These days you have an awful lot of options for hosting your website, so many that it’s easy to get lost. How much should you pay? Is support important to you, or are you a tinkerer who likes to do your own thing?
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Today, WordPress has released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, WordPress 4.0 is no more or less significant than 3.9 was or 4.1 will be. That being said, a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Let’s take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us.
Since I’ve always used WordPress in English, it took me a while to realize how important internationalization is. 29% of all WordPress.com installations use a non-English language which is huge and not that far from a quarter of all installations. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Nice!
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Gulp is one of quite a few build tools available in JavaScript, and other build tools not written in JavaScript are available, too, including Rake. Why should you choose it?
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Phil Karlton once said, “There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” This article is about the harder of these two: cache invalidation. It’s directed at readers who already work with Varnish Cache. To learn more about it, you’ll find background information in “Speed Up Your Mobile Website With Varnish.”
10 microseconds (or 250 milliseconds): That’s the difference between delivering a cache hit and delivering a cache miss. How often you get the latter will depend on the efficiency of the cache — this is known as the “hit rate.” A cache miss depends on two factors: the volume of traffic and the average time to live (TTL), which is a number indicating how long the cache is allowed to keep an object. As system administrators and developers, we can’t do much about the traffic, but we can influence the TTL.
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If you’ve searched recently for tips on optimizing WordPress’ performance, then you have definitely come across various techniques that people recommend.
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The O’Neill Clothing store had a nearly from going responsive, and Skinny Ties saw a 377.6% increase in revenue for iPhones after going responsive as well. Even Think Tank Photo’s transactions on smartphones and tablets increased by more than 96%… go figure!
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There’s no need to bust out a physics textbook to make your iOS 7 app’s views animate like real-world objects. With iOS 7’s new Dynamics API, views can be influenced by gravity, attached to each other with springs, and bounced up against boundaries and each other.
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Whenever you start a project, you have to repeat certain tasks and set up certain structures: create new folders, choose a framework, set up your development tasks. But configuring settings once and reusing them would be simpler. An easy way to achieve this is by using some kind of generator — for example, Yeoman Generator — or tools such as INIT, which can perfectly coexist with and even be used through a generator.
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Responsive images have been, and are, one of the hardest problems in responsive Web design right now. Until browser vendors have a native solution, we have to think on the fly and come up with our own solutions. “Retina” images are especially a challenge because if you have sized your layout with ems or percentages (as you should!), then you cannot be sure of the exact pixel dimensions of each image being displayed.
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A website is created with a purpose in mind. Whether it’s to sell, entertain, inform or generate leads, there are better and worse ways to go about achieving those goals. Most website owners are very familiar with search engine optimization (SEO).
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