Brian Sweeting

I’m in San Francisco this week for the Future of Web Apps Summit.  I’m looking forward to networking and hearing from great speakers over the next couple of days.

Nuggets of wisdom from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

I’m off to SXSW this morning. For those of you going, I look forward to seeing you there. For those of you staying, I’ll be blogging as much of it as I can.

Back in the old days, which for me was about 1998, I remember how much of a pain it was to set up a web development environment on a computer. Go get this package, install this component, build with these options, etc.

That pain has been completely eliminated for me now. I use two standalone applications that give me a robust environment for developing with Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Apache/LightTPD on my PowerBook. For Rails I use Locomotive, which gives me a quick way to get a Ruby on Rails Environment up and running with LightTPD and FastCGI. I also use MAMP, to get a Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment setup quickly. MAMP even has a dashboard widget that lets you start and stop the servers.

If you’re on Windows and need a good Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment, I recommend WAMP. For Rails you can use: InstantRails

Update: Randy recommends XAMPP for Windows. I tried this today, and I must say it seems quite a bit better than WAMP. Thanks Randy.

I was looking through some archived files tonight and ran across the first website I ever created. It was 1998, I was in college, and I was working for the college bookstore. Keep in mind that I had only been learning HTML for a few weeks, the design is cheesy, and the navigation isn’t very usable, so don’t be too harsh.

I give you, in all its tabled, and sliced image glory the Dixie College Bookstore website circa 1998.

I’m going to pass the baton to a few friends and maybe this could prove to be an interesting meme. If you are a web designer or developer, feel free to post screenshots (or even the whole site, if you have it) of your very first website, and leave a comment about it here.

I’ve been penning a couple of posts recently, that I just don’t think are well thought out enough. So until I get them in shape, I wanted to catch up so here’s a hodge-podge of notable things that I’ve ran across lately.

Microsoft Gets Agile

The WSJ has a great about Microsoft realizing the mess Windows was in and how they made the call to drop the legacy code and start fresh with their flagship product.

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. “It’s not going to work,” he told Gates in the chairman’s office mid-2004, the paper reports. “[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. “The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin’s warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers – the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Read the full article.

Have a strategy for your website

A great article by Greg Storey in issue 205 of A List Apart. Something I wish all my clients would read. Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)

AJAX Dialog Windows

Not a “how-to” but a “what for” for designing AJAX dialog windows by Luke Wroblewski. Quoting Edward Tufte…

“The border of an active window should be light in value (to avoid clutter with other windows), yet deeply saturated (to provide a conspicuous signal). Yellow is the only color jointly satisfying those conditions, and therefore proves valuable for bordering windows.” -Window Research: Color Guidelines

Looks like there’s as more importance to the “yellow” than the “fade” in the “yellow fade technique” .

TypeTester

TypeTester allows you to compare fonts for the web, tweak them to your heart’s content, and then export the CSS. This is a must for designers working with developers.

My Kingdom for a good Web-based RSS Reader

I have been a bloglines user since it’s inception. The problem I ran across lately, is that they do not support RSS feeds that require authentication. So I’ve been hunting around for something else. I tried NewsGator’s online aggregator since it seems they are becoming an RSS Reader empire. They do support authenticated feeds, and the interface is pretty, but there isn’t enough separation between the blogs I read when viewing entries as groups of feeds. I also wish the category/feed navigation was either in frames, or it floated along as I scroll down the page.

I’ve also tried Rojo. Didn’t like how it only allows a flat listing of feeds (gotta have my folders). Google’s Reader, but I could only get it to import about half of my RSS feeds and it doesn’t seem to support authenticated RSS either.

When I redesigned my site, I wanted to have my photos up for friends and family to see. I also wanted to get my money’s worth out of my Flickr Pro account. I was a little dissappointed to find that I could only display the last 20 photos from my photostream using SlideShowPro, a flash photos gallery created by Todd Dominey. So I decided to create a set of PHP scripts that utilizes Flickr’s API to get my photoset data and put it into the xml format that SlideShowPro uses. I also like to share, so I’ve made FlickrSSP 1.0 available to the public. Enjoy!

Get FlickrSSP 1.0

Shaun Inman is going to unveil Mint this week. Mint is a web stats tool, which is the sucessor to his earlier (and free) ShortStat. It is interesting to see this trend of people building products and then using their markets (a.k.a. blog readers) to market the product to. This is exactly what Jim Coudal was talking about in his recent ALA article. Instead of building a product and then looking for a market, Shaun built up a market of blog readers, many of whom are ShortStat users, and now he has a love-group to hock Mint to. Pricing hasn’t been announced for Mint, but I highly doubt it will be free.

Shaun is also using something else that I’ve found very interesting lately. The idea of Blog2Blog marketing. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that the bloggerati allstars feed off of each other. Shaun has tapped into the “markets” of other high profile bloggers to build buzz for Mint. As of this writing, Mike Davidson, Jeff Croft, Keegan Jones, Matt Thomas, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, and Rob Weychart have all posted on the “My favorite feature of Mint is…” meme. All of these people have been beta testers of Mint and now they are preaching its greatness to their readers. This has been going on a lot lately. Let’s look at a couple of other recent examples of Blog2Blog marketing.

37Signals

The Signals built a huge amount of buzz for Ta-Da List, Backpack, and sometime in the future Writeboard. They started out doing a series of four previews of the features of this mystery application on their SvN Blog. One that really got people going, was when they posted a screenshot that was large enough to give people some clues as to what this application was, but too small to give away any detail. For the final preview they pulled a Willy Wonka and gave out golden tickets to random people who had signed up to be notified upon Backpack’s launch. By the time Backpack had launched, they had built so much buzz that they had 10,000 accounts created in the first 24 hours of launch. Cost of this word-of-mouth advertising? Free.

BlinkSale

BlinkSale is web application targeted at small creative firms that allows them to send out invoices. I started noticing things popping up in my news aggregator about BlinkSale several weeks before they launched. The people behind BlinkSale used P2P Marketing by inviting some well-read bloggers to preview their application. Those people in-turn blogged about how great BlinkSale was. Then the buzz trickled down the blog food chain. By the time BlinkSale launched it had a huge amount of hype built up, and had a long list of testimonials to boot. The cost of this word of mouth advertising? Free.

Conclusion

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time. It takes time to build a community by giving them something they find useful, whether it’s a great product or sage advice. Word-of-mouth advertising is the hardest to come by, because it requires passionate customers. By blogging about your product/service which you are passionate about, you will win passionate customers.

If you know of other examples of Blog2Blog marketing, please post a comment about it.

I received “Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails” on Friday, and the rest of my weekend was ruined, at least from a non-developer point of view. I spent most of the day Saturday reading and implementing the code for the sample application, a simple e-commerce engine. This by far has been the best way for me to get my mind wrapped around RoR. I’ve gone through a couple of online tutorials, but nothing has been as comprehensive as this book. If you are interested in Ruby on Rails, I highly recommend it. The appendix has a section on getting familiar with Ruby that was quite good, although I think I might need to go beyond that with the book “Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition”.

AJAX is having a tremendous effect on web developers (and website visitors). There have been excellent examples of it’s use popping up all over the web, along with warnings about best practices of using AJAX. Paul Scrivens points out that while some people are worried about AJAX and it’s effect on things like page views others are embracing it and enhancing the user experience to have an effect on their bottom line.

Jason Calcanis worries that the use of AJAX negatively affects his bottom line (a.k.a. pageviews)

We’ve looked at ten different ideas for AJAZ (sic) in Blogsmith (our blog software) and we’ve decided to keep all the AJAX on the blogger (i.e. publisher) side of the business and “force” the users to deal with page reloads so we can make (or not lose) money.

…

The truth for any blog with comments is that the comment page refreshes are 10-20% of a site’s traffic (maybe more on community sites like Slashdot). Given how close to the bone running a blog business is you really can’t afford to lose anything, let alone double digits. Page views are what it’s all about I’m afraid.

Scrivens argues that thinking…

Provide a better user experience and I believe you will find that your audience grows making up for any “lost” pageviews. If the competition does you one better you will be losing pageviews to them and not to a technology that should only be used to help you (Gmail anyone?).

He points to Digg.com, who recently redesigned their site and implemented some AJAX for “digging” a site. In version one if you “digged” a site you had to wait for a page refresh. However, now with their slick 2.0 redesign when you digg a site you can just keep on going without the worries of a page refresh.

Jason worries that this is taking away from the pageviews of Digg and therefore hurting their bottomline. I would say that this is completely wrong. I think Digg will now have more unique visitors (much more important than pageviews) and more loyal users (much more important to Digg for the long run) because of the great v2.0 improvements. Also because the site has become that much more easier to use, people are more likely to go breeze through more pages than ever before.

Our CTO of 9rules, Colin Devroe, asked Kevin Rose of Digg how many pageviews they receive and it was 1.2 million pageviews daily (yeah, that’s an insane number). Then he asked how many he got for the pre-AJAX 1.0 version and he said about 70% of that. Good thing they didn’t lose too many pageviews…

Enhancing user experience can only have a positive effect on your bottom line. I find myself thinking that all the time when I’m using ODEO, and wishing that Netflix had the same AJAXified UI. When I subscribe to a podcast in ODEO, the page does not reload, I don’t get taken to a page with annoying recommended podcasts…I simply click the subscribe button, I see visual feedback that I’ve subscribed to the podcast and I can go merrily on my way subscribing to other podcasts, or can even start listening to that podcast right there (also without a page reload).

On the other hand, when I search for movies in Netflix, I click the button to add it to my queue, which reloads the page, tells me the movie is now in my queue and then feebly attempts to recommend other movies I may like. Good try, but 99% of the time, I hit the back button to get back to the previous page I was looking at.