Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/apache-vs-nginx-performance-optimization-techniques/

Some years ago, the Apache Foundation’s web server, known simply as “Apache”, was so ubiquitous that it became synonymous with the term “web server”. Its daemon process on Linux systems has the name httpd (meaning simply http process) — and comes preinstalled in major Linux distributions.

It was initially released in 1995, and, to quote Wikipedia, “it played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web”. It is still the most-used web server software according to W3techs. However, according to those reports which show some trends of the last decade and comparisons to other solutions, its market share is decreasing. The reports given by Netcraft and Builtwith differ a bit, but all agree on a trending decline of Apache’s market share and the growth of Nginx.

Nginx — pronounced engine x — was released in 2004 by Igor Sysoev, with the explicit intent to outperform Apache. Nginx’s website has an article worth reading which compares these two technologies. At first, it was mostly used as a supplement to Apache, mostly for serving static files, but it has been steadily growing, as it has been evolving to deal with the full spectrum of web server tasks.

It is often used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and for HTTP caching. CDNs and video streaming providers use it to build their content delivery systems where performance is critical.

Apache has been around for a long time, and it has a big choice of modules. Managing Apache servers is known to be user-friendly. Dynamic module loading allows for different modules to be compiled and added to the Apache stack without recompiling the main server binary. Oftentimes, modules will be in Linux distro repositories, and after installing them through system package managers, they can be gracefully added to the stack with commands like a2enmod. This kind of flexibility has yet to be seen with Nginx. When we look at a guide for setting up Nginx for HTTP/2, modules are something Nginx needs to be built with — configured for at build-time.

One other feature that has contributed to Apache’s market rule is the .htaccess file. It is Apache’s silver bullet, which made it a go-to solution for the shared hosting environments, as it allows controlling the server configuration on a directory level. Every directory on a server served by Apache can have its own .htaccess file.

Nginx not only has no equivalent solution, but discourages such usage due to performance hits.

Server vendors market share 1995–2005. Data by Netcraft

LiteSpeed, or LSWS, is one server contender that has a level of flexibility that can compare to Apache, while not sacrificing performance. It supports Apache-style .htaccess, mod_security and mod_rewrite, and it’s worth considering for shared setups. It was planned as a drop-in replacement for Apache, and it works with cPanel and Plesk. It’s been supporting HTTP/2 since 2015.

LiteSpeed has three license tiers, OpenLiteSpeed, LSWS Standard and LSWS Enterprise. Standard and Enterprise come with an optional caching solution comparable to Varnish, LSCache, which is built into the server itself, and can be controlled, with rewrite rules, in .htaccess files (per directory). It also comes with some DDOS-mitigating “batteries” built in. This, along with its event-driven architecture, makes it a solid contender, targeting primarily performance-oriented hosting providers, but it could be worth setting up even for smaller servers or websites.

Hardware Considerations

When optimizing our system, we cannot emphasize enough giving due attention to our hardware setup. Whichever of these solutions we choose for our setup, having enough RAM is critical. When a web server process, or an interpreter like PHP, don’t have enough RAM, they start swapping, and swapping effectively means using the hard disk to supplement RAM memory. The effect of this is increased latency every time this memory is accessed. This takes us to the second point — the hard disk space. Using fast SSD storage is another critical factor of our website speed. We also need to mind the CPU availability, and the physical distance of our server’s data centers to our intended audience.

To dive in deeper into the hardware side of performance tuning, Dropbox has a good article.

Monitoring

One practical way to monitor our current server stack performance, per process in detail, is htop, which works on Linux, Unix and macOS, and gives us a colored overview of our processes.

Other monitoring tools are New Relic, a premium solution with a comprehensive set of tools, and Netdata, an open-source solution which offers great extensibility, fine-grained metrics and a customizable web dashboard, suitable for both little VPS systems and monitoring a network of servers. It can send alarms for any application or system process via email, Slack, pushbullet, Telegram, Twilio etc.

Monit is another, headless, open-source tool which can monitor the system, and can be configured to alert us, or restart certain processes, or reboot the system when some conditions are met.

Testing the System

AB — Apache Benchmark — is a simple load-testing tool by Apache Foundation, and Siege is another load-testing program. This article explains how to set them both up, and here we have some more advanced tips for AB, while an in-depth look at Siege can be found here.

If you prefer a web interface, there is Locust, a Python-based tool that comes in very handy for testing website performance.

After we install Locust, we need to create a locustfile in the directory from which we will launch it:

from locust import HttpLocust, TaskSet, task

class UserBehavior(TaskSet):
@task(1)
def index(self):
self.client.get(“/”)

@task(2)
def shop(self):
self.client.get(“/?page_id=5”)

@task(3)
def page(self):
self.client.get(“/?page_id=2”)

class WebsiteUser(HttpLocust):
task_set = UserBehavior
min_wait = 300
max_wait = 3000

Then we simply launch it from the command line:

locust –host=https://my-website.com

One warning with these load-testing tools: they have the effect of a DDoS attack, so it’s recommended you limit testing to your own websites.

Tuning Apache
Apache’s mpm modules

Apache dates to 1995 and the early days of the internet, when an accepted way for servers to operate was to spawn a new process on each incoming TCP connection and to reply to it. If more connections came in, more worker processes were created to handle them. The costs of spawning new processes were high, and Apache developers devised a prefork mode, with a pre-spawned number of processes. Embedded dynamic language interpreters within each process (like mod_php) were still costly, and server crashes with Apache’s default setups became common. Each process was only able to handle a single incoming connection.

This model is known as mpm_prefork_module within Apache’s MPM (Multi-Processing Module) system. According to Apache’s website, this mode requires little configuration, because it is self-regulating, and most important is that the MaxRequestWorkers directive be big enough to handle as many simultaneous requests as you expect to receive, but small enough to ensure there’s enough physical RAM for all processes.

A small Locust load test that shows spawning of huge number of Apache processes to handle the incoming traffic.

We may add that this mode is maybe the biggest cause of Apache’s bad name. It can get resource-inefficient.

Version 2 of Apache brought another two MPMs that try to solve the issues that prefork mode has. These are worker module, or mpm_worker_module, and event module.

Worker module is not process-based anymore; it’s a hybrid process-thread based mode of operation. Quoting Apache’s website,

a single control process (the parent) is responsible for launching child processes. Each child process creates a fixed number of server threads as specified in the ThreadsPerChild directive, as well as a listener thread which listens for connections and passes them to a server thread for processing when they arrive.

This mode is more resource efficient.

2.4 version of Apache brought us the third MPM — event module. It is based on worker MPM, and added a separate listening thread that manages dormant keepalive connections after the HTTP request has completed. It’s a non-blocking, asynchronous mode with a smaller memory footprint. More about version 2.4 improvements here.

We have loaded a testing WooCommerce installation with around 1200 posts on a virtual server and tested it on Apache 2.4 with the default, prefork mode, and mod_php.

First we tested it with libapache2-mod-php7 and mpm_prefork_module at https://tools.pingdom.com:

Then, we went for testing the event MPM module.

We had to add multiverse to our /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu xenial partner

Then we did sudo apt-get updateand installed libapache2-mod-fastcgi and php-fpm:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-fastcgi php7.0-fpm

Since php-fpm is a service separate from Apache, it needed a restart:

sudo service start php7.0-fpm

Then we disabled the prefork module, and enabled the event mode and proxy_fcgi:

sudo a2dismod php7.0 mpm_prefork
sudo a2enmod mpm_event proxy_fcgi

We added this snippet to our Apache virtual host:

<filesmatch “.php$”>
SetHandler “proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000/”
</filesmatch>

This port needs to be consistent with php-fpm configuration in /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf. More about the php-fpm setup here.

Then we tuned the mpm_event configuration in /etc/apache2/mods-available/mpm_event.conf, keeping in mind that our mini-VPS resources for this test were constrained — so we merely reduced some default numbers. Details about every directive on Apache’s website, and tips specific to the event mpm here. Keep in mind that started servers consume an amount of memory regardless of how busy they are. The MaxRequestWorkers directive sets the limit on the number of simultaneous requests allowed: setting MaxConnectionsPerChild to a value other than zero is important, because it prevents a possible memory leak.

<ifmodule mpm_event_module>
StartServers 1
MinSpareThreads 30
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadLimit 64
ThreadsPerChild 30
MaxRequestWorkers 80
MaxConnectionsPerChild 80
</ifmodule>

Then we restarted the server with sudo service apache2 restart (if we change some directives, like ThreadLimit, we will need to stop and start the service explicitly, with sudo service apache2 stop; sudo service apache2 start).

Our tests on Pingdom now showed page load time reduced by more than half:

The post Apache vs Nginx Performance: Optimization Techniques appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/complete-guide-wordpress-performance-optimization/

According to Builtwith.com, WordPress holds close to 50% of the CMS share of the world’s top 1,000,000 websites. As for the ecommerce sphere, we’re at 33% with WooCommerce. And if we cast a wider net, percentages go higher. Although we may complain that WordPress can get bloated, resource-heavy, and its data model leaves a lot to be desired, there is no denying that WordPress is everywhere.

WordPress can thank its simplicity and a low barrier to entry for this pervasiveness. It’s easy to set up, and requires next to no technical knowledge. Hosting for WordPress can be found for as little as a couple of dollars per month, and the basic setup takes just a half hour of clicking. Free themes for WordPress are galore, some with included WYSIWYG page builders.

Many look down on it, but in many ways we can thank WordPress for the growth of the internet and PHP, and many internet professionals have WP’s gentle learning curve to thank for their careers.

But this ease of entry comes at a cost. Plenty of websites that proudly wear the WordPress badge were not done by professionals but by the cheapest developers. And often, it shows. Professional look and professional performance were afterthoughts.

One of the main points of feedback the owner of an aspiring high-quality website will get from a grudging professional is that performance and a professional look and feel shouldn’t be afterthoughts. You can’t easily paint or stick them over a website. Professional websites should be premeditated.

Above, a famous UK used car dealer, Ling’s Cars, tried a unique way to make a kitsch marketing punchline. Unless you’re REALLY sure about what you’re doing, DO NOT try this at home

And this starts with…

Choice of Hosting

Typically, new users will go with products that are on the low-cost side, with most of beginner-friendly bells and whistles. Considering the shady business practices by some big industry players in this arena, and the complaints and demands for site migration professionals coming from clients, this is a part of website setup that requires due attention.

We can divide WordPress hosting vendors into a few tiers.

Premium, WordPress-dedicated vendors like Kinsta whose plans start at $100 per month, or even higher-grade managed hosting like WordPress VIP by Automattic, may be worth their salt, but also may be out of reach for many website owners.

Medium tier Flywheel, A2 hosting, Siteground and Pantheon are among those considered reliable and performance oriented, offering acceptable speed and a managed hosting service for those more price-conscious. Users here may get a bit less hand-holding, but these services usually strike an acceptable balance between a solid setup, price, and options for more advanced users. Not to forget, there is Cloudways, which is a hybrid between VPS and managed hosting. Those with their audience in Europe may look into Pilvia, as it offers a performant server stack and is pretty affordable.

There’s an interesting survey of customer satisfaction with more prominent hosting vendors, published by Codeinwp.

For those of us not scared of the command line, there are VPS and dedicated-server vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon’s Lightsail, Hetzner in Europe, and OVH. Hetzner is a German vendor known for its quality physical servers on offer, somewhat above the price of virtual servers, while OVH offers very cost-efficient virtual servers. For the price-conscious, OVH’s subsidiary Kimsufi in Europe and Canada also offers bargain physical dedicated servers, and Host US has very affordable virtual servers.

With managed hosting, things to look for are a good server stack, good CDN integration, and of course SSD storage. Guaranteed resources, like with A2, are a big plus. The next thing to look for is SSH-access. Tech-savvy users may profit from WP-CLI availability.

When choosing a VPS, the thing to look for is XEN or KVM virtualization over OpenVZ, because it mitigates the overselling of resources, helping guarantee that the resources you bought are really yours. It also provides better security.

Easy Engine is software that can make your entire VPS/WordPress installation a one-hour job.

Regarding the server stack, Nginx is preferred to Apache if we’re pursuing performance, and PHP 7 is a must. If we really need Apache, using Nginx as a reverse proxy is a plus, but this setup can get complex.

Tests performed give PHP 7 a big edge over the previous version. According to fasthosts.co.uk:

WordPress 4.1 executed 95% more requests per second on PHP 7 compared to PHP 5.6.

When choosing your hosting, be aware of negative experiences with some providers that have become notorious.

Software Considerations

Things that usually slow down WordPress websites are bulky, bloated front ends with a lot of static resources and database queries. These issues arise from the choice of theme (and its page builders, huge sliders, etc) — which not only slow down initial loading due to many requests and overall size, but often slow down the browser due to a lot of JavaScript, and stuff to render, making it unresponsive.

The golden rule here is: don’t use it unless there’s a good reason to.

This may seem like a rule coming from the mouth of Homer Simpson, but if you can skip any of the bells and whistles, do so. Be conservative. If you must add some shiny functionality or JS eye candy, always prefer those tailored and coded as specifically as possible for your exact need. If you’re a skilled coder, and the project justifies the effort, code it yourself with minimalism in mind.

Review all the plugins your website can’t live without — and remove the others.

And most importantly: back up your website before you begin pruning!

Data model

If you have a theme where you use a lot of custom posts or fields, be warned that a lot of these will slow down your database queries. Keep your data model as simple as possible, and if not, consider that WordPress’ original intended purpose was as a blogging engine. If you need a lot more than that, you may want to consider some of the MVC web frameworks out there that will give you greater control over your data model and the choice of database.

In WordPress we can build a rich custom data model by using custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields, but be conscious of performance and complexity costs.

If you know your way around the code, inspect your theme to find unnecessary database queries. Every individual database trip spends precious milliseconds in your TTFB, and megabytes of your server’s memory. Remember that secondary loops can be costly — so be warned when using widgets and plugins that show extra posts, like in sliders or widget areas. If you must use them, consider fetching all your posts in a single query, where it may otherwise slow down your website. There’s a GitHub repo for those not wanting to code from scratch.

Meta queries can be expensive

Using custom fields to fetch posts by some criteria can be a great tool to develop sophisticated things with WP. This is an example of a meta query, and here you can find some elaboration on its costs. Summary: post meta wasn’t built for filtering, taxonomies were.

get_post_meta is a function typically called to fetch custom fields, and it can be called with just the post ID as an argument, in which case it fetches all the post’s meta fields in an array, or it can have a custom field’s name as a second argument, in which case it returns just the specified field.

If using get_post_meta()for a certain post multiple times on a single page or request (for multiple custom fields), be aware that this won’t incur extra cost, because the first time this function is called, all the post meta gets cached.

Database hygiene

Installing and deleting various plugins, and changing different themes over the lifetime of your website, often clutters your database with a lot of data that isn’t needed. It’s completely possible to discover — upon inspecting why a WordPress website is sluggish, or why it won’t even load, due to exhausted server memory — that the database has grown to hundreds and hundreds of megabytes, or over a gigabyte, with no content that explains it.

wp-options is where a lot of orphaned data usually gets left behind. This includes, but is not limited to, various transients (this post warns of best practices regarding deletion of transients in plugins). Transients are a form of cache, but as with any other caching, if misused, it can do more harm than good. If your server environment provides it, wp-cli has a command set dedicated to transients management, including deletion. If not, there are plugins in the WordPress plugins repo that can delete expired transients, but which offer less control.

If deleting transients still leaves us with a bloated database without any tangible cause, WP-Sweep is an excellent free tool that can do the job of cleaning up the database. Another one to consider is WP Optimize.

Before doing any kind of database cleanup, it’s strongly recommended that you back up your database!

One of the plugins that comes in very handy for profiling of the whole WordPress request lifecycle is Debug Objects. It offers an inspection of all the transients, shortcodes, classes, styles and scripts, templates loaded, db queries, and hooks.

After ensuring a sane, performance-oriented setup — considering our server stack in advance, eliminating the possible bloat created by theme choice and plugins and widgets overload — we should try to identify bottlenecks.

If we test our website in a tool like Pingdom Speed Test, we’ll get a waterfall chart of all the resources loaded in the request:

This gives us details about the request-response lifecycle, which we can analyze for bottlenecks. For instance:

If the pink DNS time above is too big, it could mean we should consider caching our DNS records for a longer period. This is done by increasing the TTL setting in our domain management/registrar dashboard.
If the SSL part is taking too long, we may want to consider enabling HTTP/2 to benefit from ALPN, adjusting our cache-control headers, and finally switching to a CDN service. “Web Performance in a Nutshell: HTTP/2, CDNs and Browser Caching” is a thorough article on this topic, as is “Analyzing HTTPS Performance Overhead” by KeyCDN.
Connect, Send, and Receive parts usually depend on network latency, so these can be improved by hosting close to your intended audience, making sure your host has a fast uplink, and using a CDN. For these items, you may want to consider a ping tool too (not to be confused with the Pingdom tools mentioned above), to make sure your server is responsive.
The Wait part — the yellow part of the waterfall — is the time your server infrastructure takes to produce or return the requested website. If this part takes too much time, you may want to return to our previous topics of optimizing the server, WordPress installation, and database stack. Or you may consider various layers of caching.

To get a more extensive testing and hand-holding tips on improving the website, there’s a little command line utility called webcoach. In an environment with NodeJS and npm installed (like Homestead Improved), installing it is simple:

npm install webcoach -g

After it’s been installed, we can get detailed insights and advice on how to improve our website’s various aspects, including performance:

The post The Complete Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/atJW2Zx6Duw/move-world-mural-drawings-deck-two

Move the World Mural Drawings by Deck Two

AoiroStudio
Jun 08, 2018

Very cool project title for a mural drawing by Deck two who is an artist from Paris, France. Entitled: Move the World, we follow him on this absolute beautiful drawing showcasing the important landmarks of the World. It’s quite stunning and I can’t even imagine the level of patience it would take to work on this kind of project. Props to Thomas for his incredible dedication!

One of my last mural project in Memphis, Tennessee. A huge 2,6 x 13 meters long panoramic view in the entrance of JKI offices. That mural embraces all the famous places in the world that the company has been reaching through the years. Long days of work to complete this freehand mural with just a couple of Molotow acrylic markers. I chose a small 2mm nib to get as much details as I could so the visitors could stare at the walls to discover all the hidden details. I hope you guys will like it too.

More Links
Learn about about Deck two
Follow Deck two’s work on Behance
Illustration & Art Direction

mural
murals
drawing
drawings

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/Yi0kECfpYmc/parallax-scrolling-1131762

One web design trend that refuses to go away is parallax scrolling. With this, the website layout sees the background of the web page moving at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll. It can sometimes be overwhelming, but when used sparingly it can provide a nice, subtle element of depth that results in a distinctive and memorable website.

But to show how it should be done, we've collected together sites that employ the technique to good effect. In some cases the parallax scrolling is the star of the show; in others it simply adds a touch of depth that makes the foreground seem to pop out a little.

01. Bear Grylls

Digital agency Outpost was tasked with creating a new digital strategy for explorer and TV personality Bear Grylls. “To live up to the new brand vision and values and embody the ‘adventure brand’ we needed to take people on a journey online,” says the studio in its case study. A rich, dynamic user experience was key.

Subtle parallax is used throughout, but the real scene-stealer is the homepage. Grylls appears in a dramatic mountainscape, and the viewer is drawn into the scene as they scroll. It’s a great introduction to the adventures to follow.

02. ToyFight

ToyFight is an award-winning creative agency, and its website is a whole lot of fun. Founders Jonny Lander and Leigh Whipday have turned themselves into 3D figures, which appear in a range of scenes throughout the site (including this cheeky Sagmeister & Walsh reference). Clever use of parallax amplifies the 3D effect, and paired with bold, bright, plain backgrounds, never becomes overwhelming or irritating.

03. Hello Monday

Hello Monday is a design agency based in Denmark. It aims to create immersive digital experiences that tell a story and bring joy to their users, and it has gone one step beyond with its portfolio site. When creating a studio site, the difficulty is that adopting cool or cutting-edge design ideas often means sacrificing clarity and usability, which is paramount for a design portfolio. 

Hello Monday manages to achieve both by introducing a subtle parallax effect within a pared-back page layout. Each project hero image moves slightly, to bring it to life and add energy to the design without detracting from the information on show. The effect is used on the studio’s homepage only, with individual project pages kept static to allow the work to shine. 

04. A-dam

A-dam uses parallax to showcase its stylish underwear

A-dam designs original boxer briefs and shorts for men with character, using GOTS-certified organic cotton. The boxers are handmade by people with fair wages and normal working hours. They're an ethical and stylish alternative to your usual supermarket pants, and their site, created by Build in Amsterdam, showcases them nicely, with assorted parallax elements popping in from all directions as you scroll.

05. Diesel: BAD Guide

84.Paris created this impressive parallax website (and associated social media campaign) to accompany the launch of Diesel’s BAD fragrance. The one-page site presents the series of rules that make up the ‘BAD Guide’. 

The user can explore by dragging the mouse around the parallax page, which is laid out like a pinboard of images to click through. There’s advice on everything from Tinder (‘Swipe right, right, right, right – you’ll sort them out later’) to Instagram (‘Don’t forget to get in touch with an ex on Thursdays #TBT’), accompanied by monochrome illustrations.

06. Myriad

Bareface’s site for Myriad shows off the furniture system’s infinite possibilities

Myriad is a range of modular office furniture by Boss Design that's designed to be flexible and reconfigurable, allowing you to build your own working spaces as you see fit. As part of its work on the launch, Bareface created a site showcasing Myriad's infinite possibilities with clever use of parallax elements, pulling in inspiring arrangements of furniture as you explore the site.

07. Firewatch

Each layer of trees moves independently

One of the most beautiful examples of parallax scrolling we’ve seen is this website for the game Firewatch, which uses six moving layers to create a sense of depth. It’s great because there’s no scroll hijacking (something that often accompanies the parallax effect), and it’s only used at the top of the page – the rest of the site is still so you can read the information without getting seasick. If you want to see how it’s done, here’s a nice demo on CodePen.

08. Garden Studio

Layering of the landscape makes it seem three dimensional

In a similar vein, Garden Studio has also opted to use the parallax technique in a sensible and delightful way at the top of its site, before moving into a mostly static page. The shifting landscape is subtle and unobtrusive yet also the star of the show – we found ourselves scrolling up and down again and again. 

09. GitHub 404

GitHub’s 404 breaks the rules of parallax for a disorienting effect

This isn’t strictly parallax scrolling as the effect happens on mouse wiggle as opposed to scroll, but it’s a really fun page that uses layering to add depth. Unlike 'proper' parallax, the background moves faster than the foreground, creating a disorienting, otherworldly feel.

10. Jess & Russ

Every illustration has a sense of depth

It's no surprise that design power couple Russ Maschmeyer and Jessica Hische's wedding website is a beauty to behold. The site charts their romantic story, with parallax scrolling used throughout to add depth to the illustrations. They got married in 2012, but the website is still well worth a look.

11. Alquimia WRG

Alquimia WRG uses parallax elements to simulate a 3D space environment

Based in Milan, Alquimia WRG is a digital agency that aims to create amazing and effective experiences for brands on digital media. Clean and minimal, and only black and white, the website uses a mixture of the usual suspects (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript) to achieve a neat package.

HTML5 canvas is used to animate the initial loading image. Subtle "parallax elements in the homepage are dynamically created and animated to simulate a 3D space environment through mouse movement," says Andrea Bianchi, creative director at Alquimia.

Page navigation is achieved via a simple and smooth page sliding effect, which is implemented by changing CSS properties with JavaScript. The works page contains a simple list of selected projects, which, when selected, reveals further information in a smooth sliding effect.

When such content is loading, a JavaScript animated preloading bar appears at the bottom of the screen, which is a nice touch. The site achieves its goal, which, as Bianchi says, "was to create an ideal balance between content, usability and user experience".

12. Make Your Money Matter

Manage your finances with information and advice from Make Your Money Matter

Finance and money are hardly the most interesting of subjects. But New York-based digital agency Firstborn is quids in with this dynamic parallax scrolling website Make Your Money Matter for the Public Service Credit Union.

With the aim of teaching the public the benefits of joining a credit union, rather than using a bank, this brilliant site includes everything from how a credit union works, to where to find one and how to apply, as well as a calculator showing just how much banks profit from customer's deposits.

13. Seattle Space Needle

Scrambled egg all over my face. What is a boy to do?

The site for Seattle's iconic Space Needle starts at the base of the 605-foot tower and invites you to scroll up all the way to the top, taking in views of Seattle and the SkyCity Restaurant along the way. And if 605 feet isn't quite high enough for you, keep on scrolling and see what you find!

14. Madwell

New York agency Madwell uses parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth

Design and development agency Madwell, based in New York, shows off its portfolio with a range of parallax scrolling effects to create a noticeable 3D style that adds a huge amount of depth.

15. Peugeot Hybrid4

Peugeot uses parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing web comic

Peugeot has gone all out with using parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing comic in the browser. The comic plays as you scroll down the page (or use its autoplay feature that automatically scrolls) and helps to advertise the car manufacturer's new HYbrid4 technology.

16. Cultural Solutions

The circles move at different speeds for a subtle 3D effect

Arts consultancy Cultural Solutions employs a subtle parallax scrolling effect to introduce depth to its homepage. Its main brand image is the use of colourful circles – the circles in the background move slower than those in the foreground, creating a subtle 3D effect.

17. Walking Dead

Walking Dead uses parallax scrolling to pull you into its gory world

We're big fans of TV zombie drama The Walking Dead at Creative Bloq, and we were gripped by this website launched to promote it. The imaginative site harks back to the show's comic strip origins and makes clever use of parallax scrolling to pull you into its sick and depraved world.

"We came at this as fans of the show, first and foremost," says lead designer Gavin Beck. "With this drive, we wanted to create a world within the Walking Dead that fans could explore and appreciate.

"To achieve this, we looked to several existing technologies and techniques such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery, Web Audio/HTML5 Audio, and parallax scrolling. The challenge was to find a unique approach to incorporate all these methods into a single engaging experience across all platforms."

18. New York Times: Tomato Can Blues

A beautiful experience is to be had with this parallax scrolling New York Times article

In today's era of low attention spans and bite-size media, how do you attract people to longform journalism? Here's a great response to that problem from the New York Times, combining some clever web design techniques with storytelling and comic-inspired illustrations created by Atilla Futaki.

One of the best examples of parallax scrolling we've seen, the article takes you through the story of a cage fighter written by Mary Pilon. As you scroll through the content, the illustrations come alive with clever animations and alterations, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the content.

Futaki's illustrations were based on police records, witness accounts, photographs and the reporter's notes, and the attention to detail shines through. All in all it's a great reading experience – is this the future of online journalism?

19. Snow Fall

The New York Times’ ‘Snow Fall’ article kickstarted a whole new craze for rich parallax sites

One of the first sites to really push the boundaries on what you could do with longform editorial content online, the New York Times' Snow Fall article combines a range of different elements, including parallax scrolling and web video.

The article, about the horror of an avalanche at Tunnel Creek, was published online in December 2012 but still stands strong as an example of what you can do with parallax scrolling. The newspaper presented the Pulitzer-winning article in an innovative way that grabbed the design community's attention worldwide.

Related articles:

5 quick ways to improve your portfolio dramatically35 brilliantly designed 404 error pagesCreate an interactive parallax image

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/06/monthly-web-development-update-6-2018/

Monthly Web Development Update 6/2018: Complexity, DNS Over HTTPS, And Push Notifications

Monthly Web Development Update 6/2018: Complexity, DNS Over HTTPS, And Push Notifications

Anselm Hannemann

2018-06-15T12:32:58+02:00
2018-06-15T13:49:35+00:00

We see complexity in every corner of a web project these days. We’ve read quite a bunch of articles about how complex a specific technology has become, and we discuss this over and over again. Coming from a time where we uploaded websites via FTP and had no git or anything comparable, now living in a time where we have a build system, transpilers, frameworks, tests, and a CI even for the smallest projects, this is easy to understand. But on the other hand, web development has grown up so much in the past 15 years that we can’t really compare today to the past anymore. And while it might seem that some things were easier in the past, we neglect the advantages and countless possibilities we have today. When we didn’t write tests back then, well, we simply had no test — meaning no reliable way to test for success. When we had no deployment process, it was easy to upload a new version but just as easy to break something — and it happened a lot more than today when a Continuous Integration system is in place.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an interesting article on the matter: “The Cult of Complex” outlines how we lose ourselves in unnecessary details and often try to overthink problems. I like the challenge of building systems that are not too complex but show a decent amount of responsibility (when it comes to ethics, privacy, security, a great user experience, and performance) and are working reliably (tests, deployments, availability, and performance again). I guess the problem of finding the right balance won’t go away anytime soon. Complexity is everywhere — we just need to decide if it’s useful complexity or if it was added simply because it was easier or because we were over-engineering the original problem.

News

The upcoming Safari version 12 was unveiled at Apple’s WWDC. Here’s what’s new: icons in tabs, strong passwords, as well as a password generator control via HTML attributes including two-factor authentication control, a 3D and AR model viewer, the Fullscreen API on iPads, font-display, and, very important, Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 which is more restrictive than ever and might have a significant impact on the functionality of existing websites.
The headless Chrome automation library Puppeteer is now out in version 1.5. It brings along Browser contexts to isolate cookies and other data usually shared between pages, and Workers can now be used to interact with Web Workers, too.
Google released Lighthouse 3.0, the third major version of their performance analyzation tool which features a new report interface, some scoring changes, a CSV export, and First Contentful Paint measurement.
Chrome 67 is here, bringing Progressive Web Apps to the Desktop, as well as support for the Generic Sensor API, and extending the Credential Management API to support U2F authenticators via USB.
We’ve seen quite some changes in the browsers’ security interfaces over the past months. First, they emphasized sites that offer a secured connection (HTTPS). Then they decided to indicate insecure sites, and now Chrome announced new changes coming in fall that will make HTTPS the default by marking HTTP pages as “not secure”.

Desktop Progressive Web Apps are now supported in Chrome OS 67, and the Chrome team already started working on support for Mac and Windows, too. (Image credit)

General

In “The Cult of the Complex”, Jeffrey Zeldman writes about how we often seem to forget that simplicity is the key and goal of everything we do, the overall goal for projects and life. He explains why it’s so hard to achieve and why it’s so much easier — and tempting — to cultivate complex systems. A very good read and definitely a piece I’ll add to my ‘evergreen’ list.
Heydon Pickering shared a new, very interesting article that teaches us to build a web component properly: This time he explains how to build an inclusive and responsive “Card” module.

UI/UX

Cool Backgrounds is a cool side project by Moe Amaya. It’s an online generator for polygonal backgrounds with gradients that can generate a lot of variants and shapes. Simply beautiful.

Tooling

Ben Frain shares some useful text editing techniques that are available in almost all modern code editors.

Security

As security attacks via DNS gain popularity, DNS over HTTPS gets more and more important. Lin Clark explains the technology with a cartoon to make it easier to understand.
Windows Edge is now previewing support for same-site cookies. The attribute to lock down cookies even more is already available in Firefox and Chrome, so Safari is the only major browser that still needs to implement it, but I guess it’ll land in their Tech Preview builds very soon as well.

Lin Clark created a cartoon to explain how you can better protect your users’ privacy with DNS over HTTPS. (Image credit)

Privacy

The ACLU discovered that Amazon now officially teamed up with law enforcement and provides a mass-face recognition technology that is already used in cities around the world.

Web Performance

KeyCDN asked 15 people who know a lot about web performance to share their best advice with readers. Now they shared this article containing a lot of useful performance tips for 2018, including a few words by myself.
Stefan Judis discovered that we can already preload ECMA Script modules in Chrome 66 by adding an HTML header tag link rel=“modulepreload”.

Accessibility

It’s relatively easy to build a loading spinner — for a Single Page Application during load, for example —, but we rarely think about making them accessible. Stuart Nelson now explains how to do it.
Paul Stanton shares which accessibility tools we should use to get the best results.

JavaScript

JavaScript has lately been bullied by people who favor Elm, Rust, TypeScript, Babel or Dart. But JavaScript is definitely not worse, as Andrea Giammarchi explains with great examples. This article is also a great read for everyone who uses one of these other languages as it shows a couple of pitfalls that we should be aware of.
For a lot of projects, we want to use analytics or other scripts that collect personal information. With GDPR in effect, this got a lot harder. Yett is a nice JavaScript tool that lets you block the execution of such resources until a user agrees to it.
Ryan Miller created a new publication called “The Frontendian”, and it features one of the best explanations and guides to CORS I’ve come across so far.
The folks at Microsoft created a nice interactive demo page to show what Web Push Notifications can and should look like. If you haven’t gotten to grips with the technology yet, it’s a great primer to how it all works and how to build an interface that doesn’t disturb users.
Filepond is a JavaScript library for uploading files. It looks great and comes with a lot of adapters for React, Vue, Angular, and jQuery.
React 16.4 is out and brings quite a feature to the library: Pointer Events. They’ll make it easier to deal with user interactions and have been requested for a long time already.

Inspired by the parallels between basic astrological ideas and push notification architecture, the team at Microsoft explains how to send push notifications to a user without needing the browser or app to be opened. (Image credit)

CSS

Oliver Schöndorfer shares how to start with variable fonts on the web and how we can style them with CSS. A pretty complete summary of things you need to consider as well as possible pitfalls.
With the upcoming macOS Mojave supporting a ‘dark mode’, Safari will begin to automatically set the background color of websites to a black color if no background-color is explicitly set. This is a great reminder that browsers can set and alter their default styles and that we need to set our site defaults carefully. I’m still hoping that the ‘dark mode’ will be exposed to a CSS Media Query so we can officially add support for it.
Rafaela Ferro shares how to use CSS Grid to create a photo gallery that looks not only good but actually great. This article has the answers to many questions I regularly get when talking about Grid layout.
Marcin Wichary explains how we can create a dark theme in little time with modern CSS Custom Properties.

Work & Life

Anton Sten wrote about the moral implications for our apps. A meaningful explanation why the times of “move fast and break things” are definitely over as we’re dealing with Artificial Intelligence, social networks that affect peoples’ lives, and privacy matters enforced by GDPR.
Basecamp now has a new chart type to display a project’s status: the so-called “hill chart” adds a better context than a simple progress bar could ever do it.
Ben Werdmüller shares his thoughts about resumes and how they always fail to reflect who you are, what you do, and why you should be hired.

I hope you enjoyed this monthly update. The next one is scheduled for July 13th, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you like what I do, please consider helping me fund the Web Development Reading List financially.

Have a great day!

— Anselm

(cm)