Galide

design for desktop, mobile, tablet

2012-01-07T17:24:00.000Z

I recently read an interesting article on alistapart, outlining how we should be designing user experience across and between devices:

1) I want to check (mobile)
2) I want to manage (desktop)
3) I want to immerse (tablet)

vertical slider navigation, not always fit for purpose

2012-01-06T16:15:00.000Z

I have seen a new trend in web design in the past few months, the vertical slider. The navigation scrolls you to a different part of the same page. and this gives the feeling of traveling through a different part of the website. All good, as long content is cleverly segmented.

I recently went to http://www.wampserver.com/en/, to checkout a specific plugin. The look and feel looks much better, but I could not find where to download add-ons. After 10 frustrating minutes I found out that the plugins could be found in the section "downloads".. although the section was not visible on the page and you had to scroll down.

"Downloads", right, yes of course. Well, it turns out that the user doesn't expect to have to scroll down to find content when using this type of navigation. And with all due respect for the team of designers at http://www.alterway.fr/ I think the previous version was much more user friendly, the current navigation being in my opinion clumsy and not fit for purpose.

A list of websites doing it well can be found here: http://3.7designs.co/blog/2008/04/12-websites-that-slide-and-scroll-with-javascript/

frameworks

2011-08-29T10:57:00.000+01:00

It is interesting to pick up skills listed by outsource companies, as you can then identify which web frameworks or technologies are making it mainstream. Below are a couple of them

1) Bootstrap

New lightweight CSS framework offered by twitter.

2) ExtJS

Javascript framework by Sencha

3) CouchDB

document-oriented database. It would have been very useful to have this around when I participating to the built of our first CMS in 2002..

Microformats make it mainstream

2011-07-21T19:12:00.000+01:00

http://schema.org is an interesting website, pulled together by google, Yahoo and Bing, and providing technical guidelines about how to implement microformats.

Probably a good idea to add this to SEO checklist for website QA process.

IE7 issue? solve it with zoom

2011-07-20T21:41:00.000+01:00

If you are struggling with absolute positioning a div in IE7 Or any other element, simpy add div {zoom: 1} (or replace with the elelement you are targetting) on top of your CSS. Will generally sort out your issue...

div {zoom:1} assigns a "layout" to the div. More in depth info can be found here.

GPLed program for Windows / Poedit

2011-06-05T20:50:00.000+01:00

Took me a little while to figure this one out.

http://www.poedit.net/trac/ticket/380

There is a bug in poedit which makes the application systematically crash if you have a syntax error in one of your file! (e.g.: __('My name is "%f"',$name); )

If you get this error, it is likely that one of your latest changes caused the crash.

install wine on CentOs 64bits

2011-05-01T20:56:00.000+01:00

If you need to install wine on a 64bits (fedora):

1) use EPEL repository:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

2) you can then install wine, which is available in this repo

yum install wine

URL Shortener & SEO

2011-04-18T08:39:00.000+01:00

URL shortener don't hurt SEO anymore.

Google recommends using a URL shortener with keywords embedded in the URL. PageRank and Anchor Text are then transfered to the target page. Google provides its own URL shortener service, available here: http://goo.gl/

Nice UI script

2011-04-12T11:47:00.000+01:00

I am being a bit lazy here, and using this blog to keep track of a plug-in I would like to use for future app UI:

http://layout.jquery-dev.net/

social media / lesson #1

2011-03-09T00:09:00.001Z

In the past few weeks I have been meeting up with social media specialists/experts, and I have read a fair amount of articles about the topic.

Most consultants I met insisted on integration: use a tool such as hootsuite to spend as less time as possible posting on various "channels" (youtube,facebook, twitter, linkedin) - post once on your blog, and then dispatch info on facebook, twitter, etc.. Measure how many likes & followers you have, and use these number as main KPIs.

It kind of makes sense, you don't want to post many times the same thing - time is money... but it also turns out that the same consultants often specialise in one or two specific channels (facebook and youtube, facebook and twitter, etc.. ).

My opinion is that business should focus on one main channel (blog, facebook, linkedin, etc.. ) and be great at it. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Networking reinforces this idea of focusing on single channels (long term content strategy, develop readership through consistency and good quality posts) and segment target market instead of trying to be everywhere.

Lesson #1: find out about which social media marketing channel matches your market the most, and focus on it. My target market is LinkedIn. And this is what I'll target for my business. This blog comes in handy to support my activities on LinkedIn (expertise in web applications development & online marketing), but is not what I should focus on.

Likes and followers can be compared to "links" in SEO. This can be used as a metric, but at the end of the day "traffic" is the most important metric. And I think that "traffic" should also be the main metric for social media.
One may argue that unlike SEO which brings traffic to your website, social media websites host your content (facebook pages, linkedin company pages, etc.. ), and you may have a lot of visitors to these pages who never make it to your main website.
However, I have developed many micro websites in the past to support SEO campaigns, and "links" can also be considered as "external content". The objective of SEO is not to bring traffic to your website, but to bring traffic to your content / brand / services / products.

Lesson #2: social media is no revolution. reporting KPI should measure traffic & conversion rate. specific KPI such as likes, followers, shares, etc.. are secondary.

managing referrals

2011-02-15T15:46:00.000Z

Developing a referal system can be a great marketing tool. Allopass, a company servicing micro payments managed to raise to €20Mo valuation very rapidly thanks to a clever affiliation scheme:

Generate Lifetime Earnings:Install an Allopass banner on your site.
When a new merchant sign up with Allopass via this banner, we give you 10% of the revenue generated by this merchant for the life of your account and his account.

http://www.omnistaretools.com/omnistartell/ Seems an interesting PHP package, and first time I come across an open source solution for managing this type of marketing channels. Worth a try.

Zend Server hosted on Windows / restart Apache

2011-02-12T16:46:00.000Z

Command line to restart Apache on windows when Zend Server is running:

net stop Apache2.2-Zend && net start Apache2.2-Zend

FogBugz demo / Joel Spolsky

2011-02-12T10:27:00.000Z

MYSQL: drop all tables without dropping the database

2011-02-12T10:09:00.000Z

A very useful little script to let you drop all tables in a database without deleting the actual database (in case for instance you don't have the right to drop the actual database).

#!/bin/bash
MUSER="$1"
MPASS="$2"
MDB="$3"

# Detect paths
MYSQL=$(which mysql)
AWK=$(which awk)
GREP=$(which grep)

if [ $# -ne 3 ]
then
    echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-User-Name} {MySQL-User-Password} {MySQL-Database-Name}"
    echo "Drops all tables from a MySQL database"
    exit 1
fi

TABLES=$($MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e 'show tables' | $AWK '{ print $1}' | $GREP -v '^Tables' )

for t in $TABLES
do
    echo "Deleting $t table from $MDB database..."
    $MYSQL -u $MUSER -p$MPASS $MDB -e "drop table $t"
done

Save this as drop.sh and run ./drop.sh username password databasename.

hosting videos on Amzon, and protect them..

2011-02-08T00:46:00.000Z

An easy to read article about how to host videos on Amazone cloud storage, and protect your bandwidth:
http://evolt.org/s3secure

SEO Tool

2011-01-21T10:15:00.001Z

Long time I had not posted a SEO Tool - here is good looking, clean and useful tool for back links analysis

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Posting the list of your competitors on your website

2010-12-08T13:14:00.000Z

It looks like posting a list of all your competitors on your website is all the rage. SEO experts will argue that you need to be found in search engines when some looks for "better than competitor X".

First step: create a page on your website and optimise it for phrases like "better than competitor X", or "alternative to competitor X".
e.g.: vzaar.com/about/viddler_alternative

Second Step: you link to this page:
Check out the footer on all vzaar.com website. They have links to all the pages created for this purpose.

Third step: you check search engines ranking, and verify that the tactics worked. Which is the case here:
"alternative to viddler" brings up the page listed above.

Still not sure whether it is a good idea or not. And will probably have to test it with a client who is fully aware of the risk of recommending other competitors to his website visitors, before actually advising this "SEO" tactic to clients...

crowdsourcing for startups

2010-12-08T09:42:00.000Z

Couple of online "crowd sourcing" services I would recomment when developing a new project from ground up, on budget..

1) Brand name

http://www.namingforce.com/ will help you find a name for your new product or website or company. It will cost ~£60 for a decent name.

2) Logo

http://www.crowdspring.com/ will let you post your brief, and get a very decent logo for ~£200

3) Beta testers, Products feedbacks

http://uservoice.com/ will let you gather feedbacks from 100s of users for £20

4) Get the crowd to generate leads for you

Came across this very recently, and not tested it. But have had the idea to develop something similar for year, and glad to see that somebody has finally decided to make this type of services available online!

http://www.leadvine.com/

5) Bonus

Promotions, etc you can get for a fiver? (well, £250 at the current $ to £ rate)...

http://www.fiverr.com

prototyping with axure

2010-12-05T11:15:00.000Z

There are quite a lot of tools and techniques used for wireframing. Scanning hand drawings has got its own merits. And if you have got good photoshop skills, it's quite easy to wireframe pages using this tool. However there are quite a few dedicated online/desktop applications worth having a look at.

The best desktop tool I have come across so far is www.axure.com. Easy to use, great library of widgets, and good community support.

The main benefit about using these "digital" tools is that you can collaborate with the rest of the team in a consistent manner. And consistency ensure that 1) you are not re-inventing the wheel each time 2) everyone communicates in the same way. This results in improved productivity & less margin for errors.

e-commerce platform to sell software

2010-10-16T11:57:00.001+01:00

I have developed quite a few e-commerce websites for software companies, and requirements are slightly different from standard e-commerce checkout process, as you can download the product at the end, and also need to cover specific requirements such as: how long is the download link available for, what to do if the download fails, etc.. etc..

There is now an e-commerce platform specially designed for software downloads: http://www.shareit.com

Big players such as AnyChart are using it, and I think it is worth considering for an e-commerce website selling software.

Building App UI the easy way

2010-10-15T13:38:00.000+01:00

Just came across Sencha UI designer product today, which looks impressive. I have used GWK a couple of times already, which is already relatively easy to use. You build the UI in Java, and Google Web Toolkit converts it into javascript.

Sencha moves a step forward and makes it easier to design the UI, by providing a drag and drop interface. The tool produces then the javascript for you, magical! Might not take long before Google decides to buy the company?

New grid system for front end design

2010-09-27T11:09:00.000+01:00

A new grid system is out: http://lessframework.com/ -

Browsing images: Lazy load

2010-09-27T11:01:00.000+01:00

Came across Mark Delamere's portfolio site recently, and though: nice way to display long vertical series of images, similar fading effect as the one used on Google Images.

This effect is rendered through the Lazy Load plugin for Jquery.

http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload

Luke 0.8 for Zend Lucene

2010-09-26T12:47:00.000+01:00

The more I use Zend Lucene lib, the more I think I should go for a different lib next time I integratet a search engine (such as Sphinx for instance). Java Lucene is fast and not too greedy resource wise. Zend Lucene on the other hand becomes quite slow and resources greedy as soon as amount of data reaches a certain volume.

In a previous post about optimising Zend Lucene index I advised to use Luke (Java Tool used to optimise Lucene index) to speed up the optimization process (which Zend Lucene does quite badly).

The thing to keep in mind is that the current version of Zend Lucene relies on Lucene 2.3, whereas Luke versions available on the Google Code website are only compatible with Lucene 2.4 ...

So you'll need the Luke 0.8 version, which is available here.

Java optimiser for Zend Lucene Index

2010-09-24T16:38:00.000+01:00

Found this interesting utility today: http://code.google.com/p/luke/

Zend Lucene is a great library to add search engine capability to your site, but it consumes so much memory that you may need sometimes to turn off the index optimiser. In which case you'll see the number of index files increasing dramatically.

And you may end up (as I did) being unable to index any more, or optimise the index, as number of index files the application needs to open is too high.

Quick fix is to run Luke on your index, and optimise it (Luke uses Java version of Lucene + Hadoop library) - et voila!