Several of my colleagues at the Web Shop have recently independently stumbled upon a couple of articles that talk about an innovative concept: Designing websites right in the web browser. The topic managed to find its way into several conversations here over the last little while, and I thought I would keep the conversation going, and bring it online to potentially include a larger number of people in the conversation.
On October 20th, which also happens to be my birthday, Canonical made the first release of the Ubuntu distribution– Ubuntu 4.10 – Warty Warthog. A friend who I took some courses with at the University of Winnipeg helped me install it on my computer, and I’ve been using it since, occasionally trying out Debian, but not finding it to offer anything more than Ubuntu to me. For the past 6 years, I’ve been using the GNU/Linux operating system, and it’s been an amazing ride. Being able to use any and all of the programming languages and servers I came across, right on my PC, has had a tremendous impact on my professional development as a software developer.
Here I am at Canada’s Web Shop, and I would like to talk about the PHP development support tools that I like to use and why.
I have used some of these tools in the past, and am familiar with their usage and benefits, and some of them are in their infancy themselves, and this is the first time I am trying them out. I am not sure whether I will make much use of them or whether they will be useful for my work, but since their running is automated (It’s “free!”), and the results nicely tie in with the other tools, why not?
Unfortunately the title of this post is nonsensical. NoSQL isn’t any one thing, it’s a broad spectrum of emerging technologies. NoSQL could be used to describe just about any data store that isn’t a traditional database, and it turns out there are many flavours of databases.
I haven’t used any NoSQL product personally but I have the answers to some important questions:
In some cases they are very interesting, in others there is debate as to whether they’re the right tool for the job.
As your website grows and expands its content and user base outside the initial scope for the project, it often becomes necessary to consider a re-design or re-organization in order to keep navigation intuitive and get the most from your content, preventing it from getting lost in a hard-to-navigate-to location. Usually a content re-design starts with your sitemap and grows from there, but when you have too many pages sometimes it’s quite difficult to simply re-organize them in your head or even on paper. The Card-Sort method is a great way to fluidly alter sitemap organization on paper to achieve the most intuitive organization for your users when re-designing. It all starts with a stack of index cards, and a big black marker.
Lately we’ve been looking for ways to build custom web applications faster. Our existing software is great but it’s not quite up to the calibre of some of the frameworks out there. After deciding on using Symfony to build our next generation software, and loving it, I set out to wrap our existing software in Symfony. As it turns out that was fairly easy thanks to Symfony’s routing system.
It’s always a good idea to design or wireframe a website or application before jumping straight to the coding or graphic design part. Wireframing, prototyping, mocking it up reduces the time to decide which part goes to which part.
The importance of it has always been taken for granted by many designers and developers to speed up development not knowing that it actually increases the development time because of revisions, missed user cases and sometimes simple user interface design mistakes.
Google recently launched a new site layout for it’s search results page. Google dropped official support for IE6 on March 1st, 2010. This meant that Google could rearrange the results page to be both mobile friendly (without switching to their mobile version, iPhone users rejoice!) and make the page much, much faster to render by the browser. In this day and age of fast, inexpensive computing, that might not look like much, but it’s still an advantage for mobile users, and lets face it, you’re probably still supporting Windows XP on your mom’s 6 year old computer, or trying to send links to your sister’s spam ridden and slow laptop, right? The less time we’ve gotta spend chewing on a page load, the better for everyone.
I have to say that Google’s list of web services is growing at a rate that I personally can’t cope up. Until I found this Firefox extension – Google Shortcuts. It displays all of Google services as buttons just next to your address bar either as a single button with a dropdown of services or as a toolbar with the list.
The settings window lets you choose which services you frequently use and want to show.
It’s a very small extension that makes your life simple. You got to have it!
First things first, what is a wireframe? Wireframe: A basic visual guide used in interface design, to suggest the structure of an interface and relationships between its pages. Think of it as a detailed blueprint of a building, showing things such as fire escapes, rooms, and layout.
Wireframes over time have become the starting point for pretty much any custom website design/interface I make. There are many different options when it comes to making wireframes. You can use wireframe programs, mock them up in Photoshop, etc. the list goes on and on. But I find the best, and fastest way to get things done is to draw it out with a good old pencil and paper. With pencil and paper you can quickly make changes, write down notes and things along these lines. It’s both fast and easy.
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