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So much good stuff in this article from 2006. Practices for developing applications that more companies should adopt.
Month: October 2007
links for 2007-10-29
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Repoze integrates Zope technologies with WSGI and reusable Python middleware.
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FriendFeed makes it easy to keep track of the web pages, videos, music, and photos your friends and family interact with around the Internet.
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Wow, bike theft in Portland is a huge problem.
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GridMaker is a small script for Photoshop which allows speedy development of simple grids.
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Presentation that reworked Yahoo’s site using a grid-based design. The presentation pdf is very good.
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A compelling introduction to Blueprint CSS and why it streamlines the design process
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One reason for organizational paralysis is that it’s easy to believe that if your tasks go away, your job goes away.
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There is renewed interest in bootstrapping, if only because lower costs now make this a bit easier and younger entrepreneurs can live more cheaply.
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As we told our client, innovative products come from companies with one important characteristic — willpower: The perseverance and committed resources to see a breakthrough product launched.
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Online mind mapping software
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“If the leadership of a company are cut off from vivid, direct contact with the front line, they are cutting off important information. Not just data, which is easy to summarize in a graph or a report, but visceral information that they remember and take
I miss Kathy Sierra
There is huge hole in the Internet that Kathy Sierra filled. This morning, I looked again for some signs of what Kathy is doing now, but her site is still dormant.
We’ve lost such a eloquent voice for building businesses and products that people are passionate about. It’s been months now, and I don’t see anyone being able to fill the void.
I miss Kathy Sierra and still hold out hope that one day she will return to blogging.
links for 2007-10-26
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Conference calls take place on regular telephone lines. No computer or Internet access required.
links for 2007-10-23
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“Companies that lead need to be willing to say that occasional growing pains are ok. If a company only listens to what customers think they need, it won’t be able to innovate.”
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“So, it’s intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone.”
Twitter Updates and Facebook Status
Twitter’s Facebook application has recently been updated to allow you to change your status whenever you post to Twitter. This sounds like a good idea in practice, but in reality, it turns out to be simply redundant.
Status updates is one of the few Facebook items that are available via RSS. Now that Twitter updates change the Facebook status, most of the RSS that Facebook provides is now full of updates that I’ve already read in Twitter.
The only updates I can get out of Facebook’s walled garden is something that both started outside of the garden and something that I’ve already read. It’s easy to see why everyone thinks Facebook is so useful. </sarcasm> :-)
links for 2007-10-21
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Very cool. Client-side databases in the browser. SQL access. One database per domain like cookies.
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“While we’d like to see WiMAX standardized across all carriers, that’s not going to happen. Verizon and AT&T have significant investments in rival technologies, and T-Mobile is on the cusp of opening up its 3.5G evolutional network. This means that in
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“Inspiring leaders have an abundance of passion for what they do. You cannot inspire unless you’re inspired yourself. Period. Passion is something I can’t teach. You either have passion for your message or you don’t.”
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Good introduction to and references for css resets and frameworks
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About 80 percent of all respondents (2015 mobile respondents contacted in July 2007) reported owning a mobile phone, with mobile adoption spread relatively equally across generations.
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Different versions of Safari for testing older browsers
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Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.
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Out of the twittersphere popped Jason Grigsby, and he analyzed how we could make Truemors faster. Without Twitter, Jason and I would have never connected.
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Seemingly every graphing solution or library in one blog post. How do they keep doing this?
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Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.
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Support in webkit for css declarations of a font location
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One of 5 finalists in the Most Promising Open Source CMS Award
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You’ll notice that our client and supplier concerns are remarkably similar. Both parties want to do the best job possible, on time and on budget—so how do we align these goals?
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Great new features in Google Analytics for measuring site search and what it can tell you about visitors to your site.
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“A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.”
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If you’re storing protected data on your users’ behalf, they shouldn’t be spreading their passwords around the web to get access to it. Use OAuth to give your users access to their data while protecting their account credentials.
Relative URLs for HTTP and HTTPs
Ajaxian pointed to a post by Ned Batchelder on relative urls. I almost didn’t click through to the post because I didn’t think there was anything new to learn about URL syntax. Boy was I wrong.
Have you ever seen a url that looks like this?
- <img src=’//fast.cdn.net/pix/smiley.jpg’ />
We’ve also created links that started from the first slash and dropped the domain, but I’ve never seen links that dropped the http or the https from the link. Ned explains the benefits of this technique thusly:
Here, we’ve left off the protocol scheme, but included a host name. In this case, the protocol scheme from the displayed page will be used, but against the host in the URL. The relative URL system is still in play here: omitted portions of the URL at the beginning are taken from the base page, and the relative URL takes over whereever it starts. On an HTTPS page, this will be an HTTPS request to the CDN, on an HTTP page, it will be an HTTP request.
I love it when I learn something new about a piece of technology I’ve taken for granted for years.
Is the Mobile Web Finally Set to Take Off?
Read/WriteWeb asks readers, “Is the mobile web (or, rather, using mobile devices to access the web) finally coming of age?”
In a word: Yes.
For more details, on why:
- It’s a Mobile Web. We Just Don’t Realize It.
- 2.7 Billion Served: Mobile Phone Usage Dwarves Everything Else
The real question is when will it take off. Are we looking at a 6 to 9 month or a 12 to 15 month horizon before the groundswell takes off.
Web Analytics guru Eric Peterson recently came to a similar conclusion about the mobile web. I think Eric nailed it when he said that the coming mobile web is probably less like a wave and more like a incoming Tsunami.
Browser Client-Side Database Storage
One of the big features in HTML5 has been implemented by the Safari developers and it’s a doozy that I wasn’t aware of: client-side database storage.
From the Surfin’ Safari blog:
The client-side database storage API allows web applications to store structured data locally using a medium many web developers are already familiar with – SQL.
Like cookies, you can store the databases per domain. I’m struggling to determine if the persistent storage in Firefox is the same thing. Firefox’s implementation states clearly that it isn’t available to web pages (only “trusted callers”). IE seems to be (per usual) implementing something similar, but slightly different.
Niell Kennedy wrote a good summary of the different techniques for boosting Ajax performance using local storage and why this would be beneficial.
I’m starting to get excited about HTML5. This database feature could be very useful for web applications.