Save for web and Devices!

This is probably one of the most useful functions built into Adobe Photoshop for web developers. One of the biggest issues we will run into when creating content for our websites or mobile devices, is that the assets we create or cultivate are just to big! with this handy function found in the file tab you can keep the quality of the image high but the load times low by dropping the size dramatically. Remember don't just save, save for web and devices.

Facebook Updates User Guidelines

Facebook announced today they’ve updated their user guidelines and will no longer require that Facebook promotions be administered through third-party applications.

What does this mean? If you want to have a contest on your Facebook page, you don’t have to pay a Facebook-app company to create and administer it for you. Which is a huge time and money saver.

This means you can upload a photo to your Region’s Facebook page and ask people to leave comments, like or share to enter to win a prize. Many of you may have not known functions like this were illegal. They were! And if Facebook would’ve come across posts like this in the past, your page would have been in danger of getting deleted.

Building a Lean, Mean, Quick, Web Machine!

Building a website can be a time consuming process. If you use the wrong kind of assets in building your site, it will become a exercise in patience and anger management. Here is a few simple tips to keep that site light on its feet, easy to build, troubleshoot, and maintain.


Small pages = Fast pages

The art of building a site that loads quickly and is quick to transition is a tricky one. no matter a persons connection speed there is always content to download. How frustrating is it when you go to a page you want to view only to have to wait sometimes, what seems like forever, for content to load. We have all been there. (modem era anyone?) Do your viewers a favor, keep those pages small no more than a couple hundred kb. (yes you can still have images and content and keep it that small)

AYSO's Julie Foudy Day

Julie Foudy – AYSO alum, Olympic Gold Medalist and former U.S. Women's National team member – has produced a new ESPN Nine for IX film: "The 99ers." This film covers the U.S. Women's National team's journey during their World Cup victory in 1999 and uses "home movies" filmed by the players themselves. "The 99ers" will air Tuesday, Aug. 20, at 5 p.m., PT.

To celebrate, Julie will be joining AYSO on Tuesday for Julie Foudy Day!

Tomorrow at noon PT, AYSO alum and Olympic gold medalist Julie Foudy will be taking over the AYSO Twitter account!

Don't miss it! Visit Twitter.com/AYSO_Soccer to check out Julie's answers and to ask her some questions yourself. Use the hashtag ‪#‎AskJulieFoudy‬ to get your questions heard. This is going to be fun!

Codecademy and Learning how to build websites.

In the last couple of years a wealth of web building software has arrived on the market that allows even the most technically challenged to build a pretty sophisticated website. Software like WordPress is even used by professionals to achieve pretty remarkable and sophisticated websites, sometimes though, a person will want more control they will want to start to lean how to actually code.

Years ago, short of going back to school this was a option that was not realistic to the average novice. These days however the game has changed. http://www.codecademy.com/ is a internet learning tool that will guide you step by step through the process of learning how to code almost every major web based language currently in use. I myself have used it to enhance and build upon the skills I already have.  The lessons are easy to follow, dynamic, and well constructed. Best of all they are free!

If you are a up-and-coming web developer and are looking to expand your skills so you can lean how to build your own sites from scratch I recommend this tool wholeheartedly.

How to Embed Your Facebook Posts

Facebook has debuted another fun new feature: post embedding. Embedded Facebook posts will allow you to take a post from your Region's Facebook page (or AYSO's National Facebook page) and embed it on a website, blog and more.

Once the post is embedded, users will be able to view the post anywhere you embed it, and engage with it by sharing, liking or leaving a comment. The above is a preview of what an embedded Facebook post looks like.

Embedding your Facebook posts on other websites is a great way to get your community engaged with your Region and drive valuable traffic to your Facebook page. Here's why:

WordPress for Websites & the 7 plugins you will need.

WordPress has become a increasingly popular method to create a website due to its ease of use, fantastic and helpful developer community, and the sheer number of high-quality free modules and plug-ins that can add fantastic features and security to your website. Here is list of the seven I recommend everyone start with.  

Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP-Admin Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate. A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and paste the key back into your Dashboard.
 
Quick Cache
When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once, this can slow your site right down. Quick Cache is a plugin that caches your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress server. You can find the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/
Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate. You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can sometimes have trouble testing changes.
Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of what to do.