Freelance Projects, Design and Programming Tutorials
I have a team of 10 people that need to communicate data to each other. a few of the people are door-to-door sales-reps and i want them to be able to–through their phone’s internet–to input customer account info and schedule a time for the service to be performed… (Budget: $250-750, Jobs: Excel, Microsoft Access, XML)
I’m Looking for a freelancer that can extract data and images from one of our vendors website, this website has an online catalog of their products. The Site has around 35 Categories and each averages between 150 to 300 products listed in tables… (Budget: $50-180, Jobs: Data Entry, eCommerce, Excel, Magento, PHP)
SWFObject provides a simple way to pass values to a SWF using only JavaScript: no server-side code required! In this tutorial, we’ll build a fundraiser meter that can easily be updated with the amount donated so far, without needing to recompile the SWF.
View the source of the demo and you’ll see that the target and current donation amounts are defined in JavaScript.
Don’t like ads? Download the screencast.
Don’t like ads? Download the screencast.
Don’t like ads? Download the screencast.
If you’re not using the Flash IDE, here’s the relevant code in copy-and-pastable plain text:
if (root.loaderInfo.parameters["goal"] != null)
{
goal = Number(root.loaderInfo.parameters["goal"]);
actual= Number(root.loaderInfo.parameters["actual"]);
}
else
{
// if can't access values in page
goal = 100;
actual = 50
}
The tutorial videos explain how to hook these up to a JavaScript object in the page.
In this quicktip tutorial, we’ll walk through one way to create complex NURBS-based icons in Maya. Useful control icons can make or break a good rig, and are essential when creating in-interface GUIs. Putting together simple, one-piece shapes are easy, but making compound icons can be much more difficult. One method for combining multiple curves is to parent them under a single transform node. We’ll first do this by hand, and then look at an easy MEL script that automates the process.
Create a handful of Nurbs curves. For this example, I’ve used the Create > Text option box command, changed the text to Cgtuts+ and then selected the Curves type. With that done, hit Create to create this collection of Nurbs shapes:
If you look in the Outliner (Window > Outliner), these curves are grouped by letters (in groups with the prefix “Char_”), and under a single “Text_” node, but each individual letter is selectable and moveable. When we hand over our final rig, we want the entire word to be the only thing that is selectable.
To achieve this, we first start by selecting and un-parenting all the curves. The MEL code to do this is as follows:
parent -w;
So marquee select around all of your text elements, enter the above command into the command line at the bottom of your interface window, and hit Enter on your keyboard.
With all of the curves still selected, freeze their transformations (Modify > Freeze Transformations).
Next, open up the Hypergraph hierarchy.
By default, only top-level transform nodes are visible in the hypergraph. To show the shape nodes, go to Options > Display > Shape nodes.
First select all of the shape nodes for every curve except curve1. In this case I’ll have 7 shape nodes selected. Now hold down Shift and select the first curve’s transform node, in this case the curve1 node, to add it to your selection. It’s very important to select the transform node last. Your hypergraph should now look like this:
The following MEL command parents the first selected items (in our case the shape nodes), under the last selected item (the transform node). So type the following code into your command line and hit Enter to parent the shapes under the transform node:
parent -r -s;
Now you can click on any of the letters and Maya will automatically select the entire word. Your control-icon is now ready! Here’s a MEL script that automates the entire process. Just select all of the curves you want to group and run this script:
global proc groupUnderTransform(){
string $selCurves[] = `ls -sl`;
makeIdentity -apply true -t 1 -r 1 -s 1 -n 0;
select -deselect $selCurves[0];
pickWalk -d down;
select -add $selCurves[0];
parent -r -s;
select -r $selCurves[0];
}
groupUnderTransform;
Having goals is an automatic tendency for everyone – and the goals will be wide in range and scope. What might be something you find not really worthy of being pursued another may envision as an ultimate achievement. It is the achieving them that is the challenging part – although I’d argue that even sitting down to set goals is a larger challenge. It should serve to be an offshoot of your to-do list…and once you’ve put them down and have them in writing, they’re a lot tougher to ignore.
The Freelance Folder blog put together a great post that not only outlines a few of the author’s “bucket list” items, but challenges the reader to come up with their own. It’s an inspiring read and will hopefully serveto get you thinking about what you really want to achieve to live your life to the fullest.
I came across this interesting article a few days back discussing how to get more done with a work buddy and how he or she can help you stay on track.
I agree with most of the points mentioned, especially the one about collaboration. I have found that when I collaborate with people on projects, I can get more work done in less time. While there can be some loss of time in communication (although solutions keep cropping up on the web, such as Google Wave), I have found it to be a productive exercise.
A work buddy can keep an eye on you when you procrastinate, help you solve problems and motivate you during difficult times.
So, what do you think? Do you need a work buddy?
Well-written software applications are fast, powerful and flexible: They are remarkably disciplined, following a rigid set of self-imposed rules. Their meticulous organization allows them to keep track of millions of bits of information, and their multitasking ability is unmatched. As air breathing, flesh-and-blood work processors, we could learn quite a bit from our binary-based brethren.
These days, software applications of all shapes and sizes are spawning peripheral programs to enable use on a smartphone, browser or home computer. It seems that every software publisher is scrambling to create iPhone, Blackberry and Droid apps that allow their users to connect from just about anywhere.
You should make yourself similarly accessible. This doesn’t entail staying in the office 24 hours a day, but it does mean leaving an avenue for contact when you’re away. Have faith that your coworkers will respect your working (and nonworking) hours. You might also want to think twice about shutting your office door for hours at a time; that would make you quite inaccessible.
Even the best computer programs (and the best workers) have a meltdown once in a while. Once an irreversible breakdown or a grave mistake happens, the best thing to do is recover gracefully. For a computer program, this would involve resetting, running diagnostics, and checking settings. For you, it might mean taking a step back from the current catastrophe, salvaging what you can, ensuring it doesn’t happen a second time, and proceeding mindful of the cause. If your software is learning from its mistakes, you should certainly be learning from yours.
Poorly-written programs take up unnecessary amounts of memory and processing power. Selfishly, they assume that there are no other operations running and no better use for those resources.
The same can be said for a worker who needs large budgets, multiple meetings, and a lot of coworker’s time to complete some basic, straightforward projects. They ignore the bigger picture, “tunnel-visioning” on the task at hand and sacrificing efficiency in the process. The successful (and inefficient) completion of a project feels very satisfying to the resource hog. You can’t blame them; it always feels good to finish an enormous, multifaceted project. But, not all projects have to be huge, and some can get unnecessarily bloated with milestones, meetings, approval stages and benchmarks.
Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer can certainly feel satisfying, but it’s not good work. Don’t be a resource hog; instead, be a lean, lightweight, high-performance machine.
A good piece of software is continually updated with new fixes and features to keep customers happy. New software is always coming out, and if it’s conceived carefully, it will target the weaknesses of currently available programs and try to trump them.
Just like the steady stream of software coming from Silicon Valley, there are annual floods of fresh graduates coming out of local colleges and training programs, armed with the latest and greatest capabilities. You may have the edge of experience, but you’ll need some “updates” to stay competitive.
If you’re have a weakness at work due to a missing skill set or an unfamiliarity with a nascent part of your industry, don’t just shrug it off. Find a book, website or podcast that covers the missing information, and integrate it into your workflow. Then, next time your group is looking for “updates” (the kind announced at group meetings), make it known that you’ve addressed a weakness or acquired a new feature within your own programming. Your “users” will certainly appreciate the added value in your “bug fixes” and “new features.”
Users will always encounter errors with their software; the handling of such errors is what dictates the program’s “user-friendliness.” Even widely-used programs have indecipherable, frustrating unfriendly errors:
“An unexpected error has occurred while processing this request.”
This kind of nondescript, vague message borders on useless, and makes the software look bad. Friendlier programs will be as helpful as possible in getting you on the right track:
“Oops. It looks like you don’t have room on your computer to install this. You may need to remove some files and/or programs to free up disk space.”
Similarly helpful (and similarly unhelpful) messages can come from humans: If you’re unable to do what’s asked, would you send your users a vague, frustrating response? If you’re truly “user-friendly,” you’ll be as clear as possible in explaining what’s stopping you from running your usual routine. People occasionally accept malformed, incomprehensible errors from computers, but they’ll rarely take the same from a human being, as we’ve discussed in these commumication tips.
Compatibility used to be a “nice to have” feature, but now it’s essential for any application. Nearly every software program released today comes with an “Application Programming Interface” (API) that allows it to deliver it’s results to other applications. Programs that lack an effective means to deliver their work to other mediums usually they get phased out by a program that “works well with others.”
To avoid getting phased out yourself, take care to interface well with your fellow carbon-based co-workers. Some have their own organizational systems that involve file names, email subject lines, and carefully-planned schedules. Accommodate their self-made systems; if you deliver the work exactly the way they’d do it themselves, they’ll love the new You 2.0.
Follow through on these 6 lessons, and unlike a computer programn, you may find yourself avoiding obscolesence.
Sequence photography is the technique of shooting a series of images where the subject is captured in successive motion. When creating a sequence photo, all the action is combined into one layered image in post-processing. Today we have collected 50 impressive examples of sequence photography, along with a couple of tutorials to help you achieve the same effect!
If you’re wondering how on earth to achieve this effect, never fear. Here are three tutorials that will get you on track for producing a brilliant outcome:
Have fun, thanks for reading, and be sure to share your results (or any other, similar effects) in the comments below! I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
As part of our massive CodeCanyon push this year, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve launched not one, but two awesome new categories. The new CSS category features everything from incredible pricing charts, to buttons, to entire frameworks; while the WordPress plugins category is quickly on its way to becoming the premier location for purchasing premium plugins on the web. In fact, I’m betting that we’ll be there by the end of the year!
Today, I’d like to show you the first ten new premium WP plugins available on CodeCanyon.
The Events Calendar Premium plugin for WordPress enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the post editor. Features include Google Maps integration as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation. Check out the full screencast here.
DDSliderWP features EVERYTHING that our jQuery plugin already offered PLUS a custom admin panel, with total management of slides.
This WordPress Gallery Plugin gives you a simple and extremely customizable way to create a gallery on any post or page. You have the option to use widgets or shortcodes to insert your custom gallery into your web site. As well, the look of your gallery is fully customizable through the WordPress admin interface.
If you own just one twitter plugin for WordPress, let it be this one! The only premium twitter plugin out right now – with support for multiple twitter users and includes a ton of premium options. This is the last Twitter plugin you’ll ever need! Check out the full screencast here.
This is a WordPress plugin that helps you sell your content; you only need to install the plugin, create a category for your private content, setup the prices of your memberships and your Paypal account. Don’t hesitate and purchase it today.
You can easily select the posts you want to sell, manage the memberships you acquire and is fully integrated with Paypal. All you have to do is activate the plugin, setup your memberships and your Paypal account.
This plugin makes it possible for you to upload blog files, directly from the WordPress media manager to MyOws.
WP Auctions is a plugin that enables you to host auctions on your self hosted WordPress powered blog or website.
Simplify your WordPress posting workflow with our automated WordPress post tagger!
Why stumble around trying to determine what keywords from your post(s) are best for getting some extra Search Engine Optimization; while you can let All Tagged Up do the work for you.
It’s never been easier to add Google analytics and event tracking to your websites. This in combination with a campaing url generator tool makes a powerfull WordPress plugin to get the most out of Google Analytics.
This deposit system enables your users to deposit money in their accounts.
But there’s always room for more — and this is a category that will grow in leaps and bounds over the course of this year. If you’re a ninja WordPress dev, and want to start profiting from your hard work, be sure to become an author on CodeCanyon, and get started!
You might have heard about cookies, but what exactly are they and what can we actually do with them? In this tutorial, we will focus on the basics of cookies, and learn about their functionality in various web application and site environments. We will also learn how to use them within our PHP and JavaScript projects, while paying particular attention to security issues that might arise when using them. After reading this, you’ll have acquired the necessary skill set to implement cookies safely into your own web applications.
The first step on our journey is to discovered just what these cookies actually are! Even if you have already worked with them, you might still find this part quite useful – so stay with me!
You can most easily think of cookies as text files, which are saved to your computer. On the request of a webserver, your browser creates such a file. After this happens, the webserver can read and write content from and to this file. Although this seems like a dangerous feature – after all, no one likes other people writing files to their computer, there are a few restrictions in place to make this process as safe as possible.
Cookies have an expiration date. This date is set so the browser can delete old cookies when they are no longer needed by the webserver. If the expiration date is empty, the cookie will be deleted when the connection with the server is closed. This occurs when the site’s window or tab is closed by the user, or when the user closes the entire browser. These cookies, sometimes called session cookies, are mostly used for storing temporary settings.
Let’s find out what these things look like on a technical level. Cookies are transfered via the HTTP protocol. This is the protocol used by browsers to retrieve and send files to the server. After a cookie has been requested, it is sent to the server every time a new item on the web page is fetched by the browser. Below, we can see a snippet of a server requesting a new cookie (this snippet is a part of a HTTP response).
Set-Cookie: Name=content data; expires=Fri, 31-Dec-2010 23:59:59 GMT; path=/; domain=.example.net
Now don’t get scared, it’s all very understandable!
In the next step, we’ll review how these properties can be used in programming languages.
Cookies can be created in many ways, but, for the purposes of this tutorial, we will focus on PHP and JavaScript.
The most important thing to remember, when creating a cookie in PHP, is that you must set all cookies before you send any data to the browser. This means that you should always initialise new cookies before any output. This includes echo() or print() commands, and the <html> or <body> tags. Of course, there are some exceptions, but this is a general rule of thumb.
<?php /***Creating a cookie***/ $name = 'clientname'; $value = 'Peter Griffin'; //time() gives current time in seconds, and we add 60 seconds * 30 = 30 minutes //so this cookie expires in 30 minutes. //You may notice that the expire date is in seconds, PHP translates this to //the correct format internally! $expireDate = time() + 60 * 30; $path = '/example/'; $domain = 'test.envato.com'; $secure = false; //only transmit the cookie if a HTTPS connection is established $httponly = true; //make cookie available only for the HTTP protocol (and not for JavaScript) setcookie( $name, $value, $expireDate, $path, $domain, $secure, $httponly); <html> .... //all content etc goes here ?>
This should seem familiar by now, except for $secure and $httponly. The ‘secure’ is to force the cookie to only be sent if an HTTPS connection has been established, if set to true, and should normally be set to false. The ‘httponly’ makes the cookie only available through the HTTP protocol, meaning that client-side languages, like JavaScript and VBscript, can’t access the cookie. This helps to prevent nasty stuff, such as Cross Site Scripting, and should be set to true if you have no intentions of editing the cookies client-sided with a language like JavaScript. Also, to prevent misconceptions, “httponly” does not mean that cookies can’t be sent over HTTPS, because they still can, in fact. However, please do note that the above snippet can be made quite smaller (and should be):
<?php setcookie( 'clientname', 'Peter Griffin', time()+60*30, '/example/', 'test.envato.com', false,true); ?>
Great! Now we can create cookies, but we have to be able to read them as well. Luckily for us, PHP makes this very easy once a cookie has already been created. In PHP, there’s an environment variable called $_COOKIE[], which can be used for extracting the value of the cookie. To use it, just insert the name of the cookie inside the brackets [] like so:
<?php $cookieValue = $_COOKIE['name of the cookie']; ?>
This environtment variable can be used like any other. Just like $_GET[] and $_POST[], it can be treated directly as a normal variable (once you have checked if the cookie does indeed exist ofcourse) if you want to.
If you want to alter the expiration date, path, or domain, you have to overwrite an existing cookie with setcookie() using the same name as the original cookie. If you alter the expiration date to be in the past (time()-30*60 for instance), the cookie will be deleted.
Cookies can be read and written client-sided as well. Even though JavaScript doesn’t offer a nice solution to read and write cookies, it is possible and widely used. JavaScript uses the document.cookie object for cookie manipulation, as shown in the following snippet:
//get current date var expiredate = new Date(); //increase date by 5 hours expiredate.setHours( expiredate.getHours() + 5); document.cookie = ''cookiename=cookievalue; expires=" + expiredate.toUTCString() + "path=/example/; domain=test.envato.com";
As you might have noticed, this syntax is quite similar to the HTTP protocol notation. This has the advantage of being more in control, but also introduces some potential problems. Below is the <painful> snippet for reading a cookie.
var cookieName = 'testcookiename';
var textArray = document.cookie.split(';'); //put all the parts of the string in an array
for(var i = 0; i < textArray.length; i++){ // loop though all string pieces
var textPiece = textArray[i]; //contains 1 string piece
//filter beginning spaces
while(textPiece(0)==' ') textPiece = textPiece.substring(1,textPiece.length);
//if the textpiece contains our cookies name
if (textPiece.indexOf(cookieName)== 0){
//return whats after the cookies name
return textPiece.substring(cookieName.length,c.length);
}
}
I know, I know; this is a pain. Luckily for you guys, I’m posting some pre-written functions below (you might want to make your own functions for learning purposes though, and you should!).
function writeCookie(cookieName, cookieValue, expireHours, path, domain){
var date = new Date();
date.setHours(date.getHours + expireHours);
document.cookie = cookieName + '=' + cookieValue + '; expires=' + date + '; path=' + path + '; domain=' + domain;
}
function readCookie(cookieName){
var textArray = document.cookie.split(';');
for(var i = 0; i < textArray.length; i++){
var textPiece = textArray[i];
while(textPiece(0)==' ') textPiece = textPiece.substring(1,textPiece.length);
if (textPiece.indexOf(cookieName)== 0) return textPiece.substring(cookieName.length,c.length);
}
}
Please do bear in mind that these snippets don’t contain any error checking.
Did you know? –
Cookies were invented by Netscape, which wanted to use them for creating a shopping cart for an online shop. Thanks to cookies people were able to keep items their cart, even after disconnecting from the shop.
Nowadays, we use cookies for almost every purpose you can think of. You can use them for saving user settings like name, language, location or screen size. This can improve the quality of the service you want to provide for a client, because you can optimize the service for a client and remember this optimization in the future. For instance, you could save the client’s preferred language to a cookie, and, afterward, show your site’s content in the preferred language every time the client visits your site.
Of course, there are plenty more fun things to do with cookies than this! In the next step, I’ll show you an example of a cool code snippet.
Finally! Now we can start writing some awesome code! Below is a bonus snippet, which uses cookies to create a relogin mechanism.
Before we begin, this snippet contains some MySQL code. If you’re not familiar with MySQL, don’t panic. Even though this snippet is a bit difficult, it should be understandable with a bit of basic PHP and cookie knowledge.
To create a “remember me” implementation, we must have a few things. Firstly, we need a database table containing a username, password, and identification field. Secondly, we need a unique string or number to identify clients safely through cookies (this is the identification in the database table). In this snippet, we’ll use an SHA-1 digest, which is just a string, as an identifier. When used properly, this provides excellent security.
Most people just insert a username and password in the cookie, and send it to the server to automatically. This should be avoided at all times! Cookies are usually sent through a non-secure connection, so the content could easily be seen by any potential attackers.
<?php
//this assumes that the user has just logged in
/****Creating an identification string****/
$username; //normally the username would be known after login
//create a digest from 2 random values and the username
$digest = sha1(strval(rand(0,microtime(true)) + $username + strval(microtime(true));
//save to database (assuming connection is already made)
mysql_query("UPDATE users SET reloginDigest="'.$digest.'" WHERE username="'.$username.'");
//set the cookie
setcookie( "reloginID', $digest, time()+60*60*24*7,'/', "test.example.com', false, true);
//this assumes that the user is logged out and cookie is set
/****Varifying users through the cookie****/
$digest = $_COOKIE["reloginID'];
$digest = mysql_real_escape_string($digest); //filter any malicious content
//check database for digest
$result = mysql_query("SELECT username FROM users WHERE reloginDigest="'.$digest.'"');
//check if a digest was found
if(mysql_num_rows($result) == 1){
$userdata = mysql_fetch_object($result);
$username = $userdata->username;
//here you should set a new digest for the next relogin using the above code!
echo "You have successfully logged in, '.$username ;
} else{
//digest didn't exist (or more of the same digests were found, but that's not going to happen)
echo "failed to login!";
}
?>
By using a digest like we did, the chances of getting two of the same digest is miniscule. A digest is a forty character string, which, in theory, should always provide a complete random ouput if the input is changed. In practice, you should add a time limit in the serverside code, so that the digest isn’t valid after X minutes. This prevents attackers from copying someone’s cookies and using them to login.
We’ve almost reached the end of this tutorial. As a conclusion I would like to sum up some best practices:
I hope you’ve learned a bit from today’s Nettuts+ tutorial. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or say hi on Twitter.
I need someone skilled in WordPress to do a few fixes for me. Only bid if you can start when selected. No next day starts. Will pay $50 All other bids will be ignored and/or marked as SPAM (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: PHP, WordPress)
Currently using fckeditor on several websites. I need it upgraded to the newest ckeditor – 3.3.1. Can be seen at ckeditor.com
3 Sites total.
Explanation of how to do it can be seen on this forum, if needed:
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=65522
I need quality backlink building services. All dofollow.
I need a small graphic design/logo for my website
cuttingedgeclassrooms.com
I’d like the design to use be related to technology in
the classroom, education, teachers, classrooms, students,
etc. I’d like something modern like the website infers
I usually don’t choose designers that don’t show
me a mock up of the design first and you must use
the code word “rocker” in your reply or else
I will not choose you no matter how good your reviews.
This should be a real easy job for any one who
designs logo’s and other graphics often. If it
goes well I’m hoping to hire the winning bidder
for more jobs in the future.
I would like to know how much will it cost for a complete SEM and SEO for a website. the website is built on Joomla.
I will disclose the address of the website, through PMS.
Please, provide the steps, that it will be used to accomplish the work.
1. website is based on joomla.
2. SEO & SEM will be done in both english and french.
3. I will provide the website address via PM
Bidder must be very good in Joomla, and have done some work on joomla SEO.