Once in a while you might get a call asking for your support for UMBC and its mission.

The person on the other end of the line? A UMBC student.

Five nights a week, UMBC students assemble at Alumni House and reach out to alumni and parents via the university’s Phonathon. The program was brought back to campus in 2011 after being outsourced to a third party for eight years.

Dayna Carpenter, UMBC’s director of annual giving, says that the university made the change because it was students who could make the most tangibleconnection to donors.

“People were really excited to talk to actual UMBC students and to have meaningful conversations,” said Carpenter.

Success is measured in numbers – and giving is up since the switch was made. But the relationships built by the Phonathon effort are just as important. Students and alumni swap stories about their time at UMBC, and a few students have received internship and job offers from alumni whom they’ve connected with during a phone call.

Logan Wern, UMBC’s Phonathon coordinator, says that students’ understanding of philanthropy has also increased: “Many of our students realize and understand the importance of fundraising and the good it does here on campus.”

One of the efforts that has benefited from the Phonathon is the Retriever Learning Center. The effort was heavily funded by alumni and it is a place beloved (and used) by many students.

“It’s because of the donors’ outstanding support that UMBC is able to offer so many resources for students and alumni alike,” says student caller Jordan Coffie ’14.

– Katharine Scrivener

Read the full issue of the Winter 2014 UMBC Magazine.

We've previously covered how to set up New Relic for a Rails app, as well as spent a lot of time looking at how to use the New Relic UI. And while the UI is very similar regardless of the language and framework you're using, actually getting New Relic set up can be radically different. Today, we will look at how to monitor a PHP application using New Relic. More specifically, we will set up a basic WordPress installation and get some performance data about it, in the New Relic dashboards.

Getting New Relic set up for Ruby is very much environment agnostic. We simply add the agent gem to our application at which point no matter how we deploy our app (Passenger + Apache, Thin + Nginx etc.), the gem will do the rest of the work to ensure we get our performance metrics. With the PHP version of the agent, the environment is a lot more important, as the agent is installed and lives on the box where the application will be deployed, rather than being part of any particular app. 

Let's set up a sandbox for us to play with (using an EC2 instance) and get a basic WordPress install up and running.

Setting Up Our Sandbox

We won't go into too much detail here as most of the things we need to do are well-documented elsewhere. But, here is a basic outline.

We need to launch an EC2 instance with Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS on it. If you don't want to set up an EC2 instance, you can just create a virtual machine instead using VirtualBox (or your VM tool of choice). If you're setting up an EC2 instance, you need to remember to do the following:

• download your key (if you've created a new one during the set up process), so that you can SSH into your instance
• add an extra rule to any security group you give to your instance to allow HTTP connections to the instance (so that we can actually access our WordPress blog via the browser later on)

Aside from that, everything else should be pretty straight forward and you should end up with a running instance (or virtual machine) that's ready for the next step.

We now need to install Apache, PHP and MySQL. With Ubuntu Server, it should be a simple matter of running the following commands:

sudo apt-get install tasksel
    sudo tasksel install lamp-server

You will need to select LAMP in the UI and you will also need to enter your MySQL password when prompted to do so (I just leave it blank since we don't care about this box being secure in any way). Once the installation is complete, we can then run a few commands to make sure that everything installed without trouble. 

First check that Apache is installed:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:~$ apache2 -V
    Server version: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
    Server built:   Jul 12 2013 13:37:10
    Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:30
    Server loaded:  APR 1.4.6, APR-Util 1.3.12
    Compiled using: APR 1.4.6, APR-Util 1.3.12
    Architecture:   64-bit
    Server MPM:     Prefork
      threaded:     no
        forked:     yes (variable process count)
    ...

Secondly, check that we have PHP:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:~$ php -i
    phpinfo()
    PHP Version => 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.10
    
    System => Linux ip-10-145-246-196 3.2.0-58-virtual #88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 17:58:13 UTC 2013 x86_64
    Build Date => Feb 28 2014 23:13:16
    Server API => Command Line Interface
    Virtual Directory Support => disabled
    Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php5/cli
    Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
    ...

And then check that we have MySQL:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:~$ mysql --version
    mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.35, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.2

We may also need to check that PHP is actually enabled in our Apache config, but since we installed lamp-server using tasksel we can be pretty sure that it is (and we can always do a quick phpinfo() script if we really want to check).

We can now install WordPress. Before we actually download it, we need to set up a database for it so. We can just follow the instructions from the Codex:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:~$ mysql
    Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
    Your MySQL connection id is 103
    Server version: 5.5.35-0ubuntu0.12.04.2 (Ubuntu)
    
    Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.
     
    mysql> CREATE DATABASE myblog1;
    Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
     
    mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON myblog1.* TO "myblog1_user"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "abc123";
    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
      
    mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
    Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
    
    mysql> EXIT
    Bye

I am going to call our new installation myblog1 (so the database for it is also named myblog1). We now need to run the following commands to get our blog running (don't forget to sudo when necessary):

cd /var/www
    wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
    tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz 
    mv wordpress myblog1
    cd myblog1
    mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Now fill in your database name, username and password into the config file (the hostname is localhost which is there by default). At this point you should be able to go to your browser, hit the right URL (in my case http://ec2-107-20-122-116.compute-1.amazonaws.com/myblog1) and WordPress will do its thing (it might not hurt to restart Apache before doing this sudo apache2 service restart).

Our sandbox is now complete and we can get started with installing New Relic.

Installing New Relic

As I mentioned previously, the PHP New Relic agent resides on the box, it therefore makes sense that you can install it using the operating system's package manager (apt-get since we're using Ubuntu). The first thing to do is to import the New Relic repository key:

wget -O - https://download.newrelic.com/548C16BF.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Now we add the New Relic repository itself to the system: 

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.newrelic.com/debian/ newrelic non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/newrelic.list'

At this point, we can use standard apt commands to install the agent:

sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install newrelic-php5

This fetches the PHP agent package from the repository and puts the agent install script on the system. The script is called newrelic-install and it lives in /usr/bin, so you should be able to run in from anywhere. The script is also somewhat unfortunately named, as you can use it to both install and uninstall New Relic from your system. In order to install New Relic, we need to run:

newrelic-install install

The script is interactive and will ask you to input your license key. You can find this by pressing the big red button when you're setting up a new PHP application within the New Relic UI.

If you have more than one PHP installation on your system, it will also ask you to pick which installation New Relic should be installed for (you can pick any number of installations including all of them). If you only have the one PHP on your system, the script will just use that one. It's worth noting that if your version of PHP is older than 5.2, the script will bail out as older versions are not supported.

If everything goes well, you should see the following message:

New Relic is now installed on your system. Congratulations!

The script will then print out some extra information for you including the location of the log files:

/var/log/newrelic/newrelic-daemon.log
    /var/log/newrelic/php_agent.log

As well as the fact that you need to restart your web server (and PHP-FPM if you're using it).

If you do restart your server and tail the daemon log, you should see something like this:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:/var/www/myblog1$ cat /var/log/newrelic/newrelic-daemon.log
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.063 (2008/main) warning: current file limit of 1024 is too low - attempting to increase it
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.064 (2008/main) info: increased file limit to 2048
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.064 (2008/main) info: New Relic 4.6 (release build 40 - "quetzalcoatlus" - "e3d29c5a2e5dc1ee455e831d589ecf5e18c7d6f0") [workers=1 listen='/tmp/.newrelic.sock'  pid=2008 ppid=2007 uid=0 euid=0 gid=0 egid=0 backtrace=no os='Linux' rel='3.2.0-58-virtual' mach='x86_64' ver='#88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 17' node='ip-10-145-246-196' startup=agent]
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.069 (2008/main) info: RPM config: proto='https' collector='collector.newrelic.com' proxy='none' certfile='/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt' certdir='/etc/ssl/certs'
    2014-03-23 05:35:14.928 (2008/connector) info: ['PHP Application'] 'Reporting to: https://rpm.newrelic.com/accounts/232928/applications/3262356'

Something named PHP Application is reporting. This is somewhat generic and totally doesn't look like our WordPress blog, but it's a good start. What this means is that all applications on your web server run and report as the same application to New Relic. This application has a default name of PHP Application. 

In our case, since we're only running one application (our WordPress install), we could actually jump into the New Relic UI and get reasonable stats for our blog. But, of course, we want to give our blog a better name and just in case, we want our server to serve more than one application. We also want to see how to separate apps from each other. We will look at how to do this shortly, but before we do, let's see what actually makes up a PHP agent.

What a Healthy Install Looks Like

There are two parts to the New Relic PHP agent. The first is a PHP extension, it's a shared object called newrelic.so. If we look at the agent configuration file:

/etc/php5/cli/conf.d/newrelic.ini

We can see it listed right at the top:

; This file contains the various settings for the New Relic PHP agent. There
    ; are many options, all of which are described in detail at the following URL:
    ; https://newrelic.com/docs/php/php-agent-phpini-settings
    ;
    
    ; If you use a full path to the extension you insulate yourself from the
    ; extension directory changing if you change PHP installations or versions.
    ; If you do not use an absolute path then the file must be installed in the
    ; active configuration's extension directory.
    extension = "newrelic.so"

This is the thing that will actually collect the stats from your apps, but it will not send the stats to New Relic, this is the job of the proxy daemon.

The agent daemon is a proxy between the PHP extension and the New Relic servers. Essentially, the PHP extension will give the data it collects to the daemon and the daemon will do things like batch it up and figure out when to send it to the server. You need to always make sure that the daemon is running, otherwise no data will be sent to New Relic. Luckily, by default, whenever you restart your server, the PHP extension will try to detect if the daemon is running and will start it, if it isn't.

A running proxy daemon has two processes. One is a monitor process and the second is the worker. The worker actually does the job of communicating with the New Relic servers, the monitoring process simply watches the worker and if the worker dies, for whatever reason, it will spawn a new one. You can stop the daemon by running:

/etc/init.d/newrelic-daemon stop

Which will send a shutdown signal to the monitoring process. The monitoring process will then kill the worker process and then shut itself down. If you ever need to kill the daemon manually, make sure you terminate the monitoring process first before killing the worker (otherwise a new worker will get spawned - obviously).

Configuring the Agent (and the Proxy Daemon)

We've already seen the New Relic PHP agent configuration file /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/newrelic.ini. Both the agent and the daemon are configured using this file.

This file is very well documented with all the options and their default values listed. Let's talk about the format of this file. The New Relic Ruby agent can be configured via YAML, which is a well-known format. The PHP agent is simply a text file, but we need a little bit of structure. Each variable in the file has one of four types (String, Boolean, Number, Duration). String and number are self-explanatory, boolean values can be true, on or 1 to indicate truthiness and false, off or 0 to indicate falsiness. Durations are strings with a particular format, for example: "1w3d23h10m" indicates one week, three days, 23 hours and ten minutes. The values for durations can be as granular as microseconds.

All variables in the file also have a 'scope'. There are three possible scopes: SYSTEM, PERDIR and SCRIPT. Variables that have SYSTEM scope can only be set in the global configuration file. Variables with a PERDIR scope can be set in the global configuration file and can also be overridden on a per directory basis. Variables with script scope can be global, per directory and can also be overridden programmatically.

For example, the most common configuration variable is `newrelic.appname`. This variable is a String type, it has a default value of PHP Application (now we know why we saw that value in the log file after we installed the agent and restarted the server). The scope of this variable is PERDIR which gives us an idea about how to override the application name for our WordPress blog. 

There are many other variables controlling things like the location of the log files, whether or not sql queries are recorded, the log level of the log output and so . I encourage you to study the newrelic.ini file to familiarise yourself with the options.

Configuring a Separate App for Our WordPress Blog 

We want to see a separate app in the New Relic UI for our WordPress blog, so let's see how we can get that going. Your options for per directory configuration are different depending on your stack, if you're using PHP-FPM, the steps are different than if you're using Nginx. In our case, since we're running straight Apache, we have two options.

Firstly, if we have a virtual host for our app, we can insert an IfModule block into our virtual host block and modify the name of the app there:

...
    <IfModule php5_module>
      php_value newrelic.appname "My Blog 1"
    </IfModule>
    ...

But I don't have a special virtual host just for the blog, so the other option is to use a .htaccess file. Ensure that you actually allow .htaccess files, by dumping the following in to your main virtual host:

<Directory /var/www/myblog1>
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
      AllowOverride All
      Order allow,deny
      allow from all
    </Directory>

We can now put an .htaccess file in the top level directory of our blog and put the following in it:

php_value newrelic.appname "My Blog 1"

The format is exactly the same as if I was putting it into the IfModule block. Now we just need to bounce our server. If we tail the daemon logs when the server restarts, we will see the following:

ubuntu@ip-10-145-246-196:/var/www/myblog1$ cat /var/log/newrelic/newrelic-daemon.log
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.063 (2008/main) warning: current file limit of 1024 is too low - attempting to increase it
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.064 (2008/main) info: increased file limit to 2048
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.064 (2008/main) info: New Relic 4.6 (release build 40 - "quetzalcoatlus" - "e3d29c5a2e5dc1ee455e831d589ecf5e18c7d6f0") [workers=1 listen='/tmp/.newrelic.sock'  pid=2008 ppid=2007 uid=0 euid=0 gid=0 egid=0 backtrace=no os='Linux' rel='3.2.0-58-virtual' mach='x86_64' ver='#88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 17' node='ip-10-145-246-196' startup=agent]
    2014-03-23 05:30:41.069 (2008/main) info: RPM config: proto='https' collector='collector.newrelic.com' proxy='none' certfile='/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt' certdir='/etc/ssl/certs'
    2014-03-23 05:35:14.928 (2008/connector) info: ['PHP Application'] 'Reporting to: https://rpm.newrelic.com/accounts/232928/applications/3262356'
    2014-03-23 06:07:58.768 (2008/connector) info: ['My Blog 1'] 'Reporting to: https://rpm.newrelic.com/accounts/232928/applications/3262424'

The PHP Application is still there, but now it has a friend which is our WordPress blog. And here it is in the UI:

We will now receive metrics as we browse our blog, both for the front-end and the admin interface. Since New Relic supports WordPress out of the box, the metrics should be broken up sensibly (when a framework is unsupported, the metrics will tend to be lumped together).

Updating the Agent & Daemon

New Relic is a complex piece of software and it's good to keep it up to date as bugs are fixed regularly and new features are added. Since we installed everything using apt-get, keeping things up to date is easy. We simply do the same thing we did to install it:

apt-get update
    apt-get install newrelic-php5

If we haven't installed another PHP on the system, we now simply need to restart our server and we'll be up to date. If there is a new PHP, we may need to re-run the newrelic-install script.

There is only one caveat to all of this. In certain situations, you may be running the New Relic proxy daemon separately from the agent, meaning that restarting the server does not automatically launch the daemon if one isn't running (this is called external daemon mode). There could be multiple reasons why you'd want to do this, for example, you might want a different user to own the daemon process so the logs are only visible to that user. In this situation, you have to remember to both restart the server and restart the proxy daemon. If you don't, you'll see 'protocol mismatch' errors in the logs.

Conclusion

As you can see, getting New Relic set up for a PHP application is very different from getting it set up for Ruby, your actual application doesn't even factor in the process, while the environment where you deploy is central. Luckily this means that if you're using any supported PHP framework, the process for setting up New Relic is exactly the same. Besides WordPress, most of the popular PHP frameworks are supported including Cake, Symphony and Laravel (version 4 and up). It is also possible to use New Relic with an unsupported framework, but you will have to put in some serious effort to get the metrics to make sense.

Baltimore City Teaching Residency – Apply by 4/14

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BCTR Residents come from all academic backgrounds and commit to become highly-effective teachers for Baltimore’s public schools.  Our 1-year program provides teacher training and certification while you work as a fulltime teacher, thus earning full salary and benefits throughout the 2014-15 school year.

Our training program includes:

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With more and more technology companies adopting remote working environments, having team members in different parts of the world is not uncommon any more.

Remote working comes with many benefits, but also unique challenges.

The biggest perk of working remotely is you are able to give all members the option to live and work where they are most productive. It’s often easier to stay focused without the day-to-day distractions of commuting to work and normal office interruptions.

But as we mentioned, many challenges persist.

Communication can be difficult.

Team-building can be very tough.

And working with time zones can throw you a curveball.

This can all be very tricky for design teams because we need to communicate regularly and extensively, share and pass files, brainstorm, and much more.

Any type of team needs to be on the same page, but this is especially true for design teams.

At Formstack, we’ve been a remote company for over a year now. We have team members from all departments working remotely across the country, and we also have a member of our development team in Poland.

As a company, we’ve learned quite a lot about remote working, and we want to share our insights with you.

Communication

Communicating is central to any design team.

When you work in the same office as your teammates, you can take a short walk or simply look across the room to talk with someone. It’s easy to bounce ideas around or steal 5 minutes of time to brainstorm.

As great as all the communication technologies are these days, you can’t beat face-to-face communication.

In a remote team scenario, impromptu discussions don’t happen as easily. You have to make an extra effort for these kinds of discussions.

Dealing with Facial Expressions and Tone of Voice

Text-based communication like instant messaging (IM) and email does a very poor job of conveying tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Yet, all of these things are essential components of good communication.

We know, for example, that a significant amount of communication is done through nonverbal cues.

We help solve this communication barrier quite simply by using video chats and gathering the team together from time to time.

Particularly, we use Google Hangouts for regular meetings and the new video feature on HipChat for quick chats.

We’ve seen designs can often come out underdeveloped when you remove face-to-face communication, but an open door policy with video communication software like Google Hangouts, or even just voice calls, is a good solution for this.

The Importance of Planning

Planning is already a critical process in a traditional design team whose members are in a single geographical location.

But then add the remote/distributed team factor into the mix, and planning becomes even more crucial and demanding.

As a development-design team, we’re always working both ahead and behind the rest of the development team.

What that means is we lay the groundwork for how designs will both look and function within the Formstack app. But once the rest of the development team hooks up all their functionality and does testing, it’s once again our turn to put the finishing touches on design.

It’s important for us to plan and understand timelines of not only our own team, but the entire development unit of our company.

We have to constantly communicate not only about the projects we’re working on that will go into development later, but also revisiting design work that has come back through the development cycle for us to finish.

Workflow

We have a couple of suggestions regarding workflow.

Utilize Time Zone Differences to Your Advantage

We mentioned earlier that Formstack has a developer residing in Poland.

Instead of this distance being a pain point for us, we actually benefit from this geographical difference because he gets to have a 6-hour head start every single workday.

Thus, we are able to jump right in and do design work on features that he has already completed while we were still sleeping.

The time zone difference is still tough, though — our Polish teammate does have to flex his hours a bit so he can have a window of time to work and communicate with the rest of our team.

Create a Style Library

Another workflow tip that’s helped our design team is the creation of a style library. We’ve built documentation around the uniform styles we want to remain consistent within our app. It has been an extremely useful tool as a remote team.

Our style library contains the snippets of code we need for easy implementation of common elements such as buttons, menus, utility classes, etc.

The library helps us design and build quicker without added communication around these standard elements.

You can build your own style library, whether you’re working as an in-app developer, front-end developer, or web/graphic designer. If you’re working mainly with graphics, your library might be as simple as a document containing consistent colors, icons, backgrounds, etc.

The goal of the style library is to maintain consistency within the product and to cut down any communication barriers.

Essential Tools

There are also a number of useful tools our design team uses that allow us to make remote working possible.

We’ve mentioned a couple already, but here are some other apps we love using:

Project Management: Basecamp

Basecamp is the project management software we use to share wireframes, mockups, and completed files. We also use it heavily for leaving comments and communicating.

Prototyping: InVision

InVision is a web and mobile prototyping tool that we use to show the UX and user flow of designs.

Version Control/Code Repo: GitHub

For our code repository and versioning software, we use GitHub. We also use the commenting system in GitHub.

Task-tracking: DailyStat.us

This app helps us keep tabs on our teammates’ tasks. This allows us to show each other what we finished yesterday, what we’re working on today, and what we need help with.

Other Things to Keep in Mind

Again, we can’t stress enough how important frequent communication really is to the success of a distributed team.

Also, we want to say that, just like riding a bike, remote working takes practice and a bit of getting used to. Don’t get discouraged if after a couple of months things don’t seem to be working out.

After a while, for example, planning and communicating just became second nature to us.

We like to set scheduled meeting times throughout the week where we’re communicating over video for brainstorming.

We also like to do quick daily video chats sometimes just to say "Hi, how’s it going?"

The way we see it, we also have to maintain personal work relationships — that non-distributed design teams have traditionally benefited from — as well.

Are you part of a remote team? What helps you stay connected and battle the communication gap? Give your advice in the comments below.

Related Content

• How to Use Your iPad for Real Design Work
• 10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer
• 7 Useful Git Tips for Beginners

About the Authors

Noah Coffey is a UX Developer at Formstack – an app that helps you design and build powerful online forms with no coding knowledge – where he creates and brings focus to the user experience of the application. Outside of work, Noah loves his time as a father, watching the Colts, and working with local charities and nonprofits. Connect with Noah on Twitter.

Aaron White is a UX Developer at Formstack where he works on streamlining the form-building process for users. Aaron is a proud father and veteran of the U.S. Army. He’s one of the company’s remote employees: Aaron works out of Bloomington, Indiana at a coworking space he founded called Cowork Btown. Connect with Aaron on Twitter.

The post How to Make Distributed Design Teams Work appeared first on Six Revisions.

The April edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, Photoshop extensions, game frameworks, educational resources, mobile frameworks, jQuery plugins, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Untrusted

Want to practice your JavaScript skills? Untrusted is an addictive video game that is played by tweaking and rewriting JavaScript code.

TypeGame

TypeGame lets you easily build mobile-friendly online games using a drag and drop builder. Combined with ActionScript 3.0, it lets you create powerful games in just minutes.

Typeform

Typeform is an easy way to set up forms that ask questions one at a time, much like a human conversation. It has a beautiful interface and is easy to set up.

Dropr

Dropr is an easy to set up portfolio for creatives. It’s responsive, looks the same (awesome) on every device, and it’s free.

GetTemplate

GetTemplate offers up responsive HTML5 and CSS3 templates for rapid web development. There are single-page templates, business templates, and more, with new ones added all the time.

Framework7

Framework7 is a full-featured HTML framework for building hybrid and web-based iOS7 apps with native features. It’s also great for prototyping functioning apps.

Nasty Icons

Nasty Icons is a set of edgy icons that can add some real interest to your designs. There are icons for plane crashes, vehicle fires, a head being stabbed in the eye, a stripper, a hangman, and much more.

Bootflat

Bootflat is an open source flat UI kit based on Bootstrap 3.1.1. It uses HTML5 and CSS3, is lightweight, and mobile first.

Fluidity

Fluidity takes the little bit of HTML that isn’t responsive right out of the box and fixes it. It’s only 115 bytes, and does things like make images and tables responsive.

UberVU Grid

UberVU Grid is a drag and drop library for 2D, resizable, responsive lists. It currently works as a horizontal grid, so you can configure the number of rows, while the columns will extend dynamically based on the items in the grid.

IxD Checklist

IxD Checklist is a handy checklist for making sure that your interaction designs are working as they should. It includes sections on affordance, feedback, simplicity, structure, and more.

Velositey

Velositey is a Photoshop extension for prototyping your designs in seconds. It makes it easy to set up the basics of your design, including layout and styles, based on an 1170px grid.

Really Good Emails

Need some HTML email design inspiration? Really Good Emails is a gallery of the best email designs out there, which you can browse based on type (alert, product sale, product update, etc.).

Badass Lady Creatives

Badass Lady Creatives is a site dedicated to featuring creative women from a variety of disciplines. It includes work from each to further inspire you.

Pixelcasts

Pixelcasts is a monthly video showing how real designers create things. It includes source downloads along with the videos, and every lesson you purchase is saved in your account for future reference.

Brick

Brick provides webfonts that actually look good. It’s completely open source, and fonts are served through Fastly’s industry-leading CDN.

Iconion

Iconion is an icon generator that lets you convert any icon font into PNG icons. You can add color, shadows, backgrounds, gradients, and more.

Mockuuups

Mockuuups is a set of four free hi-res iPhone 5S mockups. They have a fully adjustable background and display images.

MixItUp 2

MixItUp 2 is a jQuery plugin for animated filtering and sorting. It’s great for things like portfolios, galleries, and blogs.

Metalsmith

Metalsmith is a pluggable static site generator. All of the logic is handled by plugins that you simply chain together.

jQuery lightGallery

jQuery lightGallery is a lightweight lightbox gallery that works with both still images and video. It works with modern browsers, offers support for fade and slide effects, and you can put multiple sliders on a single page.

Triangly

Triangly lets you build a portfolio for your work just by adding your files to Dropbox, with no limits on how many projects you can include, and with the ability to present your images separately or in sets, among other features. It’s currently invitation only, but you can request an invite.

Jolly UI

Jolly UI is a set of over 200 hand-drawn vector UI elements to add personality to your projects. There’s a premium version for $29, and a free version that includes dozens of elements for web pages and apps.

JS Manners

Want to evaluate a 3rd party script before you use it on your website? JS Manners is a tool for scoring those scripts, including questions about performance, stability, footprint, flexibility, security, and compliance.

Slick

Slick is a fully responsive carousel that scales with its container. It uses CSS3 when available but works fine without it, among other features.

Comic Neue (free)

Comic Neue is a greatly improved typeface inspired by Comic Sans. It comes in a variety of weights and faces that even typophiles will appreciate.

Zona Pro ($10)

Zona Pro is a geometric sans-serif type family that includes eight styles plus matching italics. It’s inspired by geometric typefaces from the 1920s, with clean, highly readable shapes.

Marigny ($50+)

Marigny is a casual typeface consisting of five weights, from thin to black. It also includes a full set of small caps, fancy swash caps, and more.

Maritime Champion ($48)

Maritime Champion is a seaworthy all-caps font thatcomes in six weights, along with a Shoreline style with an additional four weights.

Laski Slab ($42+)

Laski Slab is a suite of twenty fonts designed for editorial purposes, originally developed for an online children’s magazine.

Science White ($10+)

Science White is a companion font to Science Noire, without the spider web. It comes in 3 weights, plus italics.

Lame Font (free)

Lame Font is a display typeface with a decidedly art deco slant.

Strato ($10)

Strato is a layered, slightly humanist sans serif typeface inspired by the city of Rome. It’s proportionally based on classical Roman inscriptions, but with a modern twist.

Wonderhand ($275)

Wonderhand is an extensive family of scripts, in seven widths and three weights. It has a total of 63 fonts, with two sets of alternate characters and automatic features to better imitate handwriting.

Ciao Bella ($10.50)

Ciao Bella is a sophisticated, hand-drawn copperplate script that includes four ornament fonts. It uses OpenType features to create a more genuine hand-lettered look.

1,075 Pixel-Perfect Vector Icons from Icons Solid – only $19!

Press release...

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is accepting applications for its new Health Information Technology Master's Program, offered beginning fall 2014.

As technology infiltrates the healthcare industry, the health IT field continues to grow at a rapid pace. The industry presents significant career potential, with postings for health care informatics jobs rising 53% between 2007 and 2012.

Given its large population and dynamic healthcare environment, the Baltimore-Washington area is poised for significant continued growth in the health IT field. UMBC, located just outside of Baltimore, offers a convenient location for industry professionals to receive the credentials needed to move into high-demand health IT roles.

UMBC's MPS in Health IT is an excellent choice for those who already have a degree in an IT or healthcare-related discipline, as well as those whose career has taken them into the field of healthcare IT. Designed with working professionals in mind, the program offers flexible evening, weekend and hybrid course options.

Those interested in learning more about the program can attend UMBC's Professional Graduate Programs Open House on April 23, 2014, for an opportunity to learn more about the curriculum and format, as well as receive information on financing and meet Career Services representatives. Those interested should RSVP in advance.