I’m sure you’ve been told at one point that popups are the worst thing you could ever put on your site. They irritate visitors and discourage them from returning. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. When popups are used correctly, they are the best way to convert website visitors into customers and/or subscribers. Even the most aggressive popups…
It’s not a secret that photographs provide a nice visual experience for people, and text helps convey the message you are trying to communicate. That is why the pattern of placing text on top of large photographs has been a prominent technique in web design for the last few years. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are…
HTML pages are not always better than PDFs. For example, if the main goal is for the user to print something or scroll through a brochure or catalog, PDFs can provide an admirable experience. However, posting an effective PDF to your website can be challenging because search engines may not be able to crawl them, or users may not know…
In this two-part series, I cover testing a Rails application using RSpec and some other popular gems. If you missed Part 1, head over to Testing Rails 4 Apps With RSpec 3: Part I to get caught up first. In Part 2, with the setup out of the way, we’ll dive into writing tests for the various components of a Rails…
If you’ve been surfing the web or looking for current web trends then you probably noticed that large engaging photography has become a prominent trend in more recent website design. But finding compelling photos that are high resolution and meet your target audience needs can be extremely difficult. Most stock photo sites either provide super cheesy photos of business people shaking…
If you don’t already know, a 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the user was able to communicate with your website server, but the server could not find the page requested. A user can come across a 404 error page for a few different reasons. Either the user entered in the wrong…
This post is about job control in Unix shells. Job control is your command line shell’s built-in interface for managing multiple jobs. Although I’ve known about and used job control features like & for a long time, I only recently discovered how they all fit together. With your terminal emulator’s tabs and programs like tmux and screen, it’s possible to…
About Photoshop Masks So, what are masks anyways? A mask is a technique that allows you to make very specific portions of an image invisible while showing another object in its place. However, you might be wondering when you would ever need to hide parts of an image. Masking is a powerful technique used by web designers, graphic designers, photographers or…
In this article, we’ll look at using Pry, an IRB alternative, in a Rails application. In the LISP world, it’s common to develop the entire program interactively from the REPL (language shell) —writing functions, testing and modifying them as you go and saving them to files as needed. Because Ruby is dynamic and allows you to easily modify code at…
*This is an updated version of our previous tutorial on adding Facebook comments to your website.* Facebook’s social plugin, Comments, allows you to quickly add comments to your website. Users not only have access to basic commenting abilities, they also have the option to cross-post their comments directly into their Facebook Timeline. Comment Administrators also gain access to a deeper…