I was reading this article from Slate about user generated content and the cost of running “social” sites or other sites that contain user generated content. I’ve always wondered about the costs of running something like YouTube or Facebook and how exactly do they pay the costs of running the site.
A fun exercise is to take the content that you generate and cost it out, obviously we’re buying bandwidth in small quantities so its going to be expensive, but think about the costs.
I’ve been reading up about Google App Engine, which sounds interesting. It sounds like yet another “cloud” computer although one of the advantages is that this one is free, or at least some of the services are free and it integrates with the rest of the Google services which could be rather nice.
Of course there are disadvantages as its tied into Google which some people think is evil and your code could end up only being able to run on there platform and not others.
Has anyone used it? What do you think of it? Anyone done anything more than a quick look at the introduction page?
I thought I would list a bunch of Open Source / Free utils and applications that I use almost every day. I’m excluding the obvious ones like Linux (in my case Ubuntu).
The list below is what I use in my day to day job, normally on my laptop running Windows Vista, the order really doesn’t matter its just as I thought about them. Everything listed below is available for Windows and most are also available for Linux and other OS’s. I’m a programmer, web developer and computer geek so I’m sure the list of software below reflects that, but no matter what you do there is probably at least one application that might be handy.
If you have a favourite please add a comment and share it with us. Continue reading
To the web developers out there… I was reading this article about Sprite Optimization which is basically about creating a big image with all the graphical bits of your interface on it and then using css to clip and display only the relevant pieces.
In theory (and jundging by what I read.. in practice too) this makes your site load faster. I know that WordPress does this in places in thier admin interface.
Although reading the article, they do point out that for somethings doing it this way massively complicates matters.
I think I would split things up a bit, have one file for icons and perhaps another for borders and UI elements and maybe another for buttons or something like that.
When “ajaxyfying” (my new word for when you add AJAX to a site) a website do you code all the java script your self or do you go use one of the many AJAX libraries/frameworks?
I’m currently working on something that has lots of forms for inputing values and tables for viewing the values, and I would like to make the interface a little snappier by adding some AJAX to update things without reloading the entire page. Obviously this is relatively simple to do and can be done without a fancy library by coding things myself… but is it actually worth it? I realise that knowing how AJAX works “under the hood” is a good idea, and the ability to actually code that yourself is an important skill, but other than a simple test app is it actually worth doing it yourself?
At the moment I’m playing with Prototype, it wasn’t chosen through some kind of scientific process it was just the first tab I happened to open in Firefox. I’m trying to make the webpage more responsive, not “flashy” so I don’t need any fancy visual effects just want to limit the amount of times a page loads when things are clicked on.
Any opions? let me know below.
Edit: After writing this I took alook at the WordPress code and found out it uses jQuery, so I’ve downloaded that and gonna have a go with that too.
I was looking for a mail client that would connect to a POP mail server and pull down the headers and then allow you to delete the messages you no longer wanted straight from the server. (Very useful if you have a giant email cloggy your mail.)
Alot of mail clients will do this, but they’re all rather bloated and need to be installed. Ideally I was looking for something small, that didn’t need to be installed. After a bit of searching I found nPOP, it does exactly what I wanted and has become an extremely useful little mail app. I’ve used it a number of times with my clients who have a habit of receiveing emails with 30mb mail attachements. All the settings are stored in a .ini file in the same folder as the .exe which makes moving it around or carrying it on a memory stick possible.
Works on Windows (including Vista) they also have a pocket pc version which looks interesting.
You can get it here. (Only a 94KB download, works on Windows including Vista.)
If you use any AJAX based sites you’ve probably seen the spinning “loading” icons people use to indicate something is loading (like the one on the right). I’ve been looking for somewhere I can get one for a website I’m working on.
I wondered onto this site AjaxLoad via this Stack Overflow Entry which has a web based image generator, its actually very cool. Now I just have to work out how to get the image to work correctly in ASP.Net.
Was scratching my head for a few minutes when a bound column in a grid in my ASP.Net page didn’t format correctly, for future reference and in case it can help some one here is the solution:
Set your DataFormatString to the right format, for example I set mine to {0:dd/MM/yyyy} to show my date correctly and then (and this is the secret trick) you have to set HtmlEncode to false on the column and your column should display correctly.
Weird that I could only find this after a few minutes of Googling, its not in the help as far as I could see.
As I posted a few days ago, I’ve been playing with Google Analytics. Which is seriously cool and allows me to see where all my visitors come from, what they click on and how much time they’re spending on the site.
I’m currently working on a little side project that involves doing lots of customisations to WordPress. (What exactly I’m up too will have to remain a secret for the moment, sorry customers orders.) I’ve been working today on writing a new plugin for WordPress that will turn it into what I need for my client, once the plugin has reached a use-able state I’ll start with the theme.
My development environment currently consists of WordPress 2.7 running on XAMPP for Windows (MySQL + Apache + PHP) with NetBeans 6.5 with PHP support. Netbeans works great as a PHP editor and its also a good Java IDE (although I’m not using it as that at the moment for this project.).
My biggest problem has been dusting off my PHP knowledge and trying to puzzle out the WordPress plugin API. There is alot of info on writing WordPress plugins on the WordPress Codex another useful link is this one on how to configure Netbeans for wordpress plugin development, I suggest you check out on the same page the info about creating a wordpress project and importing the source so you can have all the auto-completion goodness. The only thing I haven’t gotten working yet is XDebug so I can’t debug the PHP code or step through it in Netbeans, not sure why its not working but touch wood I haven’t needed it yet.