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Blogs ยป Archive for March, 2006
Classic Advertising Books
The Wall Street Journal today posted a list of 5 classic advertising books that may interest you. The list was created by famous advertising entrepreneur Jerry Della Famina. The books are:
The 100 Greatest Advertistements 1852-1958 by Julius Lewis Watkins, 1959
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, 1963
Bill Bernbach’s Book By Bob Levenson, 1987
A Technique for Producing Ideas, by James Webb Young, 1940
Reality in Advertising, Rosser Reeves (inventor of the USP), 1961
These are timeless classics and should be part of any marketing/web designer/copy writer’s library.
More PHP frameworks
Yes I know - with the framework in progress, we don’t need no more stinkin’ frameworks. Except there’s a couple I’ve seen recently which are noteworthy. I haven’t delved into the source code in any depth - exploring framework code bases has become as much fun as watching paint dry, but there are some interesting ideas here, if you’re looking to new angles on the problem.
First up is Tonic by Paul James which labels itself as “A RESTful Web App Development Framework”. It’s interesting because the API of the controllers you write is much like web.py which I covered before here (and tonic actually came first). Some interesting ideas - and it’s one of very few paying attention to HTTP. You’ll need to pull it out of CVS BTW (no download at this time).
Second in todays framework fiesta is Code Igniter (thanks to Mark Barton for the tip off) - this is from the same people that put together pMachine hence think it’s noteworthy. It’s very Rails-esque from superficial trawling but it’s appealing to the KISS point of view, plus there seems to be a cunning approach to URL mapping in there.
Any …
Searching For Link Partners on MSN
MSN has a very cool new feature described at SEOMoz.org that allows you to see whose linking to your competitors but not to you.
For example a search for:
(linkdomain:amazon.com.com linkdomain:bn.com) (-linkdomain:borders.com)
Will provide a list of all sites linking to Amazon.com and BN.com but not to Borders…
This is a great way to find potential link partners, as well as to find areas of the web where your visibility is low compared to your competitors.
A caveat about off shore work and outsourcing
I’ve been up since 5:30 am my time instant messaging with some developers from India.
As noted in earlier blogs, sometimes I go with US resources, and sometimes I go off shore. It’s nothing personal.
For this project off shore developers can do the job for 1/10 the cost of US developers. I’d be nuts to not take advantage of this pricing differential.
But I pay a price for this in my own time and sanity:
1. I can’t believe the back and forth required to get something right. Even a simple text change can take two days, and end up breaking other parts of a site.
2. I sometimes give up and pay a competent US developer to do something for me. He is so fast and accurate that even though his hourly rate is 5X higher, I end up paying less.
3. The time differences, large number of holidays, frequent sick days, and staff turnover can be annoying and difficult.
4. Versions of SQL and other programs are often outdated and lower end.
I am willing to put up with the above because, as you know from my blogs, I am cheap — especially in the early part of a site before proving the concept …
Google Payments a Go!
Barry Schwartz at SEORoundtable has two excellent articles about Google payments, and how it can now be used as a substitute to a merchant account by those selling through Google Base.
How to join Google Payments through Google Base
Buying Items and Accepting Payments at Google Base
On a test $1 transaction, the Google fee was 27 cents.
Do you know your character encodings?
This entry reproduced from The Tech Times #134.
Last month, I attended a meeting of the Melbourne chapter of the Web Standards Group, where Richard Ishida, the Internationalization Activity Lead of the W3C gave a remarkably clear presentation of one of the most ignored issues in web development: character encodings.
Have you ever noticed certain characters on your site not displaying the way they should? Perhaps the curly quotation marks look like little boxes, or the long dashes have been replaced with question marks. Problems like these usually arise from an incomplete understanding of character encodings on the part of the developer responsible for the site.
I’d go so far as to guess that, in English speaking circles at least, most web developers that have never learned about character encodings, and just deal with the consequences when issues like the above crop up.
As a site grows to the point where it must address an international audience (or even just an audience that likes curly quotes), however, it’s more and more difficult to ignore these issues. Even worse, in these heady times of daily hack attempts, incorrect handling of character encodings can result in severe security vulnerabilities (as Google …
PHP ZH Round One
Yesterday’s first meeting worked out pretty well, to the point where I needed a quiet morning. Good turnout for the kick off thanks to everyone that made it and especially to Christian for providing space.
Security Primer talk now online here (PDF). Also a couple of snaps from Christian.
Next mission is a “re-branding”, prompted by Esther pointing out that PHP is too narrow a topic - new name to be something like “Web Tuesday”.
Also had an offer to host next month’s meeting at the Zurich offices of search.ch (OK - I talked Denis and Urban into it).. S
hould be interesting: the search.ch dev team are doing some leading edge stuff. You may have seen map.search.ch (was released some time before Google maps and, IMO, still has a much slicker UI - check out the left and right mouse button zoom for example). Their latest app immo.search.ch adds a new spin on searching for real estate, acting as a “meta UI” for various Swiss real estate sites - although on English l10n (German or French) it’s well worth checking out. From chat last night, sounds like they’ve got some more cool …
Craigslist: It Doesn’t Have to be Ugly
(via Digg) While Ian Lloyd has chronicled the goings on at SXSW 2006 (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4), those of us at SitePoint HQ have had to jealously read the headlines from here.
One nugget that I particularly enjoyed was the redesign of craigslist that was undertaken by The Design Fab Five Seven. Having produced a slick, accessible new look for craigslist, the popular and lightweight classifieds site, they presented it to the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, live on stage at SXSW.
Before:
After:
The new design is certainly a huge improvement in both usability and accessibility for the site, the current design of which is entirely layed out using tables with a smattering of embedded CSS. Additionally, the new design seems to be even lighter than the original, weighing in at 19KB (plus 4KB of CSS and a 2KB image–negligible because they’re shared between pages). In contrast, the current craigslist Austin home page (the object of the redesign) weighs in at a whopping 31KB of HTML.
The redesign would regain a bit of weight upon adding proper URLs for all of …
SXSW 2006 - It’s a wrap!
It’s final day out here in Austin’s SXSW festival (or at least the final part of the interactive portion) and for the first time since coming here four years ago I’m actually finding myself ready to go home. It’s true that it really is a party town here, and especially when so many web geeks descend on the place as they do, but there’s something to be said for having the occassional bit of sleep!
This morning, there were more than a few people who also appeared to be flagging somewhat - last night’s Blogger and Adaptive Path sponsored events looked to have taken their toll somewhat. Regardless, the seminar rooms were still heaving with people wanting to learn more web-related stuff.
Once more I played the guessing game about what panels to attend and kicked off the day with the session about Web Standards, or to give it its proper title ‘Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards‘. This was of particular interest to me because I had tried to do exactly that some years ago and now find myself in the lucky position of working alongside a group of people who really do ‘get it’ (although it’s …
SXSW Day three - Waiting for the bubble to burst?
So you’re probably wondering what the title I chose above is all about. It only really occurred to me last night when someone said to me that this year at SXSW it felt like the dot com boom years. He said this because we were, at the time, each drinking our third or fourth free beer from that establishment, hemmed in on all sides by many other people doing exactly the same. This was the Adaptive Path party and we’d moved along there just half an hour or so ago from the venue next door where the Blogger party had been taking place but where, importantly, the free bar that they were offering had just run out. As had all the free hats and food. Yep, everyone in the town seems to want to give something away this year but honestly, what I’d really like is a night off! [I’m only half joking here]
For the first time I’ve found myself struggling to attend all the sessions, squeeze in some time to have a sit-down meal at lunch and after the sessions and also attend the many different evening gatherings (and, as you can tell, the ones that …
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