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Blogs » Archive for January, 2008

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Web Directions North: Discount For SitePoint Readers

by Matthew Magain

We’re pleased to announce that SitePoint readers who are thinking of attending the Web Directions North conference in Vancouver, BC in a couple of weeks are eligible for a discount of $50 off the standard ticket price.

All you have to do is enter the code WDN-SP when purchasing your ticket, and you’ll receive it at a discounted price of CDN $845.

Featuring a massive line-up including an opening keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman and LifeHacker founding editor Gina Trapani, as well as presentations by SitePoint authors Cameron Adams and Jonathan Snook, Web Directions North really is shaping up to be one of the most impressive conferences ever.

View the schedule for the two days, or register to attend.

Monday, January 14th, 2008 | Posted in Web Tech | No Comments »

“What PHP Deployment Gets Right” - Ian Bicking nails it at last

by Harry Fuecks

This should be required reading for anyone working on the server-side - What PHP Deployment Gets Right; this really is the final word on the subject - it really needs adding to the PHP manual, as there’s a significant gap when it comes to describing how PHP actually works, and why it’s designed to help you avoid the squirrels.

It’s also great to hear that mod_wsgi is intended to provide similar architecture (the daemon mode) - up until now was only aware of mod_neko doing something similar to PHP.

Thanks Ian!

Sunday, January 13th, 2008 | Posted in PHP | 8 Comments »

6 things to try in Rails this year

by Myles Eftos

It seems that blog posts in the first couple of weeks of the new year (happy new year by the way) follow the “x things to do this year” meme as a virtual homage to new years resolutions. Never one to buck a trend, I have prepared this short list of things you should try in Ruby and in Rails - I hope to cover each topic in more detail over the next couple of weeks.

1. Install Rails: This is aimed at those of you out there that haven’t tried Ruby on Rails yet. Jump in - have a go, there are plenty of resources out there, and it is fairly easy to install regardless of your platform
2. Upgrade to Rails 2.0: I have covered what’s new in Rails 2.0 in a number of my previous posts, and upgrading isn’t really THAT difficult if you follow the steps and fix any deprecation notices.
3. Write a plugin: Plugins allow you to re-use common patterns without having to resort to the dreaded cut-and-paste keys. Rails has a built in plugin generator that gives you the skeleton code, all you need to do is to mix-in the right modules - oh, and write the code…
4. Try out …

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | Posted in Ruby on Rails | 7 Comments »

Building your business using goal setting

by Miles Burke

Welcome back to the Web Pro Business blog for 2008, I hope you had a relaxing and safe festive break.

I had the pleasure and honor to be asked to write an article for SitePoint during December, which you can read over here. In the article, I made ten suggestions for goals to achieve during 2008, which would help your business grow.

Now, even if you haven’t taken the plunge into full time freelance or business owner status yet, these ten resolutions (also available as a single page A4 or Letter sized PDF to print) will help you get to this stage.

I’m hoping to elaborate on a few points which I made in this article over the next few posts. Firstly, let’s start with goal setting.

Most images of goal setting conjure up thoughts of sports cars, huge homes and swimming in a pool of money, however these are probably slightly grandiose for what I am suggesting. Let’s break this down to medium-long term goals, shorter term goals and actions which belong to goals.

Let’s say you are like many folk who have commented on my previous posts, and haven’t yet taken the dive into self employment. What would your longer term goal be? …

Sunday, January 6th, 2008 | Posted in Web Pro Business | 5 Comments »

Coming Soon: Changes to the CSS Working Group?

by Kevin Yank

In a previous post I reported on the crisis within the web standards community, and in particular the controversy surrounding the W3C CSS Working Group. It seems the criticism levelled by Andy Clarke and others has not fallen on deaf ears, because a movement for change is now being led from within the Working Group.

On December 14th, one of the key members of the CSS Working Group, L. David Baron of the Mozilla Corporation made an announcement:

"I’ve informed the CSS working group that I am no longer participating in member-only mailing lists or meetings. I believe the member-confidential nature of the group hurts the future development of CSS by making the group:

• fail to accept the contributions of many who would like to contribute to CSS and
• get mired in debates and stalling tactics that companies would not be comfortable using in public.

"I still intend to participate in any discussions that take …

Friday, January 4th, 2008 | Posted in JavaScript & CSS | 3 Comments »

Netscape Navigator Goes Quietly Into the Night

by Kevin Yank

On New Year’s Eve, the news went out from AOL that the long life of the Netscape Browser was coming to an end.

The End of Support announcement was respectful of the browser’s long history—longer than any other browser still in general use—as it acknowledged that it was time to call it quits:

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.”

It’s interesting that the announcement names Internet Explorer as Netscape’s chief rival. While this was true once upon a time, it seems to me Netscape might have been more successful—if only marginally so—if it had focused on marketing to Firefox users, perhaps even getting Firefox users to recommend it to their less tech-savvy friends and family.

In any case, active development of Netscape Navigator has now ceased, …

Friday, January 4th, 2008 | Posted in Web Tech | 27 Comments »

Rakish resolution - more flame

by Harry Fuecks

Happy 2008! At the risk of being a cad (or just plain annoying and silly)…

Zed Shaw, (ex-?)author of Mongrel, makes this remark in his end of year epiphany Rails is a Ghetto;

(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that’s still fastcgi right?

This one single statement [from 2007-01-20] basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average.

Let me put this into perspective for you: I’ve ran servers that needed to be restarted once in a year. They were written in PHP, Python, Java, C, C++, you name it. Hell, I’ve got this blog on a server I’ve restarted maybe 10-20 times the whole year.

Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother f***ing day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes b****es. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread.

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that …

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 | Posted in PHP | 7 Comments »