It's been over a year since I covered how to protect adminpanel routes in Laravel using Gates. Some people kept reminding me about my promise to cover ACL and user roles, and I kept putting off fulfilling that promise.
Finally I run into that on one of my projects, and that's the sign I was waiting for to continue giving back to the community I learned so much from.
What is ACL
Although some computer science theorists like to throw baffling definitions of the term into people (looking at you, MSDN), in reality it's pretty simple and straightforward. ACL stands for Access Control List, and specifies what users are allowed to do.
Spring break is only a few weeks away, just in time to get the perfect body for hitting the beach and showing it off.
To help, I have created a simple three step program for how to get the perfect spring break body.
Step one, have a body.
Check? Good.
Step two, Go on spring break.
Done? Perfect.
Step three, mission complete.
You now have a perfect spring break body.
By no means am I saying this means we have the freedom to eat as many cookies as we want and not exercise. But unfortunately, what we believe the perfect body to be is rooted in dangerously deceptive traditions.
Let us start with one of the most commonly used measures of how we measure if someone has a “healthy” weight or not — the body mass index.
A Belgian mathematician Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet came up with the BMI scale in the 19th century. The troubling thing about this is that Quetelet wasn’t a medical doctor, he wasn’t a physician — he was a mathematician. In fact, the original intent behind the index was not to determine if someone was overweight or not, but to give a quick way for doctors (200 years ago) to determine the level of obesity in a population so that the government could appropriately allocate resources.
Anyone familiar with statistics would also be familiar with the phrase, “there are lies, damned lies and statistics.” The BMI index is a combination of all three.
The way BMI is calculated is by taking the weight of a person in kilograms, then dividing that by the height of a person, which has been squared. Why? There’s no real reason to square someone’s height in this instance. Unless of course, Quetelet was trying to rig his formula to fit existing data. Which is exactly what he was doing.
BMI can be useful in some contexts, like measuring a relative level of obesity in a general population, but relying on it alone cannot be used to determine if someone is healthy or not.
Let’s just say you are not happy with the amount of weight that seems to be hanging around your midsection. Believe me, I’m with you on that one. So, the best thing to do in that case would be to go on a diet right? Maybe you’ve turned to the television and decided to go with the advice of someone who purports to be a health expert. Dr. Mehmet Oz — better known by his stage name — Dr. Oz.
From peddling green coffee extract, Umckaloabo Root Extract, or garcinia cambogia, many may be led to believe that by eating the pills or potions Dr. Oz pedals on his show can lead you to get the perfect spring break bod.
While those may promise fast weight loss and shrinking your problem areas, they are nothing more than the snake oil of the 21st Century. An article in the Los Angeles Times found that, when compared with actual science, you know, the kind that goes through testing and is peer-reviewed, that less than one-third of the claims made on the show are factual.
OK so maybe don’t get your information from the Dr. Oz show — but cutting out fat should be good, right? Eating fat must then turn into fat in our bodies must mean that it turns into fat in our bodies. Well, not really. Not to mention that eating lots of fat has to be bad for our hearts — probably one of the reasons heart attacks are so common. Right? Wrong.
According to an interview published on the University of Utah Health website, sugar is the more likely culprit of heart problems. When we eat too much sugar, as most Americans do, our liver simply can’t process it. As a result, it is stored as fat.
What’s even worse is that, because we’ve bought into the low-fat diet fad, a lot of the mega-corporations have sucked the fat right out of our foods. But with the fat gone, we’re left with flavorless food. In order to add flavor back in, the corporations added something more addictive than cocaine, and lots of it — sugar.
With the fad diets from TV shows and conventional wisdom gone, one can often be left feeling helpless.
Now believe me, looking at the photos either on Instagram or in magazines of ripped, chiseled (usually photoshopped) people who seem to live at the gym can be extremely difficult — especially when it seems all you have to do is look at a hamburger and gain 20 pounds.
I won’t pretend that I haven’t been that person.
I’ve struggled with my weight for most of my life. At the young age of only 14, I was obese. Chronically so. I was 190 pounds and was only 5 feet 6 inches tall.
It wasn’t healthy. Everyday I would wake up, and my joints would ache. I had trouble going up stairs more than one flight. I hated the way I looked in the mirror. But what was most damaging about all of that was the mocking and teasing I experienced.
Every time we had to go swimming for gym class, I dreaded taking off my shirt because I didn’t want people to see the fat on my body.
I’m not alone in this. Most Americans, according to a survey from the Centers for Disease Control, are conscious about their weight. This has led us to bounce from diet to diet, from workout plan to workout plan, with no success.
The question then becomes what to do about it.
When I was a little boy, my grandmother always told me that you never make a judgement on someone if it’s not something they can’t fix in five seconds. Bad haircut? Can’t be fixed in five seconds. Food on their face? Can be fixed in five seconds. Chronic misinformation over years about what to eat leading to someone being overweight? For sure cannot be fixed in five seconds.
As a society, we have to stop passing judgments on people for things that at that moment, they can do nothing to make the problem instantaneously better. We ought to encourage them to take charge of their life and live it however they darn well please. There are enough problems in our own lives that deserve our attention for us to be fixated on how much someone weighs.
So with the opportunity to hit the beach coming up soon, let’s all resolve that the perfect spring break body isn’t an ideal we should all be forced to conform to.
Law360 (March 1, 2019, 11:21 PM EST) — Facebook Inc. and Instagram LLC announced Friday that they will be cracking down on the sale of fake accounts, suing four Chinese companies in California federal court for trademark infringement and…
Your website is the heart of your digital marketing campaign. As such, there are numerous reasons why you should redesign your website in 2019.
In this post, we’ll cover six ways you can upgrade your site. We’ll also cover the benefits you’ll see when you implement these strategies. Keep reading to learn more about how you can improve your site in 2019!
1. Your navigation presents a challenge
When your audience accesses your site, you want them to easily move about your pages. You don’t want them to struggle to find the necessary information they need. If you have poor navigation, you will make it difficult for your audience to find the right information on your site.
It’s crucial that your audience can find the right information on your pages. If it’s too challenging to find what they need, your audience will leave your page and choose a competitors’ page instead. You don’t want to lose leads to the competition due to poor navigation.
You’ll want to test your pages to see how easily people can find information. You can ask a family member or friend to find a page on your site and see how easily they can navigate to it. This will help you understand how someone who isn’t familiar with your site navigates it for the first time.
If they struggle to find your pages, your site may need a redesign. A website redesign will help you create navigation that is simple and easy to use.
You’ll want to categorize different tabs on your website to make it easy for someone to find your information. Generic headings that can fit multiple subcategories beneath them work best.
For instance, let’s say you run a catering business. One of your tabs might be titled “Services.” Beneath this tab, you can include multiple categories, like weddings, birthdays, and corporate events. This breaks down all of your categories into subcategories, which makes it easy for your audience to access.
If your website has challenging navigation, it’s time for a redesign. A website redesign will allow you to create navigation that keeps leads engaged on your page longer.
2. You’ve updated your brand
To keep up with the changing times, you have to update your brand. You don’t want your brand to stay stuck in the past. A brand design from 1999 won’t resonate with your audience in 2019. You must redesign your website if you want to stay current with your audience.
If you’ve recently updated your brand or are thinking about it, update your website to match. Your site should accurately reflect your business. If it doesn’t, you could lose brand recognition and quality leads.
This introduces an opportunity for you to modernize your website. You can update its design, navigation, and visual elements. As a result, you’ll create a website that is more visually appealing to your audience in 2019.
3. Leads aren’t remaining on your site
When you get traffic on your site, you want people to stay on your pages. Your website is the first impression your audience gets of your business. If people are leaving your site soon after they find it, you may need to rethink your design.
You don’t want to keep losing traffic due to poor design. It may be time for a website redesign if you are getting traffic to your site but have trouble retaining that traffic.
Loss of traffic is a great reason to redesign your website for 2019. You’ll help make your website more modern and up-to-date, which will build more interest in your website. A fresh design can have a huge impact on how your audience interacts with your business’s page.
A website redesign will help you decrease your bounce rate and turn that traffic into leads for your business.
4. Your site is slow
Users hate to wait for slow loading pages. They want to access information quickly and easily. If your page takes too long to load, your leads may wind up on your competitor’s site instead of yours.
From your coding to your visual elements, there are different aspects of your site that can cause it to slow down. A website redesign can help you start fresh with your website and optimize it to run faster.
When you redesign your site, you can optimize your images from the start. This prevents you from bogging down your site and enable it to load your content faster. In addition, you’ll want to host your videos on third-party sites, like YouTube or Wistia, as these files are large and can slow down your site.
Upon redesigning your website, ensure that there is no extra code or blank spaces within code. These are small nuances that have a huge impact on your site’s performance.
If you want to learn the types of issues that are bogging down your site, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights. By using this tool, you will see how fast your site loads and changes you can make to your page to improve its performance.
You can also enlist in page speed services from a digital marketing company. If this company offers page speed services and web design services, you can invest in both to cover all aspects of your website.
If your site is slow, consider redesigning your website for 2019. You’ll start off the new year with a fresh website that loads quickly for your audience. It’s a great way to attract more leads to your page and keep them on it.
5. You haven’t optimized for mobile
Mobile-friendliness is crucial in this day. People are constantly conducting searches for businesses on their smartphones and tablets. If you want them to come on your site and remain on it, you must invest in responsive design.
The mobile experience isn’t the same as the desktop experience. If you tried to access a desktop site on mobile, it would provide a poor experience. Users would have to zoom in and out to read the information on your site.
That isn’t a positive mobile experience. If your website isn’t adapted for mobile users, you’ll want to consider a website redesign for 2019.
So, how do you make your site mobile-friendly?
The best way to make a mobile-friendly website is to implement responsive design. Doing this ensures that your website adapts to whatever device a user is using, which creates a positive experience on your site.
6. You don’t have micro-experiences
Micro-experiences are rapidly growing as an important part of your web design. If you don’t have any micro-experiences on your site, you’ll want to consider integrating them when you redesign your website in 2019.
So, what is a micro-experience?
A micro-experience is a small nuance on your site that makes the online experience special. It can be something as simple as a ding noise or a small notification button. These micro-experiences enhance your audience’s experience on your website.
To make your audience’s experience better, add different animations, sounds, buttons, and movements that will catch their attention. You can redesign your website to add these nuances and create a better overall experience on your site.
Start your website redesign today
A website redesign can give your company a whole new face. It’s a fresh start for your business and can help you revamp your digital marketing efforts.
As we roll into 2019, consider how you can improve your website and start making design changes to improve its performance. You’ll help your website drive more valuable traffic and leads for your business.
Thanks to fake reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp, it can be hard to trust what you read. Now however, the US government has begun cracking down on fake user reviews posted on Amazon.
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced its first-ever charges against a company that paid to have fake reviews posted online. The company in question, New York-based Cure Encapsulations, paid the third-party website amazonverifiedreviews.com to write and post positive reviews that appeared to come from consumers for a weight-loss supplement product on Amazon.com, according to the FTC.
“Please make my product … stay a five star,” Cure Encapsulations owner Naftula Jacobowitz told amazonverifiedreviews.com, according to the FTC. Jacobowitz’s company paid for reviews falsely describing its product, the supplement garcinia cambogia, as a “powerful appetite suppressant” that “literally blocks fat from forming,” the FTC says.
Will it make reviews more trustworthy?
The FTC “does not comment about what future actions it may or may not take,” a spokesperson told CNBC Make It. But the fact that the FTC brought the case has already sparked speculation that the case sets the precedent that the federal government is now willing to bring charges against companies that pay for fake reviews making misleading claims.
Fake online reviews are a common problem on e-commerce sites like Amazon and have also shown up on online review platforms like Yelp. Still, roughly 86 percent of consumers still regularly read online reviews, and a majority of people say that positive reviews make them more likely to use a local business, according to a BrightLocal survey.
Cases like the FTC’s settlement with Cure Encapsulations should make it easier for consumers to trust online reviews on sites like Amazon, according to Paul Alan Levy, an attorney who works for the consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen.
“I think it gives consumers more reason to place trust in what they see on these review sites, certainly,” Levy tells CNBC Make It.
“The administrative agencies, like the FTC and state attorneys general, are in an excellent position to do investigations and figure out when there are false positive [reviews] out there, and it’s good that the FTC is doing that, because it creates a sort of pressure on avoiding false positive reviews,” he tells CNBC Make It.
Squashing fake reviews
Levy notes that, in the past, e-commerce companies and review sites have sometimes taken matters into their own hands when looking to squash fake reviews. Amazon itself has filed numerous lawsuits in recent years against sellers who post false reviews, as well as third-party companies that sell the service of posting fake reviews. Amazon estimated last year that “less than 1 percent of reviews are inauthentic” on the site.
“We welcome the FTC’s work in this area,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Verge. “Amazon invests significant resources to protect the integrity of reviews,” but “even one inauthentic review is one too many.” (The company also announced a new program, called Project Zero, targeting counterfeit goods on the site on Thursday.)
Yelp also has its own Consumer Alerts program that tries to catch businesses that post fake reviews.
Of course, Levy also points out that consumers should still take online reviews with a grain of salt.
“The wisdom of the crowd on review sites has value for consumers,” he says, “[but] you should never take a single review as gospel, whether it be a five-star review or a one-star review.” Instead, he says, look for a pattern of reviews.
The FTC case
The FTC filed its complaint against Cure Encapsulations last week, after finding that the company had paid for the fabricated reviews, which purported to be written by actual customers and which made “false and unsubstantiated claims” about its products. While the extract garcinia cambogia is often claimed to be effective for weight-loss, the National Institutes of Health has noted that there is “no convincing evidence” that it can help you lose weight.
Cure Encapsulations has already reached a settlement with the FTC in which the company has agreed to never again make “weight-loss, appetite-suppression, fat-blocking, or disease-treatment claims” for any product without substantiating those claims with “competent and reliable scientific evidence,” the FTC says. The settlement also prohibits the company from misrepresenting endorsements, including reviews that falsely claim to come from an actual customer.
“People rely on reviews when they’re shopping online,” Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “When a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules.”
Correction: This article was revised to correct Cure Encapsulation’s location. The company is headquartered in New York.
