A Day in Paradise

Not sure if what I clicked through told me not to tell anyone about anything, but I just got my beta invite to Xcerion.

Xcerion is yet another OS-in-a-browser, although they prefer to call it “Cloud Computing” or “XML Internet OS”. I assume they say XML since that is probably the data transfer layer, as well as the file save format, regardless advertising an “XML OS” is totally 1997.

The interface only works in IE (Cross Browser compatibility is coming soon) and is pretty slow until everything loads up (see it’s just like a real OS). Once everything is going it seems to be pretty snappy.

I’m getting back to work

Oh yes, did I mention it was very pretty?

This is in response to Cal’s post on SEO experts.

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It really depends on the framework… Zend Framework is very SEO framework. Others that rely on a lot of ajax or javascript POST callbacks to facilitate basic navigational tasks will stop a search engine dead in its tracks.

I have also seen frameworks which use strange http redirects as part as the controller, this has the habit of killing search engines as well.

Speed is also important in SEO, being able to output the correct http cache tags. You should have complete control over the output HTML, the ability to create descriptive css styles and have full control over the structure of your html output.

Clean URL support is good in ZF, but the default front controller still needs some modification to be truely SEO friendly.

When it comes to SEO experts I totally agree that they are the scum of the earth… but they are also just playing a game that Google set up for them to play.

The monetary value of being #1 on Google is just too much to pass up.

Nice toy, they are just missing a PHP interpreter.

The first version of this post was eaten when Y! Pipes decided to take down firefox (seemed to happen a lot when I was hovering over the sources waiting for the tooltip top pop up – FF1.5.0.9)

Y! Pipes is a cool toy. There is a lot of interesting functionality, but a lot that could still be added. My problem is the scalabilty aspects of it. It looks fairly resource intensive on the part of Y! and with every additional feature that’s added more resources would be needed. In the half hour I spent playing with my pipe, I already created a monstor that takes 4.86 seconds to generate. And if I were to do any serious (and add specific tools) then I would need even more generating power.

There are a couple extra things I would like to see right off:

1. It needs an exclusion gate, possibly as an option of the union operator, where I can select all items from feeds a-y which do not exist in feed z.
2. I had some trouble parsing some old google RSS feeds I had. I was about to yell conspiracy but I re-generated the google urls and everything worked
3. I couldn’t see how to extract/interact with information directly from a feed. I want to embed a flickr image into the description of my news article, but couldn’t figure out how that was done.

If anyone wants to clone my pipe and fix it, feel free. Anyway, I loved it… reminded me of ning, but without the code

We’ve been busting our balls on the infrastructure of our new Hedge Fund Website creation project over the last couple weeks and since we did the official launch yesterday I figured it deserved a little link love

The heart of the hedge product a niche tool for hedge fund managers to manage their investor portfolios and relations. The underlying system is currently a custom PHP/MySQL system, however we are working with WebStyle Systems to create platform using eZpublish to which we can move some of our accounts and base future products on. We will also be launching another niche product based on this platform. This is still pre-alpha development.

One interesting tool that we are using for our support is SupportSuite by Kayako. This is a great support/ticket platform, what I have been most impressed with has been the moderate use of AJAX in both the backend and frontend support interfaces. Internally we use Mantis to manage our projects.

The project is still in it’s early stages. We are working on the “flagship” hedge fund websites website and moving that away from it’s launch state. Of course we have a blog where team members will be blogging (just me so far).

Thanks for the space, I now return you to your regular programming… Oh yes, we’re looking for another designer (isn’t everyone), check out the blog if you’re interested.

Please create a search function, so that I can search my 150 writeboards to see where I mention a specific company. Even simple tagging mechanism would work for me. Right now it sorta sucks.

Stella’s words when I showed her Apple’s new ipod nano line up.

As everyone has already heard Steve announced a nice new line-up of products, and for the first time in a while I’m pretty happy with what they are offering.

The conversation went something like this:

“The pink one is 4 gigs, for another $50 you can get double the space with the new 8gig nano. Then again, pay another $100 on top of that and you can get 10 times the space with 80gig ipod.”
“Cool, can I get that one in pink?”

I’m not sure if the engraving is new, but apple gives some ideas of what you can do here. There is a very cool ajaxy system that you use to create your engraving, you type your message in and the image is updated in real time. A bit resource intensive, I would have opted for a flash applet to do the rendering to save that trip to the server.

I’m running way behind on a pile of stuff, so have decided to do a quick linkdump of some things that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while now.

• I just listened to the latest pro-php newscast (I didn’t listen to the old ones, but love the new format). Haven’t listened in a while and was happy to hear my blog entry discussed. I am planning on writing a follow-up to that. You guys need better show notes, some links maybe?
• I’m giving a workshop at PHP Conference
• I experimented with Chorizo Scanner at our UG meeting, since then I’ve run some other tests and have some comments (blog entry pending).
• I am LOVING YUI. I suck at CSS and Javascript, so the grids and comprehensive js library gives me more incentive to embrace the web2.0 hype. Carousel rocks! I’m planning on blogging about the “controversy” surrounding Yahoo’s design choice in the Grids CSS.
• My Router sucks, so I apologise for the connecting and disconnecting on irc (need to use a proxy). In the last 2 weeks a 300gb hard drive failed, as did my TV tuner

So there are a couple of things that I need to catch up on. Will keep you updated.

Are you finding yourself sleeping too much at night? Are you making all of your deadlines and have time to spare? Are you spending a lot of time with your girlfriend but don’t have the cash to buy her that awesome Swarovski accessory. Do you do a lot of window shopping at thinkgeek? Are you wondering how you’re going to afford the next generation iPod? Did you participate in the recent “lets-make-slashdot-look-like-digg” contest, and are mourning the hours of CSS code that you wasted twiddling pixels and writing CSS only to be superceeded by the ugly ass css that is slashdot now? Do you spend hours tweaking the CSS on your beautiful blog, and then ruin your work of art by dropping in adsense ads to make some cash? Are you working in a boring day job and were just diagnosed with a terminal brain cloud?

If you answered yes to any of these questions and can handle some good old fashion no-nonsense CSS work (purely design implementation) email me at aaron-at-wormus.com.

A couple other important requirements:

• basic PHP knowledge required
• basic Smarty Templating knowledge required
• able to use subversion (it ain’t rocket science)
• strong CSS knowledge
• knowledge of YUI library a plus
• and dependable

Finally, we’re a small team and not in the position to pay “industry standard” prices, but the compensation is negotiable.

With the paint not even dry on the shiney new Podshow+ website, bloggers such as Dave Winer and Todd Cochrane are talking about how the new podshow is caching and rewriting the users RSS files. The by-product of this caching/rewriting is that the original copyrights are removed. Not a good thing. My listing still shows my own RSS feed which hasn’t been polled at all this month, I’m not sure what the issue is.

I understand the technical reasons why podshow wants to cache the rss files within the system, I don’t see why they are making them available outside the system.

In general I’m a bit underwhelmed with the new podshow system. I haven’t played with the functionality yet, but in general the system is dead slow and is practically invisble to any one who doesn’t use AJAX (good luck with the search engines). There’s nothing that’ll kill a site more than a hundred AJAX calls on the front page.

I’m checking my email this morning and I see the invoice for my Backpackit subscription! Nothing was charged! Somebody signed up through my affilitate link and that paid for a month of my premium usage!

This means that if I can get a signup every month, then I won’t have to pay for my premium membership. If you signup under me, and then you convince someone to sign up every month then you won’t have to pay either! Using this logic we can take down the evil thing that is Backpackit without any cost to ourselves (not like these signups cost them anything).

Anyway, I’m jazzed, even though I’ll be the first to say that Backpackit isn’t as awesome as it’s made out to be, it’s still working for me and I’m psyched about getting my first affiliate sale!

Is that blog whoring or what?

Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare.

Writeboard needs a “Save and continue Editing” button.

It’s quite easy to work with, that extra click just sucks every time you want to save a document.

One of the things that I want to get going is a collaborative journalism platform. The system will have a couple of primary features.

Article Collaboration

1. You create a “Article Stub”
2. You add reference material
3. You collaborate on the article
4. You maintain a workflow (data gathering, writing, draft, published, revision1, revision2)

RSS Aggregator

1. You can add however many RSS feeds to the Aggregator
2. You can tag specific articles in the aggregator with keywords which could pertain to upcoming stories.
3. You can select a specific quote from the article and tag it for future use in an article

In a previous post I made a list of a bunch of “getting organized” tools, I’ve looked through most of them, but none of them really do what I want.

However, the best I could find was backpackit. The things I like the best are writeboards and price ($5/month). I could have just used a regular wiki, but since I was colaborating with a couple other people the inteface is VERY easy to understand and use.

This is how I’m using backpackit.

1. Create a page for the project
2. Share the page with people who will be collaborating on the project
3. For each article we’re going to write I create a writeboard and add it to that page.
4. Everyone colaborates on the article by adding data, wikipedia style.

Obviously this doesn’t really work the way I need it to, and there are always “stop editing I’ve got an update” messages flying around IM, but for now it seems to work.

If anyone has the time/energy/skills to create my collaborative journalism platform PLEASE let me know. I’d be VERY interested in working with you or sponsoring your work.

Yes, and I’ve got referral links so if you decide to sign up with the paid for version I get 3 free weeks of service!!! Woot!

SWindows Live Mail – Mini Review

Check that out!

Mini-review at this awesome Spell Checking blog *cough* *cough*

Looks cool

And the internet grinds to a halt!

Seriously though, I went to blog something yesterday and discovered that my page was taking forever to load. It was pretty clear that the reason for the delay was the ads which were being displayed synchronously from google and holding up the display of my page. I did a bit of surfing and found this problem on just about every site I visited, either because of adsense advertising or the use of the google analytics.

I went to search for something and for about 40 minutes google was dead. Scary!

Having said that I’ve noticed some nice things about the Gmail chat interface. It is a lot smarter than your average Ajax client. As I type I noticed that because I was logged int Gmail someone sent me an IM. Google must be down (again) because when I look at the chat sidebar I get an “Unable to reach Google Mail. Please check your internet connection” which is followed with a little clock which is ticking down until it will try again. Strangely I can still respond to the IM, although my messages aren’t going anywhere.