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Blogs » Archive for November, 2006

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Answers to Episode 1 (Scavenger Hunt)

by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

If you missed it, this week’s challenge deals with finding computer-readable public data resources. Before getting to the answers, though, let’s talk a little about technique.

Monday, November 20th, 2006 | Posted in Web Developer Quiz | 1 Comment »

More Hourly Rate Magic…

by Dave Hecker

I thought one last post about hourly rates might be worthwhile, since there seems to be plenty of interest in measuring and ultimately raising the amount of profit that we make with each hour we invest in our businesses.

Many of the hours we work are dedicated to non-billable activities such as marketing or administration and it’s not easy to measure the return on that investment as a ‘dollars per hour’ figure. However, when it comes to the hours you devote to a billable client there are lots of ways that you can increase your profits. In my business, I do it in two primary ways:

1. Upsells
2. Billable employees or contractors

Upsells are simple enough to understand, but highly underrated. Just by adding a small upsell to each client, it’s amazing how much you can increase revenue. For example, I don’t sell hosting to the public but we always reserve space on our servers for existing clients who need hosting services. We charge an annual fee of $250/domain for hosting, which is higher than the industry average but since our clients already trust us they are happy to pay it. We also offer advisory services (tax, legal, bookkeeping, etc.) to known clients …

Saturday, November 18th, 2006 | Posted in Web Pro Business | 5 Comments »

News Wire: Perfection Meets Reality

by Kevin Yank

• It’s official: GWT 1.2 released
  The new release enables development under MacOS X in addition to the previously supported Windows and Linux environments, and significantly speeds up the hosted debugging runtime environment.
  (tags: google java javascript)
• Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree to Standard Sitemaps Protocol
  A sitemap is an XML file that lists all of the pages on your site that you would like to have indexed by search engines. With this announcement, you can now write a single sitemap and have it indexed by the big three.
  (tags: search google yahoo! microsoft xml)
• SWFUpload beta
  A slick JavaScript library that uses Flash internally to improve the file upload process. Display a file selection dialog with file type filters, monitor progress with JavaScript event handlers, and set up an animated progress bar to match your design.
  (tags: flash javascript)
• Zend_Search (Java Lucene)
  A case study of Zend_Search, the search engine built into the Zend Framework for PHP. Certain parts aren’t pretty, like support for non-ASCII characters. The situation will surely improve, but for now the workarounds given here are vital. (thanks harryf)
  (tags: php)
• IE+JavaScript Performance Recommendations Part 2: JavaScript Code Inefficiencies
  The second of three articles from Microsoft on how to write more efficient JavaScript. One wonders how much this applies …

Saturday, November 18th, 2006 | Posted in Industry Links | No Comments »

News Wire: Java Goes Open Source

by Kevin Yank

• script.aculo.us 1.6.5
  The last release of the script.aculo.us JavaScript effects library before Ruby on Rails 1.2, 1.6.5 includes some nice fixes as well as Effect.Event—a clever new feature that lets you fire and respond to events during a series of visual effects.
  (tags: javascript software)
• Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1 “Last Call” Working Draft
  Pushing to finalize CSS 2.1 by the end of the year, the W3C has released the “last call” Working Draft. The deadline for comments is 7 December 2006.
  (tags: standards css)
• Widgets 1.0 First Public Working Draft
  The W3C’s Web Application Formats working group has released the first draft of a specification for widgets, similar to what is available in the Opera 9 browser. So far the spec is pretty skeletal, but looks promising.
  (tags: standards)
• Client-Side Web Applications (Widgets) Requirements First Public Working Draft
  In addition to the Widgets spec itself, the W3C has published a document outlining the capabilities that it hopes to include in the finished spec.
  (tags: standards)
• XForms 1.1 Working Draft
  In a new working draft, the already intimidating XForms specification swells by 33% compared to the previous draft. Though hugely powerful, the growing complexity of XForms continues to signal the need for updates to HTML’s simple form tags.
  (tags: html xforms …

Friday, November 17th, 2006 | Posted in Industry Links | 2 Comments »

Race Conditions, AJAX and Sessions

by Harry Fuecks

Via Jeff’s bookmarks, Race Conditions with Ajax and PHP Sessions by Andy “thwarted” Bakun is an outstanding anaylsis of a problem that’s come up before on this blog here.

In fact the title is almost misleading - the first half looks at “parallel processing” in Javascript with some valuable insight - i.e. you want to read this even if you’re not using PHP.

The second half explores building a custom PHP session handler (PHP’s default session handler does not suffer from race conditions but can become problematic the moment you start handling serious traffic), leading up to a very cunning strategy that allows you to lock a single session variable (rather than the entire session) via overloading the $_SESSION variable using SPL - effectively an alternative to using session_set_save_handler() - let’s hope this becomes recognised as a feature that needs supporting.

And it’s refresshing it is to see something like this in PHP-related content…

the built-in [PHP] session handler uses the flock(2) system call […] This can be verified by using strace to list all the system calls being made by a process. Here’s the important bit:

open("/var/lib/php/session/sess_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0600) = 18
flock(18, LOCK_EX) …

Thursday, November 16th, 2006 | Posted in PHP | 2 Comments »

Usability Double-whammy!

by Matthew Magain

Usability.

We think we know what the word means, but many people struggle to define or describe it. Of course, we always know when something is usable, because it feels “intuitive”. And we certainly know when something is not usable, as it frustrates the heck out of us.

We might read a bit about the topic of usability every now and then, or feel inspired to actually apply some user-centred design techniques or perform structured usability testing in our day-to-day work. Personally I find myself getting all fired up about this stuff after attending a conference, but a few days afterwards the practical reality of a daily routine means it falls by the wayside.

So how much from the masses of usability theory do we actually use when we build our web sites, and how much goes out the window in exchange for our own judgment calls, or for something that we know has worked in the past? Do you need to be an expert with academic credentials to be able to apply this stuff? Sometimes even the experts fail to agree, or the theory is far removed from the practical, or it forces us to sacrifice aesthetics to get a tick …

Thursday, November 16th, 2006 | Posted in Usability | 11 Comments »

Lessons from the LAMP generation - tilllate.com

by Harry Fuecks

Last night we were treated to Silvan and Stefans whirlwind history of tilllate.com, delivered to a packed webtuesday - thanks to search.ch for hosting and apologies to those that got stuck out in the corridor - a search for bigger meeting spaces is in progress.

The talk - described here translates (loosely) to “tilllate.com: From 0.1 to 30 Servers”;

With 100 million pageviews and 1 million visitors a month, tilllate.com is one of the biggest web platforms in Switzerland. The site currently comprises 60′000 lines of code and 430 database tables, served by a cluster of over 30 servers. Software and infrastructure is the responsibility of a team of 5 developers and engineers. Stefan (System Engineer) and [Silvan] (CTO) present their technical experiences in building tilllate from scratch.

It was both insightful and entertaining, backed with confessions and tales of past disasters. Something about the tilllate story probably rings true for most of the “LAMP generation”.

In redux: tilllate.com began is a “just for fun” project, while the founders were students. Self taught, starting from “View > Source” and graduating to PHP, the first version, released in Y2K was ~40 scripts on a shared host. You know the sort - violation of every software …

Thursday, November 16th, 2006 | Posted in PHP | 10 Comments »

Episode 1: Scavenger hunt!

by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Let’s kick things off with something a bit unusual: a virtual scavenger hunt.

At some point, nearly every web geek gets a chance to hack on some open data, usually from a government source. The buzzword here is “mashup,” but knowing how to find and consume openly available data will remain a valuable skill long after its faddishness ends.

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 | Posted in Web Developer Quiz | 12 Comments »

Holy Hamburgers!

by Eric Jones

The only thing “Stagnant” about ColdFusion is this blog, or should I say, WAS this blog! It’s been 2 long years since I last posted on InFused and I’m happy to report today changes all that. I remember begging SitePoint to let me take this blog over from David Medlock back in May of 2004, which SitePoint as we know allowed to happen. Then a short six months later I was telling them it was too much for me, and at that time in my life it was. I had just taken a new position with my current employer and was learning so many new things about ColdFusion that I just couldn’t get things in order.

So I quit. I left this blog to become a stagnant collection of articles and a complete failure / social black-eye for the SitePoint ColdFusion community. For this I’m truly sorry but I promise you my departure was not in vain. Even though I left the SitePoint blog behind my involvement in the community has only grown! You’ve hopefully seen me on the forums as well as around the various mailing lists and if you live in the Atlanta area you’ve probably seen …

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 | Posted in ColdFusion | 8 Comments »

Welcome to the quiz!

by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Sharpen your pencils, dust off your keyboards, and put on your thinking caps — the Web Developer’s Quiz is coming.

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 | Posted in Web Developer Quiz | 10 Comments »