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Blogs » Archive for December, 2006
Unexpectedly Handy
Over the last few months I’ve received a surprising number of requests that involve integrations with Paypal, especially integrations between Joomla/Virtuemart and Paypal.
For the most part, Paypal integrations tend to be fairly easy to configure. The fraud department at Paypal, however, recently made our lives more difficult by tightening up the fraud prevention rules so that a single login from a ‘prohibited’ country causes the entire account to immediately go into a restricted mode. Once the account is restricted, transactions are limited and the account owner has to go through a painful series of validations which sometimes include waiting for a PIN to be delivered via postal mail.
Fortunately, we stumbled into this problem while working on our company website rather than a client site. Our team that handles Joomla/Paypal work is based in Romania – a restricted country according to Paypal. Although we’ve never had a problem in the past, a single login from Romania caused our entire Paypal integration to become crippled. To make matters worse, we have a 6-week backlog of Paypal related work that needs to get into production immediately, and we couldn’t risk causing a client’s account to be spontaneously restricted.
How could our Romania-based team …
Sql Server Full-Text Search Protips Part 3: Getting RANKed
Learn how to pull ranked search results out of your Full-Text indices.
Snort, Cough, Cough, Hack….
Not a very pleasant title for a blog post for sure, but that my loyal readers has been mine life for the past week and a half. I’ve been fighting the flu / an upper respiratory infection which has left my online time to very very minimal spurts. So no fancy coding lecture today. Instead just a quick note to wish all of you reading this a happy holiday and a safe and joyous new year.
We’ll return to our normally scheduled posting starting back up in January of 2007 maybe even a bit sooner if i can ever get over this "thing" i have.
Oh yea one more thing I’d like to send a big shout out and congratulations to all the winners of the first annual CFeMmys, who knows maybe next year you’ll see this blog there :)
Publishing for Success
This week I’m happy to announce the publication my first e-book, “Outsourcing Web Projects: 6 Steps to a Smarter Business“, now available here at SitePoint. The book provides a winning strategy for anyone who needs to outsource web development work to a domestic or offshore provider, and provides all sorts of tips to help the reader find the right vendor, get a great price, get the job done right, and form long-term relationships with reliable vendors. I sincerely hope that this book is beneficial to the readers, and I encourage any feedback or suggestions which might help to make it as clear and useful as possible. I’d also like to thank the SitePoint staff for being so supportive and pleasant to deal with.
Since the launch of the book I’ve received a variety of inquiries about it from SitePoint users, mostly questions about my motivation for writing the book. In short, the primary motivation was exposure, publicity, and to help my ongoing effort to position myself as an expert in the world of outsourcing and managing web projects. In keeping with Andrew Neitlich’s ‘become an expert in your field’ approach, I am hoping that the e-book will ultimately serve as …
Answers to Episode 4 (”What’s ‘normal’, really?”)
Well that was a raging success… not!
Apparently database normalization isn’t something that web developers find all that interesting. (But thanks to malikyte and xhtmlcoder for keeping the question from being a complete ghost town!)
That’s a shame, though — there are all sorts of pragmatic reasons behind good data design. To name just a few: properly designed tables often perform better than their de-normalized brethren, normalized data is much easier to aggregate successfully, and (most importantly) properly designed tables are much easier to understand.
That last one’s really the crux behind normalizing tables. Remember — computers don’t care if we write good code; when we write good code, it’s so that future developers won’t curse our names. Data normalization falls into the same future-proofing category.
Anyway, though: on to the answers. I’ll be brief, I promise.
- The FDA’s nutritional content database is — to my utter surprise — actually 3NF (everything has a primary key, and every piece of data appears to be atomic). I have some quibbles with a couple of the design choices, but they’re actually pretty minor. It’s pretty remarkable when you come across data this clean out of the box.
- Although the population …
News Wire: CSS Turns Ten
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Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta
Adobe has released Photoshop CS3 Beta for all licensed CS2 users. Others can download it to get a 2-day trial. The revamped UI is very nice, while other new features are nice, but not ground-breaking. Universal Binary support for Intel Macs at last!
(tags: software design) -
Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One Preview
About 90 minutes of free video training with Photoshop expert Deke McLelland from Lynda.com, to get you up and running with the new Photoshop CS3 beta.
(tags: design software) -
Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit
Another look at the technique of using “dummy” domain names to overcome the default 2-connection limit enforced by current browsers when connecting to HTTP 1.1 servers. In this particular case study, a 40% reduction in load time was achieved.
(tags: http) -
Transforming MODx: Tales of OO, MVC, and O/RM
Nearing 1.0, the MODx CMS is currently undergoing extensive rewrites of its core functionality in order to make it cleaner and more extensible. This article is an extensive discussion of how the MVC design pattern is being implemented in these rewrites.
(tags: php programming) -
Google Web Accelerator Debate
Google’s re-release of Google …
Where are all the visited links?
Something I’ve become aware of lately is the near extinction of the visited link state. In a recent comparative review of six industry-related government websites, only one site displayed visited links. And even then it was only on content text links, rather than the main site navigation. I have to admit, it really surprised me; after all, it’s hardly a technically advanced site feature!
But it’s more widespread than a handful of government sites…
Over the past few months I’ve reviewed a stack of sites for The Mc Farlane Prize as well as the more recent AIMIA awards, and I’ve been quite amazed by how few of the sites incorporated visited links.
Let’s not forget that these sites are submitting their work to be judged for “excellence in web design” (The McFarlane Prize), “showcasing the industry’s best innovations and projects” (AIMIA).
Now I don’t mean to infer that these sites aren’t of the “excellent” category simply because they don’t highlight visited links. But what’s going on?
In my last post, James Edwards asked me about my thoughts on “the crossover between Usability and Accessibility”, and I think the visited link is a great example of …
Pop Goes The Client
For the last month or so, I’ve been working with two particularly great prospects from our sales pipeline. Both potential clients are right in our target market and need substantial amounts of lucrative services, so we’ve been motivated to get them signed.
We had the usual exchange of e-mails, phone calls, and questions with both clients but in the end we signed one of the clients and decided to pass on the other. Simply put, one of the clients began to look less and less attractive as negotiations unfolded while the other proved to be easy to deal with in just about every way.
Both ‘Client A’ and ‘Client B’ both started out as strong prospects – established, substantial companies with good credit and lots of work. When we first sent out the contract, however, the differences became apparent.
Client A asked for some small and routine changes to the contract, mostly over the arbitration rules and some non-disclosure language. The changes were very reasonable so we were happy to comply. Meanwhile, Client B accepted all the terms of the contract but suddenly asked for a reduction on the hourly rate! This was a real shocker because the client had …
News Wire: Bill Gates on Web Standards
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Who Questions Bill Gates’ Commitment to Web Standards?
Molly Holzchlag was among a number of high-profile bloggers invited to discuss the issues of the day with a number of Microsoft insiders, including Bill Gates himself. What does Gates really think about web standards? Read the transcript and judge for yourself.
(tags: microsoft standards ie) -
Firefox 3.0: Passes Acid 2 CSS Test
The latest nightly build of Firefox 3.0 passes the Acid 2 test for CSS standards compliance, joining Opera, Konqueror and Safari. Internet Explorer is now the only major browser not to pass the Acid 2 test.
(tags: css standards firefox) -
GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source
With this latest version, Google has released all components of the Google Web Toolkit (including the previously closed-source compiler and runtime debugging frameworks) under othe Apache 2.0 open source license.
(tags: google opensource) -
google’s own cornershop
Sick of generating rounded corner images yourself? Google has a script to do this installed on most of its online services, and for now at least you can simply reference that service to get rounded corner images for your own site!
(tags: design …
Episode 4: What’s “normal,” really?
A few weeks ago, I posted a scavenger hunt for public data (answers); today we’ll return to dealing with that data.
