General by Leon Hitchens on 18 May, 2017
When I first started freelancing, I had no clue what I was doing. I didn’t know about taxes, invoicing, or best practices. Now, after a year of working, I’ve managed to get a better handle on freelancing. I know what my time is worth, how to pay taxes each quarter properly, and what are the best tools for managing my busy life.
Tutorials & Coding by Sunny Singh on 24 April, 2017
In a world of single-page apps (SPAs) that are rendered by the browser, it is hard to consider building any other way; you get a lot of benefits such as performance of almost instant-loading pages. However, there are still good use cases for building traditional server-rendered websites such as those powered by a CMS (content management system) like WordPress. We recently redesigned ninjality.com, and we chose to use October CMS to help with managing content such as this article. Choosing a CMS doesn't mean that you have to give up on the benefits of SPAs, so I want to show how we used the Turbolinks library to make our site feel like it was built in a modern JavaScript framework.
General by Leon Hitchens on 04 March, 2017
I use Facebook on a daily basis. I use it for getting my daily dose of news, whether it’s a fake news outlet or not. I also use Facebook for connecting with friends, sharing personal updates, and messaging others. The last thing I use Facebook for is work, from managing posts to now moderating comments. Yes, Facebook Comments are a huge driver of conversations off the core websites. They’re the easiest place for someone to leave feedback, leave a question, or leave an opinion. Facebook Comments can and are more widely being added to news websites from tech blogs to more mainstream sites.
News by Sunny Singh on 16 February, 2017
Ninjality has gone through multiple redesigns. With each iteration, we further realize what we should be focusing on. Our previous one in 2015 was quite significant, because we rebranded with a completely new logo, design, and marketing strategy. Today, we're releasing another redesign to kick off the year of 2017, and for many good reasons.
General by Leon Hitchens on 02 September, 2016
I’ve been blogging for years now, and I’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve experimented with different methods to create a conversation around a new article, and I do it to not only create more value but also show other new readers there’s a thriving community on the blog. I also try and create a conversation around a new article for my purpose - I want to find new friends to talk to about what I’m interested in and at the very basic level network. When I’m doing this, I’m creating value for a blog post, but also a safe place where anyone feels they could ask questions or voice their concerns.
General by Leon Hitchens on 13 August, 2016
For a long time, I’ve been a proponent of using a .com domain before you had other domain extensions. Now with the rise of different extensions from .beer .ninja to .webhost allows you to buy a vanity URL that better describes your company online, by just telling someone a domain. There is even a .blog domain coming so you can quickly setup a blog and have a custom domain saying your website is a blog. The problem is will someone know to go to a .blog over a .com.
Tutorials & Coding by Sunny Singh on 05 August, 2016
In the fourth part of this series, we learned about the last fundamental concept that is known as lifecycle methods. I want to close things off by discussing various other concepts and tools that are useful in advancing our knowledge in the React ecosystem.
Tutorials|Coding by Sunny Singh on 02 August, 2016
In the third part of this series, we learned about props and PropTypes in React. I now want to get into the last fundamental concept of React and that is lifecycle methods. We technically already have used one of these methods, getInitialState, but there are many others that you can use to build useful components.
General by Leon Hitchens on 19 July, 2016
The Serial Podcast created the conversation how podcasting would become the new online radio. While podcasting isn’t a new technology, in fact, it’s been around for decades, it’s only become popular in the past year or two. Now every business, blog, and person are hosting a podcast. Why, though? There are hundreds of podcasts already out there, and new ones are popping up daily. I have a hard time keeping up with my subscriptions now, and an even hard time justifying subscribing to new podcasts.
Tutorials & Coding by Sunny Singh on 17 June, 2016
In the second part of this series, we got into writing actual React code. At this point, you are (hopefully) familiar with JSX, setting up an environment with Enclave, creating new components, and rendering your app. In this part, let's expand our knowledge of components with props.
General by Leon Hitchens on 07 June, 2016
A marketing and advertising budget is a core part of each businesses budget. They have traditional advertising like buying ad space in a newspaper, on a billboard, or even on TV. There are also ways to advertise or market your product online with buying ads through Adsense, on Facebook or Twitter. There is also another more fresh way to market which is content marketing. Content marketing is the process in where you create content in the form of videos, articles, or another kind of video. The content relates to your business and helps your customers understand you're an expert in your field.
General by Leon Hitchens on 05 June, 2016
Slack has made our team by far a more cohesive unit for many reasons but in this article I want to cover the top 3. For preface, Slack is a communication platform that has recently sprung into a staple for most teams in any niche of the business world. Development teams, marketing teams, to even small businesses use Slack as their main communication platforms. Slack is also really popular in managing communication between remote teams, which is what we do at Ninjality.
General by Sunny Singh on 01 June, 2016
For professionals, Twitter is used as a way of growing your network of like-minded people, or potentially going outside your comfort zone in hopes of learning a new skill. As a developer, I am always on the lookout for people who are way smarter than me that I'd love to learn from via their tweets, or sometimes just want to stay up to date on news. Here are some that I recommend.
General by Leon Hitchens on 29 May, 2016
Facebook has become a driver for sales, views, and conversation. Engagement rates on Facebook are higher than any other social platform. Customer acquisition costs are also lower on Facebook than having to do research, marketing, and accessibility of the social network. These factors have made Facebook essential in any company's plans for marketing and being on social media. While Twitter is a great place to help users, and talk to them in an open forum. Facebook’s platform is the biggest driver for sales and views.
General & Tutorials by Leon Hitchens on 20 May, 2016
Starting a custom self-hosted blog isn’t hard, and for many is a way to jump into coding. We’ve been blogging for years on this site and a dozen of other sites, and we’ve used almost all of the popular blogging content management system (CMS). I also personally make a living off of blogging for Ninjality and other outlets so that I would call myself a blogging expert. I often get asked how someone could get started blogging, and how easy is it. The answer is in two parts. The first part is setting up a blog and having it designed easily. The hard part is the blogging - you’ll often write to yourself and growing your audience isn’t easy. This isn’t to say you cannot make it blogging, but in fact, there are hundreds of pro-bloggers.
General by Sunny Singh on 17 May, 2016
If you're a developer, you may be wanting to improve your skills but lack the time to devote in reading books, watching videos, or reading articles (glad you're reading this one though!). So, how do we go about our normal days while still leveling up? Podcasts. More specifically, audio podcasts which are much like radio shows but on specific topics. The great part about them is being able to listen while doing other tasks. As you can guess, we will list ones that discuss developer-related topics as curated by our team.
General by Leon Hitchens on 09 May, 2016
Working remotely has its pros and its cons, but if done right, you can become more productive and happier with work. At Ninjality, we work remotely and don’t have an office beyond each of our home offices. While I prefer an office with everyone in one location, Sunny and Kyle has proven time and time again how productive and efficient working remotely is.
Coding by Sunny Singh on 04 May, 2016
DevOps, or developer operations, can be really hard to get right. This is especially true if you're trying to build everything up from scratch. At Ninjality, we use third-party services to help us out so that we can get to releasing projects faster. We apologize ahead of time if some of these services don't really fit into DevOps, we just use this term as a broad category.
General by Leon Hitchens on 30 April, 2016
Product Hunt is a service where you can share and discover new products. The site was founded by Ryan Hoover in November of 2013, with funding from Y Combinator. The basis of the site is for users to submit a fresh podcast, an innovative app, other tech products, or wild gadgets. From there other users upvote the products onto the front page. The whole process feels a lot like Reddit but with a focus towards discovering products within the technology community.
General by Leon Hitchens on 21 April, 2016
Here at Ninjality, we strive to build social experiences for small close knit communities. We, of course, apply this thinking to our clients when we're building them websites, apps, or working to brand their newly minted company. We’re also working towards building our community around developers and designers. CodeBee.io is one of the handfuls of apps and services we’re working on to solve our problems, but also to refine our skill sets and test new ideas and development plans.
Coding by Sunny Singh on 20 April, 2016
Git is very important to our work here at Ninjality. All the code that is written is stored in repositories so that it can be backed up and shared amongst the team. In regards to open source, we think that it is very important to contribute by sharing code so that others can learn from it, use it for their own projects, and overall grow the community. GitHub is a code hosting platform for Git that incorporates social features, and we've posted some of our projects on it such as socialshares and devnews. We've realized that learning how to use GitHub isn't easy, but it's not impossible to become a GitHub Ninja thanks to the following tips.
General & Tutorials by Leon Hitchens on 17 April, 2016
Facebook Instant Articles are stripped down version of your blog hosted on Facebook’s servers. The pages load *instantly’ *and have minimal branding from your site. While many publishers argue the Instant Articles are bad for publishers, they have higher engagement and read time than a standard web page. We'll help you set up Facebook Instant Articles on your WordPress install.
General by Leon Hitchens on 10 April, 2016
The internet as a whole is noisy, busy, and increasingly hard to get users to comment, like, or more importantly share your article, website, or other content you’ve created. The problem with users is not everyone wants to create a new account to comment or use your service because it’s another account, another email, another annoying app they’ll need. You have to go above and beyond to get eyes, and more importantly users engaging with the services or content you’ve created.
General by Leon Hitchens on 01 April, 2016
Managing anything in the age of the internet is a nightmare. Employees are distributed, not every tool integrates, and communication can and is always a nightmare. There are some amazing tools online to help manage an unruly project, but they can be expensive and in themselves hard to manage. At Ninjality, we use some free project management tools including Trello and Slack. In addition to those services, we use Google Docs and Github to further the project and allow for easy collaboration.
Tutorials & Coding by Sunny Singh on 27 March, 2016
In the first part of this tutorial series, I explained why you would want to use React and the concepts of components and state. If you are unfamiliar with these concepts, I highly recommend for you to read that article. In this second part, I want to get into the fun stuff—writing code.
General by Leon Hitchens on 23 March, 2016
Writing isn’t easy. We may write tweets, texts, or Facebook statuses, however writing a blog post or something more substantial can be challenging and daunting. With the rise of Medium, Svbtle, or other long-form blogging platforms, writing a blog post with 500 or 1000 or 2000 words is commonplace. While I write on a daily basis, most folks on the internet don’t write more than 140 characters.
Design by Kyle McDonald on 15 March, 2016
Discusses the design process that Ninjality uses for their projects and client projects.
General by Leon Hitchens on 12 March, 2016
Twitter has incredible value for any small business, brand, or internet dweller looking to grow their influence. I’m an active Twitter user since early 2010, and I’ve met amazing friends and colleagues on the social media service. Twitter is complicated and not easy to break it, especially with millions of users on the site.
Tutorials & Coding by Sunny Singh on 08 March, 2016
This article is the first part in a series of tutorials that I will be writing about ReactJS. I am in the process of learning React and I think it would be valuable for you to join me on this journey as I explain things from a lower point of view. In this part, I will focus on the concepts of React and show what writing this code would look like. In the next part I will get into setting up an actual project.
General by Leon Hitchens on 04 March, 2016
I’ve been using WordPress since early 2010 and have seen the blogging platform become a larger Content Management System (CMS). I have become an expert with WordPress, learning the in's and out's, and mistakes people make when they're first starting to set up a site.
News by Sunny Singh on 01 August, 2015
At Ninjality, we like to constantly iterate on everything that we do. We market ourselves as ninjas, but we're far from perfect, and so we decided that we could do better with our current design. Not only that, but our goals for the company are evolving as we move to improving our services and overall image. With that, let's check out everything that is new.
News by Sunny Singh on 29 April, 2015
An article discussing how we moved over to a new server infrastructure with Laravel Forge. We're now running faster with NGINX and HHVM.
Design by Kyle McDonald on 01 April, 2015
We discuss our design process with the Digital Bounds redesign.
News by Sunny Singh on 01 January, 2015
We talk about the new year, design refresh, and future plans for Hylus and our YouTube channel.
News by Kyle McDonald on 05 March, 2014
A post keeping you updated on the work we have been doing lately
News by Sunny Singh on 19 January, 2014
A post announcing the redesign of Ninjality and the addition of a blog.