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Bohannan is the best pick in House District 85

The next ten years will prove to be one of the most challenging eras in Iowa history.

Whether we meet those challenges with Iowa-smart, progressive responses will depend largely on the quality of legislators we elect to office.

Christina Bohannan, Democratic candidate for the Iowa House of Representatives, would be a remarkably talented and hardworking legislator, if given the opportunity to serve.

The daughter of blue-collar parents.

Trained as an environmental engineer.

A professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law.

The former president of the Iowa Faculty Senate.

A mother.

These life experiences inform Christina Bohannan’s pragmatic progressivism.

If elected, she has the skill set to get good things done for Iowa.

Please join me in supporting Democrat Christina Bohannan for the House District 85 seat in the June 2 primary election.

Jim Larew

Iowa City



  • Letters to the Editor

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Iowa Writers’ House is gone, but need for literary community continues

When Andrea Wilson approached me five years ago with her idea of creating a space for writers in our community separate from any offered by the University of Iowa, I must admit I was a bit skeptical, if not defensive. Over a long coffee discussion, I shared with her a detailed look at the literary landscape of Iowa City and all of the things my organization, the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature was doing to make those assets more visible and accessible.

Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House - for now

Despite this, Andrea mentioned the need for an “on ramp,” a way for people who don’t feel a part of that community to find their path, to access those riches. It was there, I thought to myself. She just hadn’t looked in the right place.

Then she built that ramp in the form of the Iowa Writers’ House. As she and her team defined what that ramp should look like, what role it should play, the Writers’ House evolved from being an idea with promise to a vital part of our literary infrastructure. She showed that people were hungry for further instruction. They desired more and different ways to connect with one another. These were things beyond the scope and mission of the UI and the City of Literature. She had found her niche, and filled it, nicely complementing what was offered by my organization and others.

But those services do not come without cost. Andrea and her team scrambled, using the house as a literary bed-and-breakfast that was used by many visiting writers. They scheduled workshops. They held fundraisers. But that thin margin disappeared with the onset of COVID-19. Unable to hold those workshops, to serve as a bed-and-breakfast, to provide meaningful in-person connections, the Writers’ House was unable to carry on in its current configuration.

We have every hope and expectation that the Iowa Writers’ House and Andrea will continue to be a part of our literary landscape in the future. This will come perhaps in another form, another space. Conversations have been underway for months about the needs of the literary community beyond the UI. Andrea has been a key part of those discussions, and the work that she and her team has done offer vital information about where those conversations need to go. Gaps have been identified, and while they won’t be filled in the same way, they will be filled.

These conversations join those that have been taking place in our community for decades about the need for space and support for writers and artists. As we all have realized over these past few weeks of isolation just how much we miss when we are not able to gather to create and to celebrate those creations, perhaps those conversations will accelerate and gain focus once we reconvene. The newly formed Iowa City Downtown Arts Alliance, of which we are proud to be a part, is an additional voice in that conversation.

In the meantime, we want to thank Andrea, Associate Director Alisha Jeddeloh, and the team at the Iowa Writers’ House, not just for identifying a need, but for taking the rare and valuable step of actually rolling up their sleeves and doing something to meet it.

John Kenyon is executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.




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How to Use apply_filters() and do_action() to Create Extensible WordPress Plugins

How does a single plugin become the basis of a thriving technology ecosystem? Partly by leveraging the extensibilitythat WordPress’s event-driven Hooks system makes possible.





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University of Iowa aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half

IOWA CITY — The University of Iowa on Thursday unveiled new sustainability goals for the next decade that — if accomplished — would cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half from a decade ago and transform the campus into a “living laboratory for sustainability education and exploration.”

But the goals fall short of what a collective of Iowa City “climate strikers” have demanded for more than a year — that the UI end coal burning immediately at its power plant, commit to using only renewable energy by 2030 and unite with the city of Iowa City in a “town-gown” climate accord.

“It’s ridiculous for the UI to announce a 2030 climate plan as it continues to burn coal for years and burn methane-spewing natural gas for decades at its power plant,” said Massimo Paciotto-Biggers, 14, a student at Iowa City High and member of the Iowa City Climate Strike group.

The university’s new 2030 goals piggyback off its 2020 goals, which former UI President Sally Mason announced in 2010 in hopes of integrating sustainability into the campus’ mission.

Her goals included consuming less energy on campus in 2020 than in 2010, despite projected growth; diversifying the campus’ energy portfolio by using biomass, solar, wind and the like to achieve 40 percent renewable energy consumption by 2020; diverting 60 percent of solid waste; reducing the campus transportation carbon footprint with a 10 percent cut in per capita transportation and travel; and increasing learning and research opportunities.

The university, according to a new report made public Thursday, met or surpassed many of those goals — including, among other things, a slight dip in total energy use, despite 15 new buildings and major additions across campus.

The campus also reported 40 percent of its energy consumption comes via renewable energy sources, and it reduced annual coal consumption 75 percent.

As for waste production, the university diverted 43 percent from the landfill and reported diverting 70 percent more waste than in 2010.

2030 Plan’s first phase HAS FEWER HARD PERCENTAGES

In just the first phase, the new 2030 goals — a result of collaboration across campus involving a 2030 UI Sustainability Goal Setting Task Force — involve fewer numbers and hard percentages. Aside from the aim to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent compared to a 2010 baseline, the phase one goals aim to:

• Institutionalize and embed sustainability into campus culture, allowing individual units across campus to develop plans to meeting campus sustainability goals.

• Expand sustainability research, scholarship and other opportunities.

• Use the campus as a “living laboratory” capable of improving campus sustainability and ecosystems.

• Prepare students to live and work in the 21st century through sustainability education.

• Facilitate knowledge exchange among the campus community and with the state, nation, and world.

PHASE 2 EXPANDS ON GOALS

As the campus moves into phase two of its 2030 plan, it will expand on first-phase goals by identifying specific and measurable tasks and metrics.

Leadership plans to finalize that second phase later in the fall semester.

“This approach has meant including units engaged in activities such as academics, research, operations, planning, engagement, athletics, and student life,” Stratis Giannakouros, director of the Office of Sustainability and the Environment, said in a statement.

‘Ambitious and forward-looking’

Sen. Joe Bolkcom, D-Iowa City, who serves as outreach and community education director for the UI Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, told The Gazette the new goals are “ambitious and forward-looking.”

“The new goals will engage students and research faculty to help build a sustainable path for the campus and broader community,” he said.

The university recently made big news on the utilities front by entering a $1.165 billion deal with a private French company to operate its utility system for 50 years. The deal nets the university a massive upfront lump sum it can invest and pull from annually. It gives the private operator decades of reliable income.

And the university, in making the deal, mandated its new provider pursue ambitious sustainability goals — promising to impose penalties if it failed to do so.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com




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No Linn County Fair this year because of coronavirus concerns

CEDAR RAPIDS — The Linn County Fair has canceled grounds and grandstand entertainment at this year because of the novel coronavirus and is looking at ways youths could exhibit their work.

“After consulting with Linn County Public Health, the Linn County Board of Supervisors, and other stakeholders, it was determined this was the best decision due to the uncertainty of what the public health situation may look like at the end of June,” Albert Martin, Linn County Fair Board president, said Thursday in a statement.

The fair was scheduled June 24-28.

The Linn County Fair Association said it is working with the Iowa State University Extension and Outreach of Linn County and Linn County 4-H to determine how 4-H and FFA members and other youths will exhibit their work. Those details — which could include in-person or virtual exhibiting — are expected to be finalized and announced in mid-May.

Tom Barnes, executive director of the Association of Iowa Fairs, told The Gazette on Thursday that the Benton County Fair also was canceled for 2020.

Organizers for the Wapello County Fair in south-central Iowa previously announced they would not host the fair this year.

Comments: (319) 339-3155; lee.hermiston@thegazette.com




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Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House — for now

IOWA CITY — Once upon a time, there was a house in a city that loved literature.

It was a quaint, two-story home in the heart of the historic district with brick stairs, pale yellow siding, a hipped red roof and a rich history: Its original owner was Emma J. Harvat, who in 1922 became the nation’s first female mayor for a city of more than 10,000.

Nearly a century later, in 2014, Andrea Wilson was working in advertising in Florida and pined for a more “altruistic purpose” for her life. So she planned a return to Iowa, where she grew up in Columbus Junction.

But this time Wilson would live in Iowa City, known for — among other things — pioneering academic creative writing pursuits at the University of Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop.

Wilson wanted to write and found the idea of the historic Harvat house so charming she bought it “sight unseen” from down in Miami, aiming to run it as a bed-and-breakfast. But when she arrived, Wilson discovered a need in her new community she aimed to fill. It had a surprising dearth of literary resources for those outside the university.

“There wasn’t any place for the public to take a class or meet other writers or really be part of a writing community where people could just express their humanity through words,” she said. “It became my passion project — to try to create that for this community. I thought if anywhere should have a place like that, it would be America’s only UNESCO City of Literature at the time.”

So in March 2015, Wilson debuted Iowa City’s first community-based literary center for writers — or those aspiring. She had hoped to open a communal writing space closer to downtown but didn’t have the funding. So she gave her home a third identity: the Iowa Writers’ House.

She continued to live there and maintain her bed-and-breakfast business, which funded the writing endeavor and kept its cozy corridors bustling with interesting characters.

Famed visiting writers included Leslie Jamison, American novelist and essayist with works on the New York Times bestseller list; Hope Edelman, whose six non-fiction books have published in 17 countries and translated in 11 languages; Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist and MacArthur fellow; and Piedad Bonnett Velez, Colombian poet, playwright and novelist of international acclaim.

And over the years, the Iowa Writers’ House connected, served and motivated thousands with its workshops, seminars, readings and summer camps. It offered editing services, founded a Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellowship, and — among other things — inspired a growing network of friends and creatives to value their own stories and the stories of others.

“I said yes to everything anyone ever asked of me,” Wilson said. “We gave tours. I received visiting scholars. We hosted dinners for visiting poets and writers for the university. And a lot of that was all volunteer. We never had a steady funding stream like most literary centers do.”

So when the coronavirus in March reached Iowa City, later shuttering storefronts, canceling events, curtailing travel plans and crippling the economy, the Iowa Writers’ House momentum stopped, too.

“Once COVID hit, because all of our programming is live and people come to the house, we had to cancel it,” Wilson said.

She dropped most of the organization’s spring season. She lost all her projected bed-and-breakfast business. And in a message posted to the Iowa Writers’ House website last month, Wilson announced her hard but unavoidable news.

“As the situation pushes on, and with no programming in the foreseeable future, we must make drastic changes,” she wrote. “Organizations must weather the storm or adapt, and in the case of this little organization with a big heart, evolution is the only option.”

And so after five years of intimate conversations, communal meals, singing, laughing, crying and lots and lots of writing and reading — all done in the shadow of Harvat — the organization is leaving the historic space and “taking a break to assess our mission and consider our best options for the future.”

Wilson said she plans to focus on her own writing. And the Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellowship program will continue — allowing for the release later this year of a third volume of “We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa,” including six new authors with multilingual stories of living in Iowa.

News of the goodbye — at least for now — has been met with an outpouring of support and testimonials of the impact the Iowa Writers’ House has had,

“I grew up without a writing community, and it was a very lonely experience,” Erin Casey wrote to Wilson after learning of its pause.

Casey — on the Iowa Writers’ House team and director of The Writers’ Rooms, an offshoot of the house — said her involvement in the project shaped not only her career but her personal growth.

“You, and the Iowa Writers’ House, helped me become a stronger person who felt deserving of companionship, respect, and love,” she wrote. “Watching the house grow, the workshops fill, and the stories come in about how much the IWH touched people’s lives added to the joy. I finally found a place to call home.”

Casey said that while the future is unknown, its legacy is not.

“The IWH will live on in the hearts of the people you touched,” she wrote. “Writers have found friends, support, guidance …”

Although the project isn’t getting a fairy-tale ending, Wilson said the story isn’t over.

“The organization is leaving the space. I’m leaving the space. We’re going on an organizational break so we can determine what a sustainable future might be,” she said. “But it’s really the end of a chapter. And we don’t know what the next chapter will be.”

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com




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Should you use Userbase for your next static site?

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

  • If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
  • If you never want to see your users' data.
  • If you're tired of dealing with databases.
  • If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
  • And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

A sign up form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

  • Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
  • Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
  • It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

A log in form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.



  • Code
  • Front-end Engineering

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What happens if my visa is refused or cancelled due to my character?

If you have your visa refused or cancelled, you need to get expert advice a soon as possible. Strict time limits apply to drafting submissions and appeals. A visa refusal or cancellation can limit the type or visas you can apply for in the future or even prohibit you from applying for any visa to […]

The post What happens if my visa is refused or cancelled due to my character? appeared first on Visa Australia - Immigration Lawyers & Registered Migration Agents.




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Should you use Userbase for your next static site?

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

  • If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
  • If you never want to see your users' data.
  • If you're tired of dealing with databases.
  • If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
  • And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

A sign up form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

  • Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
  • Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
  • It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

A log in form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.



  • Code
  • Front-end Engineering

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When Your Veteran Spouse Battles More Than PTSD

For many veterans’ spouses, we’ve watched our partners struggle not only with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but with other mental health conditions, as well. Around 80 percent of people with PTSD wrestle with at least one other co-occurring mental health condition in their lifetime.What many people don’t see is the impact PTSD and comorbidity have on vets’ spouses.




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When Your Veteran Spouse Battles More Than PTSD

For many veterans’ spouses, we’ve watched our partners struggle not only with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but with other mental health conditions, as well. Around 80 percent of people with PTSD wrestle with at least one other co-occurring mental health condition in their lifetime.What many people don’t see is the impact PTSD and comorbidity have on vets’ spouses.




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How to use social proof for gaining credibility and boosting conversions

The internet has given many web companies the chance to rise and meet new audiences. The challenge for these companies is the competition to grow the customer base and build the companies’ credibility. One of the ways to do that is to use social proof as a marketing tool. Many people make decisions regarding a […]




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Dain Yoon’s Make-up Art Will Confuse You

If you follow Dain Yoon’s Instagram, you get the pleasant surprise to regularly get totally surreal photos of her. The 22 years old artist, based in Seoul, Korea, likes to disrupt reality by using herself as a model for stunning make-up art. You can discover more of her work on her website.




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How to Improve User Experience Design: Tips to Increase Conversion Rates

No one can deny that UX (user experience) is the foundation of any website. This is the main reason why many website owners always look for ways to improve it. Some even spend a lot of money on design because of it. So, what is UX design exactly? And what is the difference between user […]




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How to personalize the mobile experience for app users

Mobile user experience somehow ‘imposed itself’ with all the development and improvement of mobile communication devices. In fact, it is the quality of user experience that divides outstanding apps from their less outstanding counterparts. The same factor enables startups to learn from big brands and to improve their products. User experience for mobile applications – […]




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How to Specify User Agent with cURL

Over the years I’ve shared how to perform a number of actions with cURL: how to send POST data, how to retrieve headers, follow redirects, check GZIP encoding, and more. Another useful cURL directive is sending the user agent, as some servers respond with different content or headers depending on the user agent. Let’s have […]

The post How to Specify User Agent with cURL appeared first on David Walsh Blog.




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6 Causes of Pixelated Text in Photoshop and Their Fixes

You’re working on some text in Photoshop for your photo. Things are going along great…until you realize that your text is horribly pixelated! Why? You may have even created this exact type of file before and not had this problem. Why is the text pixelated now? There are a few things that can cause pixelated text in Photoshop. The good Continue Reading

The post 6 Causes of Pixelated Text in Photoshop and Their Fixes appeared first on Photodoto.




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How to Use Lightroom Presets- A Handy Guide

How many of you love wasting hours of time making the same basic edits to a lot of photos? Anyone? No? Well, that’s understandable. None of us like doing menial repetitive tasks and it’s no different when editing images — even for those of us who enjoy the editing process. The good news is that Lightroom has a handy tool Continue Reading

The post How to Use Lightroom Presets- A Handy Guide appeared first on Photodoto.




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3 Tips to Use Perspective in Photos

Perspective is a powerful tool in photography, and if you’re able to master it you’ll find that you’re able to snap far more interesting photos. It is a common misconception that you need special lenses to experiment with perspective, when in actual fact all you really need to do is move around. If you’re interested in using perspective in your photos, here are 3 easy tips that will help:   Get high, and get low  The easiest way to see perspective in action is by snapping photos from above and below eye-level. Try snapping a photo of a subject from the ground, then again from above it, and see how perspective makes a world of difference in the photos that you end up with. Play around with scale Because objects that are further away look smaller, you can reverse that effect and create some amusing photos. Often this is referred ... Read more

The post 3 Tips to Use Perspective in Photos appeared first on Digital Photography Tutorials.




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7 Reasons Every Photographer Should Learn How to Use Photoshop

Many photographers think that learning how to find the ideal location and take a picture at the right time is all they need to know. However, this isn’t the case, and in a world where CGI rivals reality and touch-ups via photo editing software are now seen as a necessity to customers, relying on point and click will kill your photography business. Here are seven reasons every photographer should learn how to use Photoshop.   Royalty Free Photo Touch-Ups Are Essential When a family orders school photos, they pay a flat fee for copies of the school pictures and a little more if the child’s name is embossed on the picture. They pay a separate fee if the picture is touched up, whether it is hiding acne or reducing glare on the child’s glasses. Photographers who know how to touch up photos without making it look artificial or cartoonish can ... Read more

The post 7 Reasons Every Photographer Should Learn How to Use Photoshop appeared first on Digital Photography Tutorials.




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The Power of CSS Selectors and How to Use Them

One of the challenges of coding premium WordPress themes is the unpredictable nature of how they will be used. Compared to coding a custom website, especially one using static HTML documents where you have complete control over the markup, you have to solve problems creatively and ensure flexibility. In these cases, CSS selectors make all […]


The post The Power of CSS Selectors and How to Use Them appeared first on Web Designer Wall.




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You Might Be Tempted to Use These CSS Tricks But Should You?

The temptation to dive right into new and exciting CSS tricks is strong – you might even do it without knowing it through learning by example or implementing that hot new framework everyone is talking about. It is more important to fully understand new CSS classes and properties, experiment with them and learn their limitations […]


The post You Might Be Tempted to Use These CSS Tricks But Should You? appeared first on Web Designer Wall.




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Why Is Going Green So Hard? Because Our System Isn’t

By Jill Richardson Other Words If environmental solutions aren’t systemic, living green will always mean going against the grain — and usually failing. Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The … Continue reading




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How To Build a Website That Your Users Will Love

Find out what users love and hate and how to build the best website for your audience. From content and navigation to design and hosting, use our 5 top tips.




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Why Use A Digital Marketing Agency?

Outsourcing your marketing when you're running a small or medium sized business is often seen as an expensive option, one that can be done yourself. It might even be seen as something that's...




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✚ Tornado Lines – Useful or Not? (The Process 088)

It looks like a tornado. It's messy. It's circular. It almost looks intentionally confusing. But how bad is it really?

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use

Should you use Userbase for your next static site?

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

  • If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
  • If you never want to see your users' data.
  • If you're tired of dealing with databases.
  • If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
  • And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

A sign up form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

  • Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
  • Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
  • It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

A log in form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.



  • Code
  • Front-end Engineering

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"I always hated that word—marketing—and I hate it now. Because for me, and this may sound simplistic,..."

““I always hated that word—marketing—and I hate it now. Because for me, and this may sound simplistic, the key to marketing is to make something people want. When they want it, they buy it. When they buy it, you have sales. So the product has to speak. The product is what markets things.””

- Interview with Tom Ford.




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"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses..."

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

- Artist Sol Lewitt on conceptual art.




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Shim uses node.js to test sites on multiple browsers

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. Read the rest...





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What's Inside the White House?

Visual explanations are a big part of data visualizations, and this video exploration of What’s Inside the White House? by animator Jared Owen gives viewers a great perspective of where the major rooms are located in context with the rest of the building. I would bet that most people don’t know that the Oval Office isn’t in the main, center building.

The White House is full of lots of interesting rooms. A lot of people don't realize that this information is public! Please join me as we take a walk through the different rooms and what they are used for.

Found on Core77




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California Study: Four Widely Used Neonicotinoid Pesticides Harm Bees

Center for Biological Diversity Press Release WASHINGTON – Four commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides can harm bees and other pollinators, according to a new analysis by California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. The study found that current approved uses of the “neonics” … Continue reading




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‘Coming Mass Extinction’ Caused by Human Destruction Could Wipe Out 1 Million Species, Warns UN Draft Report

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading




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Can Houseplants Improve Indoor Air Quality?

By University of Illinois Extension In an era of increasing energy prices, many Americans insulate and seal up their homes during the winter months. Although this can result in savings on the monthly power bill, sealing the home can concentrate … Continue reading




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‘Coming Mass Extinction’ Caused by Human Destruction Could Wipe Out 1 Million Species, Warns UN Draft Report

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading




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Why Is Going Green So Hard? Because Our System Isn’t

By Jill Richardson Other Words If environmental solutions aren’t systemic, living green will always mean going against the grain — and usually failing. Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The … Continue reading




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Common traps in user needs research and how to avoid them

Whether you call it a field visit, a contextual inquiry or a customer discovery interview, the goal of early stage research is the same: to uncover users' needs. Here are 5 mistakes I've seen crop up time and again in this kind of research.




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Why personas are antiquated (and what you should use instead)

Personas are antiquated… this coming from someone who has relied on and written about them for years. For years at 3.7 Designs, we’ve created personas during the design discovery phase. I recently realized that the traditional marketing persona is no longer a relevant practice. The keyword here is “traditional.” At 3.7 we’ve adopted a practice […]

The post Why personas are antiquated (and what you should use instead) appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.




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Inform user about automatic comment closing time

To prevent spammers from flooding old articles with useless comments you can set WordPress to close comments after a certain […]




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Customizing the User Registration Notification eMails

If a new user registers at a WordPress site the new user and the administrator receive notification mails: User: From: […]




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When Your Veteran Spouse Battles More Than PTSD

For many veterans’ spouses, we’ve watched our partners struggle not only with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but with other mental health conditions, as well. Around 80 percent of people with PTSD wrestle with at least one other co-occurring mental health condition in their lifetime.What many people don’t see is the impact PTSD and comorbidity have on vets’ spouses.




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Should you use Userbase for your next static site?

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

  • If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
  • If you never want to see your users' data.
  • If you're tired of dealing with databases.
  • If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
  • And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

A sign up form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

  • Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
  • Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
  • It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

A log in form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.



  • Code
  • Front-end Engineering

use

Cute Collection of 210 User Interface Icons

Did you remember how was your life before Freepik and Flaticon. No I can’t remember the dark ages either. To celebrate this golden times, they are giving away once more an incredible package of 210 User Interface Icons in 3 versions: Flat, filled and lineal.  Download This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License …

Cute Collection of 210 User Interface Icons Read More »




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On-board Deep-learning-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Fault Cause Detection and Identification. (arXiv:2005.00336v2 [eess.SP] UPDATED)

With the increase in use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)/drones, it is important to detect and identify causes of failure in real time for proper recovery from a potential crash-like scenario or post incident forensics analysis. The cause of crash could be either a fault in the sensor/actuator system, a physical damage/attack, or a cyber attack on the drone's software. In this paper, we propose novel architectures based on deep Convolutional and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (CNNs and LSTMs) to detect (via Autoencoder) and classify drone mis-operations based on sensor data. The proposed architectures are able to learn high-level features automatically from the raw sensor data and learn the spatial and temporal dynamics in the sensor data. We validate the proposed deep-learning architectures via simulations and experiments on a real drone. Empirical results show that our solution is able to detect with over 90% accuracy and classify various types of drone mis-operations (with about 99% accuracy (simulation data) and upto 88% accuracy (experimental data)).




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Recurrent Neural Network Language Models Always Learn English-Like Relative Clause Attachment. (arXiv:2005.00165v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

A standard approach to evaluating language models analyzes how models assign probabilities to valid versus invalid syntactic constructions (i.e. is a grammatical sentence more probable than an ungrammatical sentence). Our work uses ambiguous relative clause attachment to extend such evaluations to cases of multiple simultaneous valid interpretations, where stark grammaticality differences are absent. We compare model performance in English and Spanish to show that non-linguistic biases in RNN LMs advantageously overlap with syntactic structure in English but not Spanish. Thus, English models may appear to acquire human-like syntactic preferences, while models trained on Spanish fail to acquire comparable human-like preferences. We conclude by relating these results to broader concerns about the relationship between comprehension (i.e. typical language model use cases) and production (which generates the training data for language models), suggesting that necessary linguistic biases are not present in the training signal at all.




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Single use register automata for data words. (arXiv:1907.10504v2 [cs.FL] UPDATED)

Our starting point are register automata for data words, in the style of Kaminski and Francez. We study the effects of the single-use restriction, which says that a register is emptied immediately after being used. We show that under the single-use restriction, the theory of automata for data words becomes much more robust. The main results are: (a) five different machine models are equivalent as language acceptors, including one-way and two-way single-use register automata; (b) one can recover some of the algebraic theory of languages over finite alphabets, including a version of the Krohn-Rhodes Theorem; (c) there is also a robust theory of transducers, with four equivalent models, including two-way single use transducers and a variant of streaming string transducers for data words. These results are in contrast with automata for data words without the single-use restriction, where essentially all models are pairwise non-equivalent.




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Credulous Users and Fake News: a Real Case Study on the Propagation in Twitter. (arXiv:2005.03550v1 [cs.SI])

Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high speed; but exactly because of this they are the preferred medium for influencing public opinion via so-called fake news. Moreover, there is a general agreement that the main vehicle of fakes news are malicious software robots (bots) that automatically interact with human users. In previous work we have considered the problem of tagging human users in Online Social Networks as credulous users. Specifically, we have considered credulous those users with relatively high number of bot friends when compared to total number of their social friends. We consider this group of users worth of attention because they might have a higher exposure to malicious activities and they may contribute to the spreading of fake information by sharing dubious content. In this work, starting from a dataset of fake news, we investigate the behaviour and the degree of involvement of credulous users in fake news diffusion. The study aims to: (i) fight fake news by considering the content diffused by credulous users; (ii) highlight the relationship between credulous users and fake news spreading; (iii) target fake news detection by focusing on the analysis of specific accounts more exposed to malicious activities of bots. Our first results demonstrate a strong involvement of credulous users in fake news diffusion. This findings are calling for tools that, by performing data streaming on credulous' users actions, enables us to perform targeted fact-checking.




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Sunny Pointer: Designing a mouse pointer for people with peripheral vision loss. (arXiv:2005.03504v1 [cs.HC])

We present a new mouse cursor designed to facilitate the use of the mouse by people with peripheral vision loss. The pointer consists of a collection of converging straight lines covering the whole screen and following the position of the mouse cursor. We measured its positive effects with a group of participants with peripheral vision loss of different kinds and we found that it can reduce by a factor of 7 the time required to complete a targeting task using the mouse. Using eye tracking, we show that this system makes it possible to initiate the movement towards the target without having to precisely locate the mouse pointer. Using Fitts' Law, we compare these performances with those of full visual field users in order to understand the relation between the accuracy of the estimated mouse cursor position and the index of performance obtained with our tool.