Month: April 2016

My Favourite Stock Photo Sites

I’m sure it’s not just me that finds it incredibly hard to find relevant stock photos. For those of you in perpetual search of good stock images, look no further.

This is a list of my current favourite stock photo sites with a Creative Commons Zero license (CC0) images.

Pixabay

This site is usually the first site I visit when I go on the search. You may need to create an account to download the highest resolution image, but it’s not the type of account that will land you on a spam list. This site has my personal seal of quality.

IM Free

Lots of great stuff here. A little more than stock photos is offered here. The site includes many items including templates and icons. What more could you want from a site giving you free stuff! Stop complaining!

Unsplash

Ten new stock photos every. My favourite feature on this site would be the collections. This feature makes it that much easier to find a consistent set of free images for you to use. Bravo Unsplash… Bravo.

FancyCrave

This site features an awesome layout and great navigation. The images are super vibrant and are really quite eye catching. Quality is definitely king on this site. I’ve used it many a time and am thankful for its existence.

Gratisography

I saved the best for last. I absolutely love this site. Some of the images leave me completely incredulous while others are just plain bizarre or creepy. It’s great fun taking a look through when you’re bored. Thank you Ryan McGuire.

Pexels

(Added 8/11/2017) My front-end designer just brought this site to my attention! It’s got a great source of photos and really cut and dry licensing. Thanks Erin!

The Value Of Good Web Design

I came across an article on one of my favourite blogs/websites and thought I’d share. I encourage everyone who reads this to continue on and read the original article as well.

I, Website

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about the value of being unique in video game creation. The conversation led me to think about how I evaluate different things in my life. I found myself asking questions I may not have thought to ask myself when making assessments. Should we value unique idea more than ideas that are recycled? What if the execution of the recycled is better than the original? Should we give appreciation to those that create, or those that revolutionize?

Our conversation and the above article made me think about the way programmers create in modern society. We live in a world where open source affords us the incredible ability to steal ideas and cheat our way through solutions, but find ourselves contributing to the community instead. We find dedicated communities that build amazing solutions to problems that we all have, and are all able to share in the value of a finished project.

That left me to think about how we build websites (or anything with code, really). Are we stealing every time we use a code snippet or open source project? Should our work be devalued for using an existing solution to supplement one of our own? Where do we draw the line, as developers, in saying that something is built from scratch? Can we consider anything built from scratch?

As we build better creation tools, higher level programming languages, abstracted development processes, scratch becomes farther and farther from where we started. For example, tools like Sass and Less allow us to create CSS programmatically and save time. Does this mean the final product has a lesser value because we were able to complete it with greater ease and in less time? Should we assign it a greater value, considering the extra time and effort that went into learning the tools? The answer seems pretty simple when it comes to investing time into learning another language, but where does that answer land when we look at website building tools like Squarespace?

I’ve seen web developers go from writing lines of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for hundreds of dollars to dragging and dropping widgets for thousands.

I guess it all comes down to the end result.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Fun Lorem Ipsum

I think it’s safe to say that anyone developing or designing has used Lorem Ipsum at some point. Lorem Ipsum, to break it down to its basic use, is dummy text. It helps developers/designers see what real content in an area would look like. This helps when you’re looking to change line-height, font sizes, font faces, or many other options. It also helps developers create sections that flow with the amount of content that will be input.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed sodales maximus ipsum, vitae sodales orci luctus a. Vestibulum feugiat bibendum ex, sed elementum dolor bibendum faucibus. Sed non metus nibh. Donec at feugiat felis. Integer at nisl libero. Sed congue dignissim dignissim.

As you can see, it can be quite boring. So, a few good people decided to spice things up a bit. Here’s a few of my personal favourites, and their links for you to use.

Samuel L. Ipsum (censored for content, sorry)

Look, just because I don’t be givin’ no man a foot massage don’t make it right for Marsellus to throw Antwone into a glass mother******’ house, ******’ up the way the ****** talks. Mother****** do that **** to me, he better paralyze my ***, ’cause I’ll kill the mother******, know what I’m sayin’?

Hipsum

Pabst pitchfork salvia, craft beer heirloom gochujang four loko pickled. Cronut sartorial kickstarter YOLO green juice, seitan biodiesel. Quinoa four dollar toast cornhole knausgaard plaid cred. Ethical keytar pickled, gluten-free wolf vinyl art party tacos butcher master cleanse typewriter austin.

Cupcake Ipsum

Cupcake ipsum dolor. Sit amet dessert jelly-o powder cake lemon drops halvah gummies. Sweet bonbon halvah powder sweet muffin. Cookie croissant pudding pudding. Topping brownie icing chupa chups sugar plum bear claw. Sweet roll sugar plum cookie candy canes dragée donut bear claw.

Bacon Ipsum

Bacon ipsum dolor amet shoulder corned beef pork chop porchetta swine prosciutto frankfurter ball tip venison cow. Alcatra spare ribs frankfurter beef ribs pork cow. Ground round swine tri-tip, pig kielbasa short loin beef hamburger. Shankle porchetta pork capicola salami leberkas biltong short loin.

Enjoy!

Hello World

I’ve finally decided that I would like to have a blog.

Why a blog? Mainly, I’d like to resolve and track problems while having a recorded set of instructions that I can visit when the problem eventually turns up again. Partially, I’m getting tired of all the nonsense on social media, and would like a more intellectually stimulating outlet to air my thoughts.

That leaves me with the task of writing my first blog and setting the tone for future blogs to come. To that, I say what I’ve been conditioned to output on any primary run.

Hello World!