The incredible amount of data available publicly on the internet for any industry can be useful for market research. You can use this data in machine learning/big data to train your model with tens of thousands of entries.
Here, in this article, I’m going to discuss the development of a web scraper with Node.js, Cheerio.js, and send back-end data to Vue.js in the front-end. Along with that, I’m going to use a simple crawler Node.js package.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: April 5, 2021 – April 11, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) is built on the power of Oracle’s industry-leading business intelligence tool Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). This allows users to build powerful data visualization with real-time data that highlights data patterns and encourages data exploration instead of delivering static flat reports. OTBI provides users a wide variety of data visualization options from standard graphs to advanced visuals such as trellis, treemaps, performance tiles, KPIs, and others.
FlexDeploy has an innovative CI/CD solution for managing the build and deployment of OTBI WebCatalog objects across the pipeline. Using FlexDeploy’s partial deployment model, developers can assemble related catalog objects into packages, build them from source control or a development environment, and deploy them into the target environments.
Everyday design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
15+ Useful Web Development Tools That You Might Not Know
Free Font Alternatives: The Ultimate Guide
Best Lightweight SVG Icon Sets for Web Designers and Developers
Modular UX Platform for eCommerce
Unsplash Is Being Acquired By Getty Images
The Junior Designer Starter Pack
UI Inspiration: 20+ Web Design Concepts for E-Commerce
Create Beautiful Charts With Styled Components
Font Size Is Useless; Let’s Fix It
The post Popular Design News of the Week: March 29, 2021 – April 4, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
This week Google announced further details of its plan to remove cookies from ad tracking. The strategy, which the ad giant expects to be fully implemented by 2022, has come about due to increasingly stringent privacy laws in a growing number of territories around the globe.
Google’s first step was the announcement in January of FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Google itself is still testing and fine-tuning the system, but in essence, Google will replace 3rd-party cookies in Chrome with groups of anonymized users.
Critics of the plan have questioned whether users will be genuinely anonymous or whether Google will be tracking individuals to group them properly. The answer came earlier this week in a low-key announcement of KaST.
KaST (Key and Surface Tracking) is the first iteration of Google’s new tracking technology. It works entirely without cookies and is fully device-agnostic.
The technology behind KaST is surprisingly old. It was first trialed in 1987 as a simple process for auditing the input of stenographers. Although the latest version of the technology draws heavily on voice recognition software algorithms, the original version of KaST — software named TAAA (Typist Account Accuracy Audit) — predates modern voice recognition by at least two years.
KaST uses…biomechanical and cognitive patterns, identifying individual users based on their keystrokes.
Just as your voice has a unique, identifiable modulation — anyone who uses telephone banking will be familiar with speaking their password — so too does your biomechanical input.
When you type on a keyboard or a touchscreen, the force, speed, and accuracy with which you hit characters are dependent on two things: your cognitive process and the unique biomechanics of your hands (the bones, ligaments, and muscles).
For example, when I type WordPress, I almost always type it as WordPRess (with a capitalized R). That is one facet of my combined biomechanical and cognitive process.
KaST uses keyboards and touch screens to track combined biomechanical and cognitive patterns, identifying individual users based on their keystrokes.
KaST is heavily reliant on BMaC (Bio-Mechanical and Cognitive) input. Although Google hasn’t released any data to support the accuracy of KaST, BMaC is known to be surprisingly accurate.
Reports suggest that the KaST algorithm is 89.7% effective for character strings of 12 characters or more, leaping to 97.6% for 19 characters or more on a single device. That makes it too inaccurate for high-end processes like security but well within the necessary margin of error for a non-critical process like serving ads.
Google will be able to identify you on any machine, on any device, in any context, as soon as you type 19 characters or more
When switching to a touch-screen device, the accuracy plummets to just 87.8%. This may be one reason Google has been low-key in its trumpeting of the new technology so far.
According to TechBeat, initial trials of the tri-axis position of a device (X, Y, and Z rotation) were abandoned as inaccurate. Still, even without those additional tracking signals, Google claims KaST on mobile will achieve ~94% accuracy by the 1st quarter of 2022.
Much like many of the algorithms that govern our daily lives, KaST will be largely invisible to most of us. Unlike cookies that can be legislated for and removed from a local machine, your BMaC is as inescapable as your DNA.
Where privacy concerns really grow is that your BMaC follows you from device to device. How you type at home is identical to how you type at work. Your personal and professional profiles are now instantly connectable; Google will be able to identify you on any machine, on any device, in any context, as soon as you type 19 characters or more.
Within 24 hours of KaST’s announcement, Apple stores were reporting rush orders of pre-M1 MacBook Pros. With some stores reportedly selling out late on Wednesday.
The rush came in the wake of a Reddit post — that has since been removed — that claimed that the notoriously bad butterfly keyboard on pre-M1 MacBook Pros circumvented KaST because the inaccuracy of the keystrokes, and the tendency of the keys to stick introduced a random element that disguised the end-user from the KaST algorithm.
Although the Reddit post is unsubstantiated, it transpires that M1 Mac owners may not be the lucky ones after all.
Advocates maintain that KaST — and Google’s wider FLoC strategy — are beneficial to users and the web as a whole. They claim that identifying users without 3rd party cookies does more to protect privacy than hinder it.
Opponents argue that in a digital world rife with user tracking, privacy compromises of this magnitude cannot be contemplated simply to enable more sophisticated ad-serving.
Despite KaST’s early stages of development, privacy concerns are mounting, and a campaign has been launched to regulate Google’s use of the technology.
The post Key and Surface Tracking Comes to Chrome first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As a web designer, you face plenty of challenges, both good and bad. One of the bad ones is to suddenly find out that you’re either in danger of missing a client’s deadline or will be unable to meet it at all.
A missed deadline could be due to something beyond your control and no fault of your own. There are measures you can take to avoid what you do have control over. Such as not having the right design tool or design resources to do a task that has to be done.
An ounce of prevention can definitely be worth a pound of cure in this case. Before starting a project, make sure the tool or tools you will be using will be up to the task.
The 15 design tools presented here are the tops in their respective categories. You should be better able to handle whatever is thrown at you.
Its more than 200,000 sales to date have certainly established the BeTheme multipurpose WordPress theme as an all-time favorite among web designers.
In truth, “multipurpose” doesn’t do BeTheme justice. Users might argue that “all-purpose” would be a more accurate description.
Be’s 40+ core features give web designers plenty to work with in terms of page-building tools, design aids, design options, and special effects.
Most notably:
Click on the banner to learn more about Be’s other core features.
Timezy will help you create a booking environment that works best for your business by allowing clients and customers to book your services as easily as possible. You can then integrate Timezy into your website to streamline and speed up your booking operation.
If you lack a website of your own, Timezy will provide you with a modern web page you can customize to fit your brand for clients to book appointments at any time.
wpDataTables is the top-selling and most powerful WordPress table and chart-building plugin on the market. There are other good ones, but their table and chart-building capabilities quickly become inadequate as you go down the list of what wpDataTables can do that most others cannot.
wpDataTables key features and capabilities:
You can also brighten up or improve a table or chart’s readability by highlighting or color-coding key information.
Click on the banner to find out more about what this plugin can do for you.
LayerSlider is not for sliders only. This multipurpose WordPress tool can also be used to create eye-catching animations and engaging content.
This popular design tool has been assisting web designers for nearly a decade and serves millions of active monthly users.
Amelia is a user-friendly WordPress booking plugin you can use to manage your appointments and events on a single platform.
Amelia can service multiple business locations.
With its more than 80.000 sales to date, Uncode has become one of ThemeForest’s all-time best sellers.
Uncode has a comprehensive library of tutorial videos and a showcase of user-created websites that is well worth visiting.
Created with perfection in mind, Total is nonetheless an extremely user-friendly WordPress theme.
Click on the banner to learn more.
Dr. Link Check saves you the inconvenience of having to periodically conduct a manual search of your site for broken links.
Dr. Link Check inspects for:
Dr. Link Check publishes downloadable daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
Mobirise is not only a top tool for creating fast, responsive, user-friendly websites. It also has the advantages of being offline. Mobirise is also free.
Factors that contribute to Mobirise’s excellent performance include:
Click on the banner to download your very own copy.
When a website builder is fast, free, responsive, user friendly, and Google-friendly as well, it is certainly worthy of consideration.
The 8b website builder:
Download your copy now.
WhatFontIs, with its database of more than 700K commercial and free fonts and font-finding AI functionality enables you to identify fonts from images you upload.
This top-of-the-line font-finding tool:
Litho is a responsive multipurpose Bootstrap 4 HTML5 template that gives startups, design agencies, and other businesses an ideal website-building starting point.
Litho’s features include:
Litho offers 5-star professional support.
XStore may be the best tool anyone could have at their fingertips when looking for a fast and easy way to create a high-performance eCommerce website – for only $39.
XStore’s key features include:
GOODIE’s web development platform assists clients who are eager to get a professionally-coded website quickly up and running.
GOODIE’s services focus on:
GOODIE’s specialties include 1-10 page, WordPress, and eCommerce websites.
There are several excellent reasons for letting Heroic Inbox manage your business’s departmental email inboxes.
They include:
Two key Heroic Inbox features are its smart workflows and a fast and friendly UI.
Every web designer owns a toolbox of tips and tricks they use in their website building projects. Even when a toolbox is superbly stocked, it is always challenging to keep it up to date. Doing so requires maintaining a knowledge of the latest and greatest web design resources and tools—some of which you may need to meet ever-changing industry demands.
This article features the top tools & resources for designers and agencies for 2021. Choosing one or more of them could not only help you stay on top of your game but could even make your day.
The post 15 Useful Tools & Resources Worth Checking Out first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
While APIs make it simple to share data back and forth between applications, the process of managing APIs can be anything but simple. A developer working with hundreds of different APIs over the course of their work can get bogged down trying to test, implement, and manage it all, turning what is supposed to be something straightforward into another layer of complexity.
Building API integrations is complex, but Postman makes it easy to create an API service. With Postman, developers can simplify every step of building and managing APIs — from development and testing to collaboration and support — so that more people can design APIs with simplicity, usability, and consistency.
While many of us are habituated to executing Spark applications using the ‘spark-submit’ command, with the popularity of Databricks, this seemingly easy activity is getting relegated to the background. Databricks has made it very easy to provision Spark-enabled VMs on the two most popular cloud platforms, namely AWS and Azure. A couple of weeks ago, Databricks announced their availability on GCP as well. The beauty of the Databricks platform is that they have made it very easy to become a part of their platform. While Spark application development will continue to have its challenges – depending on the problem being addressed – the Databricks platform has taken out the pain of having to establish and manage your own Spark cluster.
Once registered on the platform, the Databricks platform allows us to define a cluster of one or more VMs, with configurable RAM and executor specifications. We can also define a cluster that can launch a minimum number of VMs at startup and then scale to a maximum number of VMs as required. After defining the cluster, we have to define jobs and notebooks. Notebooks contain the actual code executed on the cluster. We need to assign notebooks to jobs as the Databricks cluster executes jobs (and not Notebooks). Databricks also allows us to setup the cluster such that it can download additional JARs and/or Python packages during cluster startup. We can also upload and install our own packages (I used a Python wheel).
Everyday design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: March 22, 2021 – March 28, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Ever since Patrick Debois coined the word DevOps back in 2009, teams and organizations have been clamoring to adopt relevant practices, tools, and a sense of culture in a bid to increase velocity while maintaining stability. However, this race to incorporate “DevOps” in software development practices has resulted in a perversion of the concept. This does not mean that there are no successful practices of teams adopting DevOps practices, but the word overall has become a buzzword. As per the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report, team managers are more likely to proclaim that their teams are practicing DevOps compared to the actual frontline engineers and developers.
Therefore, this piece aims to realign the meaning of DevOps as well as highlight the need for considering debugging as a core element of the practices and cultures that enable DevOps for teams. The argument for debugging as a core component in the DevOps pipeline is a result of the evident need for a shift-left in the way we build and release software, empowering developers to adhere to the intrinsic principle of you build it you run it.
