Draconis Software Blog

There’s an interesting post at ZDNet today about how many traditional companies are quickly adopting Web 2.0 concepts on their customer-facing web services, while at the same time, internal services aren’t utilizing these as quickly (if at all):

More organizations shift to Web 2.0 while IT departments remain wary by ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe — A couple of recent announcements from two large, very well-known organizations provides some interesting data points on how Web 2.0 is affecting the product designs and business processes of otherwise very traditional institutions. Both USA Today and the U.S. Patent and Trademark office have recently unveiled strategies for letting their users use two-way Web capabilities to contribute directly to the products and services they offer. And many other mainstream companies, such as Pepsi as well as GM and XM Radio have been exploring externally-facing Web 2.0 concepts in their products for a while now.

Perhaps the biggest issue most IT departments have (and really, the managers who juggle worker productivity concerns), is the worry users will spend too much time contributing to these social services than otherwise being productive. “Thus, the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.”

(Read the article)

There’s been an interesting debate going on about free vs. pay-per-use WiFi that I’ve found intriguing: the idea is to draw customers into shops at times that normally wouldn’t see much action, but at issue is whether too many people are mooching off the free service and hurting the business. A number of people have likened it to the air conditioning incentive offered by movie theaters a number of years ago. Of course, I and most other customers would probably rather have it free, but I can certainly understand shop owner’s oppositions.

Every so often, I like to head out to a Starbucks (which costs a couple bucks for the TMobile service they provide, plus a Venti cup of whatever’s brewing) or a FreshCity (where it’s free), take my MacBook, and get some work done. I find it’s often good motivation when I pick up and move to some other place – different environs give me a nice motivational push. What’s your take? Do you think offering WiFi for free at Starbucks, Panera, FreshCity, McDonald’s, and other places would be harming or helpful?

(Read the article)

There are a lot of people out there using WordPress to run their blog (this one does), and understanding a bit of how it works can go a long way to wrangling it to meet your needs. Recently, I wanted to add several buttons to the bottom of my post pages: buttons to submit the pages to digg, Reddit, and other sites. The trick is, I didn’t know how to make changes to just the post pages (read: singles) and not to my index page. This article outlines the basics of how WordPress handles displaying pages, and how you can start customizing it a bit beyond just pluggable themes.

(Read the article)

As you probably know, we’re big proponents of small tech businesses doing consulting work. Well, over the last six months, we’ve been putting that into practice, and at some point we’ll get around to writing up our experiences. For now, though, I’d like to talk a little about consultant best practices. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately regarding project management and how to streamline software development for our clients, and now that a medium-sized project has just wrapped up, a few thoughts have popped into mind.

Thus far, the majority of our clients have had us working with a third-party designer the client already has a relationship with (either they work for the company or were hired by them). We write the majority of the backend code for their project, and tie in the design work created by the designers to create the finished product. As we’ve progressed, we’ve come up with a few ideas that should help in these kinds of situations. This is a start, and I’d like to continue adding to these over time. Be sure to leave your thoughts.

(Read the article)

Clive Thomson has an interesting article on Mechanical Turk, a new Amazon company. Mechanical Turk provides developers with an interface for solving problems that are better solved by humans. As Clive puts it:

Computers suck at many tasks that are super-easy for humans. Any idiot can look at picture and instantly recognize that it’s a picture of a pink shoe. Any idiot can listen to a .wav file and realize it’s the sound of a dog barking. But computer scientists have spent billions trying to train software to do this, and they’ve utterly failed.

Mechanical Turk provides an interface for people to complete simple tasks like these, and get paid for their work (albeit very little).  An example of a successful business that uses Mechanical Turk is CastingWords, a podcast transcription service. Computerized voice recognition is still shaky, especially for something like a podcast, whereas humans can do it quite easily. Other examples of tasks in which Mechanical Turk can assist are image recognition, surveys, or aesthetic evaluations.

Each task usually pays anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars, so it’s unlikely that the humans completing these tasks could make much of a living at it. But a few minutes here and there could bring in a few extra dollars a day. Interestingly, the article also mentions potential labor issues, as Mechanical Turk provides a “virtual day laborer hiring hall” for things that companies might otherwise pay wages for.

I’d be curious to here feedback from users, either from the developer or the worker side.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, which (sadly) comes about only once per year.  Take a minute to think of the sysadmins who you work with (if you aren’t one yourself!) and be sure to let them know how much you appreciate the hard work they do for you.  And if you’re a sysadmin: Thank you!

There are a number of things going down across the web to commemorate the day.  Digg is sponsoring a contest, called Sysadmin of the Year, which seeks to honor the most amazing sysadmin.  Be sure to check it out and nominate your amazing sysadmin (or yourself, if you’re amazing).

Of course, you’ll want to check out the sysadminday.com website (check out the gallery – I’ve been there!).

Boingboing.net has several links up to some great sysadmin day-inspired stuff (be sure to check out the UK Unix Users Group song).

Search-engine optimization has been all the rage ever since there were search engines – Google especially seems to be the most successful at spawning whole cottage industries around optimization (and with good reason – it’s far and away the most popular). As several have pointed out, making some simple changes to your pages, and getting into good habits, can have dramatic effects on the number of visitors to your site.

An article, 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic, over at Performancing.com, takes a look at three aspects of your site and strategies to take to increase search-engine traffic: better copy, lots of links, and networking (the social kind). Some very good suggestions.

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO is available at SEOmoz.org. This very complete article gives a great list of items you should be aware of to best optimize your site (everything from avoiding broken links and minimized downtime, to meta tags and document organization). Another great link to check out from SEOMoz is the Page Strength tool.

As you become more serious about your search engine optimization (and as your web site grows), there’s going to come a time when you need better control over just what content is being indexed by web crawlers. Matt Cutts has an article, Bot Obedience: Herding Googlebot, on building a robots.txt file and other strategies for holding googlebot’s hand over at his blog (which has plenty of other great tips for SEO).

If you’re running a blog (and who isn’t these days?), then you’re going to want to check out this 5-part post called Getting Ranked (with tips on how your page URLs should be formatted, how to improve accessibility, etc). One blogger, Paul Stamatiou, followed these tips and found a marked increased in his web traffic.

Hopefully you found these articles useful. There’s a ton of other great stuff out there, so consider this a starting point. Getting better traffic from search engines isn’t complicated, but it does require a bit of work and plenty of common sense. Good luck!

Recently, I’ve been working on some Javascript effects using the great Scriptaculous code, and needed to create a “panel-resize” widget, where dragging an icon between two panels would result in both panels’ sizes changing relative to each other (in other words, dragging to the right would widen the left panel while shrinking the right, etc). I hadn’t seen this in use anywhere, so I decided to create a mockup and explain how I created it.

Of course, it’s by no means perfect, so be sure to let me know what you think. But I think it’s a workable example that seems to work fine in Firefox, Safari and IE (haven’t tested Opera, Konqueror, or several others yet).
(Read the article)

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PHP is probably still the leader when it comes to server-side scripting and programming, although recently Ruby on Rails has started to give it a run for its money. Ruby on Rails provides a fast, easy way to get a web application written, and it benefits from using an MVC aritecture. Well now there’s a toolkit in development called the Zend Framework that aims to bring these advantages to PHP. IBM developerWorks has a good article giving an introduction to the Zend Framework.

The article describes two problems with Ruby on Rails that Zend can fix. First, most web developers know PHP, but many don’t know Ruby, so using Ruby on Rails would require learning a new programming language. Second, a lot of hosting providers still don’t allow for Ruby on Rails, so using it would require changing providers. Another benefit I can see is that many companies insist on PHP being used for certain applications, and might dismiss the idea of Ruby on Rails outright if they haven’t heard of it.

This isn’t to say that Zend would only be used as a second-rate version of Ruby on Rails. PHP is a good language in its own right, and for some applications its be a better choice than Ruby. However it’s worth noting that Ruby on Rails is more than just a framework. It also provides code generation an debugging tools that can make development a lot easier.  But the next time you need to create a web application using PHP, you should definitely consider using Zend.

Designing a website doesn’t have to be quite as hard as it used to. There are a number of freely available resources for people building sites. There’s a new IBM developerWorks article that gives links to a bunch of good ones. From the article:

Web developers can find many free resources, although some are freer than others. If you design a Web site or Web application, whether static or with all the dynamic Ajax goodness you can conjure up, you might find resources to lighten your load and spice up your content. From free icons to Web layouts and templates to on-line Web page tools, this article demonstrates that a Web architect can also get help these days at little or no cost.

We’ve discussed CSS galleries before, but there are some other nice resources the article mentions, including Creative Commons content, Open graphics, design tools, and even complete web templates. In particular I’ve found the Color Scheme Generator to be very useful, since I have enough trouble getting my clothes to match, let alone a whole web page.