Tools

CheckPanel: Fresh Task-Management App for Site Owners

CheckPanel is a brand-new web app from Germany. It aims at the organization of recurring tasks around maintaining a website. One of the many use-cases could be the inevitable check whether an URL is reachable or not, the so-called web monitoring. But, as experienced admins will confirm, there are a lot more things to check regularly when you want a website to run flawlessly.

Read more
PNG Optimization Online and Local: Can CompressPNG and ImageAlpha Dethrone TinyPNG?

If you are a regular reader, you will certainly remember TinyPNG, a fresh service, created by Voormedia from the Netherlands, that lets you compress PNGs easily and to a noticeable extent. Many of you, I know I did, will have integrated TinyPNG into their daily workflows. Around 70% less weight than before is what TinyPNG promises and almost always achieves, while you don’t even see the difference. A brand-new service from the Czech Republic by the name of CompressPNG has arrived, ready to dethrone TinyPNG. Chances are good, as you’ll see if you read on. Mac users will find a nifty alternative to both online services…

Read more
Full Throttle: Cloudflare Promises To Boost Your Website’s Performance

Websites nowadays should best be jack of all trades services. Extremely fast, secure against attackers, packed with lots of the most amazing features. This is not easy to accomplish. We could try to lock in dozens of web developers for weeks and not let them out before they offer a fitting solution or, we should look for other ways. The start-up Cloudflare from San Francisco offers one of these “other ways” and its quite disruptive. Their solution: Route all your traffic through our servers, we’ll take care of the rest. Sounds easier than it actually is.

Read more
uiFaces: Placeholder Service for Avatars in Design Mock-ups

We have been introducing you to placeholder services frequently. This new app by the name of uiFaces, that we want to show you today, does not stand in line, though. It covers a rather unique aspect of modern design, the integration of Social Media. With uiFaces you can easily integrate social network areas into your design mock-ups. With its ample flexibility, uiFaces covers any use-case.

Read more
Social Media Image Maker: Photo-Editing One-Stop-Shop for Social Media Networkers

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, then Pinterest, Tumblr, Xing or LinkedIn and what do I know where all you’ve set your flag, and are networking as networking can. All these services want you to maintain a proper profile and, if you really do think you should register practically anywhere, you should try your best to make a good impression. One main necessity to achieve this is adequate imagery. Even if you really have reasonable images for these use-cases at hand, that’s still where the problems begin. I don’t know of two social networks that share image resolutions or other specifications. You can’t simply upload the same picture to a zillion websites and hope for an adequate presentation. Instead you have to struggle with the same zillion different requirements when it comes down to even such a simple thing as a profile header-image. To further complicate the situation, social networks have fun changing their image-related specifications frequently. A new tool by the name of Social Media Image Maker promises relief…

Read more
Down with Boredom: 5 Pattern Generators for Background Designs

If you want the background of your website to consist of more than a color, you’ll be thinking about a background image. If there’s no obvious image you should use or if you don’t want to get determined by your imagery, while at the same time being able to serve different resolutions more or less effortlessly, you’ll soon turn your thoughts on textures or repetitive patterns. Creating repetitive, seamless patterns is not easy. Pattern generators are there to help you achieve just this. We have aggregated the five most promising tools…

Read more
Varnish – Free Cache-Server Extraordinaire Speeds Up Your Website

Complex web apps and high traffic spell doom to many a web server. Web as well as database server have to put together the right data at each new visit to deliver it as renderable HTML. No wonder caching solutions have become popular throughout the last few years. Caching means storing already deliverable content in memory instead of compiling it anew at each new hit. The duration or lifetime of cached content is configurable and should be fine-tuned according to the needs of your web project from minutes to hours to days. Quite a few web apps already are equipped with some kind of caching strategy. If you want the real deal, say a speed boost of 300 to 1,000 times faster, dedicated solutions should be considered.

Read more
How To Pin Web Apps As Tiles To The Brand-New Startscreen Of Windows 8

The new user interface of Windows 8 needs a lot of getting used to. The upside is, the introduction of the so-called tiles, which are intended as the main way of interacting between user and system, brought new possibilities to provide the user with additional information. Tiles are not limited to showing an icon, the way it was before Windows 8, only without the tiles ;-) Inside the tiles notifications can be placed and kept in sync. This is not only possible for apps, but also for websites. Microsoft provides several specialized meta-tags to customize the looks and contents of tiles with links to websites.

Read more
Google PageSpeed: Website Optimization Out Of The Box

Rumor has it that there are literally countless aspects influencing the ranking of websites in Google. Besides the ever so valuable content and the still important backlinks to your site, our greatest search engine tends to throw long hard looks at the performance, the loading time of your digital subsidiary. Long loading times get on everybody’s nerves. Google knows that and ranks optimized pages better, a big advantage in terms of SEO. Optimization does not only cost time, but needs a lot og knowledge, too. Google has two solutions in store with which optimizing your websites can become a whole lot easier, easy even. Ever heard of PageSpeed?

Read more
WebEngage Interactivates Your Website

Your main goal in running a commercial website may be set to high profitability. Especially when you are running an online shop, you will want to generate the highest revenue possible, the more buyers you attract the better. In ecommerce one strong handicap exists. You cannot interact with the prospective buyer in a way you would be able to in a real shop of the analog world. The would-be buyer has to rely on the one-way communicative efforts your website offers. WebEngage changes that, if you let it…

Read more