Cloudinary Blog

Blog posts by Mickey Aharony - Page 4
Mickey Aharony photo

Mickey Aharony

Content Marketing Manager

Mickey is a lean mean marketing machine who has lived and traveled around the world, finally settling high up in the clouds with Cloudinary.

An Eye-Opening Talk: Building Apps for the Next Billion Users in Africa

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
An Eye-Opening Talk: Building Apps for the Next Billion Users in Africa

William (iChuloo) Imoh, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, recently embarked on a U.S. speaking tour, February 20-March 12, during which he powwowed with technical and product teams and communities at such renowned enterprises as Netlify, Pluralsight, Lucidchart, Twilio, and more in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. On March 5, he gave an enlightening talk, entitled International Developers and Development: Building for the Next Billion Users at Cloudinary in Santa Clara, California. Below is a synopsis. For details, see the related slides.

Read more

How to Improve Live Streaming: Expert's Tips and Tricks

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
How to Improve Live Streaming: Expert's Tips and Tricks

Video is an increasingly important component for websites - whether it’s to inform visitors, enhance user experience or support sales and marketing efforts. But delivering high-quality video at large scale can be quite a challenge. You need to consider encoding, format, bandwidth usage, delivery and the devices on which visitors may be watching the video, to name just a few concerns.

Read more

Cloudinary Upgrades Image Management and Optimization for Thrillophilia

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
Cloudinary Upgrades Image Management and Optimization

Thrillophilia is India’s largest online tours and activities platform. Through its website and app, the company offers a one-stop solution for travelers looking for tours, activities and things to do. Users can choose from more than 10,000 activities in 200+ cities in India and 15 countries in Asia. Headquartered in Bangalore, India, the company was founded in 2011 and employs more than 50 people.

Read more

Top 7 jQuery Sliders and Three Ways in Which to Create Your Own

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
Top 7 jQuery Sliders and 3 Ways in Which to Create Your Own
Cloudinary offers a cloud-based solution to help developers manage and optimize rich media (images and videos). With images being ubiquitous in online content, image sliders, which rotate banners or enable browsing through multiple images with animation effects and CSS3 transitions at the top of a website’s homepage, are becoming popular.
 
In our opinion, jQuery is the hands-down, No. 1 choice for building sliders. This article describes 7 ready-made, high-quality, and user-friendly jQuery sliders, complete with excellent designs and features. Also included are four tutorials along with code samples to help you build your own jQuery slider.

Top 7 Ready-to-Use jQuery Sliders

ResponsiveSlides.js

This is a small jQuery plugin that creates a responsive slider with the elements inside a container. It works with numerous browsers, including Internet Explorer version 6 and up. In addition, it supports `max-width` in CSS for IE6 and other browsers that don't natively support `max-width`. You must run jQuery 1.6 and up to use this plugin. Also, keep in mind that all the images are of the same size.
 
Options: File links, markup, CSS, slideshow, customizable options.
License: Open Source (MIT)
 
 

BXSlider

This is a fully responsive, popular slider that is well supported on GitHub. The slides can contain images, video, or HTML with built-in support for touch and swipe. The file size is small and the theme, simple to implement. This slider, which uses CSS transitions for animation with native hardware acceleration, works well with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, iOS Android, and IE7+ browsers.
 
Options: Horizontal, vertical and fade modes, transition duration, margin between slides, starting slide, random start, slide selector, infinite loop, hiding control on end, captions, text ticker, adaptive height, animations as CSS or jQuery, preload images, swipe threshold, numbered pagination, full customization of slider controls, full callback API and public methods
License: Open Source (MIT)
 
 

Slick

This is a fully responsive, popular slider that scales with its container and that is well supported on GitHub. Even though Slick uses CSS3 when available, it’s fully functional without CSS3. Additionally, Slick is swipe enabled with support for desktop-mouse dragging and arrow-key navigation.
 
Options: Separate settings per breakpoint, single and multiple items, variable width, adaptive height, lazy loading, infinite looping, add, remove, filter and unfilter slides,
autoplay, dots, arrows, callbacks
License: Open Source
 
 

WooThemes FlexSlider 2

This is a fully responsive slider with intuitive markup and support by all major browsers. Its features include horizontal or vertical slider and fade animations, multiple sliders, callback API, support for hardware-accelerated touch-slide, and customizable navigation options. 
 
Options: Installation, file links, markup, animation type, easing, direction, looping, smooth height animation, slideshow and its speed and randomization, video, sliding with keyboard arrows or mousewheel, and a pause-play element
License: Open Source (MIT)
 
 

Swiper

A mobile touch slider with hardware-accelerated transitions, this one is intended for use in mobile websites, mobile apps, and mobile native or hybrid apps. Swiper works with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8.
 
Options: Initialization, hash navigation, parallax, lazy loading, emitter API and events, HTML layout, CSS styles and size, and support for CDN
License: Open Source (MIT)
 
Demos / Download / Documentation

Super Simple Slider

As its name implies, this slider is simple and small. It’s also browser friendly and responsive, with support for arrow keys, and works with all HTML content.
 
Options: Slideshow, order-slide display, transition, speed, show-hide navigation
License: Open Source (WTFPL)
 
 

Animate Slider

This is a slider plugin with specific animations for each of its elements. It offers predefined animation classes and adds them to each slider element, allowing addition of classes with delay for each of the animations. 
 
Options: Autoplay, time, animations, fade-bounce-rotate-enter left or right, delay of slide display 
License: Open Source (MIT)
 
 

3 Ways to Build Your Own Slider

We collected a few great write ups from across the web showing step by step how you can easily create your own slider.
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

Summary

We hope you enjoyed this compilation of different ways to build sliders on your site using jQuery. If you’re a user of jQuery and have additional image-related tasks on your website, or want some help preparing and optimizing the images for your slider, check out Cloudinary’s jQuery integration. We offer a very easy way to upload images, deliver them to users via CDN, and perform advanced image transformations on the fly with one line of code. If you want to try it out, sign up for our free plan. 
 
And of course, please let us know in the comments below if you’ve tried out any of the sliders of code samples above and have any thoughts, and if you can share additional jQuery-based slider solutions. 
Read more

What matters most to web users might surprise you

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
Is your website offering the best user experience?
 
The most common frustrations voiced by people when visiting a website are the time it takes for pages to load and the amount of bandwidth some sites eat from their monthly mobile plans. 
 
What these users might not realize is that, in many cases, the culprit is the same: website image performance. Ensuring images are optimized is particularly important to businesses who manage these sites since they account for the majority of the downloaded bytes on a web page, and can slow down load times considerably. 
Read more

Is the future of the internet going exclusively mobile?

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
As the use of mobiles grows, are websites fading away?
 
At the end of 2014, activity on smartphones and tablets accounted for 60% of the time Americans spent online, according to comScore. Given the fast migration to mobile, these figures have been growing every year, and this trend in migration is not limited to the US market alone. According to a recent IDC report, the leading mobile vendors shipped a total of 334.4 million smartphones worldwide in the first quarter of 2015 (1Q15), up 16% from 288.3 million units in 1Q14. With this rise in mobile adoption, it seems like more users are turning to their mobile devices to perform online activities rather than their desktop computers.
Read more

Are you guilty of making these mistakes when handling images on your website?

Mickey Aharony
By Mickey Aharony
Most common image handline mistakes of web developers

As the number of images and videos on a website continue to grow, slower load times and thus a negative user experience are both growing concerns for any company.  An article this summer in The Fiscal Times, citing Internet data measurement company HTTP Archive, noted that the average website is now 2.1 MB in size, compared to 1.5 MB two years ago. And one of the biggest reasons for this growth is the addition of content such as videos and engaging images designed to drive more traffic to the site.  

Read more