A simple minimal HTML5 CV / resume template with a responsive layout that makes it easy to view on a handful of devices.

Looking for a minimal coming soon page for your next project… Download dot.one, a simple minimal template that uses lwtCountdown, the lightweight jQuery plugin to handle the countdown event. It’s free to download and free to use for any purpose without any restrictions.

Cloud-based apps make it easier for freelancers, or anyone wanting to be productive, to work on the go. This list features some of nicest, web-based collection of tools which you might find useful.

Storage

• Google Drive – a recently released file storage and sync service from Google which gives users a free of charge 5 GB cloud storage.
• Dropbox – is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. The default free plan lets you store up to 2GB of data.
• Ubuntu One – online cloud service that allows you store, sync, share and stream either your music, photo, video, and document collection at any time and from any device. The free plan lets you store up to 5GB.
• Box – web service that allows you to get access to and share content from anywhere.

Invoicing

• Bamboo Invoice – free and Open Source online invoicing software intended for small businesses and independent contractors.
• Simple Invoices – another free open source web-based application that you can install and run from your own web-server.
• Billing Boss – great online invoicing tool that greatly benefits freelancers and small businesses.
• Invoice Bubble – another free online invoice software that lets you create invoices and send them to your clients in seconds. The free version is ad-supported with an optional $5 per month premium account to remove ads.

Time Tracking

• Makesometime – freelancer tool that helps you keep track of your time, invoices and projects you’re working on.
• Todoist – a simple online to-do list and task manager.
• Weave(iPhone App) – free iPhone app which you can use to add income, expenses, projects, and time spent on each todo item.

Just Useful

• Lemon – this amazing cloud-based app allows you to capture and organise your receipts tracking your spending/purchases.
• MailChimp – simple tool that helps you manage email campaigns, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.
• Evernote – an app that helps you store, organize and sync all your notes, web clips, and images across a multitude of devices.
• end.ai – a URL shortening service brought to you by C2 Media

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, the 3 most popular CMS engines are all open source which means that information on exploits and security vulnerabilities is always available on the public domain. As a developer/designer you should strive to patch up your system and keep crackers from poking about your network. This post covers a few basic tips on how to achieve that…

Install updates

…the most obvious, easiest and single most effective way of securing your installation. New iterations are meant to patch up security holes, add new features and enable your installation to stay compatible with new standards.
Update your plugins and installation whenever you can, it is after-all effortless, just a few clicks here and there from your dashboard and you’re good to go. If you’re worried that an update may contain unknown exploits or possibly break your plug-ins and themes, then you can always hold of updating until potential issues have been identified and resolved.

Better username

Everyone who has ever used WordPress knows that it has the “admin” default administrator username, it makes sense that one changes this to something unique from the get-go. Once youre setup, WordPress wont allow you to change your username from within the admin dashboard.
You can create a new account with better credentials and drop the old one, but then you’d run the risk of losing post and comment data associated with that account. The best way would be to use your host’s MySQL administration tool to directly alter your database elements, wpmu.org has a tutorial on how this can be done here.

Use a strong password

This is a no-brainer… every system needs a strong unique password. If your password is password then maybe you’re just asking for it. Just be sure to pick something you’ll remember. 1Password is a great app that lets you manage your passwords with ease, make use of it if you can.

Limit login attempts

A brute force attack consists of trying every possible code, combination, or password until the right one is found. Any website that requires authentication is susceptible to such attacks.
A popular way of preventing this in WordPress is using a plug-in that records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If a certain amount of consecutive login failures have occurred from the same IP range, then the system locks out further requests from that range. Limit Login Attempts and Login Lockdown are free plug-ins that allow you to secure your site this way in WordPress, grab yourself a copy.

Secure your wp-config.php file

wp-config is probably the most important file in your installation. It contains all your configuration information. One way of securing this file is adding the following few lines of code to your .htaccess file …

# secure my wpconfig.php file
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

These configurations will restrict anyone from directly accessing the file returning an 403 forbidden error instead.

Define random keys and salts

Authentication Unique Keys and Salts are just a bunch of random characters that help improve encryption of information stored in the user’s cookies. You can generate random salts via WordPress secret-key service and replace the ones found in your wp-config.php file.

/**#@+
* Authentication Unique Keys and Salts.
*
* Change these to different unique phrases!
* You can generate these using the {@link https://api.WordPress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/
 WordPress.org secret-key service}
* You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies. This will
 force all users to have to log in again.
*
* @since 2.6.0
*/
define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

/**#@-*/

Remove wordPress version info

This is one security by obscurity tip you find floating around the web. By placing the following code snippet into your theme’s function.php file, WordPress version information will be excluded from your head meta tags section of your installation.

function remove_version_number() {  return '';}
add_filter('the_generator', 'remove_version_number'); 

Backup

Backing up is one contingency plan you can have in case something goes horribly wrong with your install and it turns out you can’t rectifying the problem. You can always keep a copy of your server side files and databases somewhere away from your host computer.
From your admin panel, you can navigate to tools > export to use WordPress built in export feature which creates a file containing your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. Some plug-ins can also help you backup your sites. You can try your hands at Backup to Dropbox, a plugin that automatically uploads a backup of your entire website, including all files and its database, to Dropbox.

Use correct file permissions

File permissions can be change with ease from your FTP client. Try to go as low as possible. 644 should work for most files, 755 works for folders, 600 could work for your wp-config file, if you find that a particular file permission breaks your site then you can always assign a higher one but try to stay away from 777.

Change The Default Table Prefix

The default “wp_” table prefix makes it easy to guess the names of tables in your database. You can change the prefix to something a bit more creative, a few random characters would do, preferably after “wp”, that way you can still identify your WordPress tables in your database .

Recommended reading

1. Securing your wordpress website
2. Hardening WordPress
3. How to secure your new wordpress installation

Well, today I roll out a new design theme to my site. Now multi-page based, the new design is cleaner, faster and packed with a lot more content.

WordPress

I wanted to run a blog along side my web portfolio, a place to post code experiments, samples, resources and other trickery. For this I chose WordPress as my CMS – making the process of posting content and uploading stuff less tedious. I crafted the theme from scratch with the help of several tools, some of which highlighted below.

Responsive design

There is no doubt that responsive design is the future of web development, I used a few CSS3 Media Query and transitions with the new design to make it adaptive to common screen resolutions. There are 4 break points, 1024px for large screens, 768px for tablet devices, 480 / 478px for smart-phones, and 320px for small resolution mobiles. I’m still tinkering with this feature but in the mean time, resize your browser. See how it works ?

Tools & Technologies Used

1. WordPress as the CMS (SEO is handled by Yoast)
2. W3 Total Cache
3. museo sans typekit font
4. Fancybox image gallery
5. respond.js for polyfilling min/max-width CSS3 Media Queries
6. sharrre custom share buttons
7. disqus commenting system