Great article in copyblogger about how to tighten up your copy to make sure you kill those sales conversion trolls .
Avoid the carney, the sea-monkeys, and the trolls. Write content to be identifiable, engender trust, and provide clarity on calls to action.
Ahhh… finally, the Google Wave developer preview of Google’s HTML 5 re-imagining of online collaboration and communications at Google’s I/O conference.
The interesting idea of it as a Product, Platform (for the embedding of things in the web) and Protocols as well as the re-visioning of email if it had been invented today, kinda sorts well with actual usage. For example, in the demo, the use of email and then a sort of “in-email” IM session (we’re going to need new verbs and adjectives, I can tell) being used is pretty similar to what really happens in real life though you generally have to jump to a new app and those conversations end up being isolated form each other. So, at least that idea in Wave is sound.
Really useful article on how to start implementing continuous deployment in your organization. It encapsulates a lot of the stuff I just posted on the Five Whys and Lean Startups.
I can imagine a few other things you need here, like a complete sandbox for for each dev, as well as the continuous integration server to keep testing every commit, and the cultural change is enormous but not onerous.
I think the other important thing is that this is scary. Even me at my most crazy would be a bit concerned about this. People will be worried, especially if this is something you haven’t done from the very start. You also need a culture that doesn’t punish honest mistakes. Otherwise, people will fear to deploy something in short cycles from idea to production in nothing time.
Noticed for the first time in ages that my server was not set to the correct timezone since DST started. Oops. Very easy to fix on Hardy. Just ssh into your box and
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
then pick your geographical time zone.
Et voila.
I’ve become a big fan of Cucumber in a very short amount of time. Mostly, because it’s enabled us to translate user requirements quickly into step by step instructions we can then code to. Especially with the turnover in staff at AI this means that business logic, reasoning and behaviour lives in the app and can be reviewed without a lot of overly hefty documentation and such. Write code to reflect behaviour, test, deploy. Voila, app done !
Great intro and springboard article from the Register if you don’t know much about Sphinx on the smarter, scalable way to do full text search these days. All the cool kids are using it (and with good reason).
Sphinx and Rails goes together pretty much like chocolate and peanut butter these days and we’re using it on at least two production projects at AI, as well as it being a favourite of mine for personal use.
Great article on the anthroplogy inspired design and implementation of the Joel Spolsky ’s free social question and answer site Stack Overflow< which allows highly technical questions to be asked by its users and answered by its community.
Some great anthropological insights for all social software in the video but read the article as well. Love their nine building blocks of social engineering.
Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.
BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.
The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.
Devs hate dealing with infrastructure. They’d much rather code solutions than worry about whether the servers have been updated, a piece of software is there or the environment differs from what they have on their development boxes.
Amazon EC2 started it (though really you still need to manage the hardware), Google app engine (if you like python) followed, and Heroku made it seemingly effortless to deploy and run Rails apps. It’s now following with pricing plans, both Shared and Dedicated that can handle production deployments (I love the pricing tier names : Blossom, Koi, Crane, Ronin, Fugu and Zilla… ;-) ). IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is now becoming the increasingly accepted standard for devs in both startup staging and business production.
I like this. From mattf’s shinily resurfaced blog .
Love the simplicity of this.
The only thing I’d add is that you should go into the resulting spreadsheet, go to Share | Set Notification rules and have it email you whenever anyone submits a form right away.