Starting in the next week or two I will be starting to publish articles and tools that support pen and paper processes that for me at least are very useful in the website and web application development space. The tools will be in the form of single A4 PDF documents that are useful in the concept and planning phases of web projects.
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posted on the February 28th, 2009 No Comments »
As corporates and small business engage the web more and more heavily, the need to ensure a website is up at all times becomes more and more critical. There are a number of services (wikipedia has a great list) that offer to monitor website availability by using various traffic types (ping, http, etc) to ensure the site is available to the public. At what point should you use one of these services, and additionally, what kind of monitoring should you do (assuming you have the appropriate network infrastructure) to perform monitoring also. If you are a company with some internal hosting capability or with a number of servers hosted in a data centre somewhere, then I think implementing a solution as illustrated below is wise.
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posted on the February 22nd, 2009 1 Comment »
I’ve been asking myself a question lately:
“What is it that makes some programmers more effective than others? Not quicker, not more technically elegant or advanced, just more effective.”
I think it all comes down to balance – having a mix of skills that make you accessible to the business world whilst keeping a foot planted firmly in the realm of software development. In a lot of large corporations these days the need for this balance is reduced (well at least it seems to be), as the analyst programmer has been broken apart into two distinct entities; that of the business analyst and the applications developer. However, the company in which I work this is not the case, and my team of developers is engaged (through myself) directly by the business to design and deliver software solutions – be they large or small.
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posted on the February 18th, 2009 No Comments »
Well I’ve now got to the point where the HTML template for the site is complete, so it’s time to implement it. I had three of the previously identified CMSes up and running and I was going to implement the template in each of the products to get a feel for how easy it was to implement a HTML template into the CMS.
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posted on the February 16th, 2009 4 Comments »
Well after installing and running up my two contenders from the last round (TYPOlight and Concrete5) the clear winner for me was TYPOlight. I don’t doubt that Concrete5 will be a great CMS but it’s not there yet. So if you are looking at contributing to a CMS or getting in early with one, Concrete5 is probably worth a look.
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posted on the February 12th, 2009 No Comments »
Choosing a CMS for a website you are developing so it can be maintained by non-technical users should be a breeze shouldn’t it – I mean there are literally dozens of the light blighters out there. So why is it so hard? Well I guess for one, the number of CMSes available does make the decision making a little harder. If there was one product that seemed to be an industry leader and people were flocking to it, then that would also make things easier. I guess a couple of years ago, that was probably the case – Joomla had stuck it’s head out above the competition (the likes of Drupal, PHPNuke and Mambo – a project from which Joomla was forked).
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posted on the February 1st, 2009 2 Comments »
