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Blogs » Archive for June, 2008
The SitePoint Web Of Fortune
We’ve all heard the stories of everyday people turning small sites into a healthy income that have allowed them to quit their day jobs and enjoy lives of online entrepreneurship.
But if you’re yet to find that killer strategy to earn a profit from the Web, I’d like to introduce you to a brand new product that’s going to make your journey to online prosperity simpler, easier, and oh so much faster…
The Web Site Revenue Maximizer
By Peter T. Davis & Georgina Laidlaw
Niche sites with the right content and monetization strategy are extremely valuable assets and this new SitePoint kit will walk you through, step-by-step, how to generate profit from the Web. You’ll learn from the pros just how easy it is to plan, build, and earn a steady income from your online portfolio.
Then, when you’re ready to cash out, you’ll learn how to flip your sites for profit.
It doesn’t matter if you’re new to the Web, or you already own a couple of sites. You’re sure to find some amazing nuggets of wisdom which will ensure this kit pays for itself again and again…
Here’s a just snippet of what you’ll learn:
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Rollin’ With Google App Engine, 80’s Style
Building a web application with Google App Engine is quick and easy, and you have the power of the google distributed content delivery network and the ‘BigTable’ database at your disposal. So what’s it good for?
When I was 14 my Dad bought a Commodore 64. I poured over the manuals, taught myself C64 BASIC, bought C64 programming magazines and created a stack of audio cassettes full of unfinished projects. It was awesome fun being able to create sounds and make things happen on screen.
Then about 2 years later I discovered girls and didn’t become interested in technology again for some years. I often wonder if I could have reached Bill Gates-like heights if only I had continued to apply myself to technology instead of fluorescent colored shirts, skinny ties, and Blue-Light discos.
Dave Winer said that because of Google App Engine, "Python is the new BASIC". And my first experience with App Engine did indeed generate that same sense of fun that C64 BASIC did way back in my embarrassing past. With zero Python experience and just the App Engine guestbook tutorial under my …
Apple’s MobileMe Misses the Mark
Thousands of developers have gathered in San Francisco for Apple’s Wordwide Developers Conference 2008. The spotlight at WWDC is on the new iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store, which is launching in July to bring (officially) native apps to iPhone and iPod touch devices, but web developers have been eyeing MobileMe, Apple’s relaunch of the .Mac service.
For users of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Picasa Web (or any of the competitors from Yahoo! and Microsoft), MobileMe is a new contender that promises to automatically push your online changes into desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices like the iPhone (and vice versa). Unlike its competitors, however, MobileMe shows no signs of offering open APIs for other web applications to integrate with the service.
The other big difference between MobileMe and its competitors is that MobileMe costs $99 a year. On the one hand, you can use free services that integrate with an ever-expanding range of web apps and web-enabled desktop applications; on the other hand, you can pay for a service that only integrates seamlessly across supported devices and desktop apps.
Speaking as a card-carrying Mac fan, I’ll be sticking with my …
Google Changes Favicon, Challenges You To Do Better
Last week Google tweaked their favicon (that little 16×16 pixel icon in your browser’s tab), changing it from an uppercase G to a lowercase g.
Now, a change like this is normally something that shouldn’t matter — it’s not like they changed their actual logo to begin with a lowercase g, or made any changes to their home page. They just tweaked the 256 pixels in the browser’s tab. But this is one of the strongest brands in the world, and tabbed browsing has become a standard feature in all browsers.
Favicons are no longer an optional “nice-to-have” — users come to rely on them as a usability aid, so those 256 pixels are an extension of a company’s brand. Add to that the fact that people generally don’t like change, and the result is hundreds of blogs complaining about how ugly the new icon was.
Personally, I don’t mind it. The new icon threw me at first — the big G was instantly recognizable, and being able to jump to a tab based on that visual aid is a crucial part of how I navigate. However, after a few days of getting used to it, I realized …
10 Questions for Mark Mandel on Transfer ORM
Ahead of the WebDU conference next week, Mark Mandel just yesterday released version 1.0 of Transfer ORM. If you’re wondering what the hell Transfer ORM is and why you should care, I asked Mark to answer a few questions to explain it all to us.
This post is in the same series (and uses the same questions) as the Geoff Bowers on FarCry and John Farrar on COOP.
Hi Mark! Give us your elevator pitch: summarize the essence of Transfer in a sentence or two.
Transfer is an Object Relational Mapper for ColdFusion.
It generates and populates CFCs that are Objects that represent the data in your application based on an XML configuration file. From there, it is able to automatically insert, update, delete that data into, and out of your database, without you having to write any of the SQL or CFML to do it.
OK, that sounds pretty cool. Let’s dig a little deeper: tell us more about the main features.
At the top level, Transfer generates what is commonly referred to as Business Objects for you, without you having to write any CFML or build a CFC. By Business Object, I mean an Object that represents an entity …
Last we checked, PHP IS a framework.
When it comes to web programming languages, PHP probably holds the record for copping criticism from the community at large. Comparisons with alternatives such as Ruby on Rails and Python/Django are common; defenders of PHP are quick to criticise the comparison of a language and a framework. But at the end of the day, developers work with Ruby on Rails, and with Python/Django, and with PHP. Just PHP. For most of the PHP applications out there, the language is just perfect, because PHP, to an extent, is the framework.
PHP is designed for the web. You could plug vanilla Ruby or Python into a web server and get up and running pretty quickly. But, at least at a basic level, you’d want a framework to deal with common issues of web development. In PHP, you just get started. PHP and Apache work out request data, output handling and more, right out of the box. (PHP also masters deployment.) David Heinemeier Hanson, the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, calls this the immediacy of PHP.
Now, consider the “average” PHP frameworks. They help you handle request data, manage your output, control app flow – …
This week in Rails – new release edition
Rails 2.1 release
This week saw the release of of version 2.1 for Ruby on Rails. You can see the announcement on the official Rails blog.The new major features are:
- Time zones (by Geoff Buesing)
- Dirty tracking
- Gem Dependencies:
- Named scope (by Nick Kallen)
- UTC-based migrations
- Better caching
IronRuby runs Rails
The IronRuby team also announced this week that they managed to get a “Hello World” example running on an unmodified Rails stack. Although it’s not yet ready for prime time, we are one step closer to being able to run Rails on .NET. See the announcement on Jon Lam’s blog.
RailsConf
RailsConf was held in Portand this week. Unfortunately a trip to the US was stretching the budget a little, so if you were like me and unable to make it, check out Gregg Pollack’s video compilation of a number of interviews he had with some of the speakers. RailsConf in 36 Minutes.
Until next time Railers!
Why Yahoo’s BrowserPlus has a long way to go
Yahoo recently announced BrowserPlus, a browser-plugin based runtime that enables web applications to “break out of the browser”, and offer functionality typically reserved for desktop applications. While not entirely ready yet, a preview release of BrowserPlus demonstrates building some common applications purely in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, including an IRC client, a drag-and-drop photo uploader and a JSON AJAX request inspector.
With BrowserPlus, Yahoo wants to make web apps “break out of the browser”, bridging standard web technologies with OS APIs and bringing web apps a step closer to desktop apps. However, the approach isn’t at all new; Gears (formerly Google Gears) did the same with local storage for web applications last year, XUL has offered rich UIs for web applications for quite some time, and Adobe AIR changes the game entirely by exposing the OS through JavaScript APIs. Mozilla’s Prism can make web applications feel a little more like desktop applications. BrowserPlus simply goes a step further, by bringing potentially unlimited functionality to a standard web application through a plugin-within-plugin system. And guess what? All of these effectively have platform lock-in. (Flash and Silverlight get an honourable mention, requiring applications be built on their platform …
Did Rails Sink Twitter?
Twitter is arguably the most heavily used Ruby on Rails application in the world. Almost since its inception, Twitter has fostered a wildly passionate cult following. Also from the beginning, Twitter has suffered from chronic outages under that load.
In the past month, record downtime has prompted fresh outcry within its ever-growing user base. This, along with increased attention from mainstream media has forced Twitter to publicly acknowledge these issues, and to reveal a few details about the source of these problems.
Though there has been much speculation about the source of Twitter’s performance issues, the closest we have had to a real peek under the hood has been this Twitter Developer Blog post:
Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.
But wait, what exactly do they mean by “technologies and practices”? Could they mean Ruby on Rails?
Twitter and the Curse of the Framework
Ruby on Rails is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. To build an application in Rails, you start by defining a collection of objects that model the things your application will do, then …
The Week in ColdFusion: 28 May – 3 June: Another CFML engine goes open source
Strictly, this falls outside the 28 May – 3 June timeframe for this weekly roundup, but it’s news too big to hold off on: Railo, the alternative CFML engine, is going open source. Hat tips to Kai “Agent K” Koenig, currently kicking his heels up at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, and also to AJ Mercer who has been dropping hints on the CFUGWA mailing list all afternoon.
According to reports from Scotch, Railo 3.1 running on JBoss wlll be released sometime around October on JBoss.org, under the LGPL license. Although coming only a couple of months after the Open BlueDragon announcement, this move is generating a lot of excitement. No doubt the coming weeks will see a lot of blog commentry – once again, it’s an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer.
Right, back to our regular programme!
Code
News flash! ColdFusion Jedi Master makes a mistake! That’s right, Raymond Camden has posted about a “bonehead” custom tag mistake that had him scratching his head for quite a while – showing us that he IS actually human after all, and not just a coding machine. The machine did do …
