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Many of us struggle silently with mental health problems and many more are affected by them, either directly or indirectly. It’s {Geek} Mental Help Week and we would like to help raise awareness with a couple of articles exploring these issues and offering solutions. – Ed.

Everywhere we go, from ground to sky, we are surrounded by noises. Cars, planes, trains and people are just a few examples of what can be heard throughout any city or town. These noises stimulate our ears almost 24 hours a day, and few choices are available to us for avoiding them — one being specialist equipment, such as noise-cancelling headphones. Being aware of the noises around you will increase your comfort and ability to work more efficiently.

This article will help you become more informed about the impact that noise has on your life. We’ll discuss the good and bad sides of noise and sound (yes, they are different), so that you can use both to benefit your personal well-being. We will look into the science behind why we get distracted by noise and how we can reduce and even negate it.

The post How To Increase Workflow And Reduce Stress With Nature Sounds appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

CodeMyUI is an interesting project that catalogs open source code snippets from around the web. Its primary focus is on frontend code that often pushes the boundaries of modern web development.

HTML/CSS/JS code is now capable of doing lots of neat stuff. But not everyone wants to build sample components or UI effects from scratch.

The benefit of CodeMyUI is that everything remains curated in one location. Each project is hand-picked which contributes to a higher level of quality.

Each code snippet is pulled from elsewhere online. Sources range from tutorials to online code sites like CodePen. You’ll find the author’s name & further links by clicking the snippet details for more info.

While there’s no official Twitter account, you can subscribe to the newsletter to get CodeMyUI updates right to your inbox.

This is certainly a project that can have lasting effects if you’re looking for open source code based on advanced development standards.

Read More at CodeMyUI curates Free Code Snippets for Web Projects

Everyone loves getting something for nothing, especially when it’s a great pack of design resources to dig into, so we’re delighted to bring you this free bundle, exclusive to WebdesignerDepot, curtesy of SmartyBundles.com

The download includes mockups, templates, stationery, 3D renders, vectors, and more.

Designed to save you time, and help you win clients; the vector elements will be particularly useful for logo designers, and the mockups are a fantastic way of showcasing your designs to potential clients.

Let’s break this pack down: there are 12 free mockups, 10 free business cards, a set of vector shapes for logos, 5 badges for logos or calls to action, 11 stylish logos, 8 free stock images, 3 free InDesign templates for a wedding brochure and two distinct product catalogs, 10 free ornaments, 1 tileable pattern, and 10 free stationery packs.

All files are free for personal, and commercial use. The vectors all come in .ai, .eps, and .pdf formats. The bitmaps come as .psds. The stationery files come as .doc, .ai, and .pdf; or as .pdf and .indd formats.

Download the files below the preview:

Source

Software development is a rapidly growing industry with more demand for programmers across the spectrum. Nowadays mobile apps are another huge area that offer career opportunities beyond just websites and desktop programs/enterprise applications.

The QCon San Francisco conference is a large gathering of software developers from around the world. The 2015 event runs for a total of 3 conference days and 2 optional workshop days.

You’ll find topics that cover a wide gamut like machine learning, architecture, streaming data, and specific languages like Java/C#/JavaScript/etc.

The first three days are full of incredible speakers and are certainly worth attending.

But if you have the extra time it might be working staying on the 19th & 20th for extra workshops. You can learn everything from building your first iOS application to the fundamentals of Java programming.

Mid-November is fast approaching so if you’d like to attend then register now before tickets are sold out.

Also to stay up-to-date with the latest happenings you should check out QCon’s Facebook page or follow the official Twitter account @QConSF.

They’ve also released a brief intro video for people thinking of attending in the future.

Read More at QCon San Francisco runs from November 16th-20th

Alongside a clear navigation, a good search functionality is one of the most important features, especially for large and complex web projects. That’s the only way of making sure that your visitors can properly orientate themselves throughout your site and find the contents they expect. However, the search feature often doesn’t work the way it should be intended to. While most content management systems have their own integrated search, the options of customization are often restricted. The web service Swiftype provides an extensive and sophisticated search functionality that can be configured individually and is easily integrated into any project.

First Steps: Signing Up and Creating a Search for the Website

Swiftype is a web application that provides an extensive search functionality for any website. Once signed up, the user can create a custom search engine for a website. Doing so is more or less as simple as entering a domain URL. After that, Swiftype crawls the entire website and creates an index. If an XML sitemap is available, it can be used for indexing.
Via black and whitelists, directories can be ex or included, meaning that only certain parts of a domain structure will be entailed in the indexing process should you so desire. Headlines, body texts, as well as the URL, are indexed. For every indexed site, there’s an overview page that informs the user under which terms the website was listed up in a search.

Overview of All Search Engines Created

Depending on the extent of the website, the crawling process might take a few minutes. Afterwards, the search feature is simply integrated into the user’s own website. To do so, an input field has to be equipped with a particular class and a small JavaScript area has to be integrated.

&lt;input <span class="html-attribute-name">type</span>="<span class="html-attribute-value">text</span>" <span class="html-attribute-name">class</span>="<span class="html-attribute-value">st-default-search-input</span>"&gt;

The JavaScript area loads the search results from the service and displays them as a drop-down list or layer. During the input, context-sensitive search results are already shown in a drop-down list. Confirming the search leads to the display of the list of results in a layer on the site.

Altering the Appearance of the Search Result

The appearance of the result can be adjusted using the configuration menu. This allows the user to align the search colour and overall appearance with the design of the website. Single parts of the results can be altered as well. For example, it is possible to only display the name of a website or to add a short text as a teaser. An image provided for every website via Open Graph can also be shown in the search results.

Adjusting the Appearance of the Search Results

If the options to adjust appearance and composition of the search results are not sufficient, you can also use Swiftype’s developer API. Doing so will have search results being returned as a JSON object. All of the processing and the output can then be steered completely using your own script.

The developer API enables you to program your own search via JavaScript or PHP. This sounds less spectacular than it actually is. The advantage is that the user doesn’t need to think about the search algorithm itself. Simply follow the documentation covering the developer API and you will be good to go. This allows basically anyone to program a search without any knowledge of search algorithms.

Sorting Search Results and Weighting the Importance of Different Content

The integration of the search via Swiftype without the need for programming is already a great thing. Even better is Swiftype’s option to arrange the search results manually and to weight the website’s contents.

Changing the Order of the Results

To give you major impact on what’s found first, it’s possible to change the order of search results via drag & drop. Swiftype displays all results for a certain search term and also shows you how often the found pages have been viewed. This way it is possible to move pages further down in the result list, remove them completely or push them up to the top, all depending on how interesting they are in regard to their contribution to your content strategy.

Another option is to prioritize the contents of the website to change the order of results. Sliders that can be set between 1 and 10 allow the user to change the priority of the title or the body. The date of publication or the date of the last update can also be considered during prioritizing.

Different Content Priorities

In how far the order of the results will change after the new weighting can be seen in a preview. If the new settings actually change the order, the results are rearranged showing an animation so you can quickly see if results end up going up or down on the list.

Last but not least, Swiftype offers the option to set synonyms for search terms. For example, if “website” is a commonly searched term, this term can be set as a synonym for another one even though only “website” can be found in the result. That way, when entering the term “web page” as an equivalent to “website”, all results containing “website” will be shown as well.

Statistics for Search

To constantly improve the search to fit the user expectation or your own internal goals, a statistic is also included in Swiftype. It displays the amount of search requests as well as the most searched-for terms in a very clear way.

Statistics on Search Requests and Search Terms

Search terms that did not show any results are also listed up. This can be interesting as it shows if a website’s content can be expanded by important search terms.

The statistic can be created for any desired period and even be exported.

Powerful Tool, Easy to Use

Swiftype offers a plethora of features as well as the option to customise the appearance and the impact of the search algorithm. It is easy to use, and the user interface is very clear. It’s no exaggeration to call it intuitive. After a very short period, the user has integrated an individual search on their own website. There is no learning curve. The product is almost self-explanatory.

Thanks to the integrated statistics, search results can continuously be improved as the user behavior is observed at all times. From this point on, you can certainly put a lot of effort into the project if your goal is to offer the perfect search experience to your visitors. Or you can simply go with the solution out of the box.

Swiftype offers a free 30-day trial. Those who decide to permanently use Swiftype pay 19 dollars per month for the Pro plan and 249 dollars for the Business plan. The business plan offers, among other features, team access and expanded analytics options.

You need not believe me, however. Go there and check it out for yourself. The trial period is completely free.

(dpe)

The Big Data TechCon event will be held for two days from November 2nd-4th in Chicago. It’s a fairly small yet impressive gathering of data folks from database administrators to software engineers.

The 2014 conference brought in over 600 people and 2015 is expected to be much larger. Check out the current list of speakers in attendence along with the pending schedule.

Here’s a brief snippet of info gathered from the Big Data TechCon website:

Big Data TechCon features practical, how-to classes and tutorials for IT and Big Data professionals, including data and business analysts, developers, software architects, data scientists, and project managers.

Attend Big Data TechCon to get practical training on Hadoop, Spark, Storm, R, HBase, Kafka, Flink, Predictive Analytics, Data Warehousing and much more!

Take a Big Data analytics tutorial, dive deep into machine learning and NoSQL, learn how to master MongoDB and Cassandra, discover best practices for using graph databases such as Neo4j…

This conference is meant to not only educate, but connect and share with others in the industry. It’s a meetup of people who simply love databases & data structures.

Visit the Big Data TechCon website to find more info & ticket prices.

If you won’t be able to attend you can always stay up-to-date with the event’s Facebook page or via live tweets @BigDataTechCon.

You can also find some neat clips on the Big Data TechCon YouTube channel.

Read More at Big Data TechCon 2015 in Chicago November 2nd-4th

Patrick Hamann in a and fast-paced talk on avoiding single points of failure. He suggests:

• Use preloading and prefetching
• Load fonts asynchronously
• Always use timeouts / circuit breakers for Ajax requests
• Cache resources
• Treat the network as an enhancement

Developers at the Financial Times managed to shave 1.5s of the total download time by providing users with assets served over HTTP/2. I think this suggests just how different the future of performance and optimisation is going to look.

Related: Facebook has started ‘2G Tuesdays’ where employees are encouraged to use a 2G connection all day in order to best simulate user experiences around the globe.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Embracing the Network is a post from CSS-Tricks

Karen McGrane tweets, dreamteam assembles, epic redesign ensues, story of entire process published.

Some minor nuggets #RelevantToMyInterets:

• A big part of the effort was content strategy and taxonomy work. Cleaning up the tag and category system (and actually inventing different types of tags) meant they could offer many more interesting ways to browse the site.
• They stayed on WordPress. They don’t have too much positive to say about it, but I suspect it’s about like this. They are doing some of my favorite things with it, like using Timber and ACF.
• There is a new design, and the front end work involved implementing that design. But of course front end work is about much more than that these days, including the the absolutely vital job of making the site fast and ensuring advertising is well-handled.

I’ve long been a fan of this behind-the-scenes exposé of work. See “Working in Public”, the video series of redesigning CSS-Tricks, and most recently, the CodePen Redesign.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Redesigning The Toast is a post from CSS-Tricks

A few decades ago the prominent forums were run on top of vBulletin or Invision Power Board. These systems are still around today but they’re fairly clunky and cost a lot of money.

Flarum is a completely free alternative to PHP/MySQL forums. It’s meant to be a continuance to phpBB which is another type of forum software.

In its own words, Flarum aims to be:

• Fast and simple. No clutter, no bloat, no complex dependencies. Flarum is built with PHP so it’s quick and easy to deploy. The interface is powered by Mithril, a performant JavaScript framework with a tiny footprint.
• Beautiful and responsive. This is forum software for humans. Flarum is carefully designed to be consistent and intuitive across platforms, out-of-the-box.
• Powerful and extensible. Customize, extend, and integrate Flarum to suit your community. Flarum’s architecture is amazingly flexible, prioritizing comprehensive APIs and great documentation.
• Free and open. Flarum is released under the MIT license.

At this time Flarum is still in beta, however it’s garnered a lot of positive press from developers. Check out the growing list of features to see if this could be a good solution for your next project.

You can download Flarum right from the project homepage or from the GitHub repo.

Those who might want to learn more can visit the official community forums or follow the Twitter account @Flarum.

Read More at Flarum: A New Open Source PHP/MySQL Forum CMS

This autumn we figured we’d give you an early Halloween treat and share with you our list of the best tools and resources available for all web professionals, regardless of whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, working in a large team or free lancing.

The following tools are guaranteed to make your life and your work a lot easier.

1. Muffin Group – Be Theme

The Muffin Group is a passionate team of creators who produce web applications and WordPress templates. They are not only creative minds, passionate about they work, they also have a lot of experience under their belts. The best proof is their BeTheme for WordPress, which boasts more than 150 ready to use layouts and 19 customizable header styles.

This is by far the biggest theme ever created. Packed with goodies and intuitive, BeTheme can be used for a vast number of purposes. BeTheme isn’t called the biggest WordPress theme ever for nothing. It boasts a one click installation, it works wonderfully for E-commerce websites, it has unlimited menus, and a wide variety of pre-defined demos. You no longer need coding skills or programming knowledge to start up your own website. Leave it to the Muffin Group to make your site look stunning and professional.

The BeTheme has a top of the line admin panel, a layouts configurator and is constantly receiving updates. Designed for speed, it works flawlessly with any browser and is compatible with WooCommerce, MailChimp, bbPress, Contact form 7, W3 Total Cache and basically all popular plugins. If you need any help starting up, you can take a look at the comprehensive BeTheme user guide or contact Muffin Group support forum for any issues.

2. Jupiter WordPress Theme

Emphasizing visual perfection, the creative minds behind Artbees produce top of the line design assets, stunning WordPress themes and excellent icon designs. All their products encompass thorough research, a well-crafted strategy and customizable features. This is obvious in one of their most popular products, the Jupiter WordPress theme.

This tool has helped over 20,000 users create and maintain their websites. But Artbees weren’t content to leave things as they were so they put in a lot of time and work into improving Jupiter and, as a result, this November will bring Jupiter V5. From a programming standpoint Jupiter V5 come with deep codebase refactoring, a complete theme re-structuring and massive performance enhancements.

As far as design and visuals are concerned, Jupiter V5 brings to the table: more header stiles, shape dividers, shape icon boxes, gradient coloring capability for page elements, blending effects doe page sections, more Google fonts, fancy title ornaments, new buttons and a lot more. You’ll also be able to integrate your website with social media easier than before with Twitter, Instagram and Quote blog posts. But these aren’t the only new features of Jupiter V5, be amongst the first who get it this November and find out for yourself how much it can help your website.

3. Argento

Argento is not like any other template – it was especially created from the ground up based on the best E-commerce stores practices and according to the guidelines for Magento developers. Argento, a Magento template, comes packed with more than fifteen popular Magento extensions and a sleek, fluid layout right out of the box. Based on CSS3, with CSS and JSS files created on a clean code that can be merged and minified with the default Magento minifier, Argento also impresses with its speed.

If you want to make sure that your website will look just as great on all devices, Argento is the perfect choice for you, as it was built to work on iOS, Android and BlackBerry. This means that you will save money by not having to invest in another template or the use of a mobile application. Even more, Argento provides your online store with a improved HTML structure, resulting in better SEO performance manifested in the correct usage of SEO important tags and HTML attributes. To top it all off, the Magento professionals will have your new Magento responsive template installed within a day, for free.

4. Metronic – #1 Selling Ultimate Bootstrap Admin Theme

Keen Themes is a talented team of professionals that deliver premium quality themes. The Jango Frontend Theme is a Bootstrap HTML5 template that is fully responsive and user friendly. The Conquer Theme is a Bootstrap Admin theme boasting an advanced mega menu and all-purpose layouts.

We’ve left the best one for last: the Metronic Theme, also known as the most famous multi-purpose Bootstrap admin theme.

With more than 32,000 sales, the Metronic theme can boast AngularJS 1.3 support, Twitter Bootstrap Framework, one of the most powerful frameworks for responsive web applications and an unlimited array of colors. On top of all of that, Metronic has super clean code and more than 700 templates pages. Dubbed ‘not just a theme’, Metronic has 7 ultimate admin themes and will save you over one thousand hours of UI coding, not to mention costs for development. Multi-purpose, highly efficient, precise and responsive, this admin dashboard theme is sure to supply your every need.

5. actiPLANS

If you’re still using Excel spreadsheets to keep up with your employees’ leave time, then you definitely need actiPLANS. actiPLANS is a powerful tool that is here to rid you of unnecessary paperwork and late nights. With an intuitive interface and a user friendly work schedule for each member of your team, you’ll find that keeping track of everyone’s leave time requests doesn’t have to give you a splitting headache anymore.

actiPLANS makes everything easier both for managers and for employees. The former have all the essential info right at their fingertips. No more being taken by surprise by an employee’s holidays and missing deadlines because of an understaffed team. All employees have to do is to request leave time in one click and wait the notification whether the request is approved or rejected. actiPLANS comes with flexible rules for PTO, easy to customize leave types, comprehensive charts and reports, as well as a leave time history for every team member. Starting this November, it also comes with a mobile app that allows you to send a leave request or notify co-workers when you’re running late on-the-go.

6. actiTIME

If you often lose track of your time spent working on different projects, then you need actiTIME – simple and flexible time tracking software. Dubbed ‘Timesheet for smart decisions’, this incredibly intuitive tool will help you keep tabs on all the hours you spend working on a task or a project. In addition to this, it will also register leave time and allow you to add comments to your time-track. Keeping an eye on budget and deadlines has never been this easy before. actiTIME enables its users to set deadline reminders and budget control notifications.

This nifty program knows everything about boosting performance and keeping expenses under control. If you’ve never been able to manage your working hours properly, actiTIME will do it for you. Used by more than 9,000 companies around the world, this time tracking tool offers comprehensive reports on staff performance, cost of work, overtime, expenses and many others. What’s more, a user-friendly mobile app for iOS and Android keeps you up to speed with your progress and expenses at all times.

7. BugMuncher

We’ve all heard countless times that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is something that holds true about web screenshots of bugs as well. However, a screenshot isn’t always as comprehensive as a developer might like, and this is where BugMuncher comes in.

It has a simple, intuitive interface that will help anyone submit detailed user feedback reports containing all the information a developer needs in order to act on them. This awesome tool can be added to a website just by adding a Javascript snippet; then, everything will be taken care of by the BugMuncher servers, which means that the website’s speed won’t be affected in any way.

BugMuncher will provide bug reports that include a screenshot of what the user actually sees, without requiring an extra browser plugin. In addition to this, you will also receive details about the browser and operating system of your client or coworker, details of any Javascript errors that occurred, screen size and resolution, which browser plugins they have installed and even the path they took through your website. BugMuncher can integrate with a number of third-party tools including Trello, Zendesk, Jira, GitHub and Zapier. Fixing a bug has never been easier.

8. Icons8

A website’s icons can really give it a distinct feeling and set it apart from others with a similar target audience. If you want to make sure your website (or even your mobile apps) always looks sharp and elegant, then you need to get your icons from Icons8.

The minimal application for Windows and Mac, Icons8 App, provides you with a great selection of icons, with themes ranging from business, city and computer hardware to food, gaming and social networks.

With these icons, your website will look flawless, as they match the style of the operating system’s native icons. These icons are compatible with Windows 10, iOS 9 or Android 5 Lollipop. Within the app you will also find other cool features such as icon recoloring, fast search, export to Photoshop, Xcode, etc., recoloring and resizing, as well as the possibility of choosing format (SVG, PNG, PDF or EPS).

9. Daily Hosting

In need of a cheap, yet efficient web hosting provider? Daily Hosting provides you with the best web hosting reviews that tell you everything you need to know. You will find exhaustive information about all the criteria you need to factor in before choosing a web hosting plan for your website.

Daily Hosting keeps you up to speed with the latest web hosting offers that will meet all your requirements and won’t burn a whole in your pocket. The free hosting guide allows users to look at several hosting companies and compare them in order to choose the best offer that suits their needs. With dozens of reviews, Daily Hosting helps you make an informed decision. Their blog contains even more details about web hosting that will transform any newbie into a well-informed buyer.

You don’t have to take a leap of faith when you invest in a web hosting solution. To make sure you make the best decision, head over to Daily Hosting, and look over their reviews for pros and cons.

10. Fire Checkout

The best way to increase your site’s conversion rate is to keep your customers happy. Fire Checkout will help you do just that. The name is self-explanatory. Your buyers won’t have to spend time filling in 6 pages of useless info just to place an order. Instead, this Magento one step checkout will help them finish this last step quicker than ever before.

Fire Checkout is fast, intuitive and incredibly flexible. With a minimalistic 3 column layout and Ajax based Coupon code support you’ll be able to increase your sales effortlessly. Fire Checkout allows you to add two custom content blocks, locate your customers’ country and city and create as much as 5 custom fields. Ready to watch your sales figure sky rocket? Fire Checkout delivers fast results thanks to its cutting edge features. Optimized for all types of devices and created with user experience in mind, this tool is available in 12 languages and is 100% open source.

Read More at The Tools For Web Professionals You Can’t Miss This Autumn