WebDev3000 » Other License http://www.webdev3000.com web design, freebies and more Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:07:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 Videola http://www.webdev3000.com/videola/ http://www.webdev3000.com/videola/#comments Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:45:51 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=981 I don’t know about you, but I think that a really good book simply doesn’t need a movie adaptation. For example, I simply wasn’t able to watch Dune after reading Frank Herbert’s books. If I have to eliminate one of the following – music, video and text – it’s always the video part that goes out. I know it may sound strange, but that’s my personal opinion and I’m not going to change it anytime soon. Well, my personal opinion doesn’t stop me from writing about video-related piece of code, so here’s Videola!

Built on Drupal and open sourced, Videola is, as far as the official mumbo-jumbo goes, “an enterprise-level video management system and video delivery platform. It allows you to create paid-access or free-access video websites which can serve video to the desktop, mobile, or television-based devices.” This piece of code allows you to easily create your own video streaming website using any business model you consider best – subscription (Netflix On-Demand style), ad-supported (Hulu style) or rental (Blockbuster / Amazon style). Obviously, you can (and should, I guess) use your own video content…

… so if you got enough videos ready to be streamed, I think the features at your disposal should be more than enough – Videola offers quite a few of them, including extensive video analytics, HD/adaptive bitrate/secure video streaming, user queues, listing of similar videos on each page, option to show video previews to non-subscribed users, in-stream ads and even iOS & Android compatible mobile streaming via WiFi or 3G. Awesome!

In case you’re still wondering, you should know that Videola works with all major browsers, including mobile ones, requiring that you have PHP & MySQL up and running on your server. A demo can be accessed right here. That’s all, folks!

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/videola/feed/ 1 OpenJS Grid http://www.webdev3000.com/openjs-grid/ http://www.webdev3000.com/openjs-grid/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 21:18:29 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=949 I hate statistics. I think I said that before, but I must say it again. It’s my hate for the math behind it, not anything else, since I must also admit that a lot of useful information is contained in various databases and tables. When it comes to displaying them, things can get rather ugly… but you can also step into a beautiful world and show records nicely shaped into a user-friendly datagrid, all thanks to OpenJS Grid, today’s topic.

To make a longer story as short as possible, I will say that OpenJS Grid is – at least according to its official page – “the easiest jQuery Grid ever,” its current version being labeled “1.7″ and offering a bunch of interesting features, including inline editing, the ability to show or hide row numbers, various data filtering methods, even CSS3-powered theming support!

Unfortunately, it seems that the theming part only works in Firefox and Chrome as it should, since I noticed some strange display issues in Opera and IE 8. Other than that, it is supposed that OpenJS Grid requires jQuery and it’s compatible with all major browsers but, as I just said, it seems to be “more compatible” with some than others… so please feel free to drop a comment and enlighten me: what seems to be wrong with this piece of code in Opera or IE? Maybe it’s just something wrong on this side, after all… ;)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/openjs-grid/feed/ 0 Vectorian Giotto http://www.webdev3000.com/vectorian-giotto/ http://www.webdev3000.com/vectorian-giotto/#comments Thu, 12 May 2011 10:30:00 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=924 As you probably noticed until now, we usually stay away from standalone software for a single platform here, on WebDev3000. Well, today we’ll talk about Vectorian Giotto, a program that only works with Win 2000/XP/Vista/7, so in case you’re wondering why is this happening, I can only tell you two words: free and awesome. Ready for it? Let’s go!

According to the official mumbo-jumbo, Vectorian Giotto 3.0 “is the free Flash animation package made for you to design, not to code.” While Adobe’s Flash is slowly moving away from designers to coders (according to the official Giotto page I mentioned above, the introduction of ActionScript 3 lead to simple actions like a button click to require 10x more coding than before!), Giotto provides a familiar interface and all the tools required to get some quick Flash work done without having to code your heart out. Even more, it doesn’t cost a single penny! ;)

The features list looks pretty solid, including a built-in editor for color palettes, vector drawing tools, filters… not to mention that rich collection of templates that allows you to have a simple banner ready in a matter of minutes. Ssssss-mokin’!!! Other than all these, I think I can only add a minor drawback – the documentation is only available online, but since Giotto is such a great product, I think we can overlook this minor issue, don’t you think? After all, you only need to remember that Vectorian Giotto is one hell of a Flash tool, great for both amateur and professional designers and, since it comes for free… why not give it a try? Good luck!

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/vectorian-giotto/feed/ 1 G5 http://www.webdev3000.com/g5/ http://www.webdev3000.com/g5/#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 08:37:44 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=921 I don’t know about you, but “G5″ sounds like an assault rifle to me – in fact, I am almost sure you have to find some military-related meaning for it, but since we’re supposed to be talking about webdev stuff here… let’s move to the G5 framework, shall we?

Today’s main keywords should be HTML5, CSS3, PHP, jQuery front end, framework and, best part of it all, free. G5 is free for personal and even commercial use as long as humans.txt remains unchanged and placed right inside the index head. If all these are not enough to make things clear, let me add that G5 is a framework that can help you to easily build PHP-powered HTML5 websites making use of resources like Modernizr, CSS3 Pie, jQuery and others, providing excellent compatibility even with older browsers, as well as a bunch of useful features, including GZip support, robots.txt / robots meta, shorthand CSS with some basic reusable classes, sticky footer and more.

G5‘s default design provides a 940 pixels total content width in a “F” shape, coming with a bunch of popular items like Orbit, Reveal or Tipsy. This freely available framework requires only PHP and, obviously, one of those major browsers – seems we’re getting more and more of them with each day, don’t you think? Anyway, if you encounter any problems with G5, don’t be shy and get back here to drop a comment – as long as it’s not spam or nonsense, it will be our pleasure to publish your thoughts. Thank you in advance! ;)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/g5/feed/ 0 Laker http://www.webdev3000.com/laker/ http://www.webdev3000.com/laker/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:00:19 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=915 Some time ago, I started to write a book for someone. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to finish it, that someone got out of the tutorials/books business, so I ended up with a nice table of contents and a few chapters that I turned into individual articles. On the other hand, the thought of writing a book keeps haunting me, so I’ll probably write at least one or two small guides before I die (maybe more than just that, I’m don’t have any plans of dying anytime soon), but once the writing’s done… preparing the content for delivery may be a bit tricky with all these devices around, so this is where Laker steps into the spotlight.

Don’t look at its name, because Laker is not mistyped and has nothing to do with sports – the official mumbo-jumbo claims we’re facing “a compendium of files, frameworks, styles and tips for designing digital publications in HTML5″ and I have nothing against it. After all, the thing that really matters is to distribute your work properly – in this case, you can use Laker to turn your book into an app for iPhone and iPad, featuring swipe for changing pages, double tap for showing the table of contents, the ability to include multimedia content like sounds, images, YouTube videos, as well as a bunch of other goodies.

Laker is open source and uses the Less Framework, its capabilities allowing you to easily build digital magazines, slideshows, catalogs, surveys and a bunch of other reading material. At last, you should keep in mind that you need a Mac and xCode for exporting the iPhone/iPad apps created using it, but Laker also allows you to create content for all modern browsers, as long as you don’t need to deliver iOS apps. Well… I guess that’s all and, if you ask me, I must say that Laker is one hell of a diploma thesis! :)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/laker/feed/ 0 Panabee http://www.webdev3000.com/panabee/ http://www.webdev3000.com/panabee/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:30:14 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=912 Remember PickyDomains and BustAName? No need to worry if you don’t, I’ll concentrate those stories in just a few words right now: it’s all about finding the best domain name for your business – nothing less, nothing more. Well, last night I just bumped into another Web-based tool built to help us get this job done and, since I really like the way it works (the looks aren’t bad at all, either), today it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Panabee!

Panabee has a really smart name and visual image, combining a panda and a bee. Why? No need to get into that now, you can find a lot of funny facts about the site and its services in the “Umm, Panabee?” section. How does it work? It’s really simple – all you need to do is type in two words or a domain name (strange enough, it works with three words, too… but the idea is to get a domain name as short as possible, not stuff like freeappdownloadsforyourandroiddevice.com), press that Search button and, finally, wait for a few seconds for the magic to be unleashed – what you will get is much more than just some straight suggestions based on keywords you entered – you get variations, alternate endings, a list of related terms, translations, Twitter and Facebook posts related to your search, even Google results and Wikipedia related terms. Sweet!

To give you a good example of a great domain name I found using Panabee, I just have to say that “free software” seems like a really tough name to find, since freesoftware.com, freesoftwar.com or even stuff like freeesoftware.com are all taken, yet… freesoftwa.re is still ready for you! Feel free to consider this WebDev3000′s gift to you today. I know only one will get it, but all I can hope is that he/she will put it to good use… and drop a message below to let us know that this domain name has been taken, of course. That’s all, folks – enjoy Panabee and be nice enough to share some great finds with the rest of us, all right? Good luck! ;)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/panabee/feed/ 3 Skitter http://www.webdev3000.com/skitter/ http://www.webdev3000.com/skitter/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:29:05 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=910 Online image galleries that also offer some cool animations when moving from one picture to another never get old, don’t you think? Sure, some people may say that watching slideshows instead of checking a bunch of thumbnails and going for the thing you want to see is a waste of time, but when it comes to slideshows, there are plenty of pieces of code to check out, so Skitter fits in really nice into this story, if you ask me… ;)

The jQuery plugin known as Skitter is freely available, looks great and enables virtually anyone to turn unordered image lists into slideshows, offering quite a few animation types, including cubes, bars, fade effects, and so on. The options available include animation particles velocity, label display on/off or slideshow timing, not to mention that each slide’s animation type can be mentioned as a class name, allowing for easy use of multiple animation types straight inside a slideshow.

As you probably figured out by now, Skitter requires jQuery and works with all major browsers… or at least that’s what is supposed to happen, since I will be honest and confess that I wasn’t able to take it for a spin using all those mobile and desktop browsers currently available in the wild, but I am sure you’ll be so nice to drop a comment below and let us know about any compatibility issues you may encounter, right? Thank you in advance and… that’s all, folks!

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/skitter/feed/ 0 LikePortal http://www.webdev3000.com/likeportal/ http://www.webdev3000.com/likeportal/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:22:42 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=902 I am in shock – it seems Facebook has become more popular than Google and porn together!!! I know that this may seem complete bullshit to some of you, but here’s the proof – what can you say against that, huh??? Now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lot of people are looking for Facebook clone scripts these days, but we won’t get that far – LikePortal should be enough for now…

… especially since LikePortal has a lot to do with Facebook – after all, its main purpose is to help you create unique likes to share on Facebook, then watch what’s happening with them – the amount of people that press those Like buttons, comments… not to mention that LikePortal also supports sharing of your content on Twitter too, next to Facebook!

Available as donationware, LikePortal uses MySQL and PHP, coming with support for multiple languages, including Chinese, using it is really easy and – at least theoretically – works best with Firefox, Opera and Chrome, but I have to tell you that I noticed some glitches while browsing it in Opera (the official page of the product is also a demo of the script itself…). Was it only me, or is this a problem everyone has? Feel free to drop a comment below, I would be grateful! That’s all, folks! ;)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/likeportal/feed/ 0 Page Speed http://www.webdev3000.com/page-speed/ http://www.webdev3000.com/page-speed/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:40:21 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=900 As I’m sure you know already, Google’s algorithm has been taking into account the speed of the Web sites checked for quite a while. Obviously, the speed of a page/website doesn’t only depend on the raw speed of the server hosting it, since there’s much more to keep in mind than that, and Page Speed was always one of the best tools to help you evaluate your websites’ performance…

… only that today we’re talking about Google’s popular Firebug/Chrome addon with a twist: Page Speed just got a brand new online version that offers similar functionality to the addon mentioned above, only that it can be used on any Web browser. Using it is really straightforward – all you have to do is enter the URL you want to check, choose if you want to get suggestions for improving your site’s speed on desktop or mobile devices, then browse the results.

If the above doesn’t seem clear enough, then you definitely have to take a look at Page Speed or… just read some of that official mumbo-jumbo right now, despite the fact it doesn’t actually say anything new: Page Speed “is a web-based tool that allows users to analyze pages at any time, in any browser, without downloading an extension. It also features Page Speed Mobile analysis, which lets developers analyze their site as viewed by a mobile browser, and get suggestions specific to mobile optimization.” Got it? Get to it! ;)

]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/page-speed/feed/ 0 SEMRush http://www.webdev3000.com/semrush/ http://www.webdev3000.com/semrush/#comments Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:30:46 +0000 Codrut Nistor http://www.webdev3000.com/?p=896 For some people, SEO is nothing more but words and numbers. After all, the Web is all about money… isn’t it? No, it’s not – at least not for me, so I simply refuse to believe that all people into this huge industry only think about their earnings before anything else, especially when it comes to helping others. In the end, SEO should be the art of delivering your visitors exactly what they’re looking for, not tricking them into visiting your shop and selling them a whole bunch of lies, as it still happens way too often. Well… SEMRush can’t take care of your way of doing things, but it surely helps you see where you’re standing!

Available for a quick try without registering, freely registered users and even as a $49.95/monthly PRO service, SEMRush has one major goal – to help you view the top keywords that your website ranks for organically, providing information such as keyword, traffic percentage, position in search results and more. More than the above, SEMRush can also show you what URLs from your site rank for specific keywords, so everything looks pretty solid…

… especially since you can use regional databases and Google versions for the domain or keyword report, the documentation is extremely well done and the paid plans can deliver up to 100,000 results per report and 10,000 reports per day, not to mention the ability to export those reports to CSV or XLS. What I really hate is that I was only able to check a single URL without creating an account, but even the free account sounds pretty good if you need some valuable information and you don’t want to spend anything to get it.

I guess that’s all for today, folks, but I have a question – if you’re one of those having a free SEMRush account already, can you tell me more about the goodies it offers? All I can see is “10 results per report” and no export capabilities, but I really hope there’s more than meets the eye… ;)

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]]> http://www.webdev3000.com/semrush/feed/ 0