This means that you can listen to Spotify (or any music, videos and games) and stream movies and video online without worrying about anyone snooping on your online activities. But that’s not all. Another way to provide quality protection is by using multiple layers of VPN software. Each VPN application has its own feature set which can provide secure streaming to different parts of your device. These layers can be as detailed as you want, ranging from port-forwarding to encryption to DNS server. Each VPN is usually supported on a variety of device types, which is why it’s important to check for compatibility. Many of the top-rated VPNs are recommended by a number of well-known online services, such as Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu and even the UK-based BBC.

Other precautions that you should take when using a VPN include:

Make sure that the VPN service you choose is supported on your device. If it’s not, you won’t be able to use it and you won’t have the best experience.

On an unknown device, you may need to try out the VPN on multiple different devices to ensure that it is as good as it can be.

If your IP address is not publicly known, it could increase the possibility of your internet provider, ISP or government intercepting your online activities.

If you use your computer, use a VPN service on a different machine, or even set up two different computers on your computer, make sure that they are both connected to the same WiFi network.

Turn on password-protected WiFi and have an extra computer/laptop handy that you can leave with your other family members. If you do, you will avoid being asked for your password multiple times every time you connect to your computer.

Some VPN services offer free trials that give you a taste of the service. Use this to get a taste for the service and then decide for yourself if it’s right for you.

Choose a VPN service that offers a good balance of speed and reliability. Quality VPN services, especially VPN apps, usually have high levels of encryption and decryption for each content they are connecting to. This makes it easier for users to keep their activities private and ensure that your privacy is protected.

Set up your own password-protected Wi-Fi network that you can use to get connected to the Internet. Ensure that all devices on your Wi-Fi network are using the same password. You may be able to get away with using your Wi-Fi password on two separate devices.

After you’ve set up a secure online network, do not be surprised to find that the government or your ISP would try to track or monitor your online activities. If your network is public, it could expose you to the potential damage that your online activities could cause. However, there are some privacy-enhancing measures you can take.

What is a third mortgage?
The interest is guaranteed by the lender. It’s similar to the interest-only portion of an adjustable mortgage, but does not have a fixed interest rate.
What’s the best way to pay off my mortgage?
Most homebuyers currently having a mortgage at least five years, my advice would be to pay off your mortgage as soon as you can and to look for a refinance mortgage program if necessary.
What if I get a negative equity situation?
The second that you have a negative equity situation, you can write a personal loan against your home. Most banks have third-party collections agencies that can take your principal, if they can. Your lender will probably ask you to submit information to the credit bureaus like your income, assets, and loans (checking your credit score will usually tell them if you have a negative equity situation). If you do this, I recommend that you use a payment plan that minimizes your monthly payments. Your lender will likely ask you to submit more information about your income. Paying down the total principal balance, or a partial principal balance, can be a good plan to help pay off your loan more quickly. Some homeowners find it helpful to include a small percentage of your income as income on the tax return. While you are not allowed to include income on a tax return, your mortgage payment can be included on your tax return as non-deductible interest.

What happens if my house is foreclosed?

If your home is foreclosed and sold at auction, the following will happen:

The bank will continue to hold on to the home as it is no longer a piece of real estate (it will be owned by the buyer), and will not write you a mortgage payment. The owner of the house will not pay any tax on the home if you own a tax lien on the property. If you sold it at auction, the tax lien and a lien on the home from the city will be satisfied by the proceeds. The bank will refund your closing costs, including the real estate broker’s commission, as well as your mortgage payment (tax lien notwithstanding). This could result in as much as $8,000 in net profit for your bank.

EasyPop is a jQuery plugin designed to be super easy to use as well as customizable. It’s main use is to display the title of a menu item or icon within a popup bubble.

The other day i was looking for a popup bubble plugin for a site i was putting together. I had something very specific in mind, all i needed was a simple popup with the title of the menu item in it.

More sites now a days are using simple icons as menu items or with their UI and a simple hover over bubble that explains what that button does can really help.

So after searching for about an hour i decided to just make the plugin myself, as i wasn’t having much luck finding what i was looking for. So I put together EasyPop. It’s a very simple and easy to use plugin. I go into detail on how to use it on the demo page. I hope you like it, and feel free to point out any bugs.

Noise is an important part of most designs when it comes to websites. It helps direct the user’s attention to certain parts of the site without overwhelming them. I’ve recently started seeing sites use a type of Javascript animation that is really appealing to me. It’s subtle and at the same time has a huge impact on the design.

The plugin is called Firefly by Motyar. It’s incredibly easy to add to your site and can really bring the design to life.

To add it on your website you will first need to include your jquery file, you can download the recent version of jquery from the site http://jquery.com/.

Once you have that installed head over to the plugin page on GitHub and download the plugin https://github.com/motyar/firefly.

Once you have both javascript files, simply include them in your code like so:

And then call the plugins function with this:

$(document).ready(function() {
	$.firefly(); 	
});

The plugin allows for customization with two options ‘images’ and ‘total’. Images, lets you call whichever image you want to float on the screen. Total, allows you to define the amount of images to pull onto the screen at a time.

$(document).ready(function() {
	$.firefly({images : ['1.jpg', '2.jpg'],total : 40}); 	
});

And that’s it, you now have floating pixels on your website. You can use this plugin to add particles to a photography site, add fireflies to a field background image, add water debris, stars… the list goes on, its use is only limited by your imagination. Here are a couple example sites:

Quazar Web Design

FireFly

As Web Designers it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in web design. Inspiration helps us to come up with fresh ideas or build on the ideas of others. Let’s start this week off with a few awesome designs that caught my eye.

Tidy Web

Full Fat Designs

Grade Graphic Design

Popcorn

Mathieu Strabach – Webdesigner

As Web Designers it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in web design. Inspiration helps us to come up with fresh ideas or build on the ideas of others. Let’s start this week off with a few awesome designs that caught my eye.

Inspiration Dormant

Piro Pixel

Fleet Creature

Column Five Media

Moa Beer

. I’ve put together a list of the tools I use to keep an eye on site traffic and to help increase it.

I know, I know, we’ve all heard of twitter. It’s been around since ‘06 and is used by every pre-teen on a family cellphone plan. But this is a huge traffic driver for anyone’s site. If you have weekly content going up, you’re going to need a way to alert the masses of your updates. But first you’ll need a heavy following.

I’ve read a few books in my day on how to increase twitter followers, and most of them have one thing in common. To be followed you must first follow, not sure if that’s a quote, if it isn’t I’m coining it. But seriously, a great way to gather followers is to first follow them. Find a twitter account with a large following, preferably one that’s related to your niche. Whether it’s design, photography, programming, whatever. Most likely their followers enjoy the same stuff that you do and that you’re posting about. Everyday follow a few of them 10, 20, 100, however many you have time to add. After a few days of this you’ll have a considerable amount of people following you. Make sure to keep up on your tweets during this process.

This isn’t where it ends, most likely only a handful of the people you followed will follow you back. We now need to weed out the ones who are apparently too cool for us, this brings me to my next tool.

Manage Flitter is a great way to sort your twitter followers. It allows you to see who you’re following who isn’t following you. All those hundreds of people we added over the past week who decided they didn’t want to follow back, we need to unfollow.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, why unfollow these people. Why not just follow ten thousand people in my industry and not worry about it. Here’s why, you can’t tell me the first thing you don’t do when visiting someone’s twitter account is look at their followers compared to their followings. It’s all about appearance, if someone is following 5000 people and is being followed by 100, there must be a reason. Now if you’re following 5000 people and are being followed by 6000, maybe you have some interesting tweets worth following.

Create yourself an account, it’s free, and unfollow all the non followers. You’ll pick up a few followers along the way that you aren’t following to put you over the top, trust me.

Next up we have bitly. As you know, twitter has a character limit of 140. When we add a new blog post that we want people to know about, the best way would be to drop the link into our twitter feed that now has a colossal following. Only thing is, the link is sporting a 200 character count. This is where bitly comes into play, it works by taking your 200 character link and shortening it to a reasonable size.

People will also be more inclined to click on a shortened link, simply due to curiosity. When they see a link such as http://www.wikipedia.com/something-relevant -to-the-page/ they know the next stop is Wikipedia, whereas when they see something like http://www.bitl.ly/4jdd6w they think “This could be anything, it could be the coolest link I click on all day”. And the last, and probably biggest, reason to use bitly, it keeps track of all your links. This includes click count, which lets you know how many people have clicked on that link.

I’m sure you’ve used it before, if not here’s the low down. You create an account, select your interests (design, photography, tech…) and click the Stumble my interest’s button. What happens next is it brings you to a site related to the interests that you saved in your account. These sites are added by people who have the same interests selected as you. So let’s say you find a really neat photography site, you can ‘Like it’, and it gets added to the vast amount of sites already in circulation for those interests.

So here’s how you can use it to your advantage. After posting something on your site, go to the url and ‘Like it’ using the stumble toolbar. You will then notice a spike in traffic over the next few hours coming from people randomly dropping onto that page. Now this doesn’t mean they will become avid followers, or even stay on your site for very long, but it will build recognition.

Discus is a comment system complete with social network integration. It can be integrated with most site platforms and is an awesome way for people to comment on your site. You don’t have to add the discus comment plugin to your site, but do create an account with them. Commenting is a great way to create recognition and with many sites using plugins like disqus to power their commenting section it’s a great way to create traffic.

Even if you don’t use disqus, comment on as many articles as you feel relates to your field. Make sure the comment relates to the article though, the last thing I want is to encourage spam commenting, I get enough of that as it is. With most commenting systems you can add a link to your name which will lead to your site.

Last but not least, google analytics. Here is your main hub, the page that wraps everything up for you. Set up an account, bookmark the page, check it every day. This is where you will monitor all the traffic to your site and from where it’s coming from. It’s a very simple process to set up an account and will help you greatly in understanding which methods work best for driving traffic to your site.

I usually check the traffic to my site every morning, then once when I get home at night. It allows me to see which sites are linking to me and where most of my daily traffic is coming from. Once I know that I can focus on bettering those methods.

All this said and done, these are only a few of the tools you can use to boost traffic to your site. Without content they can only do so much. Content is key when it comes to websites, keep it original and you won’t have a problem.

As Web Designers it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in web design. Inspiration helps us to come up with fresh ideas or build on the ideas of others. Let’s start this week off with a few awesome designs that caught my eye.

Cascade Brewery Co

Art and Code

Great quote!

Sawyer Hollenshead

2mlab

These are things

• Best viewed in Chrome and Safari
• Basic HTML knowledge required
• Includes HTML, CSS and javascript files
• Also includes photoshop file

When it comes to web design I’m a huge fan of both minimalism as well as heavy imagery. If you’re a photographer, artist or designer, minimalism is a great way to emphasize your work.It allows the user to focus on a single aspect of the site at a time while still remaining visually pleasing.

I recently put together a minimalist portfolio design which I haven’t yet been able to use. I started with just the design and decided to chop it up and code it to feature on the blog.

The design itself is fairly simple but also very easy on the eyes. As for the code, I used Codrops’ ‘Slicebox’. A great slideshow plugin that utilizes the CSS3 3D transform property. You can read up on some of the documentation on their site. I’m also using the bxslider along with fancybox for the subfeature thumbnail image slides.

Feel free to download the source files and use them for your project. They’re very easy to customize, simply replace the image paths in the array:

var thumbImages = [
     "image/large-1.jpg",
     "image/large-2.jpg",
     "image/large-3.jpg",
     "image/large-4.jpg",
     "image/large-5.jpg",
     "image/large-6.jpg"
];

with you’re own images and you’re good to go.

For the thumbnails you can use your full sized images and it will resize it accordingly. Just replace the image paths:

About Page

The about page is pretty straight forward, you can replace the text and image to customize it.

Portfolio Page

The portfolio page is similar to the home page, with regards to the image replacement. Simply replace the images in the array:

var portfolioImage = [
     "image/large-1.jpg",
     "image/large-2.jpg",
     "image/large-3.jpg",
     "image/large-4.jpg",
     "image/large-5.jpg",
     "image/large-6.jpg"
];

with you’re own images.

Contact Page

The contact page form is set up visually but you will need to add phpmailer or some form of mailer for the functionality.

If you have any questions feel free to send me a message or post in the comments.

Enjoy

EDIT:

There was a bug with the Slicebox plugin that made it break in Firefox 10. I’ve made a quick modification to the plugin for now until I can find a better solution to the problem. Here’s the fix:

On line 93 of the plugin (jquery.slicebox.js) replace:

if( Modernizr.csstransforms3d )

With:

if( Modernizr.csstransforms3d && navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox") == -1 )

And on line 101 of the index.html page replace:

if( !Modernizr.csstransforms3d )

With

if( !Modernizr.csstransforms3d || navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Firefox") != -1 )

As Web Designers it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends in web design. Inspiration helps us to come up with fresh ideas or build on the ideas of others. Let’s start this week off with a few awesome designs that caught my eye.

Bicho Malvado

Caffe Uno

Kaleidoscope

Media Parker

Clearfire