web development

How WordPress developers treat publishers like suckers and marks or why I’m now ashamed to be a WordPress developer

In a conversation at WP Tavern (a Matt Mullenweg official property) about the problems with maintaining recent WordPress versions (say anything post 3.7), a very lively debate took place about whether major new features in WordPress should come enabled by default with no option to disable them.

The feature in questions was oEmbed this time but it could just as easily have been emojis or XML-RPC (which recently took thousands of WordPress websites down in a major hack exploit).

Keep reading How WordPress developers treat publishers like suckers and marks or why I'm now ashamed to be a WordPress developer

Three Ways to take Full Length Website Screenshots on OS X

At last a website screenshot utility with a decent name. I've always wanted to like Paparazzi on the name alone.

Visiomente: Modern Carpet Baggers or What’s Wrong with American Business

Foliovision were recently contacted to provide $500 of technical work by a firm called Visiomente. A simple Typepad to WordPress content move. Normally we would never write about an inquiry but Visiomente made such an effort to screw us and wasted enough of our time that a look at their business tactics is widely instructive about what’s wrong with American business these days.

Our hopes are this post might help other small businesses protect themselves against Visiomente and their ilk in the future.

Visiomente appears not to do anything themselves except run around and subcontract experts to provide work to high end clients. It appears Visiomente’s sole business model is to contract at the lowest possible prices and then charges on the work at the highest possible prices under their own name.

Keep reading Visiomente: Modern Carpet Baggers or What’s Wrong with American Business

Textile: How to write in the world’s greatest markup language

I often have to introduce our team to Textile formatting and our clients. I've linked to the other great Textile documentation out there.

Textile Editing on OS X: BBEdit, iTextile, MarkMyWords

So for non-programmers, here's how to get Textile editing working on BBEdit. Review of other OS X textile solutions.

Latin1 to UTF-8: A single query to find all the Latin1 database tables

We've found that even WordPress sites which are principally already UTF-8 have the odd Latin1 table sneaking into them. Here's how you find them.

Google Chromium Binaries: Here’s where Google hide the nightly builds of Chrome without the spyware

For some unaccountable reason, the URL 404's now (don't Google know about 301 redirects?) - here's the new working nightly build link.

Ten steps to build a great mobile version of your website

As mobile devices get better, more visitors are using smart phones to surf. Here's a step by step guide to quickly create a great mobile site.

What’s wrong with commercial WordPress Themes: WooThemes vs ElegantThemes

Think you are getting commercial quality flawless code with a paid WordPress theme? Think again: commercial themes are boobytraps for the unwary.

How to get HTTPD and FTP to play well together or SEO image management nirvana

While developing the Foliopress WYSIWYG we decided to create the images management on the basis of Kae Veren's excellent KFM file manager. While we are totally happy with how KFM handles the images itself, we were unable to work with images uploaded via ftp.

Uploading images one by one through an image editor is fine, uploading twenty that way is annoying. One of the reasons to prefer WordPress over Typepad is that you do have direct access to the server via ftp. So this was clearly not acceptable. It wasn't even possible to change the file ownership of httpd via SSH (without root permissions).

Keep reading How to get HTTPD and FTP to play well together or SEO image management nirvana

How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings

We've just had to move another client's old site to a new one.

There are lots of inbound links but the page URL structure has completely changed for the better.

The client wants to rank right away.

What do we do?

301 the old site is the traditional answer.

Not so fast says Eric Ward who is one of the masters of link building, having built links by hand for longer than almost anyone else on the internet and for more large corporate clients than any individual I know (there are some SEO companies working fairly stealth with portfolios of almost 100 big names):

I wouldn't 301 it yet. First I'd run a backlink analysis on the old site and then visit each site linking to the old site, and for those that look exceptionally trustworthy and legit, ask them personally for a hand edit to change the link from the old site to the new site.

Painful.
Slow.
Tedious.

Effective.

Frankly for a website with thousands of backlinks, that's just not a realistic option. Well for Walt Disney or some of Eric's other clients perhaps it is. But what should the rest of us do?

Keep reading How to move an old website to a new site address and retain Google rankings

Coding Languages, a developer’s new girlfriend

Why all this fascination with Ruby on Rails?

The success of 37signals...these guys have built some cool stuff in very small teams.

But in general I believe that a lot of the coding developers (as opposed to user interface developers such as myself) like trying new languages like some men like trying fresh girlfriends.

Each time a new language comes along they think this might be the one.

For those of us just trying to produce working applications efficiently for clients, switching languages is a waste of time and money.

i.e. we will switch but only if the incentives are enormous or our current technology has badly dated.

Many developers are choosing to remain in PHP. CakePHP is PHP's answer to the Rails framework on Ruby.

Dominican developer Kevin Lloyd has written a succinct list of the reasons to choose CakePHP over RoR:

laziness
speed
shared host support
cost

The big debate about Ruby on Rails versus PHP was set off by Alex Payne of Twitter's complaint about the speed of RoR in an interview:

All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise....there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

Kevin adds:

I don’t do Web Development for my health or for fun. I design web applications for clients. A lot of my work involves redesign of already existing sites. How do I say to a client: Hey, although your current web host that you’ve prepaid a year for is sufficient for 90% or the stuff you can throw at it, I’m using this new technology and you need to shell out some more $$$ for a host that can handle it.

That's our situation as well. We love web development but it is a means to an end. User interface, front end, user convenience. Of course reliability and security are very important to us as well, but that is more a question of coding practice than coding language.

Keep reading Coding Languages, a developer's new girlfriend