PrettyGoodSync: Find Public Keys For Your Contacts

Encryption software such as PGP and GPG unfortunately has always been suffering from low adaption rates outside of the computer nerd / hacker crowd. The less than stellar user experience of many of those encryption tools has been a major contributing factor to that. However, those tools have come long way both feature-wise and as for their usability, for instance have a look at the formidable GPGMail / GPGTools for OS X that makes dealing with public key encryption a breeze. Nevertheless, ... Read more

Great Rock Singers: James LaBrie

Because I'm very much into metal music as well as I'm into great singers I thought I'd write a few blog posts about those heavy metal singers I'm particularly fond of. First one's probably my all-time favourite: James LaBrie of Dream Theater. These are a few videos that give you an impression of his technical prowess, awesome range and versatility: Read more

One Small Step

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Chosen – User-friendly select boxes

HTML <select></select> boxes can be rather unwieldy and don't exactly cater for a stellar user-experience. To alleviate that pain Harvest provide a highly useful jQuery plugin that's been adequately named Chosen. Apart from a nice CSS styling Chosen adds several user interface improvements to vanilla HTML select boxes such as search, easy-to-use multiple selections and option groups. Using Chosen is as easy as adding the following JavaScript code to your website: $('select').chosen(); This will automatically spruce up and enrich every select box on your website ... Read more

Notifications in web apps: Mailgun and Twilio

If you want your web app to notify your users upon specific actions or events Mailgun and Twilio are great solutions for doing so. The former allows you to - among various other features involving eMail - send eMails via a nice and simple REST API. This is particularly handy because you don't have to worry anymore about delivering eMail asynchronously in order not to delay user actions in the browser. For example, with Mailgun you can simply commit a registration confirmation ... Read more