Today, creating cool videos for any platform (web, TV, etc.) is not that hard with the help of high-quality footage.

VideoBlocks is a professional stock footage website to find 100,000+ stock videos, motion backgrounds, sound effects, production music and more.

Info: VideoBlocks is giving away 3 * 1 month (unlimited downloads) subscriptions ($79 value/each) to WRD readers and details can be found at the end of this post.

The website has a huge library which is well-categorized (slow-motion, nature, people, locations or cartoon, ambiance, horror.. for sounds) which eases browsing and locating the right resources.

In contrary to what you would expect, they are offered for a good price with a single plan of “unlimited downloads”. They can be used in any type of projects and no additional fees for that.

VideoBlocks’ library grows regularly with new resources being added each day and their footage is already being used by media giants ABC, MTV or National Geographic.

How to join the giveaway?

Commenting to this post is enough. Winners will be selected on 27 March 2013 (1 week later) with the query below and announced as an update to this post.:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_id=3885 AND comment_approved=1 AND comment_type='' GROUP BY comment_author_email ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

Good luck.

The winners:

• dlv (comment #1182947)
• Luca (comment #1182707)
• pablo luis rey (comment #1186747)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.

Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets and similar spreadsheet apps have powerful formula functions.

Formula.js is a JavaScript library that brings most of these formulas to web developers.

The formulas are listed under multiple categories like date/time, text, logical, financial and much more.

Also, besides client-side it works with nodejs (to be released soon) as well.

Speeding up websites has a huge effect on the success of the website as it directly effects the user experience and search engine rankings.

Browser Diet is a very nice guide that lists the steps needed to be taken for a better front-end performance.

It is created by a team of experts that work on large projects and presents the “best practices” under categories like HTML ,CSS, JS, server, images and more.

Also, the guide is not only listing these practices but also sharing “how to implement them” in detail.

Simply, a must-bookmark (and it is open source).

Scout is a free application (with Windows and Mac versions) that allows anyone to make use of Compass and Sass without the complexity of Ruby + command line.

The application runs Sass and Compass in a self-contained Ruby environment, has support for defining multiple projects and various settings to customize the use.

Using Scout, we can define custom output folders (so that any generated CSS can be directly written into our project folders) and also set the style of the CSS (nested, compressed, etc.).

And, a logging interface displays every action performed by the app (with any errors occurred).

A high-quality photo has the power of converting any design into something beautiful. And, that’s usually where the stock photo providers come in.

Depositphotos, one of the biggest stock photo providers, has a huge database of photos and vector images from thousands of contributors.

I remember their launch ~3 years ago, had used them those dates and now see that they grew to 12+ million images.

Well, such many images can look hard to browse but they have a good categorization and search system for narrowing the results.

It is possible to include/exclude keywords, choose orientation and filter by color (which I think is the greatest option).

Lately, they announced the acceptance of videos from their contributors as well, so, stock videos under the same service doesn’t seem so far.

Pricing

Once, stock images were costing hundreds of dollars it was hard to use them for every project. But, the pricing of Depositphotos is very reachable.

Images have different prices for their sizes but, as a short info, web-ready images would cost ~$2-4/each dollars and print-ready ones will be ~$8-10/each which is so reasonable for the result they help us to create (the even become cheaper with the subscription plans).

Become a contributor

For any photographer, becoming a Depositphotos contributor is a great way of presenting and sharing the work you created.

They have a pretty straightforward revenue-sharing model, have a modern uploader and you can always view the stats of your inventory.

Also, if you are shooting videos, this may be a good time to submit them in order to catch their launch of the videos section.

Conclusion

You should definitely check Depositphotos, browse through their repository and see how easy + good-priced the service is.

PredictionIO is an open source prediction engine that allows developers to implement predictive features to their sites/apps.

Such predictive features can be the recommendations of videos, articles, deals, photos or documents, restaurants, etc. that are specific to a given user (which we see in many sites).

The application is designed to work with big data (supports Hadoop, Mahout, Cascading and Scalding) and has SDKs for major programming/scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Java and -soon- PHP).

It has a REST API for integrating the prediction features into apps and an admin interface helps setting up everything.

PredictionIO can be installed on any platform (runs on JVM), it is in the beta phase but still very valuable considering it is hard to find an alternative in that field.

If you prefer creating websites using WordPress and make use of ready-to-use themes, MightyDeals has an offer that you may like.

MightyDeals, the creative deals website, is offering a pack of 17 high-quality WordPress themes by DX Themes for a very good price ($17 rather than $289).

The themes in the bundle include ones for creatives, businesses, parents/kids, hotels and much more.

All of them work cross-browser and most are responsive down-to-mobile.

It is possible to find features like portfolio management, responsive image sliders, AJAX contact forms, custom sidebars, testimonial widgets, price tables, SEO control, etc.

To sum up, even if only a single item in the bundle, will be a fit for a project of yours, it is still a good deal.

When working on a project, after each CSS or JavaScript update, the need to refresh the browser is a time-loss (and it is usually done 10s of times).

Tincr, a Chrome extension, solves this by integrating itself into Chrome’s Developer Tools and auto-refreshing the browser once these files are changed.

It is not bound to any IDE and works with all of them. There are several built-in project types (Ruby on Rails, Chrome extensions, Atlasian projects..) and custom ones can be created for any custom CSS/JS structure.

Also, it -kinda- converts the Developer Tools into an IDE by adding an auto-save feature to changes made to the code from Developer Tools

CanvasQuery is a JavaScript library that eases working with HTML5 canvas and adds lots of new methods to it.

The library provides a jQuery-like syntax and methods added are mostly for image manipulation (like masks, blur, crop or fill mask).

It also brings blend modes, new shapes, text wrapping and much more.

CanvasQuery can be used with or without jQuery, has methods for color conversion and can be extended with plugins.

SVG.js is a JavaScript library for working (manipulating and animating) with SVG without any complexity.

The library is standalone, very lightweight in size (5kb gzipped) and has lots of features.

There are built-in methods for creating shapes (rectangle, circle, polygon, etc.) or defining images.

They can all be animated with size, position, color or any other properties and be interacted with standard JavaScript events.

It has support for grouping elements for mass manipulations, filling them is possible and a unified API simplifies working with the library.

SVG.js is extendable with plugins and there are already various plugins (like dragging or easing).