3D printing

 

For methods of transferring an image onto a 3D surface, see pad printing. For methods of generating autostereoscopic lenticular images, see lenticular printing and holography.

A three-dimensional printer

Timelapse of a three-dimensional printer in action

Part of a series on the
History of printing

Techniques

v t e

3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model.^[1] It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer control,^[2] with material being added together (such as plastics, liquids or powder grains being fused), typically layer by layer.

In the 1980s, 3D printing techniques were considered suitable only for the production of functional or aesthetic prototypes, and a more appropriate term for it at the time was rapid prototyping.^[3] As of 2019, the precision, repeatability, and material range of 3D printing have increased to the point that some 3D printing processes are considered viable as an industrial-production technology, whereby the term additive manufacturing can be used synonymously with 3D printing.^[4] One of the key advantages of 3D printing^[5] is the ability to produce very complex shapes or geometries that would be otherwise infeasible to construct by hand, including hollow parts or parts with internal truss structures to reduce weight. Fused deposition modeling (FDM), which uses a continuous filament of a thermoplastic material, is the most common 3D printing process in use as of 2020.^[6]

Terminology

The umbrella term additive manufacturing (AM) gained popularity in the 2000s,^[7] inspired by the theme of material being added together (in any of various ways). In contrast, the term subtractive manufacturing appeared as a retronym for the large family of machining processes with material removal as their common process. The term 3D printing still referred only to the polymer technologies in most minds, and the term AM was more likely to be used in metalworking and end-use part production contexts than among polymer, inkjet, or stereolithography enthusiasts.

By the early 2010s, the terms 3D printing and additive manufacturing evolved senses in which they were alternate umbrella terms for additive technologies, one being used in popular language by consumer-maker communities and the media, and the other used more formally by industrial end-use part producers, machine manufacturers, and global technical standards organizations. Until recently, the term 3D printing has been associated with machines low in price or in capability.^[8] 3D printing and additive manufacturing reflect that the technologies share the theme of material addition or joining throughout a 3D work envelope under automated control. Peter Zelinski, the editor-in-chief of Additive Manufacturing magazine, pointed out in 2017 that the terms are still often synonymous in casual usage,[9

procedure to be used in 3D-printing

 

The general concept of and procedure to be used in 3D-printing was first described by Murray Leinster in his 1945 short story Things Pass By "But this constructor is both efficient and flexible. I feed magnetronic plastics — the stuff they make houses and ships of nowadays — into this moving arm. It makes drawings in the air following drawings it scans with photo-cells. But plastic comes out of the end of the drawing arm and hardens as it comes ... following drawings only" ^[10]

It was also described by Raymond F. Jones in his story, "Tools of the Trade," published in the November 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. He referred to it as a "molecular spray" in that story.

1970s

In 1971, Johannes F Gottwald patented the Liquid Metal Recorder, U.S. Patent 3596285A, a continuous Inkjet metal material device to form a removable metal fabrication on a reusable surface for immediate use or salvaged for printing again by remelting. This appears to be the first patent describing 3D printing with rapid prototyping and controlled on-demand manufacturing of patterns.

The patent states "As used herein the term printing is not intended in a limited sense but includes writing or other symbols, character or pattern formation with an ink. The term ink as used in is intended to include not only dye or pigment-containing materials, but any flowable substance or composition suited for application to the surface for forming symbols, characters, or patterns of intelligence by marking. The preferred ink is of a Hot melt type. The range of commercially available ink compositions which could meet the requirements of the invention are not known at the present time. However, satisfactory printing according to the invention has been achieved with the conductive metal alloy as ink."

"But in terms of material requirements for such large and continuous displays, if consumed at theretofore known rates, but increased in proportion to increase in size, the high cost would severely limit any widespread enjoyment of a process or apparatus satisfying the foregoing objects."

"It is therefore an additional object of the invention to minimize use to materials in a process of the indicated class."

"It is a further object of the invention that materials employed in such a process be salvaged for reuse."

"According to another aspect of the invention, a combination for writing and the like comprises a carrier for displaying an intelligence pattern and an arrangement for removing the pattern from the carrier."

In 1974, David E. H. Jones laid out the concept of 3D printing in his regular column Ariadne in the journal New

Balance and a Rewarding Career Using FlexJobs

For many, the United States Census Bureau study about commuting comes as no surprise. The Bureau's report shares that the average time spent commuting back and forth to work has grown to almost 30 minutes each way. And for most professionals who work in an office setting, giving up five hours of life each week for a commute is pretty standard.

But Sara S. struggled with a lengthy commute combined with long, draining hours. She realized that something had to change. Her work life was taking a toll on her family and personal commitments and pushing her to professional burnout. It was time to take back control of her life.

Committing to Pursuing Balance

Recognizing that she needed a change, Sara looked for remote roles independently. It was only a short time before she realized she was spending more time sourcing legitimate positions than she was applying for and following up on them.

"I had been looking for a remote position for a few months and wasted so much time and energy on fake job leads." Even with the many awareness campaigns, job seekers like Sara are often overwhelmed with the number of scams targeting job seekers. Fortunately, she found FlexJobs, and her job search became streamlined and productive.

Building a Rewarding Career

Sara knew that her next role needed to do more than create balance. She was also determined that it would be a quality position aligned with her career goals. "I didn't want to step backward in my career or be stuck in a position with no growth opportunities."

Fortunately, Sara remained focused on her goals and found a perfect fit in a fully remote role with UnitedHealth Group. Now, Sara can be more present for her family without having to put her career to the side. "I found an organization I can grow with, professionally and personally."

Thriving Throughout All Areas

If you ask Sara how working remotely has affected her life, she'll tell you she's enjoying building better balance in the larger, more apparent areas of her life. "I have more time for the things that are important to me—my kids, my education goals, and my health," she says.

But like most professionals new to remote work, Sara discovered that work flexibility has also enhanced her life in other areas. "I am saving on gas and auto expenses, eating healthier, and I can wear activewear to work, so I go for a jog or do Pilates on my breaks!"

Advocating for Work Flexibility

Now that Sara is thriving in a meaningful role supporting her work-life balance, she has become an advocate for others to make effective changes in their lives. "I have recommended FlexJobs to so many people. It was well worth purchasing the membership."

Her guidance to others looking for more work freedom? Your job search is much more than tailoring a resume and hitting "submit." Sara says, "Don't forget about the value of networking," also stating that, "A flawless resume is useless if no one ever reads it."

Create Your Own Success Story

We hear from job seekers like Sara every day, sharing the enormous impact that flexible work has made on their lives.

If you're ready to build a better work-life balance, take the tour and discover all of the resources that FlexJobs offers to support you in your job search.

What Do We Have in Common? Best For: Team Bonding

Best For: Team Bonding

This icebreaker is best suited for new hires who may feel more
reserved as they virtually meet the team.

Find common ground and get the conversation going with your team
members. Have a manager or team leader start the conversation by
sharing something they have an interest in, like popular TV, music,
foods, or whatever they love to get everyone thinking. Popcorn it over
to the most enthusiastic team member with that same interest and have
them share a new one.

Typical icebreaker questions can get people to say a sentence or two
about the subject, but if you're passionate about it, you'll see more
personality come out from the most unexpected colleagues in the call.
Instructions

Start with a random team member or yourself.
You or your teammate will share an interest, such as a TV show or hobby.
Someone with that same interest should either drop a note in the
chat or raise their hand.
Their turn will begin, and they will share a new interest.
Enjoy!

Check your site settings

 It’s worth spending some time clicking through all of the sections in the WordPress Settings menu, as many of the options there can impact the SEO of your WordPress site.

In particular, it’s worth double-checking your visibility settings in Settings → Reading to ensure that you’re not accidentally preventing search engines from indexing your website. That’d hurt your visibility and your WordPress SEO!

You should also ensure that your Writing and Reading settings are all set correctly; these control your default categories and what should be displayed on your homepage. Don’t forget to give your site a strong tagline in Settings → General!

1.3. Pick the right permalink structure

Your permalink settings define what format your page and post URLs will take, which can significantly impact WordPress SEO. So if you’re creating a new site, one of the first things you should do is change your permalink settings, which you can find in Settings → Permalinks.

If you don’t change your settings from the default, all of your pages and posts will have URLs that look like example.com/?p=123. While this is perfectly okay, it’s not particularly nice, and it might impact how users and search engines perceive the quality and relevance of your pages.

Changing the permalink structure alters your website’s URLs, components, ordering, and structure. Therefore, selecting the correct format when setting up your website is essential, as changing it later can cause SEO issues.

We usually recommend that people use a structure that creates URLs that look like example.com/post-name/, or example.com/category/post-name/, depending on how much importance they anticipate placing on categorizing their content. Choosing either of these options will be perfectly suitable for most WordPress sites.

For the first option, you can just change the permalink setting to /%postname%/, like so:

Changing the permalink settings to ‘Post name’, in Settings → Permalinks

To include the category, you can select “Custom Structure” and change the value to /%category%/%postname%/.

If you previously had ?p=<postid> as your permalink, WordPress will take care of all the redirects for you. This is also true if you change from /%postname%/ to /%category%/%postname%/.

If you have an established site and change from any other permalink structure, you might want to consult our article on changing your WordPress permalink structure and the tool you’ll find.

1.3.1. Choose WWW or non-WWW

It would help if you thought about what you want your site to show as www.example.com, or simply example.com. Make sure that in your general settings, in Settings → General, the version you want to show up is properly reflected:

Setting the site URL to include or omit ‘www’

From an SEO perspective, there’s little difference either way. Additionally, most hosting and server setups will automatically redirect requests for the ‘wrong’ version to your selected version. That makes this primarily a branding consideration — which approach feels best for your site?

There’s not a massive amount of difference from a technical perspective, either. Some setups might have minor headaches if they omit the ‘www’ component, but these are increasingly rare.

Check you’re using suitable hosting

 According to WordPress’s technical requirements page, the recommended hosting plan to run WordPress should include a modern version of PHP, MySQL or MariaDB, and HTTPS support. It is possible to work with older server software, but that is not recommended. If you check your Site Health, you can see the technical details of your installation. In addition, if you open your hosting provider’s dashboard, you should be able to see what type of plan you are on.

Remember, paying for good WordPress hosting pays dividends. Upgrading your hosting plan is one of the easiest improvements you can make.

1.1.2. Upgrade to a recent version of PHP

While the numbers are going down quickly, many WordPress sites still run on outdated versions of PHP. One look at the WordPress stats reveals that some sites still run on a PHP version in the five series, while PHP 8.0 and up have been available for years. These old PHP versions don’t receive any more security fixes and are thus increasingly vulnerable to attacks.

Luckily, the WordPress team has dropped support for anything older than PHP 5.6.20. Today, the project recommends running WordPress on at least PHP 7.4.

So, one of the most important things you can do to improve the performance and security of your site — and thus, your WordPress SEO –, is to upgrade your hosting environment to a modern version of PHP. There are a lot of benefits to this:

• PHP 7+ offers an incredible speed boost.
• It runs a lot more efficiently, meaning less stress on your server.
• Bring loads of modern development features.
• It’s a much safer and more secure environment.
• It’s future-proof.

Now, this is something we all want. If you’ve checked your current hosting set-up in the previous section, you have an idea of what your site runs on now. If this shows outdated server software like PHP 5.5, it is good to update this. However, take special care before doing so. Ask for help if you’re not sure what you are doing — especially if you are a beginner working on your WordPress SEO.

Here are some steps to take:

• (Always!) Back up your website.
• Make a local staging environment based on a modern version of PHP.
• Install the backup of your site on that server.
• Test thoroughly to see if everything works properly.
• Upgrade your live site — most of the time, your hosting provider can do this for you.

We have a post that shows you how to set up a test environment for your WordPress site. WordPress.org has a post on the advantages of updating your PHP version and what to consider when doing that.

1.1.3. Make sure you’re using SSL and HTTPS

Adopting SSL (getting an HTTPS URL and a green padlock icon in the browser URL bar) was an optional tactic in the past. Many sites, arguably, didn’t need the extra level of security that SSL provides.

Today, having a valid SSL certificate installed is mandatory — search engines may ‘penalize’ sites without valid SSL certificates and setups (and/or show warnings next to their search results). Google has mentioned that HTTPS is a ranking signal. In addition, it’s generally good practice for all websites to use SSL to prevent hackers and third parties from intercepting requests and data.

Many modern site speed and performance techniques require a valid SSL/HTTPS setup. To take advantage of faster web technologies like HTTP/2 and the upcoming HTTP/3, browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox need the website to have a valid SSL certificate.

If you want to move to SSL and ensure that your site is served correctly over HTTPS, we have a handy guide with tips & tricks for moving to HTTPS. Since version 5.7, WordPress comes with a basic tool to make the detection of and moving to HTTPS easier.

A tutorial to higher rankings for WordPress sites

 

A tutorial to higher rankings for WordPress sites

This is the original WordPress SEO article since 2008, fully updated for 2022!

WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO. But even though it gets a lot right “out of the box,” there’s much more that you can do to improve your performance. It’s time to focus on WordPress SEO!

Optimizing your site using the tactics and best practices outlined in this article will help you improve your rankings, gain more subscribers or sales, and have a better website.

Because you should ingrain proper SEO in all aspects of your online marketing and PR, this guide covers quite a lot of ground! It’s a long read, so feel free to use the table of contents below to jump around.

Before we start…

This article assumes that you’re using our Yoast SEO plugin, which adds more features and SEO tools to WordPress. If you’re not already using it, you can set it up right away with our beginner’s guide to Yoast SEO. Please check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify app if you are running a Shopify online store.

Read more: How much does Yoast SEO cost? »

Most of the principles will still apply if you’re using another SEO plugin. Of course, we’d prefer you to switch over and use our powerful WordPress SEO plugin, which is why we’ve written a migration guide for you. It’s a straightforward process!

Table of contents

• Get your basic WordPress SEO right
• Optimize your content
• Optimize your site structure
• Speed up your WordPress website
• Secure your WordPress website
• Cater to your mobile visitors
• Analyze and improve your performance
• Promote your site
• Conclusions

Get your basic WordPress SEO right

Want to learn how to build your own WordPress site?

We have an epic article on that — including hours of video. Find out how to make a WordPress website.

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well-optimized content management system. A basic setup can provide a strong foundation without extensive customization, theme optimization, and plugins. Beginners can get started pretty quickly with WordPress SEO. That said, you can do a few things with WordPress SEO to increase your chances of ranking, refine your workflow, and make sure your website is perfectly optimized.

By putting the correct basic settings in place and applying a few simple techniques, you can ensure that you have a solid foundation to build upon!

1.1. Check your site health

Before you make any changes to your site, it is good to see where you are now. There’s a lot to gain from getting it right: running your website on a server with updated software at a web host that offers excellent performance. So ask yourself: on what hardware and software are your sites running? What is your hosting plan? Are you using a budget shared hosting provider, or have you invested in a dedicated hosting plan at a well-known web host that fine-tuned its servers with WordPress?

To find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your site, you can visit the Site Health section in WordPress. Also, you could choose to install the Health Check plugin. This plugin gives you loads of technical insights and helps you get information that outside parties can use to help you improve your site. Eventually, all features of the Health Check plugin will move to WordPress core.

Site Health gives you an overview of how your site is doing