After launching Fwd:Vault last month, it’s been a race to add the necessary features and functions to take the service broader. First on the list was more subscription tiers. I launched with just two: free and “unlimited everything.” I did this because, well, it was easy. Your instinct may be to dismiss my decision as [...]
Read More coding theory, crappy coding, software development, standardsThe latest and greatest version of jQuery, version 1.4, was released on January 14, the birthday of jQuery’s original launch. Bugfixes and improvements abound! The jQuery team has put together a site devoted to the new version, called the 14 days of jQuery, covering the major version changes as well as infrastructure updates coinciding with [...]
Read More ajax, handy functions, jquery, open source, programming, software development, standards, usabilityEveryone at this point knows the story of Michael Vick (quick summary if you don’t: he beat dogs, then got his high-paying job back after getting out of prison). Now the Philadelphia Eagles have given this guy a damn award. I could sit here and articulate this guy’s rise-fall-rise-again story as a sign of the [...]
Read More optimization, software development, usability, user interfacesIn case you haven’t heard, Sun is being bought by Oracle. After dancing around the issue in blog posts over the past 8 months, MySQL developer-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius finally comes out and adamantly opposes MySQL’s role in the sale. In a Dec. 12 blog post, Widenius tries to rally open source MySQL supporters in [...]
Read More business support, enterprise, open source, software developmentI recently made the decision to store times on Fwd:Vault systems in Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. I decided to do this because I have time-sensitive events happening along several dimensions. Email coming into the system has several timestamps associated with it: the user’s initial delivery, relay from their mail server, and receipt by the [...]
Read More coding theory, fwdvault, software development, standards, tech support, Twitter, usabilityIt’s a common problem with no single right answer: extract the top domain (e.g. example.com) from a given string, which may or may not be a valid URL. I had need of such functionality recently and found answers around the web lacking. So if you ever “just wanted the domain name” out of a string, [...]
Read More coding theory, crappy coding, php, programming, regular expressions, software developmentThe Future of Web Apps conference is so right up my alley it’s almost stupid that I couldn’t attend. Web development with a focus on business: customer service, driving traffic, marketing, sales… It’s essentially the event for geeks who want to go from the basement to the corner office. Fortunately, Ryan Carson and the team [...]
Read More business support, content sharing, customer service, entrepreneur, expo, marketing, software development, usabilityWith all the fancy cURL-based API’s out there these days (Facebook and Twitter immediately come to mind), using cURL to directly access and manipulate data is becoming quite common. However like all programming, there’s always the chance for an error to occur, and thus these calls must be immediately followed by error checks to ensure [...]
Read More browsers, php, software development, TwitterI was recently quoted in an article over at IT World, discussing underused developer tools (e.g. security testers). My quote is on page 2: http://www.itworld.com/development/74088/developer-tools-you-dont-use-and-why-you-dont-use-them Also FYI I am on vacation the rest of this week; return to our regular schedule next Monday.
Read More entrepreneur, fwdvault, get inspired, media, software development, usability“Should I use TEXT or VARCHAR field here?” I’ve lost count of the number of times that I asked myself this question when putting together database structures. Since the maximum a VARCHAR can hold is 255, it becomes a question of whether or not the data you’re saving will be any longer than that. Sometimes [...]
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