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Blogs » Archive for February, 2008
Business Web Apps: Which Do You Use?
Over the last couple of years there has been a massive increase in the number and diversity of business orientated web applications. All designed to make your business more productive in one way or another, products like:
- Basecamp (project management)
- Gmail (email)
- Remember The Milk (to-do lists)
- Crazy Egg (web site statistics)
- Fresh Books (invoicing and time tracking)
Which business web applications do you use? and why?
Have they improve your business productivity?
Wow! Windy Wellington’s Webstock Wrap-up…
For those of us who weren’t able to make it to New Zealand for last week’s Webstock conference, interface design Luke Wroblewski has done an admirable job of blogging key points from many of the presentations.
Here’s a choice selection:
- Jason Santa Maria on Good Design Aint Easy. Jason reflected on the fact that, unlike the Web, print design comes with fixed constraints such as page size and unchanging font sizes and layouts. However, these limitations are advantageous because they permit designers to make use of the golden ratio and the “rule of thirds” — a case in which constraints can offer a creative advantage, not a disadvantage.
- Molly Holzschlag on Why Web Standards Aren’t. Molly revisited some of the issues discussed at the recent Web Standards Group meeting in Melbourne — that what we have currently is not really a set of standards, but a set of best practices that browser vendors can choose to implement (or not). W3C specs will only become true standards if the development of them happens in a completely transparent fashion, with zero ambiguity in the outcome.
- Peter Morville on Ambient Findability. Peter described findability as “the ability …
Procedural programming, OOP or a bit of both?
How do you prefer to program?
There are plenty of arguements for and against both, but at the end of the day, which do you use?
- are you a Object Orientated Programming (OOP) devotee?
- a Procedural Programming fanatic?
- or perhaps you prefer to work both sides of the street?
Tell us which and why?
Marketplace Users Risk Getting Left Behind
I’ve just been taking a look over some of the early results of the SitePoint Reader Survey.
We’re getting some invaluable feedback about the site — tons of suggestions for things we can improve from forum users, article junkies and blog-addicts. And there are some great ideas are streaming in from old-timers and new visitors alike, which is awesome. One thing concerns me a little, though.
One group of users in particular seem to be under-represented, and that’s those who frequent the Marketplace. Given the huge percentage of traffic that the marketplace accounts for, this is really surprising. Whether these users are too caught up buying and selling web sites to be bothered filling out a 5-minute survey, or perhaps they’re not interested in winning a Wii because they’re worried about it distracting them from concentrating on flipping their latest hot property, I don’t know.
I will say this though — now is your chance to give suggestions for improvement on all avenues of sitepoint.com, including the marketplace. So if you have some firm ideas about what changes you’d like to see happen, you know what to do.
Who knows, you might score yourself a …
Drupal 6.0 Released
The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.
After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6’s major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project’s continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.
While I haven’t used Drupal on any major projects, I got to see it in action in the FullCodePress international site-in-a-day competition last year, when the Australian team chose it to power their charity’s site. And when I attended Drupal MiniCon here in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, a recurring theme was that the installer needed to be friendlier for first time users.
I’m happy to report that, with the version 6.0 release, getting Drupal up and running is as easy as it should be, and the Lullabot team have prepared an excellent screencast (MP4, 12 minutes, 38.5 MB) that anticipates …
.NET on the ‘Net Feb 8-14: Windows 2008 Server Made My Valentines Day
Hey ladies and laddies. It was a very, very significant week in .NET. First and foremost, Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing and it is currently available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The most significant offshoot, for us ASP.NET types, is that this opens the door to production IIS7 hosting. Which oftentimes translates to “no more calling the sysadmins to tweak some IIS setting because I can set them in my web.config” or “holy smokes Batman, this integrated pipeline is awesome!” Also, for those of us crazy enough to be developing on Vista, Service Pack 1 was also released to manufacturing this week and should hit widespread availability by March 18.
In addition, Microsoft also released a Visual Studio hotfix aimed at significantly increasing performance and quashing some bugs in the web design tools. One very significant offshoot is that JQuery now works with Visual Studio 2008 intellisense. Finally, Scott Guthrie updated the ASP.NET MVC roadmap while, for the poor souls stuck working in SharePoint, the Visual Studio Team released a significant update.
In arguably the coolest release of the week, Tim Sneath announced the release …
Make money from your mistakes
It is possible to profit from your mistakes. Let me tell you a little true story.
“ Once upon a time, one Saturday morning my (then) hosting company accidentally deleted one of my reseller accounts and failed to get the hosting back on-line for 2 and a half days, (the hows and whys of it are not for this post).
As you can imagine, my clients were furious. Even though it was not my error — I was responsible for it. So, once everything was back up and running, what did I do? Did I give them an imaginative excuse, using lots of acronyms and blaming everyone else? No. I sent all the affected clients a personalised email. Apologising and explaining what had happened and what I was doing to prevent it happening again. I sent this email to everyone, even to the clients who had not noticed the outage.
The response to that email was actually incredibly positive:
“Thanks for letting us know”
“I appreciate your honesty”
“Oh, by the way I need “X” doing, can you send me a quote.”
And business continued on happily after…
THE END ”
The moral of the story?
Now, whilst it is not the most exciting story, there is …
The Week in ColdFusion: 6-12 Feb: Spreading the ColdFusion love
Fresh blogging blood: Adam Lehaman, previously Adobe’s “ColdFusion Specialist”, is now a full time ColdFusion Evangelist - and he’s also relaunched his blog, Adrocknaphobia. I had the pleasure of seeing Adam present during the CFCAMP event in Perth late last year, so I can tell you he’s really good at what he does. Also on the Adobe front, Kristen Schofield, ColdFusion marketing manager, is looking for ColdFusion case studies, so if you’ve done something cool, this could be your opportunity to tell the world about it.
Older podcasts from CFUnited, posted in January, somehow ended up in my feed this week, but it was a good reminder - there is some great content tucked away there. See the full list on the CFUnited site.
Ajax integration is proving to be one of the most talked-about features in ColdFusion 8, sparking lots of interest in JavaScript frameworks and particularly ExtJS. Justin Carter has released an alpha version of ColdExt, an ExtJS-based tag library for ColdFusion, to RIAForge. Justin has also posted some information about where he sees the project heading next.
And then for some code: Ben Nadel and Ray Camden have started an image manipulation project on RIAForge - ImageUtils.cfc - which …
Yahoo: 60% Chance To Sell To Alternative Bidder
Yesterday, when Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang formally spelled out the reasons to shareholders for why his board rejected Microsoft’s $42 billion offer, he made it sound like everything was roses:
I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!’s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders
Of course, communication with one’s shareholders always needs to walk a fine line between sobering and optimistic, but good luck to any shareholders who can’t see through the spin.
So, if not Microsoft, who? It’s obvious that a sale to someone is imminent.
The New York Times is suggesting that a deal is close to being struck with News Corp:
News Corp. and a private equity firm reportedly would buy significant stakes in Yahoo as part of a complex deal designed to push the Sunnyvale-based company’s market value toward $50 billion.
The Times, on the other hand, believe that AOL might be the next to step up:
It is also understood that one option being explored is to …
File Not Found? Google Knows Best
A new feature thrown into the beta 5 release of the Google Toolbar for IE — ignoring a site’s 404 page and displaying its own File Not Found page (with links and a Google search bar, of course) — is causing plenty of bloggers to cry foul.
Google’s Matt Cutts has gone into “it’s OK, we’re just helping” mode, clarifying that Google’s version of the File Not Found page only kicks in if the site’s 404 page displayed is smaller than 512 bytes (an assumption that is supposedly intended to target default pages only). Of course, it’s entirely plausible that a custom 404 page just doesn’t use much markup, which in Google’s eyes, means it’s not worthy for display.
Yes this is a setting that users can turn off, and yes the user can choose just to uninstall the toolbar altogether. But on the other hand, this is a setting that is turned on by default, and is a very popular piece of software with a huge user base — should the fact that I keep my markup lean result in my 404 page being overwritten (for those users) with Google’s opinion of what they should see? It’s …
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