Dannyguinther

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You probably have some tasks you do on the weekend to get ready for the week ahead, which can make your time off less enjoyable. Pack those tasks into a “power hour” on Sundays so you can make the most of your weekend and still have a smooth start to your work week.

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Whether it’s coffee makers, can openers, or food storage, OXO consistently makes some of our favorite products, and they’re hanging on to that praise with their over-the-door hook.

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Marcus DeSieno's photos remind you that the eye in the sky is never too far. The post Ah, the Beauty of Nature ... Seen Through Creepy Webcams appeared first on WIRED.

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The new release of rspec-benchmark fixes issue of propagating errors when using perform_under matcher.

This cheat sheet is for novice programmers (or more experienced developers with poor memories) and includes a basic reference to core Minitest syntax as well as assertions and Minitest::Spec expectations with simple code examples. (Free PDF, no email signup required.)

This article describes the SQL case statement and how to use it in Rails. https://solidfoundationwebdev.com/blog/posts/how-to-do-a-case-or-switch-statement-in-sql-and-rails

This week: Apple news. Also, some Amazon news. But mostly Apple. The post All About Apple appeared first on WIRED.

Just pushed a new version of Jekyll-Timeago, a library to compute distance of dates in words (originally built for Jekyll and Liquid based templates).

This episode is from Ara T. Howard’s talk at Rails Remote Conf 2015. You can watch the full, unedited presentation, Program Like You Give a Damn, on YouTube at your convenience.

 

• Check out All Remote Confs for next year’s remote conference lineup!

• Freelance Remote Conf will run from February 24th-26th. The speaker lineup is all but complete!

• Ruby Remote Conf will run from March 23rd-25th. Get your tickets or submit a CFP!

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Béarnaise, a classic sauce that’s a variation of hollandaise and typically served over steak, can be difficult to make. With this cooking hack, however, you can make a pseudo-béarnaise sauce that is easier to whip up and stores in the fridge for longer.

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Want to know who the new Spider-Man might be? Curious about the status of the Deadpool flick? Read on for this week's superhero movie news.

The post Cape Watch: Can We Get Suicide Squad Details for God’s Sake? appeared first on WIRED.

“Hopefully it captures your soul," says artist Daniel Rozin.

The post This Mirror Shows Your Reflection in…Furry Pompoms appeared first on WIRED.

A lot happened in the world of late-night chat shows this week. (Short version: Seth Meyers crushed it.)

The post The Week in TV: Jon Stewart Welcomes Caitlyn Jenner appeared first on WIRED.

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#EspressoMonday Episode Nr.16

Is It Worth Paying For a Premium WordPress Theme or Not?

There is no doubt about what WordPress can deliver in many ways in performance and flexibility. Being an open source tool, there is a lot to choose from and the possibilities are endless. However, the debate rages on whether or not buying a premium WordPress theme is worth it or not.

Before we get into the heat of things in this #EspressoMonday episode, grab your espresso and let’s do it the Brent Weaver way – one shot in an espresso cup.

As an open source tool, WordPress remains dynamic and progressive with the themes evolving regularly or sometimes, at a much faster pace. With all these choices available, a lot of people, not only web designers, think if it is really worth shedding a few dollars on a premium theme. Should you buy a premium WordPress theme or not?

Advantages of a Premium Theme

Buying a premium WordPress theme has always been a hot topic not only here on the 1WD community but among those who use WordPress. In fact, we have written a few articles which tackle this subject. You can find one of them here. Before we delve into the advantages of using a premium theme, we are not saying that you should not use a free theme because there are free themes that have awesome features as well. However, free themes have some limitations compared to their premium counterparts and here are the reasons why.

Premium Support

Because you pay, premium theme developers are bound to provide support 24/7 or risk losing precious customers. So if you encounter any problems or questions along the way, you can always expect that your queries will be answered promptly. You are always rest assured that, you will get prompt, excellent service through forums or email.

Regular Updates

Another reason for going premium is the regular updates. Since competition is tough, premium theme developers will regularly update the themes or they will lose to competition. Expect regular updates or get newer versions every 2 or 3 months including bug fixes. In addition, premium themes have extensive documentation to help you every step of the way.

Unique Features

One that’s never lacking in premium themes is the unique features because, as mentioned, competition is stiff. Premium theme developers will always strive to think, innovate, and add the newest and most unique features they can ever think of to make their theme much better than the competition.

Great Attention to Details

Premium theme developers are very detail oriented and have better tweaks, such as SEO. In line with SEO, premium themes come with a clean footer and support lowering your security risk as well as removing any annoying links from untrusted websites.

Easy Customization

Premium themes have been developed with their customers in mind; thus, themes are categorized to suit the needs of their customers. So whether you are a freelance photographer looking to showcase your portfolio or a new business owner with limited portfolio, you can always find something for you in a premium theme.

Unique Look

Premium themes are no doubt superior than free themes. What does that mean? That means it’s unique. So if you want a blog or website that stands out from the rest, you will never get it from free themes. Why? The answer is pretty simple – a lot of users are already using the free themes.

Fast Website Development Process

Premium WordPress themes have been developed with functionality in mind. Therefore, their tools are easy to use even for the not technologically savvy people. When tools are easy to use and deploy with just a few clicks, it is much easier and faster to create a website than when you use hard coding.

Disadvantages of Using Premium WordPress Themes

Just like any other issue, it won’t be fair if only the advantages are presented, so here are the disadvantages of using a premium WordPress theme.

Do Not Undergo Review

Unlike free themes that undergo a review process by WordPress before you can use them, premium themes operate independently. Because of this, some of the features they have might not be compliant to the WP standards in terms of licensing.

Not for Everyone

Buying a premium theme may not be a practical decision if you are just thinking of creating a blog of website as a hobby. There’s no need to shell out cash if you are not thinking of generating an income from it; otherwise, it will just be a waste of your money.

Too Many Unneeded Features

Premium themes, in their bid to be super awesome or super cool, might be adding features and plug-ins that are not necessary. Then, you’ll end up buying something that is useless, which defeats the purpose of why you bought a premium theme in the first place.

Conclusion

Premium themes are definitely awesome but before you think of purchasing one, look at the factors whether or not you really need one. If you want a blog or website for a personal hobby, there are a lot of free themes which you can use to showcase your hobby. However, if you want to showcase a service, a product, or a business which you hae plans to monetize or profit from, then a premium theme is for you. So depending on your needs and goals, assess them first before opting for a premium theme.

Another point to consider before buying a premium theme is to to buy them from a reputable source, such as ThemeForest, otherwise, you will find yourself with a big headache. We also have an article where we featured some of the best premium themes in 2015 as well as some reviews of premium WordPress themes, like the X Theme.

Have an awesome #EspressoMonday!

The Loena Lamp is a beautiful lampshade that glows like a fairy light.

This beautiful designer lampshade by Dutch design team Ontwerpduo doesn't just emit light when it's on. When the room goes dark, the lampshade glows with a beautiful geometric pattern for up to eight hours.

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Many opportunities end up being money suckers because of overhead, slow progress and low margins.

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We come bearing gifts! It's Rails 4.2, and the final version is ready just in time for Christmas. It's full of great toys, useful gizmos, and polished edges, courtesy of a fantastic community of merry elves who've been coding away with jolly glee for months.

This is probably also the most well-tested new major release of Rails in a long time. Through four betas and three release candidates, tons of people have helped ensure that regressions and bugs have been caught. Since the first beta, we have some 1600+ commits of spit and polish applied. So you have good reason to be excited!

To recap, here's a walkthrough of the major new goodies:

Active Job, ActionMailer #deliver_later

The headline feature for Rails 4.2 is the brand new Active Job framework, and its integrations. Active Job is an adapter layer on top of queuing systems like Resque, Delayed Job, Sidekiq, and more. You can write your jobs to Active Job, and they'll run on all these queues with no changes.

With an always-configured queue in place (though the default is just an inline runner), we can build on top of that where it makes sense. And the first place it makes sense is to send Action Mailer emails asynchronously. So we're introducing the #deliver_later method, which will do just that: Add your email to be sent as a job to a queue, so you don't bog down the controller or model. Voila!

The cherry on top is our new GlobalID library. It makes it easy to pass Active Record objects to jobs by serializing them in a generic form. This means you no longer have to manually pack and unpack your Active Records by passing ids. Just give the job the straight AR object, and it'll serialize it using GlobalID, and deserialize it at run time. So much easier!

Special thanks go out to Cristian Bica and Abdelkader Boudih for their outstanding work bringing this trinity of improvements to Rails!

Adequate Record

Aaron Patterson is always hunting for performance bounties in Rails, and with an improvement project called Adequate Record for Active Record, he's come up good. A lot of common queries are now no less than twice as fast in Rails 4.2! This is a great step forward for performance. While computers are constantly getting cheaper and performance is improving, nobody ever said "hey, get that free speed out of my framework". So there you go: Some free speed, buddy!

Web Console

Out of the wonderful Google Summer of Code for Rails campaign comes Web Console, which gives you a development console to inspect the state of affairs on all exception pages! It even allows you to jump between the different points in the backtrace, and you'll be able to inspect things right at that point.

It's a wonderful improvement to the debugging workflow. Thanks to Genadi Samokovarov and Ryan Dao for their work on this project.

Foreign Keys

Rails has long had a tumultuous relationship with foreign keys, but the drama days are now over. If you want to have foreign keys, you can have foreign keys, and Rails will still smile as it takes your order. The migration DSL gets add_foreign_key and remove_foreign_key and the standard schema.rb dumper will support maintaing these declarations. Foreign key support starts out as an exclusive to the MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters.

And so much more...

The above are just the highlights. We have many more goodies packed into this release than that. You can read a great summary in the release notes.

Maintenance consequences and Rails 5.0!

As per our maintenance policy, the release of Rails 4.2 means bug fixes will only apply to 4-2-stable, regular security issues to 4.2.x, 4.1.x, and severe security issues to 4.2.x, 4.1.x, and 3.2.x. In addition to these already stated commitments, the honorable Rafael França has agreed to also apply bug fixes to 4-1-stable. So everyone still on 4.1 and unable to move quickly can thank Rafael!

Rails 4.2 also marks the last big release in the 4.x series. With this release out, we're now working towards the big Rails 5.0! This means rails/master is now targeting 5.0.

Rails 5.0 will target Ruby 2.2+ exclusively. There are a bunch of optimizations coming in Ruby 2.2 that are going to be very nice, but most importantly for Rails, symbols are going to be garbage collected. This means we can shed a lot of weight related to juggling strings when we accept input from the outside world. It also means that we can convert fully to keyword arguments and all the other good stuff from the latest Ruby.

The release target for Rails 5.0 is currently Fall of 2015. So there's a while yet, but we're putting this out there for people to know, so gem maintainers and other Ruby implementations can know where we're going. We'll be working on putting out somewhat of a road map for the features when that's become a bit clearer.

Thanks to all and happy holidays!

It continues to be a pleasure and an honor to be involved with the amazing Ruby on Rails community – both contributors and users. The collaboration and resulting quality has never been better. Have a great holiday season and New Year's, and we'll see you all with more delicious releases in 2015!