So for a couple projects in the past year I’ve utilized the Google Search Appliance (here forward called the GSA). The GSA is a powerful tool – it’s like your own slice of Google, only you can customize it, and in theory, tweak the algorithm and manipulate your results. Like a “SEO box” – but to my understanding, the algorithm is different, but in theory it’s the same.

The Versions of GSA

I’ve worked on a Google-mini, the Virtual GSA (version 5.0, no longer offered for download, for shame) and a 6.0 GSA. In terms of front end coding, you manipulate the XSL/XSLT code to change the default appearance. It’s cool – you can get the power of Google without the “branded” Google crap you get from the customized Google. So – your own branded, somewhat manipulatable Google box. Cool.

What is Google?

Of course, Google is not Bing. It is not Yahoo. It is not a commerce engine – it is a relevancy machine. The sole purpose of a Google crawl is to gather documents, have you execute a query, and for Google to say:

“I think this is what you want?”

At least, that’s *MY* experience with the GSA – they have a capability referred to as “Results Biasing.” This allows you to “influence” the results. My issues with this, is that you can make changes, but without arduous testing, you are never sure how long it’ll take the results to show up changed.

You can force a recrawl, but it seems the GSA “caches” the prior results for roughly 15 minutes. That means to tweak your results means retesting every 15 minutes, and even with results biasing, you may still be out of luck. It’s a crap shoot. A coworker and I spent several hours manipulating and testing results, only to eventually make one result bump up one slot, and we were working against tightly knit test set – we basically had 500 pages that were pure keywords and some other custom attributes to be utilized through a customized “Search As You Type” functionality.

Search As You Type

Yes – this was cool. A mix of plain JavaScript and PHP that essentially created a JSON result of your Google Search query. It’s a very cool project, and it allowed for some very unique experimentation with the results of a google query. I can’t delve into it to much, but we manipulated the data to spit out the results in a different display, for a more “spread” experience and relevant results. Very cool.

The Lessons Learned

I think the most difficult thing about the work was digging through the documentation – it was somewhat inaccurate at times, and very often some important, pertinent information was often in a single sentence, in some random blurb. Like Meta tag length limits (320 characters). Agitating, but we were able to rewrite our original meta tag code (to be better, in my opinion) to generate structural details in the PHP vs. including it in the meta data (it was a prototype stage, okay?). The only problem was the keywords were still being stuffed – way too many repeats and useless character phrases. This is a matter of education to the client, and clarifying that the GSA was not a “easy to manipulate” set of data – it was a complex beast, and that in ANY kind of manipulation should be taken with a grain of salt.

By no means is this article definitive, and, to be 100% honest, totally accurate. I spent many emails and phone calls with Google Support (which was a decent experience, I’d dare say surprisingly so) to come to many conclusions of our work arounds and test data issues and uncovered new information (little nuggets of wisdom) hidden in the documentation, and even uncovered a few inconsistencies in the documentation (from 2009) in terms of how the GSA was handling result diagnostics.

It’s a powerful tool – but it’s not EXTREMELY customizable to fit every situation. I wish the had more “virtual” instances (like the VGSA they had) of all their products. I’d love to really see the full capabilities when you don’t have to drop a ton of cash just to play with some hardware.

Let me break down twitter for you. It’s been abused by Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, it’s been used in by stars to flaunt their nudity (NSFW? I guess…). It’s all the rage and no one knows why.

I use twitter quite prolifically – mostly to vent, sometimes to ask questions. I don’t use auto-follow, I don’t use any “tips or tricks” to gather “hundreds of followers in a day.” I simply use the service, blog, and tweet. Somehow, I keep getting followers – possibly because of my associations of people I talk to (tweet with) or my hash tag usage (possibly again, through people’s auto-follow based on the hash tag usage from people). I’ve played with the twitter API on an as-yet-unreleased twitter project (I’m trying to make sure I “follow the rules” and get OAUTH working). Has that got me followers? Possibly.

Twitter – It’s Your NICHE, Not Your Numbers.

The very simple key to twitter – it’s not popularity, it’s not mass following, it’s not having the most followers.

The inherent problem with twitter, is, as since the myspace days everyone felt that the more people you had “friended” the cooler you had to be. I guess this herald’s to people’s high-school days where higher numbers of friends translated into something that mattered – perhaps the inherent psychological need is filled (yes, wikipedia link, deal with it).

The problem is that people still associate greater numbers with some sort of correlation to their skill level, reputation, or validation of “social media mastering.”

Again – It’s Your NICHE

If you have 50,000 people following you, and you’re following 50,000, and twitter is averaging 221 tweets per second, how are you really reading all your beloved followers? By automated scripts, or because you aren’t a master of anything except collecting followers. This is not a reflection of “social media savvy” nor a reflection of how effective they are at whatever it is they claim they do – be it real estate, loan sharking, web development, or ESPECIALLY SEO, SEM, or Social Media in general – if you compare some of the “top ten” or “top 25″ “experts” in various blogs you’ll see one of two things – they’re either the same list with the “obvious” experts (like my list) or full of self-claimed experts that tend to have a lot of seminars/webinars to show *you* how you can have google paying you fat checks for a measly $150!

Quality is What Counts – NOT Quantity

I’m really reinforcing that quantity issue – it’s the quality of who you follow that benefits you the most, as well as the quality of your tweets. Tweeting is the new blogging – and just as people blog about their cats, their daily lives, their secrets, people twitter the same things, so you WILL see mundane tweets, from even those that tweet about subject matter you’re interested in. People you find/follow on twitter that either speak of the subject you’re interested in, answer your questions, will post links to their blogs as well as remarkable links worthy of reading. What people post is important – after all, if they share every mundane article/image/digg/Retweet it waters down their quality as well.

The First Rule of Tweet Club

You have to tweet to play (okay, not really). By no means do I consider myself a twitter master, as I still tweet fairly mundanely – it’s my way of letting off steam, 140 characters at a time. But I also follow some pretty cool people, and have found some articles worth saving, some tips worth knowing, and some people worth finding. Won’t you be my twitter neighbor?

I’ve been on twitter since sometime in 2008 (I assume, this is as far back as twitter is showing me).

In that time, I’ve added a ton of followers, and constantly sorting through the requests I’ve received. I don’t follow everyone. Particularly “Gurus” with thousands of following/followers. I don’t follow people who primarily use Twitterfeed so it’s just a stream of RSS posts. I don’t follow spammers (naturally) or people that do nothing except hock their site, their product(s) or their friend(s) similar products, and I especially do not follow self-claimed gurus, be it social media, seo, sem, etc.

The people I follow on twitter fall into a few categories:

• I know them personally.
• I know them professionally.
• They are an understood expert in their field(s) like:
  • Web Development (Particularly Javascript Framework Developers)
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Analytics
  • Social Media

Particular niches I subscribe to, and I have developed a small list of experts that I’d trust what they say (and occasionally toss questions to them). I consider this list to be “obvious” experts – they’ve proven themselves professionally, or have written at length in blogs about the topic.

My Obvious SEO Experts on Twitter

1. Matt Cutts (from Google)
2. Rand Fishkin (from SEO Moz)
3. Aaron Wall (from SEOBook)
4. SearchEngineLand (from itself)
5. Jennifer Laycock (from Search Engine Guide)
6. Mark Scholl (from EnginePoint Marketing)

I’ve limited the list to six – because I feel they cover a breadth of knowledge that you could gain, mainly from their blog postings – sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough (some times it is).

I’ll work out additional “Obvious Twitter People to follow” in the future.

I am a MooTools JavaScript developer. I love the framework, and in writing MooTools code, I’ve become a better Object-Oriented-Programmer, and a better JavaScript developer. If you follow technology, you know there’s multiple JavaScript frameworks – jQuery being the most popular (IMO), with Dojo Toolkit being the most used in enterprise applications.

After having used JavaScript libraries (originally prototype/scriptaculous, some Moo.FX, then jQuery, then MooTools, and currently a project using Dojo) you come to expect a certain amount of consistency in general concepts, and in that expectation, the libraries have delivered.

$, $$, dojo.query, dojo.byId, document.getElementById – give me my element nodes!

So, basic JavaScript, people have developed a few different ways to get the elements they want, including custom functions – like Robert Nyman’s getElementsByClassname – which take advantage of local browser support, but you’re still forced to account for those without it. *cough*IE*cough*

MooTools uses the $ or $$:
[code lang="javascript"]
var idEx = $('someId'); //get element by ID
var arrayEx1 = $(document.body).getElement('someElement'); // return first matching 'someElement
inside of 'someContainer', or document.body in this example
var arrayEx1 = $(document.body).getElements('someElement'); // return array of 'someElement' (or class name, if you have the right components downloaded) that are contained inside of 'some container', or in our example, document.body.
var arrayEx2 = $$('someElement'); // return array of all found 'someElement'
[/code]

Pretty powerful stuff, for so basic an idea.

jQuery is kind of similar:
[code lang="javascript"]
var someArray = $('someElement'); // return an array of those elements/that ID/etc.
[/code]
Very powerful for a single selector – but it has the added bonus that they’ve allowed it to be overwritten, so you can use jQuery with another library (say, MooTools) that also uses the $ selector. It took me a little bit to get used to the return of an array outside of a single element.

Dojo does things a little differently
[code lang="javascript"]
var someArray = dojo.query('someElement'); // return an array of elements
[/code]

The get(’selector’).get(’selector’) (like mootools $(some).getElements(’someElse’)) can be pulled off in dojo/jQuery, but perhaps not as intuitive, in my opinion (again, I’m biased as a long-time MooTools fan/developer).

Which is better?

I can’t say which JavaScript library is better. Perhaps more-so, I don’t want to. It’s moot. You pick the library you’re most comfortable with, and most importantly, for your Clients – you pick the one that they’re development team can run with for the long-term.

How to choose a JavaScript Library – the condensed version

I’m a life-long student, and a professional developer – I’ve coded many languages, and I’m learning others, so it’s easy to see certain correlations that have started popping up.

MooTools… is definitely for the JavaScript Developer, and if you’re Object-Oriented as well, it’s even better.

jQuery… is for the designers out there who know some xhtml and want to get some JavaScript without dealing with the headaches it can bring. It’s go ta low barrier of entry, but I’ve thought of this Thomas Jefferson quote:

That which is Popular is not always Right, what is Right is not always popular

Don’t read too much into that. I just infer that people that say it’s “the way” have some additional education to do in general.

Dojo… is for the Java Developer crowd. As I’m delving more into Java, I see the strong similarities, and see why it’s involved in a lot of Java-based enterprise solutions – you could jump back and forth between Dojo and Java and feel pretty comfortable.

Coding Syntax, Preference, What’s Left? DOCUMENTATION!

This is the area most things suffer in – either too much or too little documentation. I’ve grown fond of MooTools docs structure. It’s easy to find what I need with it’s break down of how the functions are applied – string, array, elements… Easy!

jQuery docs are along the same lines, but I have difficultly in navigating them. I blame myself because of my long-term familiarity with MooTools, it’s become second nature, so jQuery is still slightly foreign.

Dojo docs, in my opinion, are the WORST of the docs. They’re broken down into their three main components (dojo, dijit, dojox), but beyond that it’s a guessing game to get to the API reference you want/need. I was finding myself hitting the wrong sections because the search led me there, but it was not representing what I was searching for.

I really feel their Dojo Campus is a much better doc representation than their dojo book, or their API docs. Their book is incomplete, and if you search and find references to the book, you’ll find items incomplete, moved, referencing different version of the book, to the point you’re better off not even reading it. Along with the occasional example randomly not loading, then working, then not. It was a nightmare!

The problem – perhaps the only problem – with Dojo Campus, is the search functionality. It defaults to “title search” which failed for me 99% of the time (because I needed something in the content, and was searching for the wrong titles). Even worse, the search isn’t even featured on the home page! I had to go four clicks in until I stumbled upon it for this post. (It’s accessible in two: Click on Tutorials and one of the options)

To my understanding, the Dojo Campus is going to become the “new” face of Dojo. And with their continued improvements in coding it’s becoming a stronger contender, and more importantly, more user friendly.

Examples from the frameworks

Every framework suffers from this. Outdated examples, drastic version differences that break code, or multiple version examples. MooTools and jQuery, for the most part, are pretty solid. Dojo, I hate to pick on you, but this is where you hurt the most. I googled – a lot – and the demos – official, sitepoint, others – are all over the place. Version 0.4, 0.9, 1.2.3, 1.3… and what’s worse, no one indicates what version the demo is in, so when I started looking at Sortable Tables, I find out it was made obsolete in another version. Links to non-existent pages in the dojo book… a mess!

In my own projects, it lead me to re-write a lot of items that existed in Dojo, but for a beginner with their library I ran into way too many issues to make it feasible to spend any more time playing with the code.

Overall, my impressions have not changed

MooTools is my favorite, jQuery is a recommended secondary, and Dojo is reserved as a “use it if you have to.” They pretty much throw the W3C to the wind with their coding structures – those dijits generate a mess of divs and classes as a default, to the point that I see the benefit in their examples, but in most of my scenarios, it was overkill (and my fellow devs would kill me if I ever coded something in that spaghetti menner).

It really showcases a difference between people that code for the front-end, and those that work with the front-end but primary experience is the back-end. the code makes sense to the extent in relation to Java code – but in comparing it to the majority of front-end applications, it’s a nightmare.

Shawn Morton may have beat me to the punch – both in writing about it – and a quick iframe demo of the Skittles idea.

The general point (in terms of Web Development) is that this is an insanely simple thing to accomplish – 15 minutes and Shawn had a working iframe demo.

I wanted to grab some of the effects and colors of the original, just to see if I could do it and “make it fancy” – I mean, there’s still a half-dozen effects that can be applied to it – fades, transitions, all those whizz-bang-pow stuff people love, but I had to pull myself back a test was important.

Skittles.com Initial Test

I decided to focus on Firefox 3 so I could use rounded corners in CSS (there’s a JS library for everyone else, sans Webkit, but hell, remember, this is a test. No one’s paying, so I’m not worried about IE.

It took me a couple hours, but here’s skittles.com, reproduced without flash.

I’m too tired to write more, so – here ya go.

No doubt some people feel “basic” coding is beneath them. They feel they should be focusing on Java, JavaScript, UI Design, UX, etc. etc. Coding that PSD to valid, cross browser XHTML? Complete with CSS styling? Dealing with whatever browsers you want to support?

Funk that, especially when we have dozens of businesses fighting to do this for us (for cheap!).

Prolific competition and cheap? How can I lose!

Yes, much like that extended warranty you bought, how could you lose? Very easily!

Generally speaking, it seems you get what you pay for. But sometimes you have to realize that doing research is the best ROI. In the age of the internet, one man shops quickly get bought out by the competition, so that we can go very quickly from “my friend runs this” to “he sold it for more than it’s worth, and now it’s a shit service.” It happens, as I had dug up old reviews and contacted people – which I suggest you do. Never rely on sites and written reviews (they could be paid reviews and not disclosed, and some people will rant and rave after one use, and quickly change their mind after two uses!).

In 2006 they were hot shit! So they still are…right?

No my friend, they are not. Like I said, any time you see a review for a service, research it. Their are prolific sites that offer up reviews but I’ve noticed a lot of them allow ballot stuffing (it seems all you need is an email address to post, and those are quite easy to get). So you can see they have some heavy negative reviews followed by dozens of similar “OMG, these guys saved me, they rock so hard!”

First thing you need to realize, you are outsourcing, and more than likely this work is going overseas – and generally outsourcing is a mixed bag of issues. From the services I checked out, they claimed to be “based” in the United States, but I noticed some of their class names held Russian words, another I noticed some Norwegian – and it’s most important that as I worked with some of these companies, I “figured out” how best to work with them – regardless of who they were.

The Secret to Working with Third Party PSD to XHTML Services

It’s simple, really:

• Do not rely on their order forms to tell them everything.
• Do not make assumptions on what they will/won’t do.

You combat this by:

• Giving them requirements if it’s not on the order form!
• If they offer money back guarantees and you aren’t happy – USE THEM.

Tell them exactly what you expect – if you think certain areas should have 10 pixels of padding around them (maybe *you* think it’s common sense) but they may not!

You may have selected CSS sprites – but do you want it done a certain way? Did you want certain headings to be clickable? TELL THEM.

I guess this ultimately falls down to communication skills as it often does – overcommunication is better than too little, and it’ll save you headaches in the long run!

How to Deliver your PSDs

No doubt, sometimes you may be working under deadlines so you may spread your work out into batches – this is a dangerous approach if you think “oh we can tweak certain fundamental aspects of our designs as we send them.” Bad, bad, bad.

If you are planning batch approach, communicate this before hand so your potential partner services understands, and make sure the basics of your templates are SOLID before you send them out!

I suggest having your templates done first (so you can reuse the code and maybe not need to have every PSD sent out to be done) and make sure your sidebar and navigation areas are solid (and this is where you describe how large the click areas are). Once these areas are solid, I’d make sure all future PSDs follow these pixel perfect hand-offs to insure an easy transition with the future PSDs sent off, and it’ll also save you a lot of pain.

Have you used any services like this? Got any tips or tricks? Let us know!

EDIT: I’ve sicne tweaked my htaccess file, added below (but left the old one inline, commented out in the example)
EDIT: So I talked to Toby Miller and he helped clarify some issues I was having – the script has been updated below!

So I’ve been discussing compression – I’m a fiend for it. It’s like a drug to me. I squeeze every byte out of production code.

I’d compress HTML into a single line – I’m just that phucked up. Maybe it’s my OCD, maybe I’m just nutty, but GZIPping seems like a no brainer to me.

1-2-3 COMPRESS!

What’s GZIP? I’m glad you asked, friend!

According to the never-wrong wikipedia article on GZIP:

gzip is a software application used for file compression. gzip is short for GNU zip; the program is a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, intended for use by the GNU Project.

What this basically does is compress your files and let the client unzip them. We’re talking about massive decreases in bandwidth, so that 200k website suddenly shrinks down.

No More Optimizing, YAY!

NO NO NO! I’m sorry friend, but GZIP is not an excuse to get lazy. You can use GZIP on Javascript Frameworks so that compressed 60k core file can become a 15k file. Wow.

Just take that in.

75% reduction of an already compressed file! That’s awesome. 101k html text file can be compressed to 15k. Frickin’ badass.

So naturally, why wouldn’t I want to enable this on my Dreamhost sites?

The GZIP Code

Please note: As I’m using Apache2, we’re calling mod_deflate instead of mod_gzip.

I’ve added this to my .htaccess files:

# BEGIN GZIP
# OLD GZIP CODE
# 
# AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
# 
# NEW GZIP CODE

	AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
	
		# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
		BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
		# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
		BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
		# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
		BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
		# Don't compress images
		SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
	
	
		# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
		Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
	

# END GZIP

Danger, Will Robinson!

Naturally, their are a few caveats from GZIP, as better explained by BetterExplained.com (heh):

• Older browsers: Yes, Virginia, no doubt you may be asked to support crappy browsers. We’re talking old-school-extreme, like Netscape 1.0 on Windows 95. Apache mod_deflate has some rules to avoid compression for older browsers.
• Already-compressed content: As BetterExplained.com details, you probably only need to compress the “big 3″ (HTML, CSS and Javascript) as images/flash/etc are usually already compressed. Usually.
• CPU-load: Compressing content on-the-fly uses CPU time and saves bandwidth. Usually this is a great tradeoff given the speed of compression. There are ways to pre-compress static content and send over the compressed versions. This requires more configuration; even if it’s not possible, compressing output may still be a net win. Using CPU cycles for a faster user experience is well worth it, given the short attention spans on the web.

So enjoy the benefits friends, pass on the glory of GZIP!

I get it. You joined Twitter because it’s the new thing.

But do you really need to add 1000+ people when your first tweet is “trying out twitter?”

Twitter: The Basics

If you’re trying it out, start out small. Add the people you know. That was like ten or so people for me. Then, add the blogs you love (notice the *LOVE* – not just casually read or have in your favorite RSS reader). They may not follow you back, but people will get that, at least, when you have 30 people you’re following and only 10 follow back.e

Now, test out twitter. Tweet a bit. It doesn’t have to be relevant or interesting. Have you read my tweets? I bitch, I whine, I moan, I question, I ask, I inform. I’m all over the map. It’s a total mind dump. Why people follow me at all is a mystery – at least to me.

Twitter: Slightly more advanced.

So you’ve tweeted for a little while. You’ve picked out your favorite clients – maybe TweetDeck or its groups, or maybe Twhirl for its integration with friendfeed. That’s why I tend to use the two. My cell phone doesn’t support twitter, so I don’t bother with mobile clients (for now).

So – you’re following people. Maybe a few people (that aren’t spammers) are following you. What now? Research, baby! I suggest using Twellow aka TwellowPages to find tweeters that are interested in similar topics as yourself. Maybe using Twitter’s Search (integrated from Summize) to find key words you like. I’ve done searches on mootools, analytics, metrics, social media, and a few others as they are all topics that interest me. I haven’t ruled out others, and I usually re-run the query.

Keep an eye on your ratio of followers to following.

This makes you look like a spammer if you’re following, say, a 1,000 plus people and only a hand-full are following you back (spammers get lucky if the users are utilizing TweetLater.com – a tweet scheduler/auto follower. I use it to automatically thank followers. It’s one step less I need to do to thank people for being interested enough to follow my dumbass. It gets interesting when other peple use it so it becomes a two-step loop of “thanks for following!” “thanks for following!”

It’s possible that you really dig a thousand people on twitter – you really want to read those tweets! But it just makes you look bad. Please refrain. Slowly add a few dozen daily so people aren’t freaked out by your spam-like addiction (seriously, I’m almost to 2,500 tweets in a short time – imagine me times one thousand). Think before you act. Contribute. Response. Ask. Blog.

I know, this Twitter stuff is pretty basic.

But that’s kind of the point – twitter *is* pretty basic. Don’t make it harder or more complex than it needs to be!

So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech.

He points out the obvious – people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online.

Freedom of speech is absolute.

If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously
aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them
with our own free speech and expression.

Overall – it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies).

My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up:

We Need to be Smart About This
As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards
of policing the community.  Otherwise, the government will do that for
us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.

Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being.

Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan – nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil – collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech.

I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords.

Benjamin Franklin once said,

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.”

So what – how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good.

How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.”

Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up.

As a web developer, I get the wonderful job of constantly improving myself and my coding. I research, I test, I experiment, and I try to come up with consistent methods that, in my opinion, are a best practice in my work, and can be shown to other people to help them improve their skills. That being said, sometimes you are so damn busy you seldom have the time you’d like to properly coach (and be coached).

Personally, I love constructive criticism.

I really, really, really, do. It’s an excellent way to accurately better yourself – someone else critiques you. It’s even better when the person is someone you admire and respect – because then you’re more likely to take it to heart.

I know I’ve written bad code in the past (haven’t we all at some point?) and I know sometimes I’ll work on a bit of code and see a way to better myself, or improve upon others work (as I often do with mootools scripts, and jquery/javascript conversions). But I don’t just lock it away. I post on forums and groups. I send out emails to friends and colleagues. I ask for feedback, and I take feedback even when I don’t ask for it.

Because I have a desire to better myself. Because I recognize I am not perfect, and I can improve.

I could get all zen on you and go into a personal rant, but that’ll have to hold off for another day.

The point is – especially as a web developer in this new media age - you need to get criticism, give criticism, and improve your coding abilities. You can specialize – front-end, back-end, ATG, CSS, XHTML, WTF-Kung-Fu-BBQ, RoR, etc. etc. and so on and so on… but…

…unless you work on improving yourself you’ll always end up at the bottom rung.

It seems today everyone has a blog, and war over what software is better. Everyone and their brother’s mother has an opinion and which is best, but that’s another post altogether (for the record, I’ve used LiveJournal and currently utilize WordPress, and love it). Right now, I want to briefly discuss e-commerce shopping cart software.

My most recent experience has been SquirrelCart.

Squirrelcart PHP Shopping Cart software is a fully customizable, robust php shopping cart, designed with the advanced developer and web novice in mind.

That’s a mouth full.

Now, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t using the latest and greatest. Nor was I using untouched code, so I can’t fully comment on the software or the quality of its code – but I can comment on the quality of the prior developer, and the usefulness of subversion content repositories for any business.

When I entered the game for Client X, it was a lot of little tweaks here and there. It was fixing up code and optimization. Simple tasks, until I started looking at the code (and by all means I can’t take the credit, I work with some bad-ass developers that I get to bounce ideas off of).

The Good:

They commented the hell out of the code! TONS of comments. Personalization’s well labeled. Identifiers all over the place. 

The Bad:

Only bad thing about the comments – he listed the changes made to files, but they were meaningless. “Changed C for Y to do Z” is useless if I can’t see what was changed or for what. That’s where a good SVN comes in. A lot of bad code. Bad math. Functions being called and executed that did nothing or returned nothing of value. Recursion. A TON of edits to account for bugs. A lot of ‘hacks’ that were seemingly done because the previous developer didn’t know why he needed them.

The Ugly:

A ton of the hacks put in place were fixed in subsequent upgrades of SquirrelCart – security considerations, optimizations, compatibilities – except now I was no longer working with solid software. I was working with second-hand code, customized and tweaked, so an upgrade could totally break the site.

The Bonus:

SquirrelCart’s support and staff are bad-ass. I still think it’s a one-man shop – but the documentation is well-done and every e-mail and question was quickly answered (accurately & politely). That makes it a winner, and I’ve considered sending some business their way

Magento – E-Commerce Platform for Growth

…and it’s open source!

Magento E-commerce Software was mentioned to me by Toby one day. As I haven’t developed on it (yet) I can’t call it any real pros and cons as I did with working on second-hand code above.

The Good:

Open source! Excellent blog with useful tidbits. Constantly trying to keep its community “in the know” and it shows. Their code seems to be structured where it’s easier to add on to the package, instead of editing core files- something I encountered in other projects. Extend your platform, don’t override it, that way you can upgrade with ease!

The Bad:

Open source scares people. People feel like if it’s open, it’s more vulnerable (because hackers can get to the core code, they can more easily exploit it – which is true of bad code – from what I’ve seen so far, Magento is lacking in the “been hacked” area). They also feel like if they get it for free it’s just not as powerful as paid software.

The Bonus:

Open source! They’re on Twitter! And you all know how much people whine and complain on there – so it’s a good sign they’re monitoring word on their stuff (and when you’ve got an open-source project that relies on people paying you for support rather than your software, word is everything!)

All in all, I’m hoping to create a site utilizing Magento – but as usual, side projects often get thrown aside for school work and paid work, so a future of an affair with Magento may be a ways off for now :-/

Chris Coyier – whose blog I’ve read for some time – wrote a little script for those developers out there that want to quit supporting IE6. Naturally, it’s built on jQuery (the javascirpt for designers).

Death to IE6!

It’s kind of funny, because earlier this week I read from Elliot Jay Stock’s blog that August 27th was the seventh anniversary of the launch of IE6.

A few sites have all ready indicated they’re goign to stop IE6 support -Apple’s MobileMe (according to an email on June 9th, 2008), 37singals (as of August 15th, 2008), and facebook recommends you upgrade (or try a different browser – as of November 26th, 2007). Now – it’s funny, because back in the day, sites used to have that stipulation of “best viewed on” or…

Dude, you need to upgrade.

So we’re telling people to start upgrading to IE7, because they’ve been lagging. We did it before, but it was deemed “in bad taste.” We shouldn’t tell people what to browse with. Yet we don’t support earlier versions, so…

Yet we deemed it good taste to tell people to upgrade flash – “because hey, everyone else is doing it.” So the flip-side is flash is a plug-in, and Internet Explorer 6 is a monstrosity. But guess what? You can code a little link to bypass flash detection so users can still see the flash, with the warning that it may not be “up to snuff” without

Nostradamus predicted IE’s doom.

Maybe not – but I know this wasn’t the first IE Death March – I can’t dig up information on the last one, or the last “I don’t support IE6 banner” so I sincerely doubt this new attempt will do much.

But as “major” sites stop supporting IE6, maybe we’ll see a reduction of IE6 users as a whole faster than Microsoft was able to do with their “forced” upgrade to IE7.

So a big hub-bub ’round these parts of Columbus was Nationwide hiring Shawn Morton to do social media strategy.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Nationwide, I still have friends there, and I’m writing this because I want to!)

Social Media for an Insurance/Finances company?

Damn straight. I loved the idea. It’s forcing a big company to become more involved with its people. It’s bringing the corporate in touch with the civilians. It means instead of commercials of cheesy actors saying how “I got a great rate from Nationwide” it’s the twittersphere all-a-twittering about “I got some great info from Nationwide.com” or maybe “check out Nationwide’s hilarious new commercial.”

But all these little things aren’t what I want to focus on.

Corporate Responsibility and Transparency

Certainly you always stumble on advertising articles talking about the new campaigns – but usually it seems that’s where it stops. Company A has started a microsite, check it out at… or Company B is giving away X if you do Y, pass it on.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the company wants people to talk about it. And as David Griner points out, sometimes companies fuck up so utterly and completely what could’ve been a good review of their product.

David writes:

Over on the J-Walk Blog, John Walkenbach seemed plenty happy to have received a free bottle of a liquor called VeeV — “the world’s first Acai spirit.” Before even trying it, John wrote about the product, ran a picture of the bottle and promised to do some “live VeeV blogging” (ie, blogging under the influence).

Home run for the VeeV marketing folks, right?

Hey VeeV, I’m available for test marketing! Send free shit my way!

How’d they screw up? How COULD you screw up? I mean, maybe they’re worried they’ll be portrayed as the drink of alcoholics if someone “live blogs” drunk.

Apparently, John blogging drunk about VeeV, but the marketing agency of VeeV – Maverick Digital – put a little comment (as Bob no less) talking about about how awesome it is in pure marketing speak – which rather pissed John off.

Right, that’s what Griner said.

Right – people hate it when you try to act like you’re some random schmo (in this case, Bob) with a genuine opinion. Which brings me back to Nationwide…

Sanjaya-ize yo’self, fool!

That’s right. Sanjaya-ize Yourself – in the spirit of Elf Yourself you can upload a shot of yourself and make yourself like Sanjaya of American Idol fame. Haven’t you heard of it yet? It’s being shown in targeted markets – smart move! They identified a certain niche and targeted them with a celebrity that appeals to them.

And my point is?

Vader Sanjaya-ized. I totally stole this from Shawn.

This simple entry on the fan board for Sanjaya:

Just wanted to let everyone know that Sanjaya will be premiering his new TV commercial for Nationwide Insurance at Branch (226 E 54th St) in Manhattan on Wednesday, August 20th at 6PM.

The event is closed to the public; however, you still may be able to catch a glimpse of Sanjaya.

If you’re outside the NYC area, you can check out the new commercial on Nationwide.com (http://nationwide.com/about-us/featured-ads.jsp) and on our YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/NWInsurance) starting on Wednesday evening.

And for those who want to try on Sanjaya’s own unique style, you can check out our Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget starting Wednesday evening as well.

http://www.sanjaya-ize.com

BTW, I am part of the team at Nationwide that is putting together the event and the Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget, so please let me know if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing what you all think.

See that last part? Here, in case you missed it, I added some bold to it for you:

BTW, I am part of the team at Nationwide that is putting together the event and the Sanjaya-ize Yourself widget, so please let me know if you have any questions or comments. We look forward to hearing what you all think.

See what Shawn aka sMoRTy71 did differently? FULL DISCLOSURE OF HIS INVOLVEMENT. No bullshit, no clever white lies. He appealed to their fans, made sure they knew who he was and that he was totally pimping out his product.

That , my friends, is how you do social media right.

Just my piece in politics. I’ve talked to him, and he’s very genuine – a rare trait I’ve ever gotten from talking to anyone involved in politics.

Robert Owens on youTube?

That is correct, friend!

I’m really digging how politicians are starting to utilize new media methods to get their message out. Most recently, we’ve heard of Ron Paul’s online money raising that really helped point out the power of the people online. Then we see Obama has emulated the online presence – and they use their staff at hand to help tailor the experience to the potential voter. The undecided voters get one message, the supported get a different set – maybe facebook reminders, tweets, IMs, etc.

Very cool – I’m looking forward to the 2012 elections just to see how much the Internet is involved – maybe they’ll have mobile voting figured out by then, or maybe even electronic voting machines secured!

So Genuine Chris has declared war on Odesk.

Say what?

That’s right – a war against the friend to freelancers. Right?

From oDesk:

oDesk enables buyers of services to hire, manage, and pay technology service providers from around the world. Buyers choose oDesk for top global talent, comprehensive management tools, and a flexible hourly payment model. Service Providers choose oDesk for challenging jobs and guaranteed payment. Every day, thousands of buyers and providers work together through oDesk — a unique company at the forefront of reinventing work.

So, it’s all gravy, right? I thought about signing up their and doing some freelancing myself – I saw a few mootools projects pop-up, and I fancy me some mootools development.

But Chris points out what another developer, Issac Kelly, had to say:

“God, it’s like dealing with people you got away from work to begin with.”

Dude. I didn’t leave Corporate Internet to be your bitch.

I know, I know. That’s not what oDesk is – right? I’ve never used it, but from the “quality” of what I’ve seen, I have mixed feelings about becoming involved. It’s really five-and-diming development – and as a developer that has had to take over tasks from the lowest-common-denominator (*cough*webconsultants*cough*) it’s easy to see that YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

So I should pay top-dollar for premium development?

No – you should pay what you can afford.
If you can afford someone at $60/hour you should hire someone at that rate – not the guy that comes around and tries to undersell your guy with “I’ll do it for $25″ – because very often if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

I’m not saying that maybe you’re luck – but very often those lowest bidders underbid and end up under delivering because they just meant to get you in, and then get you at the point of either:

• A) You’re stuck with them because you’ve wasted too much of your budget to start over.
• B) They’ve been paid and you end up going with the higher priced guy/company anyways, maybe with some savable work.

So what are you going to do about it, hotshot?

I’m not. I’m looking for side jobs, because, well, kid(s) are damned expensive.

But Chris says he’s got something coming:

I’ll find the work for all of you, I’ll get you paid what you’re worth, and I’ll make all of us rich in the process. I’ll be blogging about this as it takes shape, but it’s surprisingly concrete and specific in my head what I need to do, and how I’m going to do it. I am glad someone showed me what Odesk is because it’s everything that I’m not.

And he’s shown me before he’s not one to talk smack – so I’m going to be keeping an eye on this.