WebDev3000 » GPL License

cFTP

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:38:47 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have to share various documents with people who are a bit paranoid. In most cases, it’s about some pictures from a party, but this also applies to work-related data, and when it comes to sharing something only with a few people, you could go ahead and upload some password-protected archive using RapidShare or a similar service, or…

… you could go ahead and grab cFTP! With less than 120kb to download, cFTP allows you to easily create clients accounts thanks to a very easy to use front end, then you can move on and upload as many files as needed to each account in a matter of minutes. To make everything even more serious, you can add a title and description to each file you upload. Cool enough?

Here’s the cherry on top of the cFTP cake: this piece of code comes under the terms of the GPL license, and you only need a server with PHP/MySQL and some free space to get it up and running. Obviously, the amount of free space required depends on your file uploading needs…

Unfortunately, there’s no demo for this PHP application to play with, but a bunch of screenshots can be viewed on Facebook (you can find the link on the official page I pointed earlier). That’s all, folks!

Sudo Slider

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:12:44 +0000

Since weekend is coming, I think that some CMS or shopping cart wouldn’t be a good idea. At least when I think about myself, I usually enjoy some light work during weekends, nothing special, as it happens with most of my friends. The web designers that I can call “friends” usually go in the woods during weekends, but when they don’t, they usually avoid work, that’s certain. If things are so boring for them and they end up facing some script, I know they would surely enjoy something like Sudo Slider…

But what is this thing called “Sudo Slider,” you will ask, right? Based on Easy Slider, Sudo Slider is a jQuery slider plugin packing quite a few interesting features. To make a longer story short, I think it’s enough to say that this piece of code will help you to display any HTML content via Ajax, displaying the items with fade or slide effects. Even better, you can use multiple sliders in one page and you get support for forward-back browsing, so you can easily bookmark every item.

Before giving Sudo Slider a try on your website, I think best thing to do is take a look at the demo. This 10kb plugin may be unobtrusive, but it’s surely faster to click the link above than make it work on your pages, right? That’s all, folks – have a nice weekend and be sure to enjoy Sudo Slider!

Compatibility: all major browsers

BBYIDX

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:42:57 +0000

If we forget about health and time, probably the most precious thing one can have is a box full of ideas. Hey, even one good idea can be worth millions, especially since it’s not that easy to gather a bunch of ideas under the same banner, no matter if they belong to one or more individuals. These being said, what do you think about a Ruby-powered idea-gathering piece of code freely available?

According to the official mumbo-jumbo, “BBYIDX is a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby and distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License.” Used as the foundation of the not-so-notorious, but really interesting Best Buy IdeaX website, BBYIDX allows its users to easily post, tag, comment and vote on ideas, while administrators can moderate incoming comments/ideas, also being able to assign work-flow to certain ideas for further development.

To make everything more interesting, BBYIDX comes with read and write APIs that one can employ to access an instance via another website or even mobile application. That’s all for now, folks, but be sure we’ll hear about BBYIDX again some day in the future!

Commentics

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:14:39 +0000

As we all know, and some of us even feel it, the global economy seems to cool down. Unfortunately, for some people, things are really frozen, but at least when it comes to online shops, there’s still a pretty solid chance to succeed. Sure, a lot of shops, online and offline, have been going down lately, but this leaves some room to exploit, especially since things will slowly start heating up again pretty soon.

All the above being said, you may think I’ll tell you about some shopping cart, but I won’t. Why that? Well… I am thinking about people who built their own carts, but maybe forgot or didn’t have the time to add some serious user-driven comments capabilities. For them, as well as others who may need to quickly add some user comments, here you go – Commentics!

Commentics has a really inspired name, if you ask me, but this one surely’s about the features, and not the name. Completely free to download and use, Commentics was built using PHP, and you can take a look at the demo here. Its features include captcha spam protection, smilies, star ratings, pagination, email subscription, even a RSS feed, but you’ll surely get more than just these!

The backend offers a ban system, drag and drop design, database backup capabilities and more, while this actively developed GPL project should work on all major browsers, even text-based Linux ones, but I wouldn’t bet on that. Unfortunately, I have no chance to try that right now, so why don’t you boot up your Linux box and load the demo in Links, then come back here with some feedback? Thanks in advance!

TeamLab

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:33:34 +0000

While I can work in a team, I usually hate teamwork. The main reason is the fact that my work could be influenced by other’s mistakes, but I can’t say I am really that much into other people, either. These being said, I’ll turn things upside down and tell you a few things about a collaboration platform usable by small teams and enterprises, as well. What, you were expecting a tool for solitary freelancers? Lol, not today, that’s for sure!

TeamLab is our subject today, and the story is pretty short – it comes in a hosted and open source version, both freely available, enabling you to easily create teams, manage projects, setting milestones, creating tasks, and so on. Hey, it even has a built-in instant messaging client, integrated blogging, forum, and the 2-minute introductory video tutorial can help you get a clear idea about it without wasting time. Awesome!

Unfortunately for PHP fans, TeamLab requires ASP.NET and MySQL, SQLite or ADO.NET databases to work on your server. Oh, well, if you’re happy with the name.teamlab.com URL format, you can go with the hosted version, at least for a while…

Compatibility: all major browsers, at l;east until someone proves me wrong…

AdverTool

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:18:06 +0000

Managing PPC campaigns can be pretty easy or a “headache generator” like never been seen, it all depends on the tools you’re using to get things done. To be honest, I usually go for affiliate programs, but the fact that I didn’t get rich so far may be one sign that I should also try other things… especially when we talk about bringing traffic to my sites. Since I don’t have much time for my own projects anyway, here’s what I found for you: AdverTool!

Oh, my, but what do we have here? AdverTool is an open source Web-based application that allows you to easily control PPC campaigns, integrating with most of the popular ad networks, including Facebook, AdBrite, Microsoft Ad Center or the notorious Google Adwords. Why use it? Think about managing all your campaigns from the same interface, and you already got one of the many possible answers!

To sum it all up, AdverTool can help you earn some extra cash. How? Time, my friends, time! While this piece of code won’t improve the efficiency of any campaign you may be running, it will surely give you more time to spare and do that by yourselves, and that’s what really matter – having enough time to get things done properly!

Compatibility/Requirements: all major browsers, PHP/SQL database, with support for most SQL servers

jMediaelement

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:29:06 +0000

Could you live without sites like YouTube or Vimeo? I think I could, but that would surely be a pretty boring life! Sure, that won’t happen anytime soon, especially since it becomes easier with each day to add media elements to your website. Today, we’ll take a look at jMediaelement, an audio-video development kit built using HTML5 and jQuery.

jMediaelement, shortly known as “jme,” is covered by the terms of the terms of the GPL and MIT licenses, offering support for a wide range of media file formats, including OGG, MP4, FLV, and more. With its help, you can easily create media elements just by calling a function. While it offers support for all major browsers, jme can fallback to Flash and VLC plugin when facing some exotic Web browser…

Other than the above, you should also know that the player’s looks can be easily changed using CSS, and if you want to quickly check a demo, you should take a look at this page. That’s all, folks!

Mammoth

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:56:27 +0000

While Flash may not die anytime soon, HTML5’s rise to power will surely add some problems to all people working on websites. For example, think about streaming sites. While using some Flash streaming server may not be such a big deal, adding HTML5 to the equation may give some people a headache. Anyway, until that happens… let’s take a look at one streaming server with support for most Flash codecs, shall we?

According to its author, “Mammoth is becoming a full blown high concurrency C++ Flash Streaming Server running on windows and *nix.” Its features list includes support for “all possible Flash codecs: h263, h264, mp3, vp6, speex, nellymoser, etc…,” a fully configurable threading model and, to make it all even more interesting, it can also provide container support for additional formats, such as mov, mkv, mp3 and others, thanks to FFmpeg.

Still in Alpha stage, Mammoth looks pretty solid and can be messed with for free. Covered by the terms of the GPL License, this piece of code can be downloaded from the official page, here. That’s all, folks!

Sexy.js

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:38:05 +0000

Those who claim that intelligence is sexy may be right, after all. Why? I never thought about programming/code to be sexy, and I wasn’t expecting to see a jQuery library with such a smart branding as Sexy.js. Now, they only need a theme song… and I can’t suggest anything else but ZZ Top’s Legs, since I think it goes perfectly with the home page of this product!

Sexy.js is a chainable library that allows you to easily manage script dependencies and write “sexy” code. While I would really like to see a nice video presentation of this lightweight JavaScript library, all I could find was this slideshow. Don’t get me wrong, this slideshow is nicely put together, but this piece of code surely deserves more!

Dual licensed under the MIT or GPL v2 licenses, Sexy.js can easily turn “ugly” code into “sexy” one, providing enhanced sequential Ajax (Sajax) functionality and coming in two versions – as a jQuery plugin, or standalone. Obviously, there’s no special requirement for it, since all major browsers can easily handle JavaScript. For a demo, take a look at this page. Enjoy!

ThinkTank

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:46:58 +0000

A friend of mine asked me about some project he should work on. To be more accurate, he wanted to start working on something to sell, but didn’t have a clue on the topic. “Some Twitter tool,” I said, and it seems I was right. No, he didn’t become a millionaire yet, but since I see so many Twitter-related tools showing up these days, some of them selling for pretty high prices, I think he has a chance. Anyway, today we’re going to talk about an open source piece of code that includes Twitter support, but still… I think good Twitter apps can earn you some serious dough, if you do things right!

Today’s topic, ThinkTank, comes with Twitter and Facebook support for now, but more are expected to join them in the near future. According to the company behind it, Expert Labs, “ThinkTank is a new, free installable web application that lets you capture the insights and expertise of your social network by collecting and organizing replies to your conversations on Twitter, Facebook and (soon!) other networks.”

While the above may sound just like one of thousand software descriptions wrote every day, one fact is certain: if the White House decided to adopt ThinkTank in the near future, this project is surely one to keep an eye on and, if you got what it takes and could find it a good use, install it on your own server and play with it for a while!

Compatibility: all major browsers, as long as you got PHP and MySQL running properly on your server