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…
Here at Web Ascender, we spend a LOT of time at our desks designing and developing awesome digital products for our clients. However, all that sitting and typing can take a toll on your body in the form of a repetitive strain injury (RSI). If your wrists, forearms, elbows or neck have ever felt sore after a marathon computing session,…
Today, we’re going to be looking at some of my favorite WordPress widgets. Many WordPress plugins provide widgets as a way to modify and extend the functionality of your site without having to touch a single line of PHP. Widgets are a great way to supercharge your website’s look and feel. Let’s take a look at 4 great widgets in…
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 tutorial will show you how to select an element in a photo and remove the background while preserving fine details like hair and feathers. In this example we’ll use a free photo from freeimages.com. You can download the same image we’re using in the tutorial here. First, we’re going to use the Refine Edge tool to separate the hairs…
*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…
MailChimp is a great tool for creating email campaigns that engage consumers and drive traffic to your website. It also has a powerful template designer that allows you to create a custom design starting with a basic template. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to turn a simple layout into a great-looking design. Step 1: Creating a New Template Once…
For developers that deploy Rails with Capistrano, here are a few tasks to quickly open an interactive rails console or rails dbconsole on a remote server. If you’re like me, you’ll occasionally want to open a console to run a quick query, set an admin flag on a user or just verify that a migration worked correctly. This usually means…
It’s no longer necessary to create every feature that you want for your website. Now there are plenty of third party services to help you add some extra bells and whistles without spending much time at all. Third party companies, such as Olark, Boast, and Mailchimp, spend their time and money on offering a specific product and direct their focus…
“Do you think this is a good idea?” “Would anyone pay for this service?” “How much revenue will my new online product generate?” As a consulting company, our clients ask us questions like these all the time. Usually it’s after they’ve had a flash of inspiration about a brand new product or service idea. They have all this enthusiasm but…
