Joe Workman's Blog

I’m on fire… 6 new stacks!

Earlier this month I said that I had 12 awesome stacks to release this month. I have already released 9 stacks this month. And if you can do some simple math, this means that I have developed a few more additional stacks to bring the total to 15! This last set of stacks is actually pretty exciting (not that I am biased or anything). Lets dig in and see all the new goodies we’ve got here…

In celebration of Macworld this week, get 20% off my entire store with the coupon code MACWORLD. This include all the awesome new stacks below!

NOTE: These products don’t yet have videos. I will be editing and uploading those within a day.

GeoTarget

This stack pushes the barriers and does what no other stack has done before. GeoTarget will allow you to customize the content of your site to where your visitors are geographically. You can target your content by country, region/state and even down to the city level! This is perfect for targeting promotions to a particular set of customers. You can also use this to serve different translations of your content to users based on the country they are logging in from.

GeoTarget works by analyzing your visitor’s ip address and correlating the location via the iPInfoDB geolocation database. Region and city level data is not available in all countries. I also want to stress that you need to do some good testing (there is a test mode built right into the stack) before you try to go to the city level. The accuracy is not the best and could be up to 50 or more miles away. To get up and running with this new stack, you will need to register for a free iPInfoDB API key.

For more info, check out the GeoTarget Product Page.

SpecialFx

The SpecialFx stack will allow you to add some cool effects to your stacks. You can achieve 1000 different effects! Effects can happen on page load, on hover, click, and even by clicking a link or button. These effects can be used to draw attention to a section of your page, reveal new content and hide it away. You can easily play for an hour on different effects while revealing the power and flexibility of this stack. SpecialFX integrates perfectly with the Sweet Button stack!

For more info, check out the SpecialFx Product Page.

Fluid Columns

Fluid Columns is a responsive design based columns stack. If you have a responsive or variable width site, this stack will allow you to create columns on your website that will be dynamically rearranged based on the browser width. Fluid Columns supports multiple layout modes for adjusting how our content will be arranged. Masonry stamp mode is pretty awesome. It will allow you to define a frame that the top corner of the stack and Fluid Columns will dynamically arrange all of the columns around that frame.

Fluid Columns also provides shortcut settings for setting a uniform style each column: width, height, background color, and rounded corners.

For more info, check out the Fluid Columns Product Page.

Houdini

Houdini will magically transport your stacks into previously mysterious territories! You can perform magic on with your sidebar, footer, extra content areas with zero coding! Simply select from the drop down menu where you want your content to be and Houdini will make sure it gets there! Now if you want complete control, then inserting a provided snippet of code anywhere on the page is all that is required.

Houdini works perfectly with Post Office to place a newsletter signup form right in your sidebar!

For more info, check out the Houdini Product Page.

Preloader

Preloader will place temporary blank divs with customizable loading images as placeholders until images are loaded onto your webpage. This will give your webpages a cleaner look while they are being downloaded. There are a bunch of awesome loading images that ship with Preloader, however, you can easily provide your own.

Preloader can also add a nice styled caption to your image. The caption is dynamically pulled from the images alt tag.

For more info, check out the Preloader Product Page.

Warehouse Image

Technically this stack was released as a free beta last week. However, its now official! Since stacks began, users have wanted to warehouse images. You can now easily place an image onto you stacks page by referencing it via a url or linking it via Rapidweaver resources.

For more info, check out the Warehouse Image Product Page.

Image Warehousing in Stacks

Ever since the dawn of my development in Stacks, users have wanted to warehouse the images used in my many image stacks. Now that Stacks 2 is here, I have more elaborate APIs where allowing this is now possible! I have one new free stack today as well as 9 really good updates to existing image stacks.

In case you are new to this topic, image warehousing is the process of storing your images on an external server. This could be your own webserver, AmazonS3, or maybe even Dropbox. All of the stacks below now support image warehousing. This means that you no longer have to drag and drop and image into the stack. You can simply configure the url to your warehoused image and you are good to go.

New Warehouse Image

This is very simple image stack that allows you to place a warehoused image onto your webpage. There are not fancy options, CSS or tricks here. You get an image, that’s it.

I have also added an interesting feature into this stack. When you use the link to to specify the url to your image, if you add a class attribute to that link, that class will also be added to the image. This will allow you to add classed that may be required to CSS or javascript library that you want to use the image with.

I have not taken the time to build a product page for this stack yet. However, you can download it here.

Fluid Image

I recently released this stack and as you know it allows you to have an image that will fit perfectly into a responsively designed site. I am happy to say that you can now warehouse these images as well!

For more info, check out the Fluid Image Product page.

Tip: If you use this stack in combination of my Cycler stack. Not only can you have a slider with warehoused images (as you can with almost any stack in this post) but you will also turn Cycler into a completely responsive variable width slider as well!

Image Safe

Image Safe is an awesome way to protect your images from visitors from easily copying your image. It stops users from being able to drag them off your website or save them via a right click menu. As you may guess, you can now protect your warehoused images with Image Safe.

For more info, check out the Image Safe Product page.

Fancy Image Stacks

I will stop boring you now with the details of each and every update. There are a total of 6 Fancy Image stacks that have been updated to support image warehousing. However a few of these stacks how a pretty nice overhaul with Stacks 2. Below are the links to all of the stacks that got this makeover. A couple of my favorites here are Image Hover and Popup Caption.

Image Hover Stack

Magnify Image Stack

Popup Caption Stack

Preview Image Stack

Puzzle Stack

Reflection Stack

Zoom Image Stack

Monitor your websites with Siren

Siren is definitely like no other stack out there. Siren will monitor any url and tell you when its down. You can also have it verify that certain content exists on your webpage and alarm on that. It displays alarms to the browser as well as it can email you! This is a great tool to monitor and alert both you or your clients when a site goes down.

For more info, head over to the Siren Product Page.

Important Note: It does not make sense to monitor the same domain that you install Siren on. Why? When your website is down, so is Siren! Its recommended that you install this on a separate domain, preferably one that is on a completely different server as well. This could be a great tool to allow you to offer monitoring services for your web design customers as well.

Please review our FAQ on how to schedule Siren to run on at regular intervals.

3 New Bargain Stacks

I have 3 stacks that are all do one small thing but do it very well! All of the below stacks are available now on my store for only $0.95.

Date Time

Date Time will dynamically display today’s date or the date that your webpage was last published. You can chose from over a dozen different date and time formats. It also supports localization in 25 different languages! You can also style the text size and color. For more info, check out the Date Time Product Page.

Fluid Image

Fluid Image is a responsive design based image stack. If you have a responsive or variable width site, this stack will allow the image to grow and shrink in size with your site instead of just sitting there at the same fixed height and width. You can even apply CSS borders, corner radius and drop shadows to your image. For more info, check out the Fluid Image Product Page.

Markdown

Markdown is getting crazy popular. Now you can type your webpage contents directly in Markdown and have it converted to HTML for you automatically! The stack comes with a great cheat sheet built-in in order to help you get up to speed with the Markdown syntax. For more info, check out the Markdown Product Page.

I hope that you enjoy these new stacks!

5 Free New Stacks

Last month was one of my biggest releases of all time. I released 8 new stacks and most of them were big ones. They are big elaborate stacks that rival plugins in the amount of setting and configurations available. However, my list of small simpler stacks was growing. So this month I have 12 stacks to release. All of them tend lean towards the simpler side of things. Today I am going to release 5 of these new stacks for free!

Auto Refresh

This is a really simple stack that allows you to auto refresh your webpage. Just define the number of seconds that you want to refresh and away you go! For more info, check out the Auto Refresh Product Page.

Elevator

A couple weeks ago, a community favorite, Ed Brenner asked me to develop this stack for him. I thought that it was a nice little stack idea! Inspired by the UItoTop jQuery Plugin, Elevator will dynamically add a scroll to top button onto your webpage once the user has scroll below a defined point on your webpage. Once you click on the button, you will be lifted back to the top of the page.For more info, check out the Elevator Product Page.

Note: Most of you probably know that DooBox recently released Chauffeur. This stack achieves the same results as Elevator. However, Chauffeur adds some really nice features that Elevator leaves out. I recommend that you check out Chauffeur.

Locker

Locker is a very simple stack that will stop any stack that’s put in it from displaying in preview as well as from publishing. It was brought to my attention that a similar stack with this functionality was no longer available. So I quickly threw it together as it can be very useful to have around. Some great uses for this stack could be to take notes or temporarily hide a stack that you spent a lot of time setting up. For more info, check out the Locker Product Page.

Server Info

I actually announced this stack on twitter a couple weeks ago but did not have time to officially launch it. Server Info will display all of your Apache web server information on a webpage for you. This stack is great for helping us developers troubleshoot your site issues. For more info, check out the Server Info Product Page.

Static Height

This is another one that I tweeted about but never officially released. I have wanted to develop this stack forever! So I finally took the 10 mins to do it and here it is. This stack obviously allows you to define a static height. It also ads a nice options of scrolling your content if it bigger than the size allotted. For more info, check out the Static Height Product Page.

Reflections on 2011 and Some Holiday Cheer

I think that this year flew by faster than any other year in history. Personally this has been one of the biggest years of my professional life! Here are a some of the highlights…

• When I joined the rat race, I had set a goal to be on my own by the time I was 30. It overwhelms me when I realize that I actually hit that goal! I got out of the rat race and have been a full time indie developer since February. It was 12 years of starting businesses and I made it by 6 months! (I turned 31 on August 4th.)
• Soon after that, in April, I released my website in its current form. It still amazes me to this day how much I still love the site. Big thanks to my good buddy KaL Michael for assisting in the design.
• I have released 27 awesome new stacks this year. Many of these have pushed the envelope of what can be done in a stack. They are some of the most powerful stacks out there. Check out my 2011 Stacks Pack.
• Since I am an indie, I had the opportunity to live in Brazil for the entire summer. This was an amazing experience for me and my family. I cannot wait to do that again.
• Back in January, I attended my first Big Nerd Ranch course on Cocoa. I have been sharpening my Cocoa sword all year and stay tuned for some amazing things on 2012.
• I attended my first WWDC conference and had the honor of being present for Steve Jobs’ last keynote.
• While I was spending the summer in Brazil, I had an opportunity to jumpstart my Mac application development by acquiring an awesome application named DomainBrain. It was a perfect fit in my current product set. If you have not checked it out yet, what are you waiting for?
• Earlier this year I started doing live webcast tutorials on web development and all things Mac. While I have stopped doing the shows live, I still record the videos and released them as podcasts. I also recently got my podcasts into iTunes! So you can subscribe and listen to my shows on all your favorite apple devices. If you haven’t, you should check out my podcasts.
• Stacks2 was released! While all of the credit for Stacks2 goes to Isaiah, I released 8 awesome new stacks that again pushed the limits of stacks.
• Last but definitely not least, I started my special project!!!! While I still can’t say what it is, I can’t wait to get this into you hands in 2012.

Obviously none of this would have been possible without you, my customers and friends! Thank you very much for supporting me and allowing me to help you make your websites great! I truly am blessed to be apart of such a great community. I could not have asked for anything better! I want to wish you all a Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!

Now time for some goodies…

Stacks 2 Launch Special

You can still take advantage of my launch special. You’ll receive all 8 of my new stacks build just for Stacks 2 for 50% off! This is a limited time bundle, so you better act fast if you think you might want these stacks. You can pick these up at the Stacks 2 Launch Special page now.

2009 Stacks Pack Sale

By popular demand, I have extended the biggest sale that I have ever done until 12/31. You can pick up my 2009 Stacks Pack for only $49! This is over 80% off the retail price if you were to purchase all of these stacks individually. To get this awesome deal simply use the discount code HappyHolidays at checkout.

DomainBrain donates to charity: water

Just a few days ago, I participated in Apps for Water. All sales of DomainBrain on 12/20 have been donated to charity: water. I would like to try to raise a little more money, so I have desired to keep the 20% discount going until 12/31. I will donate 50% of all sales of DomainBrain to charity: water. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, use the discount code appsforwater at check out.

Free Server Info Stack

I whipped up this useful little stack mostly for selfish reasons. Once you deploy this stack, it will tell you more than you have ever wanted to know about your webserver. This can be extremely helpful for troubleshooting why some things might not be working on your website. This stack will work in both Stacks 1.x and Stacks 2. I have not yet made a product page for this stack yet but you can download it here.

Free Static Height Stack

I have been wanting to develop this stack forever. I finally took the 10 minutes today to bang it out for you. It’s a useful stack that will allow you to define a static height. It also allows you to enable a scrollbar so that users can scroll through your content. This stack will work in both Stacks 1.x and Stacks 2. I have not yet made a product page for Static Height yet but you can download it here.

P.S. We have some major stack updates coming in January for all Stacks 2 users. If you have not upgraded yet, I recommend that you do!

Apps for Water

I am happy to announce that we participating in Apps for Water. All sales of DomainBrain today will be donated to Charity: Water. Charity: water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of public donations directly fund water projects.

We are also giving 20% discount on DomainBrain. Simply use the discount code appsforwater.

Speech Bubbles Rewritten for Stacks 2

I had a support case today for Speech Bubbles and decided to go ahead and completely rewrite it for Stacks 2. Enjoy! You can get the update via Stacks 2 sparkle. This is a free update to all current owners.

stackupdates:

SpeechBubbles - v2.0.0

---

1. New! New version built just for Stacks 2!!
2. New! 15 new gradient styles to choose from.
3. New! Full drop shadow control.
4. New! Control over padding and corner radius.

Go check out Speech Bubbles now.

Stacks 2 Launch Special

More than likely, you already know that Stacks 2 has been released as a public beta. I have to say that Stacks 2 is going to knock your socks off! It has a completely new user interface. The settings HUD, that we all know so well, has been replaced with a nicely organized settings pane. In addition to all stacks that we love we now have Stacks Templates and Stacks Media. If you would like a nice overview of the Stacks 2 update, check out my video Stacks 2 in 10 mins.

The Stacks API has also grown exponentially. This new API will allow me to provide even more powerful and robust stacks for your websites; all while making them easier to use! I have worked hard to provide 8 amazing new stacks to celebrate the Stacks 2 launch.

For a limited time, you can pick up all of them for 50% off! For more details head over to the Stacks 2 Launch Special page.

Justify Text

Justify Text is very simple. It does not even have any extra settings to tweak. Justify Text acts just like a normal text stack, however, your text will be justified on the left and right. This is the same effect that you seen in magazines and books. By justifying your text, you will give the text of your website a much cleaner and more professional look.

Justify Text will work with both Stacks 1.4 and Stacks 2. It is available for FREE download on the Justify Text product page.

Lines

Lines provides a set of over a dozen beautifully styled horizontal lines. These are perfect for dividing pages with a lot of content into different sections. Since the styles are done completely in CSS, there are no images used. This also allows you full customization on color, size and more.

Lines was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $0.95 over at the Lines product page.

Post Office

Post Office is a full featured email subscription manager. On the surface, it is a beautiful, customizable form that users can subscribe or unsubscribe from your email list. After the user successfully submits the form, the button has the ability to change color as well as display a thank you message.

Behind the scenes, Post Office is a power customer management system. All you need to do is supply a mysql database and Post Office will take care of the rest. It will both subscribe and unsubscribe users and allow you to export your active subscribers to a CSV file. Post Office even support customer specific unsubscribe links that you can add to your emails!

Now if you are already using a 3rd party email vendor, Post Office supports the following vendors out of the box: Madmimi, MailChimp, Aweber, and Newsletter Mailer. We are already working on adding integrations with Vertical Response and Campaign Monitor.

Post Office was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $14.95 over at the Post Office product page.

Power Grid CSV

Tables are a staple in web design. Over the years we have continued to try and develop new and better ways to let you display your table data. We first launched Rows which was very successful. Then earlier this year we released Power Grid which took things to the next level. Well now I am happy to save that we have nailed it. Power Grid CSV is the easiest and most powerful way to create and maintain your tables.

Power Grid CSV allows you to use a properly formatted CSV file (we recommend Numbers.app) to be imported via a URL link, Rapidweaver resources or locally on your webserver. Dropbox could be a perfect solution for you here! Power Grid CSV has more features than you can shake a stick at. Its searchable, sortable, scrollable, pageable (is that a word?) and supports both headers & footers. It also has a ton of styling features: alternating row colors, border styles, row and column highlights, text alignment and much more.

Traditionally, CSV files only support plain text. Obviously you are going to want to have more data in your tables than just text. Power Grid CSV support both HTML and Markdown. This will allow you to add images, links, text formatting and more to your tables. Now if the thought of using HTML scares you, don’t worry, you will love the Markdown support! Markdown is a widely used and has a much simpler syntax so that you don’t need to know how to code.

Image: ![My Image](http://joeworkman.net/depot/site-images/joeworkman.png)
Link: [My Link](http://joeworkman.net/)
Email: <support@joeworkman.net>

There is something especially cool about the above email syntax. Power Grid CSV will display the email link as it should in the web browser. However, the source code is encoded so that trolls cannot your webpages for urls. How cool is that?!? For more information on markdown, check out the Markdown Project on Daring Fireball.

Power Grid CSV was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $9.95 over at the Power Grid CSV product page.

Sweet Button

After I finished this stack, the first thing that I could say was this button is sweeeeeeeeeeet! Sweet Button allows you to add any link that you want to the button. This could be to a url, Rapidweaver resource or a local file on your web server. You can even use Sweet Button to maybe launch a lightbox, add a cart or other cool javascript widget. Simply add the proper class or attributes to the link and you are good to go.

Sweet Button has a very unique and stylish gradient that can be turned off if you see fit. And like many other buttons, you can customize the color, size, roundness, and text. However, there are a couple things that make Sweet button stand out.

Sweet Button ships with 93 customizable icons! These icons not only can be changed color but they scale perfectly as you make your button bigger or smaller. There are icons for everything from arrows to airplanes. You are bound to find something that fits your needs perfectly.

Sweet Button allows for a custom click state. This mean that after the user has clicked a button, you can change the color, text and icon! This is perfect for links such as downloads where you could display a thank you message to your visitors. Come on, say it with me… that is sweeeeeeet! :-)

Sweet Button was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $9.95 over at the Sweet Button product page.

Today

Today is a nice and simple stack that displays an iCal-esque data widget onto your webpage. You can configure Today to display a static date, or to always dynamically display today’s date. Today support 15 differently languages so that the date is always displayed in your local format. Today comes with 2 different themes and allows you to customize the color of the calendar header.

Today was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $4.95 over at the Today product page.

Top Sites

If you have ever added icloud.com to Top Sites in Safari, you will notice that a custom page is cached, not the page that you see while browsing. Well the Top Sites stack lets you do just that with your Rapidweaver website. When your page gets added into Top Sites, within a few hours, the page configured in this stack will be used instead!

Top Sites stack ships with a pre-configured page that you can leverage. All you need to do is add an image into your site resources and you are done. However, you also have the ability to develop your own custom page and simply point the stack to it.

Top Sites was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $0.95 over at the Top Sites product page.

Vimeo Wall

Vimeo Wall may now take the crown for the most powerful stack that I have developed. Vimeo Wall support over 10 ways to query your Vimeo videos: albums, group, channel and more. It has the ability to display your videos in a customizable gallery. The gallery iteself can be made into a slider itself, so that your users can easily navigate through your videos. The videos can either be played in a static or lightbox player.

Vimeo Wall is more than just a way for you to display your videos. It keeps track of your visitors progress on each video. Therefore, if a user has not finished watching a video and want to conitue it later, Vimeo Wall will store thier porgress for up to one year! When the user comes back to your site, Vimeo Wall will take them to exactly where they left off!

For a full working example of Vimeo Wall, go check out my new Tutorials page and watch some of my latest podcasts and videos.

Vimeo Wall was developed specifically for Stacks 2. Its available for $14.95 over at the Vimeo Wall product page.