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CodeShack provides you with free tutorials, examples, tools, and references for your everyday website development needs. We created CodeShack for all users interested in the web development scene with minimal programming experience.
We are working every day on improving CodeShack, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or feedback that will help us improve it further.
Try the New Material Design Capabilities for WordPress
If you like to build websites with WordPress, then you’re in for a treat.
Now, for the first time, you don’t need to know how to code to use Google’s popular Material Design system on your WordPress website; the web giant has released a WordPress plugin and theme to import its colors, icons, UI elements, and typography straight into your CMS.
You need to install both the plugin and theme to take advantage of Material Design for WordPress. Using the add-ons, you can tweak your typography via Google Fonts, add-in MD color, and even choose your own icons. If even that’s too much, pick one of the pre-built themes. One of the best features is that the plugin warns you if your customizations break accessibility guidelines, saving you a do-over when you discover it later on. Google calls it “an experimental plugin and theme,” which means it’s subject to change. And Google has been quick to emphasize that the plugin is very much a work in progress, asking for feedback to help them direct future development efforts. It’s a really great option for anyone who’s starting on the web, building their first site, or who really wants a nice reliable design system that they can build on in the future. It’s yet another automation tool that has driven WordPress to the top of the technology pile and made it the CMS of choice for 40% of the web. As tech hots up and AI continues to develop, it’s hard to dismiss the idea that one day soon, our only contribution to websites will be paying the hosting bill!
Software and apps often solve very complex problems for businesses and consumers in the way of sales, marketing, finances, and so on. But offering a product that solves your users’ problems isn’t enough. If the UI is just as complex as the original problem, user churn is going to be high. Today, we’re going to look at some tips for designing a simple UI regardless of your solution’s complexity.
What is it they say? Complex problems require complex solutions. That is certainly true when developing apps and software.
But how do you ensure that the complex backend doesn’t trickle over to the front end?
A complex UI, in general, is more than enough reason for many people to abandon a website or mobile app. When it comes to paying or subscribed users, though, don’t expect any of them to settle for your software’s complicated interface.
It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is. If the outward appearance of it drives your users crazy, you can expect large amounts of costly user churn in return.
The Flatfile team is very familiar with this problem, having built a successful data importer, which is a technology that many designers have struggled to build on their own. Below, we’re going to look at some of the tips that helped them overcome this UI design challenge and can help you, too.
Adobe Flash is soon to die (and people are suddenly nostalgic, hmmm)
Adobe has announced the end of its stalwart Flash browser plugin, and there's been an outpouring of emotion (sadness and joy) across the internet. To be fair, this has been coming for the best part of the last decade and it therefore seems apt that 2020 is the year to finish Flash off.
Flash Player's final days were announced with the release of its final update, named AIR 32. You'll have until 31 December 2020 to enjoy Flash, at which time Adobe will stop supporting it. It will then block content running in Flash Player from January 12, 2021. (For Adobe tools that aren't about to die, check out this Adobe software list.)
The cancellation of one of the internet's most well-known plugins is due to a cacophony of issues including a lack of users and a rise of (more secure) replacement programs. Given Flash Player's buggy, often annoying, performance issues and the fact it's a target for malware, we weren't surprised to see there are many users unbothered by the situation (and see our Adobe Flash Pro CS6 review for a dose of nostalgia).
2020 was a year that was anything but ordinary, and, well, the upcoming holiday season will be different from what we all are used to, too. To cater to holiday cheer in these weird times, artists and designers from across the globe got their creative juices flowing and created festive and inspiring wallpapers for December. Following our monthly tradition, they all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free.
We are very thankful to everyone who took the time to create an artwork and shared it with us this month — you are truly smashing! And since so many talented people have helped fill our archives with designs that are just too good to be forgotten in all these years we’ve been running this wallpapers challenge, we also compiled a little best-of from past December editions at the end of this post. Maybe you’ll spot one of your almost-forgotten favorites in there, too? Have a cozy December, everyone, and stay safe!
All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper.
We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work.
Free fonts may not always be the most brilliant fonts, but there are some truly great ones around – it's just a case of finding them. We know that the search process takes time and effort that you could be spending on other things, so we've done the hard work for you and collated this extensive list.
The best free fonts offer plenty of options for your designs without costing anything. Whether you're looking for a classy serif, a clean sans-serif, vintage fonts, or something completely different, there's no shortage of choice. In fact there, are so many free fonts out there that it can be hard to know where to start looking. Some font libraries offer free fonts and many individual type designers also offer their own creations for free on their websites or portfolios. To make it easier for you to find what you're looking for, we've gathered together the best free fonts that we've found in our regular searches of the web – a massive 89 of them.
All these are fonts that are available free for personal use, and some can be used freely for commercial use too (always check, because in some cases you will need to buy a license for commercial use – we've stated the conditions at the time of writing, but these can change).
Life as a Digital Nomad: 10 Designers Share Their Tools
Becoming a digital nomad when you’re already a graphic designer isn’t the easiest thing in the world. While this career path is rewarding due to the sheer freedom—and the traveling is a great bonus—there are numerous challenges you have to master to make the most of becoming a digital nomad. This kind of lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but, for those who have the passion for it, numerous benefits and overall empowerment await. What makes this lifestyle possible is the use of the right tools, which makes all the difference to productivity and delivering fantastic results for your clients. Thanks to the interconnectivity of the web, digital nomads have the same advantages as their counterparts who are based in one location. In other words, distance and remoteness are no longer barriers to delivering high-quality work while living the transient life you want. It comes down to how you empower yourself with the right platforms.
We asked 10 Creative Market shop owners, who are also remote workers, what their go-to tools are. Here’s what they revealed.
Identify your skill sets & strengthen them. ...
Build a portfolio & start searching job boards. ...
Use your skills to make money online. ...
Start networking. ...
Start simplifying your lifestyle. ...
Build your savings. ...
Determine your budget & decide on your locations. ...
Microsoft hits the brakes on Windows 10 updates in December 2020
Don't expect any Windows 10 preview updates in December due to holidays, says Microsoft.
Microsoft has told Windows 10 owners and IT admins not to expect any Windows 10 preview updates in December to give them a break when staffing levels are low over the holiday season.
December will be a break from the usual schedule of Windows 10 updates each month, which include optional previews that arrive after the mandatory Patch Tuesday security updates in the second week of every month.
"Because of minimal operations during the holidays and the upcoming Western new year, there won't be any preview releases for the month of December 2020," Microsoft said in a support note.
The company will resume monthly servicing with the January 2021 security releases, it said.
Microsoft releases optional non-security Windows 10 updates to give customers time to test the updates against systems.
It calls the first week of each month 'A week' and typically issues fixes for Office. The second week is 'B week' or Patch Tuesday. C and D weeks happen on the third and fourth weeks of the month. They're when Microsoft releases optional cumulative updates or previews of non-security fixes for IT pros and admins.
How to Create Chat Rooms in WordPress for Your Users
Recently one of our readers asked if it was possible to create chat rooms on your WordPress site for your users?
A chat room hosted on your site will allow your visitors to chat with each other without needing to install a third-party chat client like Slack or Discord.
In this article, we’ll show you how to create a chat room in WordPress.
Why Add a Chat Room in WordPress?
If you run a membership website or an online forum, then you may want to create an instant messaging chat room for your users.
You could use a third-party service like Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook groups, or Discord. However, with these methods, all the communication happens outside of your website, so you don’t have control over the chat experience.
These methods also encourage people to leave your website, which is bad views for your pageviews and bounce rate in WordPress.
By embedding a chat room in your website, you can keep people on your site for longer and build a stronger sense of community.
Note: Chat rooms tend to work best for small communities of users. If want to offer live customer support, then check out our list of the best live chat support software instead.
That said, let’s take a look at how to add a chat room to your WordPress blog or website.
You already know the importance of positioning your pages on the top of Google SERPs rankings, right? Well-ranked pages provide enormous organic reach to your website, increasing the possibility of attracting and converting leads.
To achieve this goal, it is essential to apply SEO techniques, which are designed to adapt their content to the algorithm’s ranking criteria.
These criteria, however, are not permanent. In an effort to make the user experience ever simpler and more efficient, Google frequently updates its parameters.
Besides the algorithm, it is also necessary to consider the audience’s behavior and preferences. Ultimately, the most important factor for maintaining good positioning is the quality of the experience you offer to your website visitors.
Therefore, to achieve good results in a Digital Marketing strategy, it is essential to stay up-to-date on the SEO trends that arise with growing frequency.
► PHP PHP is the most used programming language today. There is a multitude of CMS applications that are built primarily on PHP, including WordPress, Joomla, and so many more. Follow the links to learn more about this highly used programming language.
► HTML and CSS are the fundamental technologies for building Web pages: HTML (HTML and XHTML) for structure, CSS for style and layout, including WebFonts. Find resources for good Web page design as well as helpful tools.
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The open-source desktop operating system that powers millions of PCs and laptops around the world. Find out more about Ubuntu’s features and how we support developers and organizations below.
Kubuntu is an operating system built by a worldwide community of developers, testers, supporters, and translators.
Kubuntu is a free, complete, and open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X which contains everything you need to work, play, or share. Check out the Feature Tour if you would like to learn more!
Every part of GNOME has been designed to make it simple and easy to use. The Activities Overview is a simple way to access all your basic tasks. A press of a button is all it takes to view your open windows, launch applications, or check if you have new messages. Having everything in one convenient place means you don’t have to learn your way around a maze of different technologies.
Less setup, more innovation. Choose a flavor of Fedora streamlined for your needs, and get to work right away. If you prefer an alternative desktop environment such as KDE Plasma Desktop or Xfce, you can download a Fedora Spin for your preferred desktop environment and use that to install Fedora, pre-configured for the desktop environment of your choice.
Genshin Impact - Step into a vast magical world of adventure.
Take the helm of one of over 300 intricately modeled historical vessels and plunge into the ultimate action-strategy naval experience!
Take control of vehicles from World War II and the mid-20th century, competing against players around the world.
Whether you're looking for compute power, database storage, content delivery, or other functionality, AWS has the services to help you build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability
The new way to the cloud starts here
Build apps fast, leverage generative AI, and analyze data in seconds—all with Google-grade security.
Discover what’s happening on Azure
Access sophisticated vision, speech, language, and decision-making AI models and create your own machine learning models.
Chrome's Aurora initiative is a collaboration between Chrome and open-source Javascript frameworks and tooling to improve user experience on the web. If Aurora is new to you, take a look at our introduction post to learn more about our mission and methodology.
Nibbler is a free tool for testing websites. Enter the address of any website and Nibbler will give you a report scoring the website out of 10 for key areas, including accessibility, SEO, social media, and technology. Nibbler is completely free but limited to three reports.
Bitnami provides a free all-in-one tool to install Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and many other popular open-source apps on top of XAMPP. Visit Bitnami XAMPP or click to see the full list of add-ons for XAMPP.
WampServer is a Windows web development environment. It allows you to create web applications with Apache2, PHP, and a MySQL database. Alongside, PhpMyAdmin allows you to easily manage your databases.
WampServer installs automatically all you need to start developing web applications and is very intuitive to use. You will be able to tune your server without even touching the settings files.
AMPPS is a WAMP, MAMP, and LAMP stack of Apache, MySQL, MongoDB, PHP, Perl & Python. AMPPS enables you to focus more on using applications rather than maintaining them. With AMPPS you can create a website by installing any of the 421 Apps, customizing it, and then simply publishing it on the internet via a wide choice of hosting service providers.
MAMP is a free, local server environment that can be installed under macOS and Windows with just a few clicks. MAMP provides them with all the tools they need to run WordPress on their desktop PC for testing or development purposes, for example. You can even easily test your projects on mobile devices. It does not matter whether you prefer the web server Apache or Nginx in addition to MySQL as a database server, or whether you want to work with PHP, Python, Perl, or Ruby.
There is a lot that can be said about the quality of wallpaper sites and the way that they offer up their product. In my opinion Wallpapers Wide is the best among all of the sites out there with Unsplash being second.
HostGator: Best for low-cost hosting with a free domain
Web Fonts
► What is WebFonts? -WebFonts is a technology that enables people to use fonts on-demand over the Web without requiring installation in the operating system. W3C has experience in downloadable fonts through HTML, CSS2, and SVG. Until recently, downloadable fonts have not been common on the Web due to the lack of an interoperable font format. The WebFonts effort plans to address that through the creation of an industry-supported, open font format for the Web (called "WOFF").
When you create a website with Squarespace, you get free unlimited hosting, top-of-the-line security, and dependable resources to help you succeed. You can count on personalized support around the clock by email, live chat, or by joining a live webinar.
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43% of the web is built on WordPress. More bloggers, small businesses, and Fortune 500 companies use WordPress than all other options combined. Join the millions of people that call WordPress.com home.
8400+ Handcrafted SVG Icons for Designers and Developers
With Free CDN, Multiple Variations, Figma Plugin, Icon Editor, and More ...
Handcrafted UI icons for modern user interfaces of web, mobile, and desktop app design and development projects. Line icons is a vast and comprehensive pack of professionally designed icons, available in all vector formats that are easy to use on the web, design, coding, and beyond.
What is CSS? -CSS is the language for describing the presentation of Web pages, including colors, layout, and fonts. It allows one to adapt the presentation to different types of devices, such as large screens, small screens, or printers. CSS is independent of HTML and can be used with any XML-based markup language. The separation of HTML from CSS makes it easier to maintain sites, share style sheets across pages, and tailor pages to different environments.
What is XHTML? -XHTML is a variant of HTML that uses the syntax of XML, the Extensible Markup Language. XHTML has all the same elements (for paragraphs, etc.) as the HTML variant, but the syntax is slightly different. Because XHTML is an XML application, you can use other XML tools with it (such as XSLT, a language for transforming XML content).
• W3 Schools is a web developer's information website, with tutorials and references on web development languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, and JQuery, covering most aspects of web programming. W3Schools presents thousands of code examples. By using the online editor provided, readers can edit the examples and execute the code experimentally."
• Microsoft Virtual Academy Free Microsoft training delivered by experts. Learning paths are curated courses brought to you by Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) to help you increase your proficiency in the latest technologies. Build valuable skills through video tutorials, demos, assessments, and more.
• Codecademy Our courses are designed to keep you on track, so you learn to code “today” not “someday.”
Learn about ChatGPT, one of the most advanced AI systems available today, and dive into the world of Generative AI.
• SitePoint Extensive collection of featured articles, books, and courses. Learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, mobile app development, and Responsive Web Design.
Learn how to handle errors in Next.js — from authentication to layout and server errors — with the App Router and new error file conventions.
mIRC is a full-featured Internet Relay Chat client for Windows that can be used to communicate, share, play or work with others on IRC networks around the world, either in multi-user group conferences or in one-to-one private discussions.
It has a clean, practical interface that is highly configurable and supports features such as buddy lists, file transfers, multi-server connections, IPv6, SSL encryption, proxy support, UTF-8 display, UPnP, customizable sounds, spoken messages, tray notifications, message logging, and more.
mIRC also has a powerful scripting language that can be used both to automate mIRC and to create applications that perform a wide range of functions from network communications to playing games.
mIRC has been in development for over two decades and is constantly being improved and updated with new technologies. The most recent changes can be found on the latest news page.
To get started, you can download mIRC now from the download page.
"Learn JavaScript"
You interact with JavaScript code all the time. It powers dynamic behavior on websites and plays an important role in many fields, like front- and back-end engineering, game and mobile development, virtual reality, and more.
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• Shopify Whether you sell online, on social media, in-store, or out of the trunk of your car, Shopify has you covered.
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