Fashion isn't something you'd expect to repeat itself in the technology world - technology advances quickly and hardly ever circles back. But where animated GIFs are involved, it seems like the 90s are here again. Animated GIFs are everywhere, and not only on strange, cheesy web sites - they've become mainstream. You now see short videos shared and played as animated GIFs in reputed sites such as Gawker and TechCrunch.
Online advertising is one of the most popular tools to drive traffic to your website and mobile application in a consistent and cost-effective manner. Online text ads play a very big role in this strategy.
Two decades ago websites had such a simple usage flow. Web servers returned complete HTML pages and each user action required that a new HTML page be reloaded from the server. Later on Ajax joined the game allowing dynamic updating of specific web page fragments via simple Javascript requests to the server. Google's wide-spread use of Ajax with Gmail was simply mind blowing at the time. Today's product requirements wouldn't settle even for that.
Where do you host all of your website's assets - still on your own web servers?
In modern websites, images alone contribute to more than 50% of a website’s load time, and recent studies show that even a 1 second delay in a page's load speed can result in more than 5% loss in conversion. The impact of correctly delivering your website's images to your viewers is staggering. Luckily, Cloudinary offers a simple way to upload your website's images to the cloud, automatically transform them according to your needs and deliver them optimized through a fast CDN employing industry best practices.
As web developers, we closely monitor the shifts in today's modern web applications architecture stack. We find the client vs. server-side HTML rendering debate particularly interesting.
In the past several years, we’ve witnessed the enormous rise in popularity of client-side JS/CoffeeScript MVC & MVVM solutions. From popular libraries such as Backbone.js that strive to add basic structure to client-side apps, all the way to feature-rich libraries that manage your entire client-side stack, with data-binding, client-server model sync, dependency tracking, templates and more. The involvement of high-profile companies and individuals in this market is also fascinating, between KnockoutJS contributions from Microsoft, the Google-backed Angular and Yehuda Katz's Ember, the heat is definitely on.