Some people look at graphs with blank faces. I happen to study them with a smile, like I did when I still had a cubicle job as a Quality Analyst. Ever since I discovered Google Analytics, I’ve used it religiously to increase traffic for a few niche blogs that I own with reasonable success. Google Analytics is a wonderful tool that gives you varied data to play with, and that you get all this sophistication free is just remarkable. However, data by itself won’t give you answers. Perhaps in a later evolution, GA will be able to generate action items in plain English, but that seems like a dream from a distant future. (more…)
Tim O’Reilly said that in the age of Web 2.0, data is the next “Intel Inside”. With the ever increasing popularity of social networks, the volume of personalized user data is a virtual goldmine for Internet businesses. Facebook has been getting much press lately due to its tremendous growth, as well as emphasis on security and privacy. Interestingly, Dan Birdwhistell wrote an interesting guest post at TechCrunch, claiming to have a legal workaround to accessing and storing Facebook user data for 3rd party use. He says,
There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.
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For client-side web developers, maintaining history - and working with the default “back” and “forward” browser buttons - can be a major challenge for building an effective AJAX web application. As HTTP is fundamentally stateless, the current URL has long been the standard for recording a user’s current “location”. With the Really Simply History library, developers can embrace this concept using a simple Javascript library to maintain history for their AJAX applications. (more…)
Designers these days tend to rely on ‘the cloud’ as much as they rely on their desktop applications. This means they turn to Web Apps and Google whenever possible. It’s often cheaper, faster and more useful to work this way, especially for the little guys who may not have access to all the tools that more established designers have.
The type foundry used to be a high cost, highly skilled operation. Now neither is the case as a few web apps have made it incredibly easy to make your own fonts. Here’s a look a few of them:
I was recently mucking around with some new web hosts trying to find one that offered advanced features that most others don’t (specifically Subversion, Rails and Django support so if you have any leads please share). While I was doing this I began to notice that most web host companies employ godawful design schemas, usually purchased from sites like monstertemplates.com. So I made it my task to find a few web hosts that offer the best services, while still managing to look pretty gd good!
ClipArt has become a huge commodity in these days of Adwords and text ads. This is because people are always scouring the internet for both paid and gratis content for their blogs, designs and projects and that means big bucks for sites who can pull the traffic. The question remains, how do you find clipart without wasting hours on Google?
The article “5 Myths of Web 2.0” by The Drama 2.0 Show explains it best:
Even if the cost of building Web 2.0 products is cheap, effectively distributing them in the marketplace is a significant challenge because of the competition… Proponents of the notion that Web 2.0 businesses are cheap to build fail to distinguish the difference between the costs of building the product and building a viable company around a product.
Being the primary monetization tool for most blogs and other websites, it’s imperative to get the most out of Adsense. While it’s good to read up on other people’s strategies, sometimes it’s nice to hear it, er… straight from the horse’s mouth. Google has recently come out with a video for Adsense optimization and I thought I’d share it with you. But first, here’s a quick summary: (more…)
This week, Paris is playing host to a meeting that may change the face of the Internet as we know it. The international nonprofit group ICANN will vote on (and likely pass) new procedures in assigning new generic Top Level Domains or gTLDs. The move is a response to the Internet’s massive growth that threatens to use up most of the existing domain names by 2013. The proposal will make URL restrictions much more relaxed than ever before, except for the 64-character limit. Among the changes that may happen are:
As PHP applications grow in size and complexity of structure, developers often find themselves putting together a “deployment plan” - that is, a set of steps to go through each time they want to take the code and package, deploy or test it. This process could involve creating some deployment-specific configuration files, packaging up the code, storing the current state in version control, even setting up the database. Phing is a build system for PHP, based on Apache Ant, that aims to automate many of these processes and simplify application deployment for PHP developers. (more…)
