The demand for the complexity, scalability, and speed of development of web applications has increased dramatically for the last ten years. In such conditions quality assurance becomes as much important as architecture, development, or marketing. It’s absolutely important to allot particular time and resources to testing and reflect that in your project plans and schedules.
Google has acquired JotSpot, a privately held company pioneering do-it-yourself web application publishing. Such web applications where everyone can create, update, and uppend pages with new information without knowing HTML are called WIKIs. While you can find many free WIKIs in the Internet, JotSpot could offer very nice features that gone beyond traditional WIKI featureset. Apparently Google was working in the same direction with its Google Page Creator and Google Docs & Spreadsheets projects, so the acqusition was natural. The details of the new services that Google is going to offer are still unknown, but JotSpot says that paying customers will not be charged any more, while new customers cannot register yet.
Looking for ways to create web sites quickly or to boost projects collaboration business people start to pay attention to WIKIs. As Business Week explains WIKIs sometimes are more efficient than common collaboration tools such as e-mail.
Using free blogger account, chess grand master Susan Polgar was reporting on World Chess Championship 2006, brining her notes and comments on the event LIVE! Ironically official servers couldn’t keep up with the overload when chess fans rushed for the coverage and Susan Polgar was the first to post player’s moves with comments as they happen, attracting thousands of people to her blog.
Those who want to test web site designs in different browsers and whose main work place runs Linux now can easily install Internet Explorer and Flash Player 9 using Wine, thanks to the IEs4Linux project.
I have installed it and found it quite useful. I use Internet Explorer mainly to check how styles designed for Firefox look there, to browse Flash 9 sites (Linux has only version 7 of the Flash Player), or those built for IE only. There is one issue though, Favorites don’t work, because of the way how IE bookmarks function in Windows (they are just link files with association).
In his blog Seth Godin raises the question of finding website tweakers. I hardly can understand him, because we do provide such services and naturally are trying to solve the opposite problem of finding customers who need their websites tweaked. As Seth doesn’t say what methods he used to find tweakers I’m very much interested to know what people do to find such kind of services. What keywords they use, what websites and blogs they read, do they read local newspapers for that or whatever. That would give us invaluable information about how to improve our advertisements. And I can say that any web consulting firm can do website tweaks, but maybe not all anounce that directly on their websites. Usually you can find website tweakers with the following keywords: webapp consulting, web consulting, web application development, search engine optimization, css consulting, website design. By the way the domain name website-tweakers.com is available!
Not every hosting provider gives you SSH access. All you have is FTP, and when you install or upgrade your server software you have to download it first to your desktop, unzip and then upload each file to the server via FTP. It’s okay when it is small archive with a few files in it, but when you need to upload a 50Mb archive with a lot of small files in it, huh? It’s no fun.
Luckily most hosting servers have ‘curl’ and ‘unzip’ utilities installed. I use them right from PHP script to make any installation or upgrade to be quick and simple. This script I made freely available to everyone. You can download the script from our Downloads page.
There is no guarantee that this script will work on your server, but most of Linux hosting servers should work without problem. And of course it is not the only solution to the problem. Feel free to ask questions and report any issues in comments to this post.
With a number of hosting companies adding Ruby on Rails to their list of supported technologies, Ruby is getting wildly popular for small and medium size projects. Easiness of deployment, low resource consumption, friendliness to shared environments, compatibility with agile methods of development makes Ruby on Rails an interesting alternative to other web technologies.
That has not happened to Java. Being the most popular technology for large size, enterprise applications, Java couldn’t make its way to the masses. Java hosting is still quite expensive, troublesome in shared environments, harder to administrate. While PHP remains the most popular technology among web application developers, especially for small projects.
You may have noticed already that some search results in Google have additional links below them: 
These links are called SiteLinks as it is explained in the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Want such links to appear with your site results? Unfortunatelly you have little control over them. As Google explains:
“At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”
From my own observations I can say that your site should be quite popular and have well organized menus for the links to appear.
Sometimes to show a site in the search results Google uses page title and description as it appears on Open Directory Project (ODP), not from the site itself. This was a problem for many site administrators, including myself, as they could not change their sites title in Google listings. Now Google gave us a solution. To direct Google from using ODP to describe a page, use the following meta tag in the header of your page:
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP" />
It may take some time for changes to your page to appear, once Google recrawles your site.
On Sep 9-10 PodCamp - a free meetup for podcasters, bloggers, authors and readers - will be held in Boston. Our client Leesa Barnes will be presenting on several topics, including a 5 minute lightning talk about using Wordpress and podPress to publish podcasts. This talk is the result of our recent work when we together found out about nice podPress features and its drawbacks in distributing podcasts.
Interestingly that PodCamp organizators used a free wiki and a free blog to advertise and present the information about the conference. Yet another good example of using free open source components and word-of-mouth marketing to cut costs on advertising and promoting ideas/products/services.