It's exciting when companies offer great deals (that are also free). Today's giveaway is from Depositphotos – a subscription for a whole year worth $299. It's a great opportunity for creatives, bloggers and media industry professionals. The free subscription will allow you to download royalty-free, high quality and creative visuals for your projects. The one thing that takes a lot of time is looking for the perfect images for your website, blog or any other online publication. With your yearly subscription, your job will be so much simpler. The content is already there for you to use. Don't miss out … Continue reading →Visit us at InstantShift.com

(This is a sponsored article.) Last year, a comprehensive introduction to the basic use of SVGator was published here on Smashing Magazine. If you'd like to learn about the fundamentals of SVGator, setting up your first projects, and creating your first animations, we strongly recommended you read it before continuing with this article. Today, we'll take a second look to explore some of the new features that have been added to it over the last few months, including the brand new Path Animator.

In the run-up to Christmas, there is a tradition across the web design and development community to produce advent calendars, typically with a new article or resource for each day of December. Last year, I did a roundup of these calendars, and now that the 2019 season is in full swing, here is this year's line-up. I'm sure you'll notice that the majority of the calendars published here are true community efforts, often with the bulk of the work falling to an individual or tiny team, with no budget to pay authors and editors.

Prior to now websites were intricately designed starting right from the point of nothing, with no type of execution of pre-planned formats or styles. They were vastly improved that way. So allude it as a sharp truth or a myth, yet sites used to be more creative and capricious with a smirch of wild hues and experimental designs and some even had a video playing out in the background. In each sense, it was a great deal more fun and cooler than what it is nowadays. These days, every other website you visit resembles any of those in some sort … Continue reading →Visit us at InstantShift.com

Evolved from the Geissler tube, the neon sign was a characteristic trait of America from the 1920s to the ’60s. It has marked several decades and created its own distinct... The post 12 Stunning Retro Neon Effects in Web Design appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Finding our passion is a big challenge for all of us as human beings. At some point in life, we try to figure out what our purpose in this world is, what our future will look like. And for some of us, the answers we find to these questions are constantly changing. The constant search to find answers lets us stay curious, creative, vital — and if that's missing, we need to find our passion again by exploring what things we like in our world, what makes us happy. Searching takes time, and we should invest that time — maybe by cutting down watching TV by an hour a week.The post Web Development Reading List #139: jQuery 3, Web Payment API, And ES6 Tricks appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Whether your app landing page is encouraging people to sign up, register, join, or subscribe, it’s a key thing to get right. A carefully designed mobile app landing page can make-or-break your conversion rates, and it’s worth taking the time to get right! Landing pages can hold a huge amount of value, and if you’re […]

Sergey Zhuk has posted the second part of his "fast web scraping" series that makes use of the ReactPHP package to perform the requests. In part one he laid some of the groundwork for the scraper and made a few requests. In this second part he improves on this basic script and how to throttle the requests so as to not overload the end server. t is very convenient to have a single HTTP client which can be used to send as many HTTP requests as you want concurrently. But at the same time, a bad scraper which performs hundreds of concurrent requests per second can impact the performance of the site being scraped. Since the scrapers don't drive any human traffic on the site and just affect the performance, some sites don't like them and try to block their access. The easiest way to prevent being blocked is to crawl nicely with auto throttling the scraping speed (limiting the number of concurrent requests). The faster you scrap, the worse it is for everybody. The scraper should look like a human and perform requests accordingly. A good solution for throttling requests is a simple queue. He shows how to integrate the clue/mq-react package into the current scraper to interface with a RabbitMQ instance and handle the reading of and writing to the queue. He includes the code needed to update the ReactPHP client. The mq-react package makes the update simple with the HTTP client reading from the queue instance rather than the array of URLs. One the queue is integrated, he then shows how to create a "parser" that can read in the HTML and extract only the wanted data using the DomCrawler component.

In a new post to his site Christoph Rumpel shares an introduction to the use of Content Security policies to prevent client-side security issues in your applications. While his examples are more Laravel-specific, the concepts can be applied to just about any framework or home-grown solution. As more and more services get digital these days, security has become a significant aspect of every application. Especially when it comes to third-party code, it is tough to guarantee safety. But in general, XSS and Code Injection is a big problem these days. Content Security Policy provides another layer of security that helps to detect and protect different attacks. Today, I will introduce this concept and its main features, as well as show real-world examples. He starts with a general look at web application security vulnerabilities and, more specifically, cross-site scripting issues. These are the ones that a Content Security Policy (CSP) can help prevent. He then covers the basics of the CSP header and gets into the implementation. In his example he sets up the addition of the CSP header as a middleware so that it's included on every request. With the default header all resources are blocked so he walks through the process of restoring access to the scripts, fonts and styles his blog needs to work correctly. With the basics covered he then gets into a few more advanced features of CSP policies such as nonces for resource identification, iframe handling and the submission of forms. The post ends with a recommendation of the Laravel CSP package for use in Laravel applications. If you're looking for something more framework agnostic you might want to look into ParagonIE's CSP Builder library.

Advertise here with BSA Designers are extremely busy people. Fact. Not only do they have to make time to find inspiration for their next project, manage feedback, attend meetings, and communicate with their clients,... Advertise here with BSA The post 30 Tools That No Designer Should Live Without appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.