Joe's Blog

NOTE: The updates referenced in this post will be released sometime on Friday, February 3rd (aka tomorrow). I am publishing this blog post a day early so that you have time to review it.

Since Stacks 2 launched in December, I have been going full steam ahead with new product releases and updates. But as you know, Stacks 2 has so many amazing features that I just had to dive in and add as many as I could. Some stacks even got complete rewrites! Here are a couple interesting stats…

New Stacks Released: 23

Updates Released: 219

When I saw these numbers, I was pretty floored. With that number of updates, thank God for the new Stacks 2 update process! Can you imagine trying to process that many updates in Stacks 1? It would have taken days!

The next wave is coming

So I have been talking about my next wave of updates for over a month now. That time has finally come. This update will affect 69 stacks! The wave of updates is targeted to only Stacks 2 users and will include…

• All of my stacks will now be in the Joe Workman group in the Stack Elements library.
• Reduce stack file size by 1/3. Stacks are already small but every little bit counts.
• You should see that Stacks will process through updates a little faster with these.
• Allows me to deploy updates in a more streamlined manner by updating multiple stacks at one time.
• Tidy up your stacks directory in Finder. This may require that you run a separate utility app that you can download. There are more details on this below.

This wave of updates consolidates “stack sets” down to a single stack. (For more background info on consolidate stacks, read the section later in this post.) This update gives me the power to release updates to all the stacks in a set with a single update! Previously, I would have to issue an update on a per stack basis. Therefore, in the long run, it will be less work for you to update your stacks. This is really the main reason for doing this. All of the other benefits that I listed above are just some bonuses.

Now I would be lying if I said that these updates weren’t going to make my life easier as well. Having a 1:1 ratio for stack to SKU will be huge for me. This will allow me to automate a lot of things on the backend that will free up time for me to work on more projects and updates. So this is a win-win for everyone!

This is not your normal update process. Please make sure that you review the instructions below on what you need to do to make this go smoothly. This lays the tracks for a lot of great updates in the future. So if you dont update now, then you won’t get the cool updates in the future.

What you need to do to update

As always with my products, there are 2 ways that you can get your updates. After you have updated your stacks, you can verify the version numbers of your stacks with the list below.

Re-download the stacks from your invoice.

You can re-download the individual stacks again from your original invoice when you purchased the stacks. If you purchased a bundle, most of the time, you will not be able to download the bundle again. However, you can download each stack individually. If you can not locate your invoice you can always get them sent to you from our Order Lookup Page.

Once you have downloaded your DMG files, simply run the installer and it will take care of everything for you! Its as simple as that!

Its probably a good idea to restart Rapidweaver after you update everything.

Auto update via Sparkle

Depending on the version you have installed. Some of the older stacks never had sparkle. Therefore, you may need to redownload those stacks as described above.

If you prefer to use the amazing auto update feature of Stacks 2, then there is an additional step that you will need to do after you have updated all of your stacks. First make sure that you have installed all the updates. Then you will need to download the StacksCleanup.app utility that I wrote. Launch the app and it will do all of the work for you. Then you are done!

Download StacksCleanup.app

The StacksCleanup.app will go through your entire Stacks library and search for duplicate stacks. I obviously have logic that will cleanup any duplicates that are a result of my updates. However, you may have duplicates from other developers. This app will not do anything with the duplicates found that it doesn’t have built in logic for. However, it will alert you that a duplicate exists. If you are not sure what to do with the duplicates that are found, you may want to contact that developer and ask what you should do.

In case you are paranoid, StacksCleanup.app will never delete anything from your system. It creates a StacksArchive folder inside your Rapidweaver support folders (the same location where your Stacks folder is). All of the duplicates that have been found will be backed up there. Feel free to keep this folder around or delete it if you feel comfortable that everything is as it should be.

Behind the scenes of consolidated stack sets

I wanted to give you all the behind the scenes details so that you are aware what is going on. When you purchase some of my products, you receive more than one stack. I have 23 of these “stack sets” available on my store. Right now, all of these stacks sets insert all of the stacks into your Stacks folder in Finder. However, with Stacks 2, we can now have consolidated stacks. This means that while a stack set can contain 5 different stacks, if you were to look in Finder, you would only see one.

Let’s take my PageLime stacks as an example. When you install the PageLime stacks, you will see 10 separate stacks inside your Stacks folder in Finder. What I can do now with Stacks 2 is ship a single PageLime.stack that will contain all 10 of the stacks.

From a UI perspective, nothing will change in the Stack Elements library. You will still see 10 PageLime stacks in your library under the Joe Workman group. For those who are getting your hopes up that this will add some sort of sub-grouping within the Stack library, it won’t! Consolidating the stacks will not affect the grouping at all. Everything will be the same in the UI.

Stacks to be updated

Here is a list of the stack sets that will get updated and the version that they will have after the update has been completed.

• Cartloom v2.0.0 (must update manually)
• ChinaTube v1.2.0 (must update manually)
• CMS-CSS v2.0.0 (must update manually)
• Comments v1.1.0
• Expose v1.1.0
• Flickr Slideshow v2.1.0
• GetSatisfaction v2.0.0 (must update manually)
• Link v2.0.0
• MovingBox v1.6.0
• Offsite v1.6.0 (must update manually)
• PageLime v1.1.0
• PowerGrid v1.1.0
• QuickFlip v2.0.0 (must update manually)
• Reblog v2.0.0 (formally RSS Full Content)
• RSS List v1.6.0
• RSS Select v1.6.0
• SchoolTube v1.1.0 (must update manually)
• Styled Stack v1.4.0
• TipTip v1.5.0
• Totem v1.2.0
• Tweets v1.5.0 (must update manually)
• TwitVid v1.4.0
• Viddler v1.4.0 (must update manually)
• Vimeo v1.7.0
• YouTube v1.7.0

Stacks 2 adoption status

After this set of updates, over 50% of my stacks will require Stacks 2. If you have not taken a look at Stacks 2 yet, then you really need to. Its an amazing product that allows me to develop more robust and easier to use stacks for you.

Now go forth and make your websites great!

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.

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

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.

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!