As a software developer, I have done many web page applications and been doing blog for my programming experiences. I would like to use pictures in many cases. Pictures worth thousand words and they are universal language!
You could create your own clip art images or download graphics(actually many are open clip art/image libraries available, Open Clip Art Library as example). However your time and art skill are limited and you can only keep limited library of images.
I wish if there is any open art/image library web sites with permanent references available so that you just add a simple reference in your html page like this just like a way that you could use other people or web site's graphics:
<img src="http://OpenArtLibray.net/icon/work/DoItYourself.png".../>
In this way, there is no need to waste time to download and upload images and no waste on your and other computer's disk spaces(no duplication). Just one place with a huge amount of variety of images available, and open for people to use, or with some reasonable fees. People may vote the popularity of art/images as well.
Is there any such kind of web site available?
Typically sites discourage this. What this really does is shift the bandwidth cost to the hosting site. There have been cases where sites with pictures have analyzed the referrer to determine if images are linked to from other sites, then servering an image with text claiming the image is being 'stolen'.
The point of that, is the idea isn't very well liked.
However, some sites like w3c, allow you to link to their certification images. It all depends on what you are linking to.
It is hard to think of a business doing this, as there doesn't seem to be a revenue aspect.
Even if some were charged fees, there's a lot of work involved in checking/verifying who has paid, via referrer texts. Maybe you have a new business plan.
Update:
Oh, I have a friend who always sends me emails with links to flickr. Maybe their license lets you link to images on their site. Something for you to check out.
Update:
This text, "photo hosting sites", makes for an interesting, relevant google search.
Thanks for Chris explanation. I could accept it as a answer. However, I raised this question because I really don't like to "steal" images. I can see it is hard to charge fees, but there are some many open resources available on the web. Actually, I found one Open Clip Art Library, which allow people to contribute and share images. I found many good pictures there and downloaded. I may contribute some when I create images for my blog so I'll let people to use my.
Flickre is an open social place for people store and sharing pictures. As long as pictures are shared there, specially by people, I think you can use and link images there. Still you have to do the work: creating and uploading. Actually, I tried another open social site called as DropBox. I can create a public folder there and add my pictures for sharing. All those sites have one common problem: personal account and may not be available if inactive for certain period of time (90 days for DropBox?).
That's why I asked this question here in StackOverFlow. I hope some people may know some hosts available or any other alternative options available. Maybe it is just like Chris said, "the idea isn't very well liked".
Actually, I realize that Open Clip Art Library I mentioned in my previous email does provide image hosting-like service. If you click on any one's picture download link, it will open a new tab or window to display the graphic. The display has its URL. I have created a new user name and submitted my picture. It works well. I can include the graphics in my test web page. Not sure how long the URL will be there. It looks like permanent one.
Try searching Creative Commons licensed works. People will often upload and share photos on such places as Flickr under a Creative Commons license which allows you to remix, reference or use on your own projects, blogs or site.
There are different types of licenses under the CC with some asking you to not use their works if you're going to be making money from it or if you're engaging in commercial activity.
You just have to nod back to the original author when using items under CC and if you link back to them, that's just good karma.
Related
I'm sorry I do not know how to word that title better. I have tried searching google but my terminology isn't helping my results.
Let me explain the context. When you're on a news website or blog and you're on their homepage like: www.homepage.co.uk/ and then you click an article it will go somewhere like this: www.homepage.co.uk/2017/article/ how do they make the 2017 appear? because if you remove the /article/ from the url it takes you to an archive of all the links in that year? I don't understand, is there a process to this?
When I click a link in my website it goes to: www.website.co.uk/link
I want to be able to have that 2017/link/ in the url so they can find the archive of that year just like on their websites?
How do I do this?
I am sorry if I am not explaining this very well.
I understand changing my filenames to : "2017/article.html" might work but I do not believe that is the correct way of doing it?
Thanks a lot for your time and suggestions!
You're asking about a couple of things: one is the taxonomy of the site. Taxonomy, if you don't know, is the "shape" of or how your site is organized. News sites, for instance, are usually organized by date and perhaps topic (Health and Leisure, Politics, Entertainment, etc.). The other aspect of your question is regarding what you might call RESful "hacking" of URLs. One of the tenents of REST is that URLS (uri, to be accurate) are supposed to be hackable. A news site might have /2017/10/10 to display all articles for Oct 10. Maybe you remove the last "10", and get all the articles for October so far. If you are not using a site platform that does this for you, you will have to maintain that taxonomy yourself, and manually write all the links. Systems such as Drupal and Joomla, among others, will translate your taxonomy into automatically-maintained links. In editing a page on one of these platforms, you typically only refer to the system's internal name of the page (could be a shortened version of the article's title in the above example), and the underlying engine takes care of reconstructing the URL for you (in case the page moves, or its tags/taxonomy changes).
This is a big topic, and I encourage you to do some further reading:
http://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Building-a-website-taxonomy-in-eight-steps
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/organizing-content-with-taxonomies/organizing-content-with-taxonomies
I happened to visit this website and found it really really fast, it was like layers over layers but doesn't need to load the site at all, even once. Call me old but I'm really impressed by this technology:
https://www.bookofthemonth.com
If anyone knows what technique they're using here in this website please share. And furthermore, does Wordpress have any theme like this? For this site as a blog would be hard because it eventually needs to load and accumulate too many resources, true or false? It would be awesome if you can make a blog with articles on a site like this!(or at least that's what I'm looking for) Thanks everyone in advance.
You can always do View Source... on an internet site you like.
If you do that to the site you mentioned, you'll find that it's a react.js site, not a site delivered by a standard cms such as WordPress.
Still, this site is a typical "single page" design, with
a slider at the top
row of information showing five interesting posts
a row of hyperlinks (the How It Works) row
a row of information showing five more interesting posts ("Meet our members")
You can certainly find several, or more, WordPress themes handling this.
It's also likely that the site for a recognized brand (like the one you mentioned) is delivered by a highly scalable web server infrastructure with caching and a content delivery network. So, can you make yours as fast as this? Not without spending some serious money.
How to proceed? Look for an appropriate "One Page" wordpress theme and follow the directions.
Once you get it looking correct, you can adopt Cloudflare or another content-delivery network platform.
I'm looking at things that can distinguish a blog from a normal website. These are things that a program needs to be able identify from the html of a website or particular features that a site supports. For eg. pings. The same for news websites.
I'm working on a blog/news monitor program and it will index sites to automatically determine if it is a blog or a news site and then monitor user feedback in comments etc on posts from sites that it determines to be of a blog or news nature.
So what i'm really after is suggestions on what i can use or look out for in identifying these sites.
It's going to be a desktop app written in java so if you have any code specifics in java that'll be great.
thanks in advance
You can search the page for the word "blog", as this will probably be present. Specifically, you can look for it in parts of the HTML page, or exclude parts - like links. This will give you a decent starting point.
Ultimately, though, this is something that will have to be done manually. You should construct an interface for people to specify if it's a blog or news site, or different features of it, when the site is submitted. Then you should create a database of sites and features, and flag them so that you or another administrator can review them and make changes. Once you do this for a site, you'll never need to do it again, so for example http://*.wordpress.com/ is all going to be blogs.
Some features you can automatically detect or get a pretty good chance of detecting, but ultimately you will need a manual review.
Look for a discoverable RSS or Atom feed, which should be present on a blog or serially-updated news site.
I was wondering, how does a web designer/developer start out in his buisness with nothing to show (in the sense of a portfolio,) and only his word to show he does good work? How are those people supposed to get buisness?
If you don't have a portfolio and want business, it is best to make your own site look incredible. Show people what you can do with your own site. Once your site is incredible, network with companies in your area, friends, family and offer your services cheap if they'll let you use their site as a portfolio example.
Once your portfolio is up, referrals should be coming in and folks seeing your site should be even more interested.
EDIT Per Martin's request, when you build your own site, please don't grab a run of the mill template like every other web developer out there. If you do take a template, make it yours, modify the heck out of it.
The best thing you can do for an empty portfolio is personal projects. I was hired for my first job out of college because I had created a website for my personal business. I was able to show that I had talent because I was in charge the entire site. You shouldn't ever rely on "your word" to get you jobs.
If you need ideas for a personal project, you can see if any friends/family need help, but that can be limiting. Still, it's another project to put in your portfolio to help you get more professional work.
I'd also recommend reading up on online articles dealing with starting a business. Some recommended reading:
alistapart.com/articles/startingabusiness/
alistapart.com/articles/business1/
freelanceswitch.com/general/101-essential-freelancing-resources/
Start by doing projects for people you know and work to create a small selection of work that reflects your current skill set. At the beginning, you may find that your talents are evolving so rapidly that your previous work doesn't reflect your current abilities — that's fine. Try to create a narrative on your portfolio site that shows people your progress and how each piece of work has built on the next.
Your portfolio site should demonstrate both technical and aesthetic skills. If you're an artist or industrial designer, you want your site to fade to the background and push your work forwards. Being a web designer means that your actual site is as important as the work featured on it. Your code should be clean and organized (you don't need to be a standardista, but be tidy).
If there's one skill you should really have before you start to work for clients, it's a sense of typography. You don't want to contribute to the ever-expanding world of poorly set websites.
Good luck.
I completely agree with all of the above - if you can demonstrate your capabilities with some sample work, that will count for far more than a resume in the end. Most of my work has come through people seeing my other work, not knowing my employment history.
Get yourself a domain, build a bunch of sample home pages, create a bunch of sub directories on your site. Make one for a small business, then maybe e-commerce, then maybe a blog, make a few different example scenarios of the types of sites that you would likely be asked to do, I have seen some people design mock home pages in Photoshop and just show them all as clickable JPEGS, that can be quick yes, although I recommend using all live pages on your site to show what interactive things you can do. Up to you, depending how quick you want it up and how important it is to you. I was paid $2500 to make this blog by a guy who was just completely web illiterate. I didn't quote that price mind you, he offered it to me out of nowhere after looking at a gallery of WP templates I had up as "possible" themes for a customer's blog. Sometimes, you are just in the right place at the right time. Best of luck to you.
Do side projects and see if you can build friends' websites (for free, or if they'll pay you, cool). Do whatever you can to demonstrate your abilities. Building a personal site doesn't hurt either.
I'd recommend making an online portfolio, if not to display past projects at least to post your resume and basically a cover letter. You can get a lot of free css templates if you're not comfortable with designing your own.
I'm building a site for my wife and a friend of mine from high school. If you're not getting work, its just the economy. I've been looking for work since March. It's tough.
Just keep at it, and it'll pay off.
You need to create a professional looking site. If you are a developer I also suggest that you start a small open source project (or a big one if you are so inclinded). It doesn't have to be any thing major...a widget or library. Something useful for people to play with. On your website show examples of your work. If you have no examples then sign up for accounts on getafreelancer.com, elance.com, scriptlance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com and any of the other freelance style sites. Build up your portfolio by doing cheap work...but not work that is cheap! Create a resume and post it somewhere for google to find. Create a linkedin, facebook, and myspace account. Make it easy for people to find you and for people to find your work. Write about the things that you are interested in either by way of a personal blog or by posting articles to a site that already gets lots of traffic. Speak at small user groups or conferences to get your name out.
There is a lot you can do it is just a matter of how badly you want to succeed. Programming or designing is just as much a business as selling physical products. It is all about how much you saturate a given space with good words about your services. Marketing!
I am working with an artist to make her personal website. She would like to sell her artwork from the website. The issue is, she would like to be able to add, remove and price the artwork herself. She would also like to use paypal as the payment method.
Obviously design and coding is easy for me, that's all static. I am not sure however, what the best method would be to set up a way for her to add artwork herself.
I know there are some open source e-commerce sites (magento, zencart ect.) but I have never used these and feel they might be a bit overkill for a simple art site. Is there something else really simple I should use?
Any general thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Use a ecommerce site, its the obvious choice if she wants to sell stuff.
Zencart isn't as overkill as you think - it allows you to remove all the bits you don't want from the site using its admin gui; so you keep just the categories and the cart sections.
It also has options (IIRC, but I may be thinking of a different one, like CRELoaded) that provide for pay-and-download links.
Certainly, reusing ecommerce code will be a lot easier than writing your own.
Always use an existing framework for commercial sites. It's just too easy to make a silly mistake which allows hackers to take over control of the server.
I recently found a really cool (and free) method of using php and javascript to upload, resize thumbnails, and display all uploaded content from the folder.
Taking this code from a free tutorial and pairing it with a customized javascript gallery looks really slick (used it for my own photography site as well as a few clients who loved it).
Very soon I will be combining it with a site for a historical golf course architect... a gentleman has come to me with hundreds of pictures he would like to store on the web, but he wants the capability to upload himself at any time. The trick is this: If your client artist wants to price it herself, the gallery use would require her to be able to navigate the basic html framework enough to change the descriptions which appear beneath all of the pictures as she adds/changes them.
If you want to get started on your own check out some of the tutorials here:
http://net.tutsplus.com/category/videos/screencasts/page/3/
as well as finding a gallery that you both like for displaying the photos in an attractive way... Let me know if you want anything else from me :)
Why don't you create a simple administration panel where s/he can add, remove and price the artwork? Do you know any programming languages? PHP?
Virtuemart is based Joomla CMS , very easy to set up, an Open Source eCommerce solution. You might find a lot of free extensions of Joomla for photo gallery and other things.
Gallery2 is an excellent web-gallery software, suitable for presenting images, videos, and audio.
It has a "CheckOut with PayPal" plugin.
Gallery2 will require some time to configure, it is unlikely that you will use it "as is" after install.
Gallery2 is easily embeddable - provided minimal PHP skills, and good HTML/CSS skills, one can make it fit inside any design (maybe except for the grid-like thumbnails layout, which I guess is possible but harder than average).