Blogfreakz - Web Design and Web Development resources » Reviews

Depositphotos: User-Friendly Royalty-Free Images In A Snap!

Keith@Blogfreakz — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:15:23 +0000

Sometimes it can be difficult to find free stock photos and images online that can be freely used to complement one’s articles. But thanks to microstock photography sites like DepositPhotos.com, website owners and bloggers like me have a place to go for much-needed royalty-free images.

Despositphotos’s search feature is great. It gives you a list of suggested searches as you type in the first letters, and it also shows you how many images are available for each suggested search item. And as you can see, due to the number of images it contains, it may take you a while to look through them and choose.

I love how it lets you filter your search based on image size, something that I didn’t find in another stock photo site. I only wish they’d use specific image resolution or pixel count (px) as parameters instead of vague size measurements like xsmall, medium, xxlarge, and so on.

Next is the subscription and payment method. In terms of payment plans, Depositphotos offers very reasonable rates with 25 images per day at $180 per month. That’s about 70% cheaper than its competition! Aside from them being much more affordable, another thing that makes Depositphotos different from the rest is ‘Payment by SMS’, a payment method that allows its subscribers to order images through their mobile phone.

For bloggers like me that are just starting to use royalty-free images, Depositphotos is a great place to begin with because of their 7-day Free Trial Subscription, another thing that you won’t find in other sites. In fact, they even have this special promo for bloggers and website owners wherein they can earn free credits to buy stock images, find out more about it at Depositphotos’s official blog.

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Chit Chat for Facebook – An Honest Review

Daniel Offer — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:11:19 +0000

One of the biggest complaints about chat in social networking is that you have to be logged into the social network to use it. It can be a hindrance to productivity to keep the browser open and check back without being sucked back into Facebook for vast periods at a time. Sometimes, users would simply like to continue using the chat, much like AOL and Google Talk, without being logged in.

The solution?

One of the best solutions out there is a standalone or bundled chat program, depending on your needs. One of the Facebook messenger apps on the market is Chit Chat for Facebook.

Chit Chat for Facebook is a program that you can install on your Windows-based PC to allow you to still message on Facebook without staying logged in the main site. It works much like every other standalone client you may have already used, though it does also have some drawbacks.

The features themselves

Chit chat for Facebook is a no-frills piece of software that allows you to chat online without leaving your Facebook account open. Its functionality is exactly what you’d expect of a chat program, though in testing, I did find it slightly slow to respond sometimes.

Pros:

- Clutter free interface – It’s easy to see who is online, and who else is available to chat.

- The box that contains one chat contains all chats, i.e. you’re not spawning window after window to flick through separate chat sessions.

- The options are clear, giving you fine-grain control over important stuff like disabling emoticons and other options such as time stamping.

- The offline/online boxes are minimal, and the color scheme isn’t bad either – it’s noticeable without being too distracting and ‘in your face’.

Cons:

- Spyware – Before I even finished installing or logging in, I had to uninstall the spyware, then reinstall and run a system scan. The install process needs the end user to be aware of this, or they’ll install things they may not realize that they have, and in this case, slow down their system.

- It’s online/offline only – You can’t see whether other chatters are idle or not.

- Facebook seems to slow down slightly – This could be because your chat is logged in twice.

Overall, though, if you’re looking for an alternative Facebook chat system that won’t compromise productivity, this is a satisfactory solution.

Feature rating

Ease of installation – Given that you have to pay so much attention and know exactly what bit of the install agreement is for what, I’m rating it a 2.5. At least it gives you the opt out choice for these other pieces of software.

Features – This is advertised as a no bells-and-whistles project – so again, 4 stars – though there are some extra missing features that would make it a five-star item, such as idle status for friends.

Use – 5 stars. There was nothing difficult or uncomfortable about the use itself, and I really like that it auto-stacked chats into one box, allowing you to see who was talking to you without taking up valuable screen estate with multiple boxes.

Ease of Uninstall – No complaints: 5 stars. In addition to its ease of uninstallation, the software bundled with it is also very easy to remove and doesn’t affect the software in any way.

Overall 16.5/20

This is a solid contender for standalone chat on Facebook, and as long as you’re aware of what you’re installing, this is a great piece of software will allow you to chat without staying logged into Facebook, saving you precious time.

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Sequence.js – An Infinite Style jQuery Plugin

Keith@Blogfreakz — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:49:44 +0000

What’s great about sequence.js is that unlike most other slider plugins, it presents unlimited customization options, which is why designer Ian Lunn touts it as ‘the jQuery slider plugin with infinite style’. Rotate, fade, skew, 3D transform, parallax effects, you name it, you got it! It’s also responsive, supports touch devices, non-JS fallbacks, and it even works on browsers that don’t support CSS3.

Click on the image to view all 3 demos. Yes, THREE!

Sequence.js is an open source project and still beta stage so feel free to send Ian feedback over at GitHub. Of course, you can download this plugin now and expect his tutorials to come up anytime soon.

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jQuery Power PWChecker

Marvin@Blogfreakz — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:47:52 +0000

The Power PWChecker is a free jQuery plugin that helps your website users come up with a more secure password. It can be integrated with any form on your website.

Click on the image above to view the demo.

What the Power PWChecker does is it observes the password and checks its strength so the users will know if their choices are secure. It allows them to key in a specified minimum (default is 8 characters) and maximum (default is 16 characters) length and provides a match for their entries to see if there are inconsistencies. There is also a Callback function for onPasswordValidate and onPasswordMatch, and also works well on self-hosted websites.

When using this, add the latest reference to jQuery library, pschecker.js file and style.css file.

Below is the plugin’s markup. You can also download the SOURCE here.

Enter Password:

Confirm Password:

Submit

Strong passwords contain 8-16 characters, do not include common words or names,

and combine uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

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Lazy Load jQuery WordPress Plugin

Keith@Blogfreakz — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:20:44 +0000

Speed up your page loading time with the Lazy Load plugin! Instead of preloading images, it only loads the images that are currently viewable in the browser window, but not the other images below the page unless you scroll down.

Click on the image above to view the demo.

Even when viewing large file-size images, using the Lazy Load plugin on your WordPress blog will make browsing faster because your browser immediately resumes ready status.

Click here to download the source code for the plugin, and get the minified version here.

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Display Your Facebook Wall On Your Website With fb.wall

Keith@Blogfreakz — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:33:58 +0000

Now you don’t have to log in to your Facebook account just to check on your wall! Thanks to NeoSmart’s jQuery plugin called fb.wall, you can view the contents of your Facebook wall right on your website’s page.

Fb.wall uses Facebook’s Graph API, which allows the designers and the developers to display Facebook users’ wall contents, other pages and apps pages, onto their website.

Click on the image above for the live demo.

The plugin’s design matches perfectly with that of Facebook. You can also customize it easily with CSS! It lets you set certain parameters like number of comments displayed, guest postings, and comments visibility, to name a few.

Two versions are currently available; version 1.2.8, which costs 99.00EU, and version 1.2.7, which is free. Version 2 will be released sometime this February so better start keeping an eye out for that.

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Simple Notices Plugin – A Simple WordPress Notification

Keith@Blogfreakz — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:58:35 +0000

This WordPress plugin comes from WordPress developer Pippin Williamson. It’s an aptly-named plugin called Simple Notices Plugin, which adds a notification system to your WordPress site via custom post types. This can be very useful plugin in keeping your visitors informed of any news on your site like membership promos, site updates, upcoming features, etc.

The notice plugin assigns and stores an ID in each logged in user’s meta data, to prevent the notice from popping up every time that particular visitor opens the page. If the visitor isn’t logged in then the ID will be stored in a cookie instead.

Also, the notification’s color can be adapted to your site’s theme.

Unfortunately, there’s no available plugin demo yet but you can click here to see it in use. Then you can download the plugin here.

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Polyclip.js: Clip JPEG Images Into Polygons

Keith@Blogfreakz — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:29:12 +0000

Thanks to polyClip.js, you finally don’t have to restrict yourself to using PNG files or a graphics editor whenever you want to use an image of an object without its background. Created by ZoltanDulac, polyclip.js a jQuery plugin or JavaScript library that allows you to crop or clip any image in a non-rectangular way with HTML5 Canvas’ imagemap coordinates.

Why use JPEG with polyclip.js instead of PNG? Because PNG images can’t be as small as JPEG images when you’re dealing with photographic images, and you know how an image’s file size can affect a page’s loading time. What the script does is cut points on the image using x and y values provided by the user. If you know how to create an image map then using polyclip.js should be easy for you to use.

This plugin’s practical value can be subject for debate when you’re dealing with a lot of images but if it’s only for a handful of images, it can be a huge byte-saver.

The polyclip.js is supported by most browsers, including IE7 and 8 but it’s going to require the Excanvas JavaScript library which polyfills canvas using VML for it to function properly. It weighs in at only 2kb but for IE7 and 8, there’s going to be an additional 11kb.

You can download the latest version of polyclip.js over at GitHub. To know more about this plugin/library, you can read about it here.

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A Quaintly Designed CSS Typographic Grid

Keith@Blogfreakz — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:17:02 +0000

Here’s a very fascinating take on creating a CSS grid by Chris Coyier. If you’re site is text-heavy then this kind of layout might suit it perfectly. Check out the demo to see how it works.

Horizontal Grid

Vertical Grid

The concept is inspired by one Richard Rutter with his article Compose to a Vertical Rhythm. If you’re having trouble trying to align your site’s font with the grid because of the size variation, you can use a few tools like Baseline Rhythm Calculator, Grid bookmarklet, and Adobe Air EM calculator to help you out with the math. Or better yet, try getting some EM-based CSS.

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Rcarousel: A Continuous jQuery UI Carousel

Keith@Blogfreakz — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:50:41 +0000

Before you toss this off as just another slider review, check out this innovative content slider and carousel made with jQuery, called the rcarousel.

Created by front-end developer Wojciech rrh Ryrych, this continuous carousel is basically a jQuery UI widget which latest version (v1.1) was just released recently. Its inherent capabilities from its predecessor include custom events and a simple API.

Rcarousel supports HTML content: just place anything inside a DIV container, install the widget, and that’s it. It is highly customizable and allows the user to navigate through the content with bullets or set the scrolling to auto mode without navigation.

What sets this carousel from the others is that it has the multi carousel feature!

Check out the demo. Cool, isn’t it?

You can customize the rcarousel’s appearance by indicating the number of visible elements and a step (number of elements to scroll by). Another nice feature is loading elements on demand at runtime via API. With little effort you can fetch XML, JSON, parse them and then add elements with ‘append’ method.

Its other features are:
• Many options to choose from
• Simple to use
• Supports IMG images with links
• Auto mode
• Custom pagination

Rcarousel supports many browsers and has been tested successfully in the following:
• Internet Explorer 7+
• Firefox 3.0+
• Chrome
• Opera 10.10+
• Safari 4.0.5+

Click on the following links to download the rcarousel or its source code, and if needed, to report bugs.

If you enjoyed this carousel, you may also want to consider using Ryrych’s jQuery UI mediabox, called
rlightbox2 .