Month: March 2018

Running Outdated Drupal? You Need to PATCH NOW!

Posted on by galaxy-admin
Are you using outdated Drupal version for your website? Your website is open to hackers now! Everyone is calling it Drupalgeddon2! Here is the big news, Drupal recently found a major security vulnerability in their older versions. They have decided to release an URGENT security update, even though the 7.x, 8.3.x & 8.4.x are no longer supported now. The security vulnerability might give hackers access to your data and can take away your control from the website. Focusing on these issues, Drupal introduced an urgent security patch to address a highly critical security vulnerability. The designated flaws CVE-2018-7600 was found in the software’s core, and affects the older versions. Drupal produced patches for their older versions of its latest software – 7.x, 8.3.x, and 8.4.x. This will save you from database updates and quickly update without the possible side effects of a minor version update. What to do next if you are using Drupal 7.x, 8.3.x & 8.4.x.? Get hold of your developer and get the security release implemented immediately!
DO NOT PUT IT ON YOUR TODO LIST. GET IT DONE NOW.
The community has been expressing concerns over security in outdated versions and this is just the first wave. After you are done with the security release, plan on migrating the website to the latest version. Safety is the choice you make! Connect with our Drupal security expert now. You can read more about the official security release here –

Google Rolls Out Mobile-First Indexing for Web Content

Posted on by galaxy-admin
Google recently announced Mobile-First Indexing after a year and half of extensive experimenting and testing. The search engine giant will start migrating sites that follow best practices for Mobile-First Indexing. Google’s algorithm will now prioritize websites with a mobile version when searched from a smartphone. It will now consider mobile sites as the first node to the websites, especially when a query is fired from the mobile platform. This will surely increase the traffic for companies having mobile websites being crawled from the Smartphone Googlebot. Websites that only have a desktop version will experience a major downfall in mobile traffic, even if they have a high ranking on the search engine because Google does not maintain separate indices for different version of the websites. The websites using responsive web design or dynamic serving will generally be set for mobile-first indexing. For sites that have non-AMP and AMP pages, Google will prefer the mobile version of the non-AMP page for indexing. To make the change easier and smooth, Google will be notifying sites that are migrating to mobile-first indexing via Search Console.

What does it change for you?

Companies with ‘desktop-only sites’ will have downfall in their primarily mobile audience. It might not affect your ranking but you will need responsive websites and mobile-friendly content to perform better in mobile search results. The update is a part of Google’s announcement that said that beginning in July 2018, slow loading content will perform less as Google will be optimizing for speed. Long story short, you will have to make some amends! For more details on how you can get your website optimized for better performance after the update, contact us.

Tool Alert: UI Faces: Easier Design Process IS Everything

Posted on by galaxy-admin
Dear fellow designers, have you ever felt serendipitous? (yeah yeah I will monitor my Word Porn consumption). That is how I felt when I found UI Faces. The tiny little tool solves one of the most boring, if not major problems of the designing process. It’s an ode to all the hours that our brethren & sistren had lost while looking up for the right avatar of the UI Mockup. UI Faces is a simple aggregator of people avatars that you can use in your design mockups. It has got a whole collection of beautiful & diverse people who let you use their face in your design (faith in humanity, restored). You can save time & energy and keep your sanity to continue the rest of the design process. Every single picture on the tool is processed and tagged with age, gender, emotion, and hair color. You can easily filter for quick search and sort them by your requirements. No fuss and fume. Even my Scrum Master seemed impressed so you can take his word, if not mine. The users who have submitted their photos are aware that their pictures will be used. Also, as every picture on the website is reviewed personally by Alex, there are no copyright issues. Great guy tbh! You can use all the avatars either by the good ole’ copy-paste, API, and Sketch plugin. Easy peasy and quick! Also, this baby belongs to Mighty Alex, so go give him a shoutout!

Older Apps Might Become Useless After Android P

Posted on by galaxy-admin
Google recently came up with a developers’ preview for Android P. The developers have now found a new class in the latest Android P Dev Preview. It sets a minimum API version apps on Play Store. So, in Android P, if an app is not meeting the minimum API requirements, the OS will pop up a warning message stating: Error message: “This app was built for an older version of Android and may not work properly. Try checking for updates, or contact the developer.” We all know how pumped up Google is in keeping PlayStore in sync with new developments. Setting up a minimum API support requirement for newly uploaded apps is a perfect move. The update now restricts the developers from having a specific mindset before building an app, enabling the newly submitted apps to work with all the latest Android versions. Hence, the already available apps that fail to update will be retired for good. The news comes after Apple did something similar recently. Apple cleaned up the App Store from old apps. And even if you try running a removed app from your iCloud backup, it will popup a warning message. We have to wait for Google’s next step towards a better user experience. No matter what Google’s intentions are, once Android P goes live, things are surely going to change! Galaxy Weblinks provides all kinds of design and development services for mobile and web apps.