That being said, here’s the list of FREE video production tools for your startup.

Powtoon

If you like animated video explainer, this freemium online tool is one of the best go-to for animated explainers. The platform is very easy to use which you can learn in less than an hour. You can also create an animated video explainer for your company in just 30 minutes. The beauty of Powtoon is that it allows you to be extra creative even without formal training as an animator or as an illustrator. Everything is a template and you just have to drag and drop the elements in your presentation. We can say that Powtoon is an upgraded version of ordinary slide presentations. The platform offers a paid account and a freemium account. You can export all the videos you created on Youtube or even download it to your computer. Premium account offers a better quality of video, longer videos, and does not have any Powtoon logo in the corner of the video. The freemium account does have a Powtoon logo in the corner, maximum of two minutes video, and has low quality resolution but it doesn’t seem awful at all. In fact, it still looks professional. Paying for the premium account would be really worth it since you can save quite a deal compared to the regular outsourced animated video production which should cost you at least $1000K

Magisto

Magisto is an online video editing tool wherein you can mash-up, improve, and style your videos. You can even edit your videos through your tablet or smart phones. They have apps both for android and iOS system. It’s easy to use and has a very user friendly website. If you’re aiming of an indie type of video theme, you can opt to use this tool. You can produce a more “down-to-earth” feel for your video.

iMovie

Most startups use Mac as their power tool for their projects. One thing that has been undervalued is the use of iMovie for video marketing campaign. Believe it or not but, this free software is being used by pro film makers. All you need is a decent HD camera.

Animoto

This toll has been around since 2005 and has been featured by leading media outlets. Like Magisto, you can also mix and match your video clips and your pictures for the presentation. They have free and paid account.

Youtube Editor

Of course, we cannot miss Youtube. Google has a very fascinating way to amaze us. Youtube Editor is a very user intuitive online tool that you can compare to iMovie. For starters, you might find this a little difficult to master but you’ll get used to it.

Vine

Video marketing doesn’t have to be so fancy. Sometimes, all it needs is ingenuity to deliver the message to your target audience. Vine is a very potent tool that can offer so much for your video marketing. Aside from the fact that it’s a social platform, vine videos are very easy to produce.

Lightworks

If you have the focus to use highly sophisticated video editing tools, then Lightworks is for you. This has a lot of usable feature that can improve your video quality. This tool has also been used by the pro of the video editing and film industry. It can be downloaded for free and there is also a paid version.

Windows Video Maker

We cannot ignore WVM which has been continuously evolving since first release in 2000. We can say that most of the online tools were “patterned” after the WVM. Though the feature of this tool is still quite limited, it can help you with your simple video editing task.

Freemake Movie Maker

This is a popular tool for video conversion and editing. It can help you cut unwanted video parts, merge several clips into one, rotate video, change or add audio track to your movie and much more. Plus, Freemake can combine photos into a slideshow with music. All these features are free, an upgrade will be needed for unbranded videos.

Screecast-o-matic

You can use this tool if you’re just demonstrating instructions to your audience. This is widely used by online marketers in promoting their digital goods. In using this tool, you have to be organized and have “preset” windows for your demonstration. Screencast-o-matic has both free and paid account.  The limit for free account is 15 minutes per recording.

Prezi

This is another fresh breath in presenting ideas online. Prezi allows you to present your idea in a logical, creative, and clear flow of communication. You can customize your presentation, collaborate with your teammates, and export it from their platform (paid feature). The transition is seamless and not to mention, entertaining as well. You have to try it yourself to discover the magic of this tool.As a startup company, you have to be prudent and wise with all your decision. Using free online tools does not devalue your product or service. It only makes you resourceful and more creative. Some of these tools have been used by many startups and have taken fresh and ingenious way to present their product through these free tools.

David Jenyns is a startup founder of
Melbourne Video Production which offer high quality web videos for various brands in Australia. Find out more about David on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 10 FREE (and Cost-Effective) Video Production Tools appeared first on ENFEW.

Selecting the Right CDN – What You Need to Consider

Companies across all industries turn to CDNs (content delivery networks) to accelerate the delivery of websites and/or web applications across the internet that are critical to their business. Through an interconnected system of PoPs (Points of Presence), CDNs provide a more streamlined and faster delivery method than the standard internet, drastically reducing load time and improving the end user experience.

There are many CDN providers, each offering different solutions, features and performance levels. How do you know which one is best for accelerating your web performance? Here is a list of considerations that will help you select the right CDN.

Network Size and Reach

A CDN’s network size and reach is determined by the number and location of PoPs. A large number of PoPs located in many different regions may be ideal for reaching a globally disbursed audience, but it may not be the right CDN for you if it does not have a presence in your targeted region(s). For instance, if you are trying to reach China with your origin from the UK, you would probably want a CDN with PoPs located inside the Great Firewall and not in nearby locations outside (e.g. Hong Kong or Taiwan).

When evaluating a CDN’s network, find out if it has PoPs in your targeted regions. The closer a PoP is to your end users, the lower the latency (time required to deliver web content to the client). If no CDNs have PoPs located in your targeted regions, go with the one that has the closest PoPs.

Once you have selected the CDN with the reach you require, evaluate the size of the network and the number of PoPs it has in each region. Larger networks with more PoPs are more reliable as it can easily scale and maintain consistent performance during traffic surges and heavy loads.

Caching vs. Dynamic

Understand the difference between caching and dynamic acceleration. Caching is the process of duplicating static web content on PoPs located near end users. Upon request, the duplicated content is served directly from the nearest CDN PoP and not from the origin website, reducing the distance of delivery. A standard blog is an example of a static site, all visitors are served the exact same content and nothing is generated on-demand based on user interaction.

Unlike static content, dynamic content is real-time data and personalized content generated on-demand and served from the origin server. Dynamic content is typically served from interactive websites such as online gaming, applications, online trading etc… Dynamic acceleration provides a more direct and faster delivery path (middle mile) between the origin server and end users. Unlike delivery through the standard internet, data packets are required to travel through less connecting points and larger volumes can be delivered simultaneously.

Most CDNs provide caching services, but very few provide dynamic acceleration. Understand the type of content you are delivering. If it is purely a static site, caching alone may be sufficient. If you intend on accelerating an interactive website or interactive components on your site, a combination of caching and dynamic acceleration may be required.

Short Video – Difference between caching and dynamic acceleration.

Performance

The three primary components of performance are speed, scalability and reliability. Speed refers to how fast the network can return the requested content to the end user. Scalability is the CDN’s ability to maintain consistent performance throughout the network even during surges of traffic. Reliability is how well a CDN can maintain up time and prevent outages.

It is important to consider all three components when evaluating a CDN’s performance. A quick delivery rate is important, but an unreliable network with limited scalability will potentially present you with a lot of heartache.

The level of performance for each component varies between different CDNs and the key is to find the right balance for your needs. Always request a performance assessment/test to properly evaluate a CDN’s performance. Request scenarios specific to your business to be simulated to ensure the CDN is in fact capable of eliminating all current and potential web performance heartaches. It also wouldn’t hurt to do a Google search on the history of network outages on the CDNs you are evaluating.
Integrated Features

Each CDN offers a different set of integrated features that may or may not be essential to your needs. Integrated features may include (not limited to):

• Cloud Storage
• DNS Services
• Cloud Security
• PCI Compliance
• Performance Management Tools
• Load Balancing Tools

Content acceleration services alone may not always be sufficient for your needs and other integrated features and tools may be required. You may also not need all the features offered by the CDN, depending on traffic requirements and the type of content you are accelerating. Some features may be included and others may cost extra.

The point is to be aware of what features are offered by the CDN and which ones are included or cost extra. Review your current site structure and web performance challenges before deciding which features are essential. You may end up paying for features that you may not need or you could end up saving by not having to integrate third party tools that are included in your CDN service.

This is the end of the first part of the post about understanding Content Delivery Networks. Second part of the post will be published later this month. Subscribe for updates!

Will Vuong is a web enthusiast and is naturally curious about all things technology and design. He is also a digital marketer specializing web communications and search and is currently leading these efforts at CDNetworks. Connect with Will at Google+ or tweet him at @willv

The post How to understand Content Delivery Networks appeared first on ENFEW.

Many thanks to our friends from Guru99.com for submitting and sharing this tutorial with our blog readers.

Recording of the testing

Test recording helps to record & re run testing activity against the test targets. It is a type of automated testing but for multiple users.  This post guides you how to use Proxy Server in order to record your test.

The Proxy Server allows JMeter to watch and record user activity while they are browsing web application with normal browser.

Here is the roadmap of this practical example

Step 1) Setting HTTP Proxy server

This is Step-by-step guide to setup proxy

1. Start JMeter
2. Select Test Plan on the tree
3. Add Thread Group

Right click on the Test Plan and add a new thread group: Add ? Threads (Users) ?Thread Group

4. Add HTTP Request

Select the Thread Group; right click Add ? Config Element ? HTTP Request Defaults

In new HTTP Request Defaults element: In Server name or IP, enter “google.com”. You should keep the others fields blank

5. Add Recording Controller

Right click on the “Thread Group” and add a recording controller: Add ? Logic Controller ?

Recording Controller

6. Add Proxy Server to WorkBench

Right click on the Workbench and add the http proxy: Add ? Non-Test Elements ? HTTP Proxy Server

7. Set Target Controller where your recorded scripts will be added

8. Start Proxy Server

Return to HTTP Proxy Server, and click the Start button at the bottom. Now your JMeter proxy server start

9. Start your Browser (I used Firefox), choose Tool ? Option ? Advanced ? Network ? Setting ? Enter HTTP proxy as figure below

Step 2) Record your activity

1. Now Launch http://www.google.com in your web browser (JMeter still open)
2. Do activities search the keyword “guru99“.
3. Back to JMeter, in HTTP Proxy Server, click Stop when finished

4. After finishing recording, you will see JMeter automatically created a new HTTP request as figure below

JMeter has already recorded a user request to Home Page of Google website. Http://www.google.com/

The other HTTP requests display in above figure, you should remove them. Because, sometime JMeter also records some advertising links while you are searching keyword on Google. We should ignore them in our Test Plan

5. Click File ? Save your Test Plan as

6. A Dialog box display ?  enter a name of your test plan at File Name field ? Click Save

Now your Test Plan is saved under name RecordingTestPlan.jmx

Step 3) Run your Test Plan

1. Select Thread Group ?  Add ?  Listener?  Summary Report

2. The Summary Report will show some basic statics

3. Select Thread Group, enter information as figure below

4. Before you start the test, select “Summary Report”. When you ready to run test, select Run ? Start (Ctrl+R). JMeter will playback your activity in 100 times

As the test runs, the statistics will change until the test is done.

Step 4) Save your test result

1. Click Save Table Data to save test result to file

2. Enter the name of test result and click Save. Test Result in JMeter is saved in *.csv format as default

Troubleshooting

If you face the issue while running the above scenario … do the following

1. Check whether you are connecting to internet via a proxy. If yes, remove the proxy.
2. Open a new instance of Jmeter
3. Open the RecordingTestPlan.jmx in Jmeter
4. Right Click on Workbench ?  Merge? Select HTTP Proxy Server.jmx
5. Click on Thread Group ? Summary Report
6. Run the Test

The post How To Use Jmeter for HTTP Proxy Server Testing appeared first on ENFEW.

It became the CMS of choice for tens of thousands of other smaller shops as well. Although there is quite a big community of Magento developers, designers and administrators out there, the actual CMS itself is not the easiest one to understand. The same goes to official Magento documentation. Based on experience of many people involved with Magento CMS, the best start is usually to get your hands on to tutorials and practical implementation examples.

Today we are giving you great list of such beginner to advanced tutorials. You’ll see how learning from tutorials can actually be fun and not a scary at all. And it makes much easier to understand how Magento CMS is working. Hope you will enjoy.

Official Magento CMS Tutorials

Official Magento product site has extensive knowledge base with one section dedicated to tutorials nad examples on how to implement and tune Magento Community editions. One thing to notice, on the official site Magento tends to talk a lot about Magento Enterprice edition.

Magento Tutorials by SiteGround

SiteGround is a hosting company which pays a lot of attention to hosting Magento and has written several beginner tutorials on installing, configuring and tuning performance of Magento content management system. Worth to check, specially if you are just starting your Magento learning process.

Magento tutorials by Alan Storm

Alan is an author and contributor well known in Magento developer community. His site has section dedicated to Magento code, tutorials and tips. Topic range from using JavaScript with Magento, analysis of awailable Magento API’s to customizing Magento admin console and interface.

Introduction to Magento layout

Extensive Smashing Magazine article about Magento CMS layout customization. In this tutorial you will create a simple plugin to manage front end layout for Magento platform. Its well documented and clearly written tutorial.

Setting up blog within Magento store

Quick tutorial explaining how to setup blog section within Magento content management system. Even if Magento is created to serve as eCommerce solution, blogging is playing big role today for communicating with your online customers and usually plays great part in your eCommerce store. Follow this tutorials to understand how Magento deals with blogging.

Magento events. Tips and Tricks

Inchoo people have much experience once it comes to Magento topic. Their site is full of tutorials and we have picked the one with a little bit advanced topic – Magento events. Read this article about event – observer system within Magento CMS and how to best use it within your ecommerce projects.

Magebase Magento Tutorials

Over 60 well written tutorials starting from the beginner level tips to covering the advanced topics like caching and optimizing Magento CMS (not such an easy task by the way..). Tutorial authors are well known Magento consultants and developers. Megabase tutorials are much recommended to everyone who wants to better understand how Magento CMS works.

Introduction to Magento Themes by SitePoint

Another great tutorial to better understand Themes for Magento CMS this time published on well known developer site SitePoint. Introduction to main Magento Theme elements and tips for creating a Theme. In this tutorial you will create a simple Theme from the ground up.

MagentoGarden Tutorials

Several tutorials and blog posts describing skill set needed for maintaining, administering and developing Magento based eCommerce store.

Tips and Tricks by Code Magento

Another site with tips and tricks on how to maintain and extend Magento CMS. From debugging to rewriting specific classes and entire modules. Recomended for advanced Magento developers and users.

If you know any other useful Magento tutorial sites let us know and we will update this post to include them.

The post Learn Magento eCommerce by reading the best beginner tutorials appeared first on ENFEW.

14 Helpful jQuery Tips

Nettuts blog has a post with 14 very useful and easy to implement jQuery tips for your projects. They are aimed at the beginners and are quite easy to understand. Will surely make your projects look better.

Top 10 jQuery Tips and Tricks

Additional 10 tips which will help you to add more dynamic effect to your web sites.

20 Simple jQuery Tricks

How to create rounded corners for your pictures? Scrolling menus or WordPress and jQuery contact forms? You will find all these covered in this tutorials list, without much complexity. Everything is in simple and beginner friendly fission.

Very Easy jQuery Tricks

As the name says, these jQuery tips will be easy to implement and a good learning exercise.

51+ jQuery Examples

This is great collection of jQuery tutorials, examples and tricks you can use for projects. Covering all the best online resources and well written tutorials. Highly recommend to go through this list.

Queness jQuery tips

Again some lightweight but much effective and useful tips and tricks from jQuery land. You will learn how to check for errors and make sure that your code is running on Internet Explorer browser.

jQuery4You Tricks

This site has some great tutorials. For example – how to create video player with jQuery or how to create a chat room. These are little bit more advanced but if you followed our first seven links you are now well prepared to jump in and check out these example tutorials.

If you have any questions related to all these tutorials or want to suggest some other great resources for learning and understanding jQuery please leave your comments under the post and we will respond and answer your questions. Good luck with learning!

The post Getting started with jQuery. Best tutorials and examples appeared first on ENFEW.

1. jQuery Effect toggle() Method

The toggle() method toggles between hide() and show() for the selected elements. This method is also used to toggle between custom functions.

2. Jquery Tutorial : Toggle Effect on Hover/Click by Vikas Ghodke

Today we will learn how to get simple toggle effect on hover/click with jQuery. We will use Css and Jquery to get our final output. Check out the demo before getting into the tutorial.

3.  Simple Toggle with CSS & jQuery

I know there are a lot of toggle tutorials out there already, but when I was learning the basics of jQuery and the toggle effect, I had a hard time finding resources on how to switch the “open” and “close” graphic state.

After reading a few tutorials and mix and matching techniques I was able to achieve this effect, but wanted to share it with those who experienced the same frustration that I had gone through.

4. How To jQuery Toggle

jQuery was made to change the way that you write JavaScript. jQuery has tons of really nice effects that you can experiment with. One of my favorite things to do with jQuery is to do a toggle this is a really simple effect to do but will make people go WOW when they see it. You can use the toggle effect in multiple different way most of the time people just use the toggle up to down or toggle left to right. But some people don’t know that you can use jQuery toggle to go from your upper left or right corner to the opposite corner. Well here is some code that you can reference on different ways to toggle.

5. How to expand collapse (toggle) div layer using jQuery

In almost all of my projects, I have been using jQuery to toggle the layer. So, I thought of sharing how easy it is to expand div layer and collapse panel using jQuery. When user clicks on the header, the content gets displayed by sliding down and when you again click on the header, the content collapses.

6.  How to: show/hide a widget in WordPress with jQuery

In a previous post I talked about how to show/hide a single div html code with a search inside. Today I’d like to show you how I implemented jQuery into my new theme.

7. Basic Show and Hide

As promised in my last entry, I’ll be showing you a simple effect that you can do using jQuery: showing or hiding something, or a group of things, on the page. The two functions that let us do this are, not surprisingly, show() and hide().

jQuery also comes with another function called toggle(), which will make matching elements visible if they are hidden or hidden if they are visible. So, let’s get down to business. We’re going to start with our $(document).ready() function.

The post 7 Tutorials Using jQuery’s .toggle() Function [For Newbies] appeared first on ENFEW.

1. ezMark: jQuery Checkbox & Radiobutton Plugin

ezMark is a jQuery Plugin that allows you to stylize Radio button and Checkbox easily. Its very small (minified version is ~1.5kb) compared to other similar scripts. It has been tested and works on all major browsers (IE 6/7/8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and it gracefully degrades.

2. jQuery Fancy Custom Radio-button and Checkbox

It’s fairly easy to use just like any other jQuery plugin you just have to write couple of lines of javascript code and add some CSS to your html.

3. Fancy checkboxes and radio buttons

Many young guns ask about how to style custom checkboxes and radio buttons in forms. I prepared a typical markup, a few lines of CSS and some JavaScript functions (Safari label behavior fix included).

4. jQuery checkbox v.1.3.0 Beta 1

Lightweight custom styled checkbox implementaion for jQuery 1.2.x and 1.3.x.

Features:

1. only inline elements used, just like default checkoxes
2. cross-browser look and feel (tested in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Chrome engines)
3. work with radio buttons too
4. supports inline and jQuery attached click events
5. supports “label hovering”: when you point over parent label element, it will highlight its checkbox (thanks to Eugene for the idea)
6. dynamic skin changing
7. adds new checkbox events “check”, “uncheck”, “disable”, “enable”, ready to use in jQuery.bind() method

5. iPhone Style Radio and Checkbox Switches using jQuery and CSS

You need just two things for this to work correctly: JQuery 1.3.2+ and the switch.gif image file used for the backgrounds (both included in the zip file). After you have those two files.

6. Create iPhone-style buttons with the iButton jQuery Plug-in

At work we just released another jQuery plug-in called the iButton jQuery Plug-in (which brings the total of open source jQuery plug-ins we’ve released to four.) This plug-in allows you to generate iPhone-style buttons from checkbox and radio elements. While there are several libraries out there that generated iPhone-style buttons, we couldn’t find one that did everything we needed, so I wrote one!

The users of our application are very keyboard centric, so it was very important that we supported keyboard entry. Keyboard support often seems to be overlooked in most UI plug-ins—developers get so focused on the mouse interaction, they forget completely about keyboard entry. So we always make keyboard support a key feature in the jQuery plug-ins we write.

7. iphone-style-checkboxes by tdreyno

8. Introducing iPhone-style Checkboxes

Ever wanted those flash iPhone on/off toggle switches on your webpage? Love jQuery? Well then I’ve got something special for you. iphone-style-checkboxes implements the iPhone toggles as replacements for standard HTML checkboxes. Simply run the script and your site will be updated with these specialized controls. Best of all, the underlying checkbox is not touched and backend system will never know the difference. The change is purely visual.

The post 8 jQuery Plugins/Tutorials For Styling Custom Radio Button and Checkbox appeared first on ENFEW.