Tiny Fluid Grid was inspired by the 1KB CSS Grid and allows you to easily create fluid grids in just a few minutes, while offering the chance to customize three variables of the output: number of columns, min & max width, as well as gutter percentage.

Covered by the terms of the CC License, Tiny Fluid Grid can be downloaded as a package containing the index.html file with demo code, and the grid.css containing the CSS for the fluid layout you just created.

Compatibility: The online tool and the generated code itself should work with all major Web browsers.

LAFKON vektorDB

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:59:15 +0000

I love vectorized images, especially when they are the result of a conversion operation performed on a good photo. Sure, this requires a good photo and a program that can turn your raster image to vector, right? Scratch that, just get some free vectors, and that’s all. With resources like LAFKON vektorDB, you can’t go wrong!

LAFKON vektorDB is a freely accessible database containing free vector images created by LAFKON Publishing. How many sets are available? That’s a good question, and I am really sorry to say that I can’t answer it. Just… browse through, and start counting, if you really don’t have anything else better to do! Now, going back to the vectors and their use…

… I should add that all vectors are available as layered PDFs or SVGs, so you can easily edit them as needed. All the designs available on this page are free when used in open source projects, or with an attribution when used in free/commercial projects, being covered by the terms of the GNU and CC licenses.

Compatibility: all major browsers, as far as I can tell (no problems in Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome)

Storytlr

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:49:13 +0000

For me, WordPress is pretty easy to use, but I must be a fool to admit that using it and harnessing its power is something as easy as it gets for someone facing its first blogging script. Sometimes, people simply need to share things online without knowing anything about the script allowing them to do it, and Storytlr may be the right tool to choose…

According to the official page, “Storytlr is an open source lifestreaming and micro blogging platform,” allowing you to import data from various Web 2.0 sources straight to your website. These sources will appear on your page as a lifestream, and there’s quite a lot to see in such a site belonging to someone who’s active on social networking sites, since Storytlr supports most popular services you can think of, such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and many others.

As you probably imagined already, Storytlr comes with some built-in themes, while new ones can easily be created using HTML/CSS. Built using PHP and MySQL, Storytlr is open source and completely free to use, being covered by the terms of the CC License. Do you feel like giving it a try? I surely do!

Colorhat

Adrian — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:27:37 +0000

Time tracking software helps you increase an employee’s time management abilities and provide employees direct feedback on their targets versus productivity. If you have a small business or you are developer or an engineer or a student you should use a free application.

Colorhat is a free time management and time tracking software. At this time Colorhat is a single user system but soon it will also be available a multiuser functionality via friend and sharing functions. If you want to see what is all about, you can try Colorhat without registering. If you like it, you can signup here.

The first step after logging in, you should read the Colorhat introduction section. There you will learn how to use Colorhat and where you will find all the answers to your questions. Also you can post all the bugs you will find (if you will find one ).

If you use often combinations, Colorhat offers you Favorites. Also with Colorhat you can categorize things using lists. When you are in the Customers, Projects or Services overview, click “New List”. Give your new list a name eg. Personal, Work etc. Then press enter. You have now created a New List and need to populate it. Click “edit”, select all the entries you want in the List – then click “Save”.

Baseline

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 07:12:59 +0000

To be honest, I don’t think design can be done without using some guides, at least from time to time. Sure, most designers have a different way of seeing things than “normal” people, but I don’t think any of them has any guidelines inside the head… because this is today’s subject, and the tool to come with it is simply called Baseline.

Keeping typographic standards in mind, the guys from ProjetUrbain.com built Baseline with the goal of making website development easier. Sure, there are plenty of methods to ease your development work, but Baseline does it by offering a nice grid and a typographic layout to play with, bringing order into a world full of chaos.

Fully compatible with the latest versions of all major browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and even Opera, Baseline takes advantage of the font metrics instead of regular line height to line up major page elements, such as paragraphs, buttons, form labels and so on.

Licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons license, Baseline comes as a fully featured package, including CSS files for deployment and development, a complete set of HTML examples and templates, and even a Photoshop base document!

Compatibility: all major browsers, including Google Chrome and Safari

simpleCart(js)

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:41:31 +0000

In my early freelancing days, I had to perform (a lot of!!) basic data entry tasks on some osCommerce-based site. After cursing the hell out of that platform, I got out of that job with my reputation clean, but decided to think more than just once or twice before playing with any kind of shopping cart piece of code.

Fortunately, the path I followed in the meantime helped me stay away from any kind of shopping cart (except those situations when I was a buyer, of course), but now I really have to tell you about something a few times better than osCommerce!

That “something” is called simpleCart(js), and if I tell you that we’re talking about a shopping cart that’s as large as 20kb, you will probably say that I’m joking. Sure, I like to joke and laugh around, but this time I am really serious.

Our subject here is a very basic JavaScript-powered shopping cart script that won’t require any database or programming from you, since some basic HTML knowledge should be enough. Setting it up is extremely easy, and if you take a look at the demo, I am sure you’ll agree that this piece of code can help you achieve good results, at least when talking about the layout of the page. When it comes to security… that’s a completely different matter, and I have no idea about it yet.

Drawing the line, simpleCart(js) is a free script (MIT- and Creative Commons-licensed, it seems) that deserves your attention, so… what are you waiting for, Christmas?

Compatibility: any major browser with JavaScript enabled, of course!

FLV Player

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:18:33 +0000

This is an awesome morning, I tell you! It’s cloudy and cool, and I just got a link to a great video from a friend of mine. OK, here’s the video, although we’re not going to talk about it. What I have for you today is a video player component for your sites, and I am sure most of you will find it useful. After all, it’s always better to have some video content on a page, riiight?

FLV Player is… a FLV player component, obviously, since its name blows away any trace of doubt, and – even better than just being freely available – it’s open source and highly customizable! While there may not be that much to say about it, there’s one thing worth being mentioned here – FLV Player comes in five player types – mini, normal, maxi, multi, and JS.

The official page has enough documentation to get you started, and I am sure you’ll find FLV Player to be extremely easy to use, especially since the JS player type allows you to easily integrate it with JavaScript, drop the graphical interface and the Flash file, but keep what’s really important: the video content.

If all the above is not enough, here’s the cherry on top of the cake: this player is available under the terms of the Creative Commons and MPL licenses, allowing you to use it without citing the author. Still want more? In that case, I have nothing else to say…

Compatibility: all major browsers, as well as less notorious ones (I tried it in Maxthon and AcooBrowser, worked perfectly in both), but be aware that script blockers may cause problems, as usual

WordPress Theme Generator

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:41:40 +0000

One of the most painful parts of setting up a WordPress blog – at least for me – is choosing the theme. There are plenty of awesome free themes, as well as commercial ones, but it still feels the best when you do it yourself. The problem is that most theme generators don’t come for free, so finding a free online tool for creating WordPress themes really made my day!

WordPress Theme Generator allows you to create your own WordPress theme without even having to know what HTML, JS, PHP or CSS are, not to mention any kind of serious knowledge!

With WordPress Theme Generator, all you have to do is mess with the settings in the left side of the page, like site name, menu layout, sidebar location, overall scheme setup, text scheme, and a few others, and then press Preview at the end. If you’re happy with what you see in the preview area, you can Save the theme (ZIP file and individual theme files available) or change those settings some more, if you don’t.

Offering support from WP 2.1 up to 2.8 and being able to generate themes with widgets and tags support, WordPress Theme Generator is one of those online resources you must not miss… as long as you’re one of those working with WordPress, of course!

Compatibility: I had a sudden crash in IE8, but WordPress Theme Generator is supposed to work with all major browser, and since I wasn’t able to make it crash once again, I guess we’re talking about a pretty solid tool