Monochrome Photography Awards

Monochrome Photography Awards conducts an annual competition for professional and amateur photographers.

Our mission is to celebrate monochrome visions and discover the most amazing photographers from around the world.

The winners of the Professional and Amateur categories will receive the titles: Monochrome Photographer of the Year and Monochrome Discovery of the Year along with cash prizes.

We are open to all points of view, all levels of expertise, and all ideas of black and white photography.

 

MONOCHROME AWARDS WINNERS’ GALLERY

How much carbon dioxide does your website produce?

Oh my,

2.07 g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page.

Uh oh! This web page is dirtier than

89% of web pages tested

it looks like this web page uses bog standard energy

If this site used green hosting, then it would emit 9% less CO2

  • Over a year, with 10,000 monthly page views, stiriinternationale.ro/ produces
    247.95kg of CO2 equivalent.
  • The same weight as 1.65 sumo wrestlers and as much CO2 as boiling water for 33,597 cups of tea.

12 trees

This web page emits the amount of carbon that 12 trees absorb in a year.

561kWh of energy

That’s enough electricity to drive an electric car 3,590km.

TEST your website

 

ClassicPress chooses a path to serve business/professional organization websites

We quickly realized that the situation with Gutenberg highlights a distinction between two groups in the WordPress market: bloggers versus business and professional organization* site owners.

*Professional organizations would include, for instance, higher education and government. For the sake of brevity, this post includes such entities when it refers to ‘business’.

ClassicPress steps in

To the business website owner concerned about Gutenberg’s immediate impact, there is little difference between installing ClassicPress and installing Automattic’s Classic Editor plugin. But beyond Gutenberg, there are literally hundreds (thousands?) of improvements that can be made to better serve the business market, and WordPress won’t make them because they run counter to their goal of democratizing publishing.

ClassicPress picks up the challenge of making those improvements and dedicates itself to becoming the business website CMS. As a result, we place a high priority on security, accessibility/usability, stability, efficiency, simplicity, and above all, listening to our growing community and our market.

 

Read full article

WordPress Names Josepha Haden New Executive Director, Joost de Valk Marketing and Communications Lead

During the 2018 State of the Word address, Matt Mullenweg acknowledged lessons learned in the process of releasing WordPress 5.0. One of those was the need for various teams across the project to work together better. The friction during the 5.0 development cycle was beneficial in that it surfaced areas where the project can grow and sparked conversations that are already leading to improvements.

Last week Mullenweg announced that WordPress is expanding its leadership team to include Josepha Haden in a new Executive Director role and Joost de Valk as the Marketing and Communications Lead. These new roles better distribute project leadership to more individuals who have demonstrated the ability and judiciousness to guide large, diverse teams towards success. Haden will be overseeing WordPress’ contributor teams and de Valk is leading the marketing team and overseeing improvements to WordPress’ websites and other outlets.

The Executive Director role is particularly critical for the health of the project, as contributor and community feedback pours in across so many different mediums. Tracking all of this information and taking it into consideration amounts to a full-time job. In her first week in the new role, Haden is seeking feedback regarding the challenges contributors face when working on the project. She identified seven challenges which seem to resonate with many who have commented:

  • Coordinating on collaborative work between teams
  • Aligning our work better to project goals/values
  • Understanding team roles, leadership structures, and decision making
  • Clarifying the differences between open source and open commit
  • Tracking conversations and progress across the project
  • Raising project-wide concerns more easily
  • Improving how we recognize and celebrate success

 

Read More: WP Tavern

 

Josepha’s website: myfreshplans.com

Now we have a new baby in the family, we’ve realized that there is also a need for ideas and information for home learning for babies, so we’re adding this kind of information to FreshPlans, too.

FreshPlans offers free educational resources for plugged-in parents and teachers, from early childhood education through 12th grade.

Josepha’s WordPress theme: Parabola

“When I clicked onto your site, I came across a treasure trove! Thanks for sharing all these great resources and for your wonderful ideas!”

Joost de Valk is the founder and CEO of Yoast. He’s a WordPress / Web developer, SEO and an Open Source fanatic.

Gutenberg Phase 2 to Update Core Widgets to Blocks, Classic Widget in Development

Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in the Customizer.

Contributors on phase 2 are also developing a Classic Widget, which would function as a sort of “legacy widget block” for third-party widgets that haven’t yet been converted to blocks. There may be many instances where plugin developers have not updated their widgets for Gutenberg and in these cases their plugins would be unusable in the new interface without the option of a Classic Widget. This block is still in the design stage.

The widgets.php admin page will need to be completely reimagined as part of this process.

Updating the widgets management page and bringing blocks into the Customizer is a major overhaul but will further unify WordPress’ interface for editing and previewing content. Widgets have served WordPress well over the years, making it easy for users to customize their websites without having to know how to code.

 

Read More: WP Tavern

France hits Google with record €50mn fine over ‘forced consent’ data collection

The investigation uncovered two infractions of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was approved in 2016.

They found that the company doesn’t provide easy access to information it collects from users and that the information they do provide is often incomprehensible.

This creates a situation where people are not able to manage how their information is being used, especially in relation to targeted ads.

 

Source: RT

WordPress[.]com Secures $2.4 Million in Funding from Google and Partners to Build a Publishing Platform for News Organizations

WordPress.com has announced plans to create a new, open source publishing platform that caters to small and medium-sized news organizations. The Google News Initiative has contributed $1.2 million towards the development of “Newspack” on top of WordPress.com’s infrastructure.

Automattic and Google have joined with other contributing partners from the broader world of journalism for a total of $2.4 million in funding for the first year of the project. These partners include The Lenfest Institute for Journalism ($400K), ConsenSys, the venture studio behind Civil Media($350K), The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation ($250K), and an additional partner who will join later this month. Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub will also contribute to the creation of the platform.

“The value we offer is our knowledge of the news industry, our ability to keep pace with new requirements, and our ability to vet various plug-ins and open-source contributions to the project for security and interoperability — all at an attractive operating cost of between $1,000 and $2,000 per month.

 

NOTE: “It will leverage Gutenberg,” Kinsey said. As a user say:

You see those Gutenberg reviews with the average score now at 2 out of 5 stars and sinking? The low score is actually a good score, since it proves that GB is forward-thinking, revolutionary and an absolute necessity for bloggers. How people have survived without it until now remains a mystery. 🙂

 

WP Tavern – Full article

WPCampus Selects Tenon LLC for Gutenberg Accessibility Audit, Completed Report Expected in February

WPCampus announced that Tenon LLC, a leading accessibility firm founded by Karl Groves, has been selected to perform its Gutenberg accessibility audit. More than $10,000 has come in through WPCamps’ crowdfunding campaign. Shortly before WordCamp US 2018, Automattic pledged to fund the remainder of the audit. The final cost for the chosen vendor is $31,200.

The organization plans to deliver a progress update on Thursday, January 31, and is aiming to complete the audit by late February. A public report of the findings will be published as a resource that anyone can access.

 

WP Tavern – Full article

Ahead Of Moon Mission, SpaceIL Transports First Israeli Spacecraft To Florida

Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)’s first lunar spacecraft began a historic journey to the moon on Jan. 17, when it was transported in a cargo plane from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Orlando, Fla., ahead of launching from SpaceX Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in mid-February.

SpaceIL and IAI packed the 180-kilogram spacecraft into a special temperature-controlled, sterile shipping container, built to protect the spacecraft and ensure it arrives safely at the launch site.

After landing at Orlando International Airport, the spacecraft—named Beresheet (Hebrew for “in the beginning” and the first weekly portion of the Torah)—will then be driven to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where it will be added as a secondary payload by launch service-provider Spaceflight. It will be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket together with a geostationary communications satellite built by SSL.

“After eight years of hard work, our dream has come true: We finally have a spacecraft,” said SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby. “Shipping the spacecraft to the United States is the first stage of a complicated and historic journey to the moon. This is the first of many exciting moments, as we look forward to the forthcoming launch in Cape Canaveral.”

IAI director of logistics, Eyal Shitrit, said that though IAI has extensive experience in complex shipping projects, “the transporting of Beresheet is a unique challenge since this is a once-in-a-lifetime mission, and there is no backup plan. This spacecraft must arrive safely.”

In addition to the container holding Beresheet, two more containers will be included in the cargo plane, which itself is temperature-controlled. SpaceIL and IAI engineers will accompany the spacecraft on the flight to Florida, and more engineers will join them in Cape Canaveral.

Beresheet will undergo final tests before being launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Upon completing its lunar mission—the first in Israel’s history and the first that’s privately funded—Israel would join superpowers China, Russia and the United States in landing a spacecraft on the moon.

Since the establishment of SpaceIL, the task of landing an Israeli spacecraft on the moon has become a national project, with educational impact, funded mainly by Morris Kahn, a philanthropist and businessman who took the lead in completing the mission, serving as SpaceIL’s president and financing $40 million.

“The excitement we all feel today will only intensify moving forward, and I can’t wait for the next milestone,” said Kahn. “This is only the beginning.”

Additional donors include Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, whose $24 million contribution enabled the project to continue; Lynn Schusterman; Steven and Nancy Grand; Sylvan Adams; Sami Sagol; and others.

 

Source: MATZAV

NEWSPACK: AUTOMATTIC, GOOGLE, AND THE SAASIFICATION OF WORDPRESS

Earlier today Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com headed by WordPress co-founder and project lead Matt Mullenweg) announced Newspack by WordPress.com, a “next-generation publishing platform” “aimed at small- and medium-sized news organizations”.

The new platform is funded in part by Google, through the Google News Initiative, and other companies.

This latest announcement marks the beginning of the all-out SaaSification of WordPress. The reality is because of the open source status of WordPress (the software), what Automattic has done with WordPress.com and their other services can be done by anyone, and I’d be shocked if Automattic stays the only player in the market for long. To put it bluntly, the days of WordPress self-hosting as the go-to solution for small-, medium-, and enterprise businesses are numbered.

What competing services like Wix and Squarespace have shown us is people want simple solutions to their web hosting that do not involve having a horde of web maintainers on staff or hiring an expensive agency to run everything for them. The obvious answer to this need is to spin up WordPress as a service and extend it to provide customized services for each use case.

As Automattic has demonstrated, you can slap a whole new skin on top of WordPress core and create a custom experience which looks and feels nothing like the main application. The Wix / Squarespace killer may well be a new service running WordPress in the background and a completely unique experience on top.

Think managed hosting + a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder and a host of other customized services and you see where I’m going with this.

 

READ FULL ARTICLE on MOR10 by Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Sass is a CSS preprocessor: a programming language that compiles to (spits out) CSS stylesheets. Like any CSS preprocessor, Sass exists to let you write styling rules in a manner that is:

  1. DRY: “don’t repeat yourself,” meaning less copy-pasting and blind repetition.
  2. Dynamic: capable of interpreting variables.

DRAWBACKS OF SASS

I’ll also mention three potential drawbacks of Sass, in order of importance:

  1. Sass means one more layer of abstraction preventing a beginner user from understanding what you’re doing. Compiled stylesheets are not necessarily as readable as hand-written ones—and can be completely opaque if you don’t think about the CSS your Sass is spitting out—and even readable CSS stylesheets don’t always encode the underlying logics that guided the original Sass programmer.
  2. Sass creates the possibility of versioning conflicts: future users of your software can make changes either to your CSS stylesheets or your Sass partials, and can potentially end up overwriting one another in the process.
  3. Writing Sass and getting it to compile is significantly more complicated, and marginally slower, than simply writing straight to a CSS file.

Case Study – Analyzing Web Font Performance

The number of websites using custom web fonts continues to grow at a rapid pace and this in turn affects the rendering speed of pages. We will compare some of the top web fonts and see how different delivery methods, such as serving from Google Fonts, hosting locally, and 3rd parties, affect the overall load times.

According to the HTTP Archive, 57% of websites are now using custom fonts. Which is an 850% increase since 2011.

Web Fonts are scalable, zoomable, and high-DPI friendly, meaning they can be easily shown across desktops, tablet, and mobile phones no matter what the resolution. Other advantages of using web fonts are design, readability, and accessibility.

 

Read More: keycdn – Brian Jackson

Russia loses control over its ONLY Hubble-like telescope, but photos are still coming

Russia is now left with no space telescopes available as it is unclear whether the technical glitches can be fixed. The next replacement, the Spektr-M, will only become operational in the mid-2020s. The newest satellite is expected to be sent into space beyond the orbit of the moon.

Communication between mission control and the space telescope failed, and several other attempts to revive the radio link have proven unsuccessful.

Incredibly, the Spektr-R kept sending data back to Earth, however, which added a bit of intrigue to the incident.

Fitted with a 10-meter-wide mirror antenna, the Spektr-R is able to provide high-definition photographs and other data from the depth of the universe, while its electronic systems allow it to transmit around 100 gigabytes of information per day.

Notably, the Spektr’s expected lifespan expired in 2016 but it managed to continue its mission.

 

Source: RT