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February 2021

Web Design, Web Development

Front End vs Back End

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If you’re new to web development, you have probably heard about the two terms Front end and Back end, and you might be confused about the difference and what they do. In this article, we are going to explain both of them. Front end: Front end are programming languages that control how things look in a website which involves images, content, and structure of a website which are features that are directly viewed and accessed by the end-user. So when a company is looking for a front end developer, they are looking for someone who will be responsible for everything you see like an architect who designs a building. For front end development there are three languages only which are HTML, CSS, and javascript. Those are the three pillars that build any website. However, there are frameworks that facilitate the coding by giving pre-written standard code. There are many frameworks than you can count, but here are some examples: Bootstrap (HTML & CSS framework) AngularJS (javascript framework) jQUERY (javascript framework) Skills front end developers need: As we mentioned above, front end developers are responsible for a website’s aesthetics, although sometimes they don’t have to work from scratch. In some companies, they hire both a web-designer (he is responsible for the design) and a front end developer, in this case, the front end developer for coding the design only. Here are some of the required skills required to be a front end developer: A good understanding of front end programming languages Able to make a design responsive Knowledge of testing and debugging Knowledge of front end tools and features like CMS, APIs, and frameworks Back end: Back end programming languages define and handle how a website works. Back end addresses server-side processes, logic and data flow through the website. In a nutshell, Back end languages handle what you don’t see. A good example of this is when you search for a product on a website, back end languages are responsible for searching for the database for data on the item and returning it back to your browser. There are a lot of Back end programming languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, Java. And like front end, back end has a lot of frameworks such as: Laravel (PHP framework) Django (Python framework) Ruby on Rails (Ruby framework) Skills Back end developers need: Back end developers are responsible for making the website work through the back end language. They are also responsible for monitoring how the website is performing and implementing updates to improve functionalities. A back end developer is not limited to working on a website. He can work as a Software engineer or an IOS developer. Here are some of the required skills required to be a Back end developer: Good knowledge of database systems and manipulation languages (mostly SQL) Knowledge in Back end development languages such as Java, PHP, and python Knowledge of security compliance Strong problem-solving skills Knowledge of Back end frameworks   Conclusion Front end developers control how a website looks for the end-user and back-end developers are responsible for the server side processes and integrating them with the work of the front-end developers.  We hope that you have a clear understanding of front-end and back end development and know the difference between them.

What is an API
Web Development

What is an API?

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Nowadays, we are connected to each other and the world like never before. We are all used to the instant connectivity that puts everything literally at our fingertips from computers or mobile phones. We can purchase anything, share information or search for it and of course, text or call each other and check news using social media.  But how does it work? How seemingly very different applications connect with each other, how is data transferred from different devices and different applications and websites with each other?   What Does API Stand For?  API Stands For Application programming. API interface The reason we can do all of the activities above is the API which stands for Application Programming Interface.  The definition of API is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple intermediary devices. What that means is that an API provides a set of functions without the user having to worry about how they work.  Think, for example, a waiter in a restaurant. When you order a meal from a restaurant, the waiter writes your order and then goes to the kitchen tells the chef about the order and when it’s done, the waiter comes back with your food.  Here you don’t have to worry about what happens in the kitchen, you don’t have to worry about the food supply or the food getting burnt, but the waiter organizes all of that. The waiter in this example represents the API.  A real-world example would be the weather app on both IOS and Android devices. The weather app on both systems shows the weather anywhere in the world, but neither google nor apple have placed sensors all over the world instead they both partnered with the weather channel which provides them with an API that takes weather info from their database and displays it on your phone.   Uses of APIs System APIs: API is not used for sharing data only. They have a lot of use cases. One case is that app developers don’t have to worry setting up a wifi connection, drawing shapes on your screen or how to talk to the sensors of your device such as your gyroscope (allows your phone to know where it is in space can be used to put phone landscape mode for example) or GPS (to know your location like uber). Instead, the system provides a lot of APIs to simplify all of this. An app just asks the system to do what it needs.  It would be impossible for developers to write code for each function for each model that can use the app, doing so would millions of lines of code and would make any app considerably heavier.   Extend functionality: Smart devices are becoming more and more popular, and APIs are the reason why they exist in the first place. Now you can order your speaker to play music through google assistant, Siri or  Alexa this is possible because the speaker manufacturer took the API of each the assistant and integrated into the speaker so they can speak with each other and in turn allows you to control it via these softwares   A Gatekeeper: When an app asks for your permission to access something like your contacts or location, it doesn’t do so because it wants to but because the system does it for them and there’s no way around it. The system also allows you to revoke this permission anytime if you wish so. Also, a lot of websites use the same concept. You can use your Facebook and google account to login to a lot of websites. It’s fast and convenient however this gives those websites some data from your social media account to make an account for you and can be misused since a lot of these permissions can last for a long time.  This concept is what allowed Cambridge Analytica to collect massive data through the Facebook API. They created a personality quiz which asked for some of your personal info which is fine. However, the permission allowed the app to access your data for months even if you didn’t use it anymore, which allowed Cambridge Analytica to gain massive amounts of data and use it in the trump 2018 election campaign.

wordpress seo
Web Design, WordPress

WordPress SEO: The Source Of All Guides

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Table of Contents: SEO Overview What is SEO? Why SEO is Important for Your Website? WordPress SEO Best Practices Choose an SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme: Change Your “Permalinks” Structure to an SEO-Friendly Form: Create A “Sitemap” for Your WordPress Site: Register Your Website on Google Search Console: Use “Categories and Tags” Properly in WordPress: Internal Linking is Important: Add and Update Your Content Regularly: Focus on Content Quality: Do Keyword Research: Install a WordPress SEO Plugin: Top 5 WordPress SEO Plugins   Yoast SEO Plugin   SEMrush Plugin   All in One SEO Pack Plugin   Rank Math Plugin   SEOPress Plugin Performance and Security for better WordPress SEO   Optimize your WordPress Website Performance   Optimizing Your WordPress Website Security Conclusion   Welcome to the most comprehensive guide on the Internet for mastering WordPress SEO.  First of all, improving your WordPress SEO is not an option if you want more traffic, revenue, or conversions from your website. You might have heard that WordPress is SEO friendly, and this is why it’s the most popular and used content management system. Despite WordPress generating high-quality code that follows the SEO best practices, you need to do more work to enhance and optimize your website if you seek a better ranking on search engine pages.  In our guide, we’ll be covering the WordPress SEO from the ground up, so you’ll find a table of contents to make it easy for you to browse through the different parts of it. SEO Overview  We know that the process of optimizing WordPress for search engines looks intimidating for beginners, but don’t worry, it’s not that complicated. Let’s learn the basics first and then try to apply what you learned and you’ll feel the difference. What is SEO?  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. “SEO” is an expression used to express the process of optimizing a website for a better ranking on search engines to get more organic traffic.  Optimizing a website for search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, or so on is about creating that website well coded and formatted, making it easy for search engines to find your website and understand its content properly.  When people search the web for any topic you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear in a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and you’ll get more traffic/visitors visiting your website. Why SEO is Important for Your Website?  Search engines are the biggest source of traffic on the Internet, which makes them the most targeted source to get more traffic to a website. The point is search engines decide how to rank websites based on some advanced algorithms. They use these algorithms to understand the websites’ content and properly rank them on search engine results pages. However, these algorithms are not perfect. They still need help from website owners to understand the website content and to properly rank the website on the search engine results pages.  The point here is, if your website is not well-optimized for search engines, the search engine algorithms will not understand your website content and will not know how to rank it, and in this case, you are more likely to lose a lot of traffic.  The importance of SEO lies in optimizing your website for search engines to maximize the odds of getting more and more traffic as they are the biggest source of traffic on the Internet. WordPress SEO Best Practices The process of optimizing your website for search engines isn’t too complicated as you might think. And if you’re already using WordPress, you don’t have to be a tech geek to follow the search engines optimizations best practices. Let’s start by explaining some actionable steps towards optimizing a WordPress website for search engines. 1.Choose an SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme:  When it comes to optimizing a WordPress website for search engines, the first step is always to make sure to choose a well SEO-Optimized WordPress theme. A well SEO-optimized theme doesn’t mean to pick a well-looking one only. Still, you need to pick a theme that has a clean code that will give you two main advantages, the first one is, it will load fast, and the second is, the theme will be optimized to generate HTML code that follows the search engine optimization standards.  Therefore, you must choose a theme that is built with SEO in mind or in other words an SEO-friendly theme. When you look for a theme, try to look for one that offers features designed specifically to improve your SEO. Fortunately, there are hundreds of themes available that will suit your needs on both sides, well-designed and SEO-friendly. 2.Change Your “Permalinks” Structure to an SEO-Friendly Form:  Permalinks are short for “Permanent Link”, and they are the URLs that point to your website’s individual pages, posts, and other content. WordPress offers many options for automatic permalink types, some of them are based around numbers like the “Plan and Numeric” which aren’t perfect since they have no useful information for either search engines or users; instead, you can go with the “Post Name” option since it expresses clearly what the content of the page is about. Let’s see some examples: Non-SEO Friendly Permalinks: “https://v2.hostilica.com/blog/193847?p=2894/” SEO Friendly Permalinks: “https://v2.hostilica.com/blog/how-to-install-wordpress”  Notice that the SEO-Friendly permalinks are readable and the visitor can easily guess what he’ll see on the page by just looking at the page URL. On the other hand, with the Non-SEO Friendly permalinks, the user cannot guess what he’ll find on the page by looking at the page URL. Using SEO Friendly permalinks structure will make it easy for both humans and search engines to understand your website’s content, increasing your chances of getting a better ranking in search engine results pages. 3.Create A “Sitemap” for Your WordPress Site: A “Sitemap” is a list of all of your website pages and other content, it’s usually organized into a hierarchy and it provides a way to see how your website is structured and what it includes. The primary

Web Hosting

What is IPv6

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A long time ago, when the Internet started booming, we realized that IPv4 isn’t going to be enough to cover everyone to access the Internet. That’s why IPv6 was created in order to satisfy the deficiency of IP addresses caused by the limitations of IPv4.   What is IP in the first place? IP is short for internet protocol which is the main set of rules that governs the exchange or transmission of data between devices on separate networks. IP-based authentication is a means of verifying a network’s integrity by authenticating the source and destination of an IP packet. The IP address identifies each computer on the internet protocol address block. A network administrator can mark a specific IP address as trusted or “hide” from users and/or servers to prevent unauthorized access. Similarly, a network can be “masked” in order to allow users to send data to servers behind a firewall but remain anonymous (and thus, maintain privacy) while still allowing all other data transmitted over the internet protocol to be returned by the sender.   IPv6 the latest version IPv6 which is short for Internet Protocol version 6 refers to the newest version of the IP communications protocol, the packet data transport layer that offers a more reliable and secure structure for communication over the Internet and a location and identification system for devices on private networks. IPv6 has significant improvements over the previous IPv4 and incorporates several important security enhancements. These improvements included the use of an IP-based authentication mechanism for servers and applications, improvements in the transfer of malformed or incorrect IP packets, and improvements in bandwidth utilization. The first significant improvement in IPv6 is that IPv6 uses 128 bit addressing against IPv4 32 bit addressing, to put that into perspective IPv4 allows for about 4.29 billion addresses. In contrast, IPv6 allows for about 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses which allow for every person on earth to have billions of addresses for every device they own. Another major improvement to IPv6 is that there is no longer a need to use a port number for outgoing packets. The address that you use for a computer on the internet protocol layer can be anywhere from zero to sixteen. A packet lost within this range will be subject to an IP-wide lookup. While this might not seem like much, if there are many computers on a subnet or even a single network, each of which uses a different port, an IP packet can be returned to a sender using any one of the sixteen IP addresses, and the search will be completed for all of them. So why isn’t it used everywhere? As we mentioned briefly in the IPv4 deficiency article, IPv6 isn’t widespread yet and that’s because of compatibility. The problem with IPv6 is that it isn’t backward compatible with IPv4, so for example accessing a website that uses IPV6 from an IPv4 addressed device just wouldn’t work. Also moving to purely IPv6 equipment or dual stack equipment that can operate with both protocols is so expensive for ISPs and doesn’t give many benefits to the average customer, so ISPs are in no hurry to do the change.

ipv4
News, Web Hosting

Is IPv4 Running Out of The Market?

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In early September of 2008, Google launched its new web browser, Google Chrome. At the time, Google predicted, “In the next few months, half of all Internet users will have access to a high speed connection that provides data storage over both the Internet speed.” This prediction came just months before the company released its new browser. As it turns out, half of all Internet users now have access to a high speed connection that provides data storage over both the Wi-Fi speed and traditional broadband speed. All told, there are now 4.66 billion Internet users globally. The only way to satisfy Google’s promise of fast web access is to implement features that require both the Internet’s bandwidth and the processing power of IPv4 technology. And unfortunately, the Internet’s bandwidth has been steadily decreasing. As a matter of fact, it’s only been a matter of years that broadband connections have become so slow that it’s become a real pain to use them. We are also currently in the early stages of what is referred to as “IPv4 exhaustion.”   But what is IP exhaustion and why it’s happening “IPv4 exhaustion” refers to the exhaustion of the current pool of allocated IP addresses. Since the early 1980s, when the Internet began experiencing unprecedented growth, exhaustion has always been expected as the number of IP addresses allocated increased dramatically. The Internet’s technical complexity is made possible by many IP networking devices and networks, all of which are using up IP addresses to communicate with each other and perform functions on the Internet. There is currently less than enough space left for all the existing IP addresses to become used by the Internet. In order to cope up with this growing challenge, there are now strategies that help businesses save on resources in addressing all the incoming traffic. The heart of the problem is the fact that the quantity of IP addresses that are being assigned daily is decreasing. The Internet Protocol (IP) was initially developed to be an international IP network that would support electronic mail and file sharing between users on a global scale. However, this technology quickly became used for other purposes, including establishing reliable inter-office mail service and routing of voice calls on the Internet. This is where it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a significant increase in the number of IP addresses that are available through IPv4 or expansion initiatives. Instead, there were going to be significant increases in the number of unique IP addresses being assigned in the future. In order for us to continue to utilize the valuable IP network resources we already have, it makes sense for us to implement a system that will allow us to more precisely allocate those resources.   Solution and why isn’t it adopted: By now, you’re telling yourself of course people have found a solution. IPv6 has been available since 1999, and it utilizes 128 bit for addressing against IPv4 32 bit addressing. This means that the number of IPv6 addresses is 1028 times larger than the number of IPv4 addresses. So it can support the Internet for a very long time. But here is the catch, IPv6 isn’t backward compatible with IPv4 and shifting to IPv6 is expensive, so of course companies are in no hurry to change to IPv6. If you’re interested in learning more about the latest innovation in IP networking, you might want to visit the ipv6 article

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