Webcoda Blog

Webcoda may be a small team of web developers but we know we can compete with any company when it comes to speed of development and code quality. How we know this is because we use the best tools on the market. One of the tools that really allows us to build custom admin pages in seconds is PLINQO. If you are a developer and haven’t checked it out, here is the URL http://plinqo.com.

Basically what it is Codesmith’s implementation of LINQ to SQL. Apart from the fact that it also allows you to build the UI and not just the DAL is that you can make updates to your DAL and when you regenerate, PLINQO will not overwrite your changes. Other advantages are consistent code quality adhering to company standards as everyone works from the same templates and great database structure as PLINQO is most effective when your DB is properly designed with proper foreign keys and normalisation.

No one in the company can imagine not working with this tool anymore. It is really that awesome.

Does Twitter live up to the hype? As with most things that depends on who you are, what you do and how you do it.

A lot of people who have tried Twitter have written it off as a waste of time citing headlines such as Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'.

That may be true but 80% of TV and pop music are rubbish but there is still enough decent stuff that we can just take what we like and ignore the rest.

This is why I believe Twitter works…

You can follow only people you want to hear from.

I pick up lot’s of great news and tips about web development, current affairs, politics etc because I follow people who are in the know. There are no ads and if someone is wasting my time I stop following them.

The information comes in small bite size chunks

We live in the era of the sound bite. So many people only skim headlines anyway as so much news is free online. A lot of the time a Tweet is a link to a story. If you like a Tweet, you can click on the link and read the full story.

From a marketers point of view it is easier to Tweet than to create newsletters.

Dell has made over 3 million dollars from Twitter related sales. It costs nothing but someone’s time. Think about the effort that goes into sending newsletters. Newsletters is the tried and true method for keeping customers engaged but you cant send more than one marketing newsletter every few days without it looking like Spam. Twitter can be used to have a continuous dialog with customers reminding them about you and your services or products.

As a consumer, the information comes to me

I don’t have to go looking for the news I want. It arrives by itself, tailored to my interests.

Twitter is a real time barometer of what’s going on

Use tools like TwitScoop to see what is happening in the world in real time. We no longer live in an age where only marketers can spot the trends. Now anyone can.

Twitter is an amazing tool and definitely will have it’s place on the internet for a while to come. It can also be a big time suck.
After all if you listen to Tim Ferris, the author of The 4-hour work week we shouldn’t even be listening or watching the news. Oddly enough though, even he is on Twitter. - http://twitter.com/tferriss
I guess if you only work 4 hours a day, you probably have plenty of time to spend on Twitter.

Lately, there has been a boom in online website creation tools.
These sites allow you to create your won sites that can be really easy to set up and very (very!!) cheap.
The best ones I have seen are

http://www.wix.com – For building cool looking Flash-based sites

http://www.squarespace.com/ – Very comprehensive HTML based sites

http://www.wordpress.com – Old faithful but limited functionality although there is an iPhone app.

http://www.mrsite.com – Haven’t used it but the portfolio looks pretty good.

http://www.tumblr.com – pretty cool if all you are after is a basic Blogand also has an iPhone app.

http://www.goodbarry.com - Just added this last one long after writing this blog but it looks like it may be the best. Will give update soon.

WIX.com

Starting Price: Free unless you want to use your own domain name

The Good

• The interface to WIX is incredible!! So easy and so much fun to use.
• Tons of cool functionality

The Bad

• It’s all Flash. No matter what anyone says, I am yet to see how Flash sites can compete against HTML sites for SEO friendliness
• Your design options are limited to the templates provided. Granted there is a lot of scope for customisation.

Verdict

If SEO is not your main concern then this is a great option.
So easy to use my Grandma could build a great looking site in minutes. 

Squarespace.com

Starting Price: $8 per month

The Good

• Beautiful interface. These guys really take their design seriously.
• Very flexible layout and CSS customisation options.

The Bad

• Limited functionality.
• Although it is well designed will still require a decent amount of learning to create a site.

Verdict

If you are money poor but time rich then you can create a very decent site.
As long as you don’t need any specific functionality (or ever will) then definitely worth trying the free 2 week trial.
If I was creating a brochure site on the cheap then Squarespace would be my pick.

Wordpress

Starting Price: Free unless you want to use your own domain name

Although technically Wordpress is blog software, the fact that they allow you to add non blog pages to your site means that a lot of people are using Wordpress for their main site.

The Good

• It’s fast, easy to use and cheap and works very well if you just want a good Blog.
• It’s very widely used so there are a lot of third party add-ons and a large community.
• Very SEO friendly
• If you just want a blog you can download the Wordpress software and add it to your site.
• All open source so if you have a PHP developer handy, you can really do what ever you like with it.

The Bad

• To utilise third party add ons or create your own themes/skins, you will need to either host the site yourself or find a hosting provider. Wordpress won’t host customised sites.
• If you want a decent public facing site you will have to choose this option as the Wordpress hosted sites give you minimum functionality. This is fair enough as it is not really designed to be a full CMS.

Verdict

Great for Blogs but wouldn’t cut it as as a stand-alone CMS.

Final Conclusion

I haven’t tried Mrsite.com but it looks good. Also www.tumblr.com is worth a look for those wanting a cool blog site.
The online tools for creating websites are getting better and better. Squarespace.com is certainly a very mature, effective and highly usable piece of software.
If all your organisation requires is a good looking brochure site then with a great web designer you should be able to achieve your requirements very cheaply.
If you need any custom functionality such as integration with internal systems, Shopping Carts etc then you will always need a proper CMS system such as kentico or Sitecore

There are times when websites have different domain names but point to the same code base. The most common is a CMS system that hosts multiple sites.

As the robots.txt file sits in the root of a website it will apply to all domains running from that codebase.

A easy way around this issue is to use the free ISAPI rewrite DLL from Helicontech for IIS.

First create 2 files in the root of your site

robots.block.txt – to block acess

robots.allow.txt – to allow access

Once you install the DLL and go into the editor just add the following

Depending on the domain name of the visitor, this will either read in the content of the block file or the allow one into a robots.txt file.

Note: Your files need to have a .txt extension and the robots.txt file should not actually exist otherwise.

How many software products do you use everyday and how well do you know those products?

Being in IT I probably use more than most but accordingly I would be expected to understand these tools better than most.

If we take the attitude that most features are built into a product for a reason then it is safe to assume that we could probably improve our productivity or processes by doing a little study of those hidden capabilities.

Start small – get a list of keyboard shortcuts for software you use all the time.

I use Firefox all the time and here is the list of short cuts - http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts – I have just looked at it for the first time.

Here are a few shortcuts that I never knew existed

The last one here is one I have always wanted and never knew was possible. 1 min research for a lifetime of knowledge.

Imagine if you just spent a minute learning something new about the tools you use very day.

My only tip is to limit that time to a minute. There is always something to learn and our poor little brains can only handle so much.

It’s almost free because you need to be using the premier edition of Google Apps which is $50 per user per year- http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

If you use Google Apps Premier, Outlook 2003 or 2007 and have an iPhone and would like to sync your email, contacts and calendar then this article is for you. The rest of you will just have to imagine what it would be like.

Just to be clear here when I say Sync, I mean true 2 way sync. If I delete a contact on my phone I want that contact deleted in my Gmail and in my Outlook. Same if I delete from Outlook or Gmail.

Google is the hub. We sync iPhone to Google and Outlook to Google.

Syncing iPhone to Google

Overview here

Email

You probably already have email set up – Instructions here. This works fine and there is nothing to change.

Calendar and Contacts

Although there are third party tools out there such as Neuvasync and Soocial which are pretty good, they didn’t seem to offer anything that Google wasn’t offering out of the box.

To configure iPhone Cal and Contacts follow these instructions. - http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

The only extra thing worth noting is that if you have multiple calendars or share calendars with other people in Google,

(i.e I can see my wife's google calendar and she can see mine.) you can choose which calendars to sync on the iPhone by following instructions here -

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206&ctx=sibling

 

If you are not sharing calendars then you are missing a great feature of gmail.

 

Syncing Outlook to Google

Google has just released Apps Sync for Outlook.

All the info you need is here

Note that this will set up a new Outlook profile for you. The old profile will remain intact.

My biggest gripe is that I can’t see my shared calendars in Outlook. I hope they change this.

Second biggest is that filters in gmail don’t affect Outlook. So you have to set up rules in Outlook if you want mail to go into specific folders.

The problem with this of course is that if you change your pc you lose your rules and will need to migrate them manually.

 

Tips

Make sure you have everything backed up before you sync anything. The iPhone deletes all your contacts when you set up a new sync account.

What I did was get all my contacts on Gmail first and back gmail contacts up. This is your master list.

You can back up your contacts to gmail by using iTunes – Instructions here

The Google Apps sync lets you import your contacts/calendar from your old profile. When you do your first sync they will be copied up to gmail.

You will most likely end up with duplicates (we did). Fortunately gmail has merge function. I couldn’t see a way around this.

When you update an event on your iPhone it can take up to an hr to display in Gmail so be patient.

Issues

I did have some issues with this. The worst being that my Outlook mail stopped syncing and I had to reset up another profile and re-download all my mail again. It’s worked properly for a couple of days now so I’ll update if something more happens.

Facebook and Twitter are the most well known of the web 2.0 apps but there are many more cool apps out that may suit you better.

My personal interests are Tech, Politics, Business, Current Affairs and Comedy. I travel by train each day so I keep informed by subscribing to podcasts. I have an IPhone so I use ITunes to find podcasts and with one click I subscribe and as new podcasts are published they automatically downloaded and synch to my IPhone when I next connect. There are so many great Podcasts and they are all free and they come on video and audio varieties.

If you want to check out some of my favourite podcasts here are a few..

• Jake and Amir (Comedy)
• Digital Life by CNET Australia
• Digital Planet
• The Economist
• Larry King Podcast

I am also a big fan of Wired magazine. No other publication seems to be so ahead of the curve, have such great writing and is presented so beautifully. Wired also produces Podcasts. One of them is called the Hopkinson Report, a Podcast made by the marketing guy from Wired, Jim Hopkinson. 
I was brushing my teeth yesterday morning and listening to the latest edition (I have an IPod dock alarm clock in my bathroom) where he interviewed the creator of a start up called Redwirewhich is a site for entrepreneurs to share experiences, stories and perhaps meet up in person. I decided to take a look and see if there were any groups that might be in my area that meet up to discuss running a small business. Unfortunately it’s early days and Sydney doesn’t have too many members but the site looks pretty cool.

Undeterred the Podcast had also mentioned a site called meetup.com, so I checked to see if they have any groups that would interest me. I found this one - http://www.meetup.com/SydneyOnlineBusinessOwners/ which happens to meet up right near were I work on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. I signed up and will be going tomorrow.

The point is that even if Twitter and Facebook aren’t your cup of tea that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a site that may suit your needs.

The popularity of the iPhone has had a profound effect on not only new phones but also on websites.
Even though new phones are coming out that have twice the features, the iPhone still is the standard we compare all other phones to.

The main reason is usability. Suddenly features that have been on phones for years are actually being used. Alot of phones were capable of internet browsing and email but only since the iPhone have those features been easy enough to access that even my grandmother could do it. (This is only theoretical ofcourse. My Grandmother says her loyalty is to her Blackberry - Damn you Barack Obama!!)

So how has this affected websites? I'll tell you.
These days everyone expects their sites to be as easy to use and to navigate as an iPhone. This ofcourse is a good thing.

So what makes for good navigation?

1. Clearly organised and visible top level menu items.

2. Resisting allowing sitemaps to go more than three levels deep.

3. For larger sites (More than 3 levels) use a secondary navigation that adjusts with each top level menu item. This is usually done with the top level menu running horizontally across the top and the secondary menu vertically on the left. - Left is better than right as we read english left to right.

4. Shortcuts to most visited pages or areas prominently displayed. This can be in the page itself or in a constant part of the site on every page.

5. Landing pages - For very large informational sites as each new area of the site is entered then a landing page that has quick links (Icons are nice) and descriptions to pages below the current navigation make getting around easier.

6. Bread crumbs.  - There is a reason Hansel and Gretel were found before the wolf ate them. I wonder if they own the patent?

7. Sitemap - Not really a big fan of these but if done properly they can't hurt.

Most IT guys working with Microsoft technologies would know the phrase eating your own dog food. For those have never heard the term, to say that a company "eats its own dog food" means that it uses the products that it makes/sells.

My question is what if you don't want to eat dog food? Or what if someone else makes better tasting dog food? Should you only eat one brand of dog food out of loyalty?

At WebCoda we work with Microsoft Technologies so up until recently I ate Microsoft flavor everything. Lately though I find myself straying and it's at once both exciting and unnerving.

Where did I go wrong, how has it come to this you ask?
Well let me take you back about a year when I decided I would try working with Firefox as my main browser instead of Internet Explorer. It all seemed so innocent at the time.

My IE was playing up and was taking way too long to start loading new web pages.
Before I knew it, I was installing plugins. Oh at first it was just little ones like the color picker and the measuring tool. But before I knew it I had installed the web dev toolbar and Firebug. I knew at this point I was a goner. I could never go back to boring old IE that was still taking 3 weeks to load up a simple web page and had as much decent functionality as an Ipod - Very little. (Hey I could have said as a Mac).

The next step in my demise came when we switched our mail over to Google Apps. Maybe it was the 25 gig of mail storage or maybe it was all the extra apps such as calendar, documents and mobile access. Or maybe it was the moonlight. I can't say but suddenly I found myself using Thunderbird instead of Outlook (gasp!!). The integration with IMAP and Google calendar was too much to resist.

I am now having regular arguments with my business partner over whether we should store company info and documents in Sharepoint or whether we use Google sites or one of the many other such sites out there.
The reason is this. Why should we host our own sites which need regular backing up, only have internal access and need to be upgraded manually when we can let someone like Google handle all these things? Everytime I log into one of the google sites there seems to be a new feature they have added like a little gift that you were not expecting.

Don't get me wrong. I am a big fan of Microsoft products - The operating Systems (Except Vista), Media Center is awesome and of course the programming tools and languages rock.

Maybe it's just that I don't like the taste of dog food.

As a web developer for Webcoda I have been creating websites for others for over 10 years. Sometimes just like the proverbial shoemaker, we web developers just don't have the time to maintain our own websites. Even worse, we can be too busy coding to look into sites that most Net users every day.

So for my first ever Blog I have decided to discuss things that every web developer should do. (On the web, not in public)
I might even create my own certification if you pass all of them!

Not necessarily in order of importance..

1. Buy something from Amazon. - Amazon is the king of shopping sites. From suggestions and reviews to the amazing check out process and order tracking.
   
2. Set up a Facebook account. There has never been a more fun way to spend your work day and what better way to reunite with all the people you swore you would never speak to again? It's also an amazing display of web 2.0 and remember - what reality TV is to television, social networking is to the web. We all bitch about it, yet at the same time are strangely drawn to it.
   
3. Sell something on Ebay. If you have nothing to sell, make something up. I hear anything that resembles Jesus sells well. Maybe sell your soul (You won't be needing it where you're going anyway [insert evil laugh here])
   
4. Buy something on Ebay. If you have never experienced the sheer thrill of an online auction now is the time!! Bid for that cheap Ipod knock off that some guy in Korea has made from sawdust and potato skins. You never know it will probably work better then the real thing.
5. Upload a video to Youtube.
   
6. Explore Google Earth.
   
7. Write a Blog on Blogger.
   
8. Create social book marks with Digg or Del.icio.us.
   
9. Use P2P software to download music and movies. It's only illegal if you get caught!
10. Do your banking over the net.
11. Use Paypal 
12. Twitter on Twitter
    

If you get really adventurous you could combine a few.
E.G. Create a Digg bookmark to a Blog about a video that you posted on Youtube where you sell something on Ebay that you bought on Amazon.

There are more but if you manage these points you can officially call yourself a web developer.