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2020Media is a leading UK web host offering Linux and Windows website hosting. The company specialises in WordPress, Joomla and Drupal support.
Tips and Tricks

Free images for your WordPress site

PhotoDropper has over 62 million free images that WordPress owners can access and insert right from their WordPress dashboard.

photodropper
photodropper

They also have a premium tier that offers more professional photos on a pay-by-the-photo basis.

Many people can locate images from stock photo websites or their own libraries, but this involves extra steps of downloading the image, resizing perhaps, then uploading to the WordPress site. Checking for copyright also takes more time. This plugin does it all from within WordPress, using Creative Commons licences.

The PhotoDropper plugin is free!

You can download the plugin here, or just search for “PhotoDropper” from inside your plugins dashboard.

With PhotoDropper you have access to the entire Flickr Creative Commons database offering you over 243.8 million Creative Commons images all totally free and totally legal for you to use on your website… As long as you follow the simple licensing, which PhotoDropper makes easy.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons lets people share any work (photo, graphics, writing, etc.) with the world so that anyone can use and remix their creations under the licensing terms the authors provide. It is usually denoted with “Some Rights Reserved” instead of  “All Rights Reserved.”

Flickr (part of Yahoo) has one of the world’s largest collections of such photos that people have shared with just such a license.

The PhotoDropper Plugin makes the process of finding and adding these photos to your posts  simple and takes care of necessary attribution automatically.

Learn more about the Creative Commons license along with its rules and restrictions here.

Technical

First look at ZipApp

Actually it’s more of a second look. My first look back in April showed a product with a lot of promise but was clearly not ready.

What is ZipApp?

Simply put, ZipApp is a free tool from Microsoft to help you  build Apps for Windows 8. You don’t need to be a programmer. You get full access to the source code. It’s designed to be simple and quick to get going, with dozens for templates provided.

ZipApp
ZipApp

You can create a Zip App account at www.zipapp.co.uk and start to put your app together.

To build the app package from the Zip App project file you’ll need to download a copy of Visual Studio Express from here http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-for-windows-8

This will give you all the tools you need to build an app.

Once you’ve got an app, in order to submit it to the store, you’ll need to sign up for a developer account – info can be found here https://appdev.microsoft.com/StorePortals/en-us/Account/Signup/Start/

There is a small charge for a developer account (individual or corporate) however you get a free developer account with an MSDN subscription if you have one. As an aside, you get an MSDN subscription as part of Biz Spark which can be an extremely cost effective way of getting a load of free software and networking opportunities.

Windows 8 Phone has recently been added with Beta support.

 

ZipApp templates
ZipApp templates

Then you’ll be able to submit as many apps to the store as you wish. There will be the option to have a third party publish your app too. Microsoft are currently working on a solution to enable people to publish their ZipApp application via a 3rd party, but it’s not ready for broad availability. In effect you would simply press a button and someone else would publish your application using their store account. This option currently leads to a mail form. We added our address to this in April and to date there’s been no response.

In summary, the tools work really well to create the app, but the unsophisticated developer/designer is left hanging at the end with no way to actually the app onto a Windows 8 device.

Opinion

CiviCRM London meetup May 2013

1 Comment

The next London Meetup is just around the corner and it would be great to see you there. It will be taking place on Wednesday 29 May from 5:30pm – 8:30pm (talks starting at 6pm) at Wikimedia UK, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London, LON EC2A 4LT.

civicrm logo

For those interested in using CiviCRM these sessions are a great way to learn more about how it works and get feedback from those already using Civi. If you’ve previously been to a meetup or use CiviCRM then you already know how great it is but you can still learn more about the different modules of Civi and perhaps get some inspiration of what more CiviCRM can do for you.

Registration and more information can be found here: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=308

The sessions are still to be arranged but this is the agenda so far:

  • Welcome & introductions (5 mins)
  • First Session – CiviCRM overview and introduction to a Civi module (15-20 mins)
  • Second Session – A CiviCRM case study (15-20 mins)
  • Break (15 mins)
  • Third session – Community update (10-15 mins)
  • Fourth Session – What’s new? (10 mins)
  • CiviCRM Open Workshop
Opinion

Free WordPress ‘premium’ themes

WPMU recently published a post on free WordPress themes from premium theme developers.

theme

Theme designers who generally charge for their work, often list a couple of free themes as a showcase. Typically these are hard to find, but this post brings a list of 120 themes together.

Well worth a look.

My only reservation is to check the age of any themes you decide to use – check if it will work with the current WordPress version (and will it be supported in the future).

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