29 May 2015

Facebook Allows Animated GIFs

Yes, today is THE DAY for the animated GIFs fans.

Facebook announced today that it would support animated GIFs in the Facebook News Feed. While not everyone will see the added functionality immediately, as the update is still rolling out, eventually, the new feature will become standard on all profiles. This move represents a significant strategic change Facebook, which has historically avoided supporting GIFs, claiming that doing so would make its News Feed “too chaotic.” Instead of allowing GIFs, Facebook’s focus to date has been on video.


To try the new feature, you can paste a link to a GIF hosted on an external website like Giphy, Imgur, Tumblr, or elsewhere, into their status update box and then publish. The GIF will be animated inline after you post. You cannot currently upload GIFs directly, however, and see the same results. GIFs will auto-play on Facebook in line with your current video autoplay settings. If you choose to disable autoplay in your settings, you can tap or click a GIF (as indicated by “GIF” in a white circle on the image) to play it instead.


A Facebook spokesperson sent Adweek the following statement on animated GIF integration with business pages:

"We built support for animated GIFs to help people express themselves in fun new ways on Facebook. Like many features that we release on Facebook, we want to ensure that this drives a great experience for people first before rolling it out more widely. While Pages cannot currently post GIFs, we are exploring ways to enable this in the future."

Longtime Facebook users (read: old people like me who have been using the service since it was for college students only), will recall that if offered GIF support in the very early days. The ability to embed or upload GIFs was removed a decade ago, probably because of the negative impacts a ton of GIFs in the Newsfeed had on the product.



Sources and Additional Information:


05 May 2015

Textpattern – free and elegant content management system


Textpattern is an elegant content management system that is free, open source software. Web designers, developers, publishers and bloggers love its flexibility and extensibility. It has a powerful, sophisticated engine that can be infinitely tuned to suit whatever type of web site you can imagine.

Textpattern is tailor made for content publishers — whether you are writing for a corporation or for your own blog. The first thing you see when you log into Textpattern allows you to Just Write.

Begin publishing in minutes and when you wish to alter the layout of your site, adjust the built-in tags to determine how content should be retrieved and displayed. You have complete control over both content and presentation, making Textpattern an incredibly simple and elegant CMS to use.

In addition:

* Upload and organize images and files via your browser
* Categorize your content any way you wish
* Quickly convert plain text to valid XHTML with Textile
* Offer clean URLs to help SEO and visitors
* Take full control of date and time of articles
* Accept comments on any article in your site — you control for how long
* Set up unlimited site authors with varying privilege levels to collaborate with others on sites
* Allow visitors to subscribe to a tailored assortment of web feeds
* Take action with up-to-the-minute visitor/referrer logs

Sample of the website front page, built with Textpattern:


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