We’ve all been there. Somebody asks if you can take a look at their website that has been stagnant for a while. Something small needs to be changed. You feel up for a challenge, so you dive in. What you find is a mess. It’s really nobody’s fault. Things evolved over time, different developers and designers have done their thing at various times. Nobody meant any ill will, everybody just did their best. But here you are.
Over the last few months, I’ve developed three plugins for Tristan Kromer of GrasshopperHerder.com. He has gracefully donated these to the community, so now they are available to all: Easily create tweetable text, manage ads and monitor their performance, integrate KissMetrics. There’ something for every one.
Boonex’ Dolphin platform is widely used to support various communities. By itself it is fairly full-featured and can, for instance, be used to quickly build a private Facebook clone. It’s also pretty well programmed and can be extended in various ways. However, its development documentation is lacking. In this post I show how to integrate your module with the Spy module that shows user activity.
One question many small business owners struggle with is how much to spend on software. Should you get existing software off the shelf? Open Source or proprietary? Or should you invest in custom development? But how much does that cost and is it worth it?
2011 has been a transformative year for Streamhead. Due to some major work and planning behind the scenes, I haven’t been able to post as much as I would have liked. But all this hard work is about to pay off and you, my dear reader, will enjoy the fruits of it. In 2012, I plan to double down on in-depth articles, tutorials and case studies. All practical hands-on information. Read on for a review of 2011 and my goals for 2012.
My latest project is ExpensesSpreadsheet.NET. It is the simplest and easiest solution I could come up with to track and categorize expenses … in a spreadsheet. Let’s call it a niche web application, so it’s probably not for every one, but it should fit some extremely well. It runs on Heroku’s Node.js stack.
For SEO reasons it’s important to make sure that users only visit your site through a single domain name. Either www.example.com or example.com, but not both. In most cases a .htaccess change is the easiest fix. But not when you’re deploying to an environment that doesn’t have Apache, like Heroku. Here’s a quick way to get this functionality using Express on Node.JS
If you want to integrate PayPal with your Google AppEngine application, there are a limited number of options available. My own open source project offers a servlet that can parse and log IPN messages. This will quickly get you up and running with PayPal Payments Standard.
If you’ve ever created anything using jMonkeyEngine’s SimpleApplication and you use something other than the American standard QWERTY keyboard, you might have had the same frustration as me: Why isn’t there quick way to switch the keyboard layout? The SimpleApplication base class is supposed to make your life easier, yet there you are, completely stuck with that unnatural keyboard layout. Read on for a quick copy-and-paste solution.
Whenever you’re proposing a web site or application to a client, showing him what it’s going to look like can work wonders. It avoids confusion and can fix doubts. But how do you show off a website when you haven’t written one line of code and HTML? Wireframe tools and website mocks are the answer. This article compares a few of the many tools available.