WebDev3000 » GPL License

tooltipsy

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:00:47 +0000

Need a hand? Hey, this week is just taking off, so I see nothing bad in asking for a bit of help, even if it comes shaped as a tooltip. This is not necessarily about software, since I’ve seen a lot of websites that really needed some tooltip-based assistance to make your life easier… so I am sure tooltipsy will find its way straight to the tools collection of many Web designers out there.

The story goes like this: tooltipsy is a jQuery plugin that comes under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2 and – at least according to Brian Cray, its creator – provides “extremely efficient tooltip functionality,” while giving you complete control over all that’s involved in this equation – CSS, position and animation. Before deciding anything, be sure to take a closer look at the samples – just visit this page and hover your mouse cursor above the “Show me” buttons. Well documented, completely free and highly customizable, tooltipsy requires jQuery and should work with all major browsers – at least as long as Javascript is enabled, of course!

Other than the above, I guess I should also add a link to tooltipsy’s GitHub page. Well, that’s all of it for today. See you next time!

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Sencha Touch

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 05 May 2011 08:50:00 +0000

Not too long ago, we talked about mobl, “a new free and open source language designed specially to speed up building mobile applications.” Well, today we’ll move to another similar piece of code, namely Sencha Touch – after all, it’s incredible how popular became smartphones and mobile Internet in the last few years, so talking about such things isn’t just a good choice – it’s a must!

The official mumbo-jumbo goes like this – “Sencha Touch allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry touch devices.” This product’s official home looks great and, according to it, Sencha Touch is “the first HTML5 mobile Web app framework,” offering PhoneGap compatibility and allowing you to distribute your apps via Apple’s App Store or the Android Marketplace.

While Sencha Touch is freely available, support comes with a price – details on the available plans can be found here. If you ask me, I think support is pretty expensive, but since popular mobile apps sell 100,000 licenses really easy, I don’t think that’s a problem – only that some kind of free support for beginners on a budget would also be great…

As I was just saying, Sencha Touch 1.1.0 is freely available for open source projects, begin released to the public under the terms of the GPLv3 license. To check the demos currently available, just click here – TouchSolitaire is my favorite, by the way. Well… I guess that’s all, folks!

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vintageJS

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:08:33 +0000

A few days ago, I read an article about the closure of the last factory in the world still making typewriters (I think we’re talking about the last mechanical typewriters manufacturer, in fact). If we leave aside the fact that it’s amazing that the factory was still in business back in 2009 or 2010, there’s something nobody can deny: writing using a typewriting machine is something unique that computers will never succeed in replacing. Sure, you can get the job done faster and easier, but you won’t get the same feeling while doing it. In a way, it’s like driving a 50s sports car – while owners of cheap, mass produced contemporary vehicles will go speeding by, they will never feel the same thing you get from driving your treasure. Anyway… I guess it’s the time for vintageJS already, isn’t it?

As you can see above, I got a picture of myself took way back in 1922. Hell, no – my grandparents were all kids back in those days, so… this takes us to the purpose of this piece of code known as vintageJS, of course: upload your images, apply a custom retro, vintage look to them by messing with a few controls, enjoy the result – ta-taa! To make everything even better, using vintageJS is absolutely free and, if you’re not happy with it, you can grab the source and play with it (GPL license, jQuery/HTML5 code – sweet!).

With vintageJS, you can upload a photo to the server, then mess with its properties by easily adding sepia, green or grayscale effects, not to mention the vignette or the viewfinder controls – nothing out of this world, after all, but surely some tricks that send your images back in time in a matter of minutes.

At last, I guess I should also add a few words on compatibility… but since it’s all about Javascript and HTML5, I believe that every major browser should be able to handle vintageJS. Anyway, if you encounter any problems with it on a certain software/hardware setup, please don’t be shy and drop a comment below, all right? Thank you in advance for that & bye-bye for now!!!

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OSClass

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:03:52 +0000

No matter how tough the economic situation may be, there’s one thing that applies almost every time: those who really want to work always find something to do. For the others, the crisis is always a good reason to rub the mint and complain about how tough their life is. Well, I won’t be able to provide anyone with a job in this article, but I can surely provide webmasters with a pretty good free & open source application that has the purpose of helping you create and manage a classifieds website.

Today’s subject, OSClass, was built using PHP and MySQL and, according to its official page that I just mentioned, it provides all “you need to easily create your own classifieds website.” With a bunch of sector-specific extensions for cars, jobs, dating, real estate and so on, OSClass allows you to easily create lists, not to mention that it can display any type and amount of items, all inside a customizable interface sporting flexible theming support, a few themes being already provided with the setup package.

Integration doesn’t look bad at all, since you can easily add Google Maps or PayPal into the equation, not to mention breadcrumbs navigation and a bunch of other goodies that I’ll leave for you to discover. Obviously, there’s no need to install the whole OSClass package to get a quick taste of it, since a demo can be quickly accessed by clicking here. I guess that’s all, folks – feel free to share your opinions on OSClass with the rest of us here, don’t be shy, all right?

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Infinite Responder

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:23:01 +0000

I don’t know if it’s only me and the emails I receive, but some messages don’t really need my attention – it’s not spam, just messages from friends that usually get answers like “I have seen that video 2 years ago.” or “Sorry, but I don’t have time for that.” and so on. I am sure you got the idea, but having a customizable autoresponder script at your disposal gets way beyond all the above – no need to tell you how useful can be such a thing for a business, right?

Leaving aside the features and Infinite Responder‘s ease of use, the most interesting part of this story is that most similar scripts, some of them sporting far less features, come for money. In fact, I think that most products that have anything to do with email campaigns, lead generation or newsletters are overpriced like hell, but let’s leave that and take a look at the official mumbo-jumbo now, shall we?

“Infinite Responder is an autoresponder & newsletter hybrid that allows you to send as many messages, as many emails to as many lists as you want. It can behave as both a sequential autoresponder and a newsletter mailer.”

With features like a full Web-based control panel, global blacklist, unlimited custom fields or email-based subscriptions, this GPL-licensed script requires a Web server with Apache or IIS, PHP 4.3+, MySQL 4+, the IMAP library (for bounce and mail checking) and, finally, Crontab (for scheduled mail sending). Well, I guess that’s all for today and I am sure some of you will find Infinite Responder to be a real treasure in a world of scams and overpriced piece of code. Good luck!

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Open Web Analytics

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:36:28 +0000

Apart from these sites I don’t own but I write for with pleasure, I have a few sites of my own that I update only once in a while, so I couldn’t care less about Google Analytics. In fact, I don’t even use that – WordPress Stats is more than enough for my needs. On the other hand, I would be a fool to deny the fact that a lot of people need some serious Web analytics solutions, so I am sure one that’s also free AND open source would come in really handy. Ladies and gents, here’s Open Web Analytics!

Shortly known as OWA, Open Web Analytics is a not-so-little (current release, 1.4.1, comes in a 5.9 MB archive) piece of code that can be easily used to track and analyze how people use your websites and online applications, offering two vital features: built-in installer for both WordPress and MediaWiki sites! The rest of it is nothing but background noise, but let me give you a few directions…

… if you go to the official site I mentioned above you will find all the things you need to know about Open Web Analytics, but if you really want to be quick in deciding if OWA is worth the effort or not, you should start with the comparison between OWA, Google Analytics and Piwik 1.0. If you’re planning to use it with a WordPress site (or more), you could jump straight to the installation page – believe me, even my mother could make OWA work with a WordPress site!

Anyway, since this article’s intention is far from reviewing OWA, I think it’s enough to take the info above and use it as you see fit. To me, Open Web Analytics looks awesome and all I can hope is that you find it useful for your needs. That’s all, folks!

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SEO Panel

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:39:22 +0000

Is SEO a good thing or the root of all evil? To me, the answer is slowly, but surely, moving to the last answer. Anyway, if Google’s efforts to make things right will take the right path one day and take out of the search engine all the spammy and illegal sites that are allowed to be there simply because they bring too much money to be taken out, then SEO may become again what’s supposed to be – the art of bringing quality content closer to its target, not the art of throwing junk in your face and hoping that it generates some clicks on those ads…

… so you will surely bump into a lot of expensive SEO tools all over the Web if you want to get some SEO job done and you don’t know what to use. Fortunately, tools like SEO Panel make me hope there’s still a future for a decent Internet – it’s free, open source, and packs a lot of firepower, as its official description says: “A complete open source seo control panel for managing search engine optimization of your websites. SEO Panel is a seo tool kit includes latest hot seo tools to increase and track the performace of your websites. It is a free software released under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE V2. The main feature of SEO Panel is its extendability by using SEO plugins. Any one can easily develop and install required plugins for their seo panel.”

Released back in January 2010, SEO Panel feels great, delivering a lot of info that I know for sure some people pay to get all in the same place. Well, now you just got a golden tip, it’s up to you how you use it! To access the demos for both the admin and user interfaces, just go here and follow the instructions. That’s all, folks! Please, be nice guys and use SEO Panel to make the Internet better, not just to increase your revenue by pushing up the rankings of sites you wouldn’t look at a second time if you were a user, all right?

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Coppermine

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:22:51 +0000

In the last few months, I barely touched my digital camera, despite the fact that I love taking pictures and I’m pretty good at it, especially considering the fact that I have a poor compact one, not some state-of-the-art & expensive DSLR. The reason? I simply feel overwhelmed by my photo collection and adding new galleries to it feels frightening… but that won’t stop me from taking a closer look at one pretty interesting image gallery script, namely Coppermine.

Built using PHP and MySQL, Coppermine is made available for free, being covered by the terms of the GPL license. Its last release arrived about 3 days ago, so you can’t claim that this project is not alive enough for your needs. Coppermine offers a lot of interesting and useful features, such as automatic thumbnail generation, search capabilities, RSS support, slideshow and e-card capability, user feedback, image rotation and multiple files uploads, as well as many others. After all, you have the official page I mentioned above, check the features there, I’m not going to go through all that list again!

The demo gallery, available here, looks pretty good, but if it doesn’t blow your mind, think about the speed and wide range of features, not to mention that most people don’t need any fancy Flash-based image gallery, just to generate thumbnails and get fast image loading times, and Coppermine surely offers much more than that, yet remaining an easy to install/use, free for all and reliable image gallery. In case you need some out-of-this-world features, then you may want to search somewhere else, or just dig deeper its documentation – there’s a lot about Coppermine, trust me! Well, I guess that’s all for today, so bye-bye!

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justVisual 2

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:11:46 +0000

If someone tells you that WordPress seems like rocket science, what would you recommend? Sure, we are talking about some people that use computers at work, yet remaining computer illeterates when it comes to anything else than the stuff they do to earn their living. Well, I think the best thing for them would be a voice-controlled CMS, but until then… I think things like justVisual 2 may just do the trick.

While I may not fully agree with this description, the official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “justVisual 2 is a databaseless XML-based content management system for small or medium-sized web sites. justVisual enables support for multiple languages.” More information and download/demo links can be found here.

Now, why would I disagree with that description? After all, it has been done by the team behind it, right? Well, as long as it involves some HTML tags, as easy as those may seem to people with more than a day of Web design experience, some consider even such things to be too complicated. Anyway, the idea is that justVisual 2 can help you decrease hosting costs while still offering features like URL rewriting, plugins or multiple languages. Unfortunately, it seems the project is currently on hold, but since the code is licensed under the terms of the GPL license, nothing stops you from taking over and pushing this interesting, yet really basic CMS, as high as possible, right?

Obviously, justVisual 2 works great with any major browser you can think of, so feel free to take at least a look at the demo(admin/admin). That’s all, folks!

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ImpressPages

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:22:28 +0000

One of my dreams is to discover, one day, a CMS that allows me to add content with my mind – no voice commands, no use of ancient devices like the keyboard and mouse I use now – just the idea of an article, of a page layout, of a banner, and everything should go online in a matter of seconds! Oh, yeah, and another interesting idea – spam should be severely punished. I know, I know – I am dreaming, but small steps help us reach the highest peaks, and today we have here a CMS that allows you to edit almost everything using a drag and drop interface and just a bit of HTML/CSS… ImpressPages, of course!

But what’s so special about ImpressPages, after all? Well, while my mother could easily use it, maybe except the HTML/CSS parts, this CMS is SEO friendly, allowing you to edit meta tags for all pages and offering an automatically generated sitemap, not to mention the ease of managing multilanguage websites or performing basic content creation/editing, handing text, videos or photos/photo galleries as easy as possible. Pretty cool, especially since ImpressPages is absolutely free, being released under the terms of the GPL v3 license, don’t you think?

This demo page allows you to go and check both the public site and the admin zone, with a few restrictions needed to provide demo functionality to anyone who may be interested in it at any given time. Requiring at least MySQL 5 and PHP 5.3, ImpressPages works with all major browsers and features like the excellent newsletter module I didn’t manage to mention yet are waiting to be discovered, so I’ll let you get to it. Good luck!

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