Adding AMP Support to WordPress Sites

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is one of the latest initiatives by developed by Google to enhance the quality of mobile browsing. AMPs are an open-source framework developed with a goal of making mobile web pages quicker to load, more lightweight, and simpler in terms of both design and code.

The reason AMP pages are so much quicker and simpler than standard web pages is that they’re limited to certain libraries and functionalities. Only a certain set of HTML tags are allowed to appear in AMPS, and this also applies to CSS and jQuery. In fact, AMP pages draw from their own streamlined CSS and JS libraries to make sure that the code is as lightweight as possible.

Additionally, AMP pages are cached in the cloud to significantly reduce page load time and let users access their desired content almost immediately. The benefits of using AMP for your sites also go beyound giving your users a better UX on mobile, because it can also improve your search ranking — sites that use AMP are also more likely to be ranked higher on a Google search executed by a mobile device. Setting up AMP on your sites from scratch can be confusing and time-consuming, but if you’ve got a WordPress site, the install couldn’t be easier when using any of the following plugins:

AMP

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This plugin was developed by the people over at Automattic and is incredibly easy to use. Once it’s installed, it’s pretty much ready to go. To see the AMPs, you just need to install the plugin and then view any post with “/amp” appended to the end of the URL, so for example: www.mysite.com/mypost/amp. Once you view the page, you’ll see that the page has a clean design, the main focus of the page is the content, and that, of course, it’s quick to load.

AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages

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AMP for WP is a similar to the AMP plugin above, but with support for a few more WordPress features. This plugin has support for related posts, recent comments, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, color scheme customizations, social sharing buttons, social media embed support, and more. This plugin is a great option for those who want to benefit from using AMP without compromising too much of their site’s functionality, style, ad revenue, etc.

Facebook Instant Articles & Google Accelerated Mobile Pages by PageFrog

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This PageFrog Plugin is another popular plugin that will convert your posts into AMP format. A bonus of using this plugin is that it will also make your posts compatible with Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA), which is content that can be served to users from within Facebook’s mobile app, so if a user clicks on your link from within Facebook’s mobile app, they won’t be brought to an external browser, but can actually view your post within Facebook’s app. This plugin also gives you control over styling, branding, and theme customization, and allows you to run ads on the AMP and FBIA pages as well.

 

Best Mobile Analytics Solutions

Analytics are important, not only for tracking the amount of people visiting your site, but also to track their behavior once they’re on it. For mobile apps and mobile sites, popular analytic tools like Google Analytics don’t always work as well tracking behavior of app users as they do tracking the behavior of users on a desktop site. If you really want to analyze the behavior of your app users, you need to use analytic resources built specifically for mobile apps and sites. Take a look at the list below to see some of the best.

Flurry Analytics

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Flurry Analytics can be used to easily and conveniently track the performance of your iOS and Android apps. You can track users’ actions and behaviors in order to learn about trends. It also gives you access to your users’ demographics and interests so as to really give you a feel for who your users are and what sort of content they may be interested in.

Countly

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Countly is a mobile app analytics tool that supports apps on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. It features an easy to use dashboard and some great options for tracking and user interaction, including access to the habits and session details of your users, and the ability to interact with them using push notifications. Countly also gives you access to crash reports for all different OS builds of your apps, AND it allows you to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

Localytics

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Localytics provides real-time analytics for your mobile apps, in addition to targeted, personalized messaging options for your users and marketing engagement and campaign tracking features. They also offer different pricing packages to scale with the size of your business.

Amplitude

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Amplitude lets you easily track user behavior across platforms so that you can easily compare behaviors on web, tablet, and mobile versions of your sites and applications. Amplitude also offers free options for using their service, as well as paid elite and enterprise options.

Answers

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Answers is a mobile app analytics platform that supports iOS and Android apps. The premise of the platform is that they give you the “answers” you’re looking for — performance metrics, user history and interests, trends — without you having to wade through a lot of data to figure out all of the “answers” on your own.

 

 

 

Android Pick/Select Image from Gallery with Intents

Sometimes in your Android application you’ll want the user to choose an image from the gallery that’ll be displayed by the application (and even uploaded to your servers) after the selection is made. In this article we’ll see how to invoke a single interface from which the user is able to select images across all his apps (like Gallery, Photos, ES File Explorer, etc.) and folders (Google Drive, Recent, Downloads, etc.) using Intents.

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Google Place API Autocomplete Service in Android Application

Recently in one of my android applications I wanted to obtain the user’s location in terms of city and country that they can feed from their (edit) profile section. So one way to do this is basically have two dropdowns or dialogs (or even open an entirely new activity where the user can search through entities and select one). One of them would display all the countries in which, once a selection is made, the other one will show a restricted set of cities based on the prior country selection. Now the number of cities in the world is large, so to do this we’ll need to get a database that contains all the countries and cities and then make sure we can query that over HTTP to get the cities based on what the user types into the app (autocomplete box). We’ve to make sure the response is really quick and doesn’t cause lags. We can also bundle all the city and country data into our app but then that’ll blow up the apk size.

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Android Send and Receive SMS (Text and Data/Binary) Messages with SmsManager and Intents

There’ll be times when you’ll want to allow the users to send SMS messages directly from your app to other numbers (destination). The Android SDK does support to capability of sending SMS/MMS messages in two ways (from your app):

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Creating Android Sliding Sidebar (Hamburger) Menu with Navigation Drawer Icon

By now most of us are familiar with Navigation Drawers as they’ve been in use by Facebook, Gmail, Google Play Music, Google Play Music and tons of others apps. It’s that sliding panel that comes out onto the screen when you swipe a finger from the left edge of the screen (or sometimes right edge) or tap on the 3 bar button (sometimes called hamburger icon) in the Action Bar. If still confused then check out the design guide and you’ll know what I’m referring to. The design guide will also tell you when to use it and when not to use it.

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Difference Between setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(), setHomeButtonEnabled() and setDisplayShowHomeEnabled() ActionBar Methods in Android

The Android ActionBar has a couple of methods that can get a little confusing at times as to what their purpose is:

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