top-designers-code

Should Designers Code?

Several times I’ve asked myself about the importance of knowing how to build and code my designs. Is that necessary? Even more, is that good for the final website?

Well those are difficult questions to answer, I’ve been reading and studying different opinions. Basically we have two opposite points of view.

–           Coding is the jail of creativity.

–           Coding is the key for a perfect web design.

Very opposite aren’t they? Ok Let’s explain both theories:

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wp-hook

Background Message Interception Using Windows Hooks: A Practical Example

One of my favorite hobbies is playing computer games and streaming the gameplay using a web platform such as Amazon’s Twitch. I know, I know, it’s not very exciting to have a hobby related to computers if you already have to work with them on a daily basis, but believe it or not, streaming gameplays is actually a rising trend, with the most popular Twitch channels reporting millions of followers and views.
This trend has achieved such popularity that even Google is improving the YouTube platform to increase its streaming capabilities.

Usually, streamers like to play random sounds to enrich the experience for their viewers. For instance I love playing the infamous “toasty” clip from Mortal Kombat 2 whenever I kill another player in a game that has nothing to do with Mortal Kombat.

Of course, manually playing the sounds using a media player can be a very demanding task for someone who has both their hands already occupied playing a computer game. But how about we build a program that automatically plays the sounds we want whenever we press a key?

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Safe connections for apps

Safe Connections for Apps

It isn’t rare that Android Play Store classifies the Apps for maturation time. Fixing application bugs is a constant work. But, we can fix some security bugs when making connections with the server.

Generally the amateur programmers think that no one may try to hack their code because the information isn’t “important”, or because it is simply impossible to hack (for lack of knowledge).

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Custom Post Types Filters

Quick Guide to WordPress Custom Post Types Management and Filter Programming

This document explains how to create, manage and filter by the most common attribute types (taxonomies) any custom created post type for Wordpress . You will need a little PHP programming knowledge to create some specific templates with some custom filters and loops.

After searching and trying several custom post types plug-ins, the best I can recommend, by far, is the Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) available for free:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-content-type-manager/

In this post I will show the basic usage of this plug-in and then how to create some templates with custom and complex filters for custom post listing and loops using PHP and WordPress functions. Continue Reading

python

Sentiment Analysis, Python Machine Learning and Twitter

Sentiment140 is a tool that allows you to evaluate a written text in order to determine if the writer has a positive or negative opinion about a specific topic. Facing 2015 Argentinian presidential election we are going to evaluate the public image of the most important candidates: Sergio Massa, Mauricio Macri and Daniel Scioli. For this purpose we are going to use the python library called Tweepy to collect thousands of tweets in which they are mentioned.

What is sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of the document. The attitude may be his or her judgment or evaluation, affective state or the intended communication.
Written text can be broadly categorized into two types: facts and opinions.

  • Opinions carry people’s sentiments and feelings. These kind of texts can be classified in positive or negative. For example if we get the following text: “I would like to see Macri as president” we can suppose that the speaker has a positive opinion about the candidate. In the same way, if we get the text: “I wouldn’t like to see Macri as president” we can suppose that the speaker has a negative impression about him.
  • A fact can be for example: “Today Macri visited three neighborhoods“. We should ignore these kind of texts because we can’t determine if the writer has a positive or a negative opinion about the politician.

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php-slim-token

PHP & Slim token authentication API

Rest API authentication & security is crucial for most applications handling sensible information and user-specific data.

In this post we’ll discuss just one, token based authentication with PHP and the Slim micro framework (the logic can be applied to any routes framework or even if you have your own implementation).

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