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Blogs » Archive for February, 2008
99designs launches!
It’s an emotional moment when a child grows up and leaves home for the first time. The parents fret about whether their little baby will be able to fend for themselves on their own. Undeterred, the child throws himself, wide-eyed and fearless, into the big, wide world.
Today, Lachlan, Mark and Paul officially separated SitePoint Contests from the family to launch 99designs.
The launch is only the first stage of the 99designs re-branding — some of the features are new, such as user pages and the credit purchase process. The really cool stuff, however, will be rolled out over the next month or so.
As a bonus, the credit balance of any former participants in SitePoint Contests has been copied across to 99designs, effectively giving users a stack of free credits that they can begin using immediately. See the official 99designs blog for more information.
On behalf of the team at SitePoint we wish you guys the very best of luck, and we look forward to watching 99designs grow!
What’s so bad about the Singleton?
I keep running into people who caution against using Singleton and recommend to avoid it like a plague. What is so scary about it?
— Kailash Badu
It’s a good question, for it is true that global variables are often demonised and more recently the Singleton has befallen the same fate. Perhaps a bit surprising, it is remarkably hard to find good arguments to support this common knowledge — Googling turns up a lot of confusion.
As I have often taken this stance myself, I found it reasonable that I should be able to argue for it, so I’ll try to give an explanation. This is also in part a follow-up on my post from last week, in which I present a way to avoid global symbols, without spending much time on why.
The anatomy of the Singleton
Some of the confusion around Singletons, comes from the fact that it is a manifestation of two different concepts, which each have a negative effect on an applications architecture. This muddies the case, since people tend to only deal with either one or the other of these two.
The most obvious of these concepts, is that the Singleton is a form of …
News Wire: Safari Speeds Up AND Gets Web Fonts!
It’s been a while between drinks. Luckily, we’re back. There’s been a lot going on across the intarwebs lately — check it out:
- $1.2m paid for the letter ’s’ in a domain
A British travel company has paid $US1.1 million ($A1.2m) for the domain name cruises.co.uk, a price that is effectively $1 million just for the letter “S” since it already owns the address cruise.co.uk.
(tags: domain valuation) - uTest - Software Testing Community
A software testing tool based on the “crowdsourcing” business model.
(tags: testing crowdsourcing development software qa) - Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth
Yahoo! launches surprisingly reasonably priced web hosting for small and medium sized businesses. Unlimited storage and bandwidth for $11.95 per month!
(tags: hosting yahoo!) - Safari is about to get crazy fast
Holy cow is this thing fast! I am currently testing Webkit build r30090 (DMG download link) against standard Leopard Safari 3.04. This unoptimized WebKit build version is running circles around the standard Safari browser. It isn’t even close.
(tags: apple safari browser firefox) - W3C Gets Excessive DTD Traffic
The W3C is suffering from its own success. If only developers could get a handle on XML catalogs, …
What’s wrong?
If you want to find out how good your product/service is — ask what’s wrong with it.
You may think you know what your customers want and need, but that may not be how customer feels about it. An important part of client service is not to find out how great things are going, but to find out what’s not going so well.
Ask your clients for an honest opinion on what they like about your product/service, but more importantly — ask what they didn’t/don’t like. Let them know that you want to improve your service/product and would really appreciate their honest appraisal on anything and everything — no matter how big or small. How can we improve?
Ultimately by engaging your clients, showing that they matter and acting on what they say (if appropriate). You will:
- improve your product/service
- be more competitive
- improve client retention rates
- improve your image
So, what are you waiting for? Find out what’s wrong.
Take the SitePoint Reader Survey: Win a Nintendo Wii!
We here at SitePoint would like to get your input on how we can improve sitepoint.com — and we’re prepared to bribe you with shiny toys to get it!
The SitePoint Reader Survey is upon us, and there’s one heck of an incentive for you to complete it. One lucky winner will receive a brand new Nintendo Wii game console and a copy of the amazing Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (as well as a second guitar, so you can rock out with your friends!).
The purpose of the survey is to learn more about how people use the site, what kind of content our readers want to read, as well as to gather data that we can use to bring more relevant advertisers to sitepoint.com.
We’ve tried our best to keep the survey as short and easy to complete as possible — read the forum announcement for complete terms and conditions. When you’re ready, go ahead and …
I’ll leave you with some screenshots of Guitar Hero III and a few pictures of Alex and Brothercake rocking out to Guns and Roses in the SitePoint office.
Yahoo Says No: Genius or Suicide?
News wires around the world are reporting that the Yahoo board are planning on rejecting Microsoft’s $42 billion bid of a week ago. Whether this is a display of brave optimism by Yahoo, or simply a play to convince Microsoft (or another potential buyer — did somebody say the G word?) to raise their bid is anyone’s guess.
Typically, whenever a takeover bid is initiated, the buyer’s stock price takes a bit of a hit. However, I bet Ballmer didn’t count on it being quite this much:
Microsoft closed at $32.60 per share on January 31, hours before the Yahoo bid was placed. On Friday, the stock closed at $28.56, a decline of about 13% and the lowest it has been since 2006. That erased just under $38 billion in Microsoft shareholder value.
Ouch.
.NET on the ‘Net Feb 1-7: DataContext Dilemmas & Versioning Databases
In the running for “post of the week” there is an outright tie between Rick Strahl’s brilliant post on strategies to handle Linq to SQL’s DataContext dilemma. Her threw in a set of sample business object wrapper samples for good measure. K. Scott Allen posted an equally brilliant series of articles on database version management.
Honorable mentions start with Rob Conrey posted the Subsonic 2.1 beta for public consumption. While you are there, make sure to check out his excellent post on hacking legacy applications for fun and profit. If you are having .NET TDD nightmares, you might want to comment on Phil Haack’s plea for Unit Testing horror stories. From a technical perspective, Derek Whittaker reminds us to take out the trash. Also interesting is Dave Ward’s explanation of some neat tricks to remotely load user controls. Rounding things out, make sure to check out Steve Herbert’s examination of performance implications of Linq to Objects, it’s sweet.
As for upcoming events, if anyone is in the DC area, there is the Rockville …
Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…
Some of you will already know The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) mail list. For those that don’t know it, the website and mail list are great resources and sources of discussion for anyone interested in interaction design, user experience and design.
The IxDA is a member-supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of more than 1,500 members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues.
Now, as Michael Jackson once said: “I’m a lurker, not a writer”.. OK well maybe that was me. But all the same, there’s been a really good discussion going on over the last few days that I’ve been watching with great interest. List members have been posting ‘The One Book’ they’d recommend to Engineering Management folk (or anyone else for that matter, I’d venture).
So without further ado, here’s a summary of some great reading on User Experience, Usability, and Interaction Design:
- The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
- Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology, Ellen Isaacs & Alan Walendowski
- Communicating Design, Dan Brown
- The Design …
Are you a “green” employee?
There is plenty of talk about how people want to work for environmentally sound businesses and how people are being more environmentally caring at home. However, there is evidence that those same people may not be doing the “right thing” at work. Are you that person?
I have compiled a short list of questions to find out:
- Do you switch off your computer when you finish work?
- Do you use a mug rather than disposable cups?
- Do you print out your emails?
- Do you use public transport or walk/cycle to work?
- Do you recycle any garbage/rubbish you create at work? (I’m not talking about the standard of your work!)
- If you are the last to leave, do you make sure all unnecessary lights and equipment are switched off?
How well did you do?
CSS Reset Reloaded. Again.
Last year Eric Meyer documented his thoughts on resetting the styles of a web page to a common baseline. For designers who crave pixel-perfect layouts, differences between the default styles that each browser applies can be infuriating, and this was a terrific approach to leveling the playing field in the quest for an identical render across all browsers.
His comments when he first released the style reset rules were that they were:
… not a case of “everyone must use these styles in a certain way without alteration”. Nor am I saying that everyone must use them or else be cast into darkness. Remember before that I termed these “my take on the topic of reset styles” (emphasis added). Your take may be subtly or greatly different.
However, he recently released a modified version that reworked some of those styles, and in doing so conceded that this really could be a consistent benchmark from which to begin developing style rules that behave predictably in all browsers:
… over time, I’ve come to realize that this is more than just a throwaway development tool. It really is the beginning of a baseline style sheet. (Or can be.) Things like …
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