Browsing all articles in Web Developer
Apr
6

How to Protect Your Pictures from Pinterest Pinnings

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The interest on Pinterest has grown exponentially and users have been pinning photos from all over the internet. If your site leverages on having loads of images, this pinning fever might worry you a little – there are references to Pinterest as being the ‘haven for copyright violations’ for a reason. If you are not fond of having your valuable copyrighted photos pinned by these pinners, it may seem like there is nothing you can do to stop them, or is there?

prevent pinterest How to Protect Your Pictures from Pinterest Pinnings [Quicktip]

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Feb
23

Amazing 30 WebGL Experiments

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3 Dreams of Black

Authored by Google Data Arts Team, 3 Dreams of Black brings you into 3 dream worlds constructed through a combination of rich 2D drawings and animations interwoven with interactive 3D sequences. Check out the wonders for wonderful experience!

3 dreams of black 30 WebGL Experiments That Are Just Wow!

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Feb
23

Designing For Android

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But let’s face it. Android’s multiple devices and form factors make it feel like designing for it is an uphill battle. And its cryptic documentation is hardly a starting point for designing and producing great apps. Surf the Web for resources on Android design and you’ll find little there to guide you.

If all this feels discouraging (and if it’s the reason you’re not designing apps for Android), you’re not alone. Fortunately, Android is beginning to address the issues with multiple devices and screen sizes, and device makers are slowly arriving at standards that will eventually reduce complexity.

This article will help designers become familiar with what they need to know to get started with Android and to deliver the right assets to the development team. The topics we’ll cover are:

  • Demystifying Android screen densities,
  • Learning the fundamentals of Android design via design patterns,
  • Design assets your developer needs,
  • How to get screenshots,
  • What Android 3 is about, and what’s on the horizon.
[Note: A must-have for professional Web designers and developers: The Printed Smashing Books Bundle is full of practical insight for your daily work. Get the bundle right away!]
Jan
26

46 Examples of HTML5 Websites

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HTML5 technology is the proposed next extensive major revision of HTML. It works on every platform, is compatible with older browsers, and handles errors gracefully. HTML5 adds many new syntactical features. These include the video, audio, and canvas elements. These features are designed to make it easy to include multimedia content on the web without having plug-in and APIs. Other new elements, such as section, article, header, and nav are designed to enrich the content. In this Today’s post showcased 46 Best Inspirational Examples of HTML5 Websites.

Spigotdesign

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Aug
8

Static HTML vs Dynamic URLs for Search Engine Optimization

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What’s a static HTML page?

The classic static web page is generated from an actual page ‘physically’ located on the server: so if you had a page named static-page.html somewhere on your server you could find and download this page (it exists, you could grab it via FTP).

The very first websites all used static HTML pages and so the first search engines cut their teeth on static web pages.

What’s a dynamically generated web page?

As the web developed a new way to generate websites arrived, dynamically generated web pages. They differ from static pages in that there is no ‘physical’ equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server (so you can’t directly download it via FTP).

Dynamically generated pages in it’s simplest form is a single template page that’s used to generate an entire website (could be 1,000,000 page site). Since dynamic pages use scripting languages like PHP and ASP the template will be named after that language for example dynamic-page.php.

This one template page can then be used to create a theoretical unlimited number of unique (unique content) pages each with a unique dynamically generated URL. A simple example would be a 100 page site with each page generated with the format below-

dynamic-page.php?page=1
dynamic-page.php?page=2
dynamic-page.php?page=3
dynamic-page.php?page=4
dynamic-page.php?page=5


dynamic-page.php?page=100

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Apr
2

Introducing Gmail Motion

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A new way to communicate : Gmail Motion

The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion — now you can control Gmail with your body.

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Mar
29

Syncing Content With HTML5 Video

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Embedding Video

This is old news. Embedding video in a document is as easy as adding a <video> element and pointing it to the source video. Adding a controls attribute gives you native controls:

1 <video src="chris.ogv" controls></video>

This is the theory, though. In the real world of intellectual property, corporate competition and device-specific solutions, we as developers have to jump through a few hoops:

01 <video controls="true" height="295" width="480">
02 <!-- hello iOS, Safari and IE9 -->
03 <source src="chris.mp4" type="video/mp4">
04 <!-- Hello Chrome and Firefox (and Opera?) -->
05 <source src="chris.webm" type="video/webm">
06 <!-- Hello Firefox and Opera -->
07 <source src="chris.ogv" type="video/ogg">
08 <!-- Hello legacy -->
09 Your browser does not support the video tag,
11 check the video on YouTube
12 </a>.
13 </video>

This shows how we need to deliver video in three formats in order to satisfy all of the different browsers out there. There are a few ways to accomplish this. Here’s what I do…

Convert Video With Miro Video Converter

Miro Video Converter is an open-source tool for Mac that makes converting videos dead easy. Simply drag the video to the tool, select WebM as the output format, and watch the progress. A few other converters for Windows and Linux are available, too.

Miro in Syncing Content With HTML5 Video read more

Mar
6

In Search Of The Perfect CAPTCHA

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The Incentive To Act Human

To understand the need for CAPTCHAs, we should understand spammers’ incentives for creating and using automated input systems. For the sake of this article, we’ll think of spam as of any unwarranted interaction or input on a website, whether malicious or for the benefit of the spammer (and that differ from the purpose of the website). Incentives to spam include:

  • Advertising on a massive scale;
  • Manipulating online voting systems;
  • Destabilizing a critical human equilibrium (i.e. creating an unfair advantage);
  • Vandalizing or destroying the integrity of a website;
  • Creating unnatural, unethical links to boost search engine rankings;
  • Accessing private information;
  • Spreading malicious code.

All of these incentives lead to profitable or otherwise gainful situations for spammers. Automating the process obviously allows for superhuman speed and efficiency.

Those who run websites know that this is a big business and a big problem. Akismet, the popular spam killer (commonly seen as a WordPress plug-in), catches over 18 million spam comments per day and has caught more than 20 billion in its history. Mollom, which provides a similar service, catches over half a million spam comments per day and estimates that more than 90% of all messages are spam.

No amount of asking nicely will stop the spammers, but their greed can be used against them; using automated systems to increase profit does have a weakness.

Enter the CAPTCHA

On one side of the coin is the spammer; on the other is the humble website owner, a pleasant sort, who experiences common problems:

  • Blogs and forums that sink under the weight of spam posts,
  • Accounts that are registered under false pretences for unlawful purposes,
  • Bots that ruin the dynamics of a website,
  • A dive in the quality of content and the user experience.

Automated spam plagues website owners to no end, so CAPTCHAs are appealing and compelling… initially. The time needed to moderate and review user-generated content versus the time needed to implement a CAPTCHA is what pushes most developers to do it.

In fact, CAPTCHAs are used a lot. The reCAPTCHA project estimates that over 200 million reCAPTCHAs are completed daily, and it takes an average of 10 seconds to complete one. The Drupal CAPTCHA project logs close to 100 thousand uses per week, and this is just a fraction of websites (those that choose to report back).

CAPTCHAs tackle a problem head-on: they focus purely on stopping spammers. Genuine users are, for the most part, overlooked. That is to say, an assumption is made that the normal behavior of users is not affected.

It’s not true, though. The issue of genuine usability is not new. The W3C released a report back in 2005 on the inaccessibility of CAPTCHAs, which suggested that some systems can be defeated with up to 90% accuracy. More recently (in 2009), Casey Henry looked at the effectiveness of CAPTCHAs on conversion rates and suggested a possible conversion loss of around 3%:

“Given the fact that many clients count on conversions to make money, not receiving 3.2% of those conversions could put a dent in sales. Personally, I would rather sort through a few spam conversions instead of losing out on possible income.”

— Casey Henry, CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates

In 2010, a team from Stanford University released a report entitled “How Good Are Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs? A Large Scale Evaluation” (PDF), which evaluates CAPTCHAs on the Internet’s biggest websites. Unsurprisingly, the results weren’t favourable, the most astounding being an average of 28.4 seconds to complete audio CAPTCHAs. The study also highlighted worrisome issues for non-native English speakers.

Web developers like Tim Kadlec have called for death to CAPTCHAs, and he makes a strong argument against their use:

“Spam is not the user’s problem; it is the problem of the business that is providing the website. It is arrogant and lazy to try and push the problem onto a website’s visitors.”

— Tim Kadlec, Death To CAPTCHAs

Completing a CAPTCHA may seem like a trivial task, but studies (like that of the W3C) have shown that that’s far from the reality. And as Kadlec mentions later in his article, what about users with visual impairments, dyslexia and other special needs? Providing an inaccessible wall doesn’t seem fair. Users are the ones who invest in and give purpose to websites.

The question is, are CAPTCHAs so unusable that they shouldn’t be used at all? Perhaps more importantly, does a usable CAPTCHA that cannot be cracked exist? If the answer is no, what is the real solution to online spam?

The World Of CAPTCHAs

The human brain is an amazing piece of work. Its ability to conceptualize, to find order in chaos and to adapt under extraordinary circumstances makes it highly useful, to say the least. For some tasks, it outshines a computer with great ease. In other tasks — mathematics, for example — it is laughably inferior.

Logic would dictate, therefore, that the most successful CAPTCHA would be:

  • A task that users excel at naturally but that computers can’t begin to comprehend,
  • A task that is incredibly quick for users to perform but arduous for computers,
  • A task that minimizes the need for additional user input,
  • A task that is relatively accessible to all users, even those with special needs (that is, the CAPTCHA should be no more difficult than general Web usage and the current task demand).

One of the greatest advantages that humans have over machines is our ability to visually recognize patterns. The most popular CAPTCHA technique derives from this.

Web developers have explored many options: simple recognition tests, interactive tasks, games of Tic Tac Toe and equations that even mathematicians would have struggled with. We’ll explore the more sensible ideas being implemented online today.

Text Recognition

The most popular type of CAPTCHA currently used is text recognition (as seen with the reCAPTCHA project).

Smb2-recaptcha in In Search Of The Perfect CAPTCHA
The reCAPTCHA project aims to stop spam and help digitize books.

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