tadej.eu » Web development

5 Google Wave Invites Left

Tadej Gregorcic — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:37:38 +0000

I have a couple of Google Wave invites left, so let me know if you need one.

Although it still has a long way to go before you will want to use it on a daily basis (for one thing, it is slow), Wave is probably going to be an important communication and collaboration tool for some obvious reasons:

1. The platform is easily extensible

You can write a useful gadget in a couple of hours (Google Wave gadgets guide).

2. The server architecture is open to federation

Just like e-mail (Google Wave Federation – Why it matters).

3. E-mail is an outdated communication tool

4. It’s Google

Google has a lot of steam to power this transition – slowly but surely

Drupal Published Date equals Effective Date fix

Tadej Gregorcic — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:12:50 +0000

We have a gaming site where the node creation date is irrelevant to the user as they only see it once it is published by our moderators.

Surprisingly, there is no “published on” date in the original Drupal database, so the Views can only sort by the mysterious “created on” date.

As I didn’t want to hammer this problemmette away with the formidable Scheduler module, here’s a quick fix.

Get the Rules module and add this triggered rule:

After updating existing content
Conditions: updated content type fits, NEGATE “unchanged content is published”, “changed content is published”
Custom PHP action:

$node->created = time();
return array(“node” => $node);

Seems to work just fine.

Now I can use the “posted on” date in Views to display the games in a logical manner. Too bad there is no way to do this retroactively.

Here’s my Rules screen shot:

And a related article: http://drupal.org/nyobserver.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

Tadej Gregorcic — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:22:14 +0000

The days started early today at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin – Robert and I are currently at Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop on Building Successful Web 2.0 Applications.

You can follow my tweets from the event on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tadej (hash tag #web20expo).

Some other tags from the event:

*update* #w2eb now seems to be the one to go with

*SESSION HASH TAGS**
Strategy & Business Models :: #w2eb_strat
Marketing & Community :: #w2eb_mktg
Design & User Experience :: #w2eb_ux
Development :: #w2eb_dev
Sponsored Sessions :: #w2eb_ss
Keynotes :: #w2eb_key

There is also an official back channel.

Our friends from Zemanta will have (at least) two presentations here (let me know if there are more):

Andraz Tori: Beyond Who Else Bought What
Marko Samastur: Easy Deployment of Site Extensions With Browser Plugins

Berlin – the tag debate…w2eb?

Don’t Fire The Translator … Yet

Tadej Gregorcic — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:25:50 +0000

Translate Server Error

Despite a myriad of translation engines and web sites, human translation is still a very important job that requires a lot of experience and knowledge to be done properly.

It’s not just the language.

No-one in their right mind should tackle e.g. legal or technical translations if they’ve never worked in any of the fields (unless the job pays really, really well and it’s worth digging through books and Googling everything ).

Translation work is well paid (and rightly so) – and thus quite expensive for the client.

After all, you usually pay for 1-3 passes of proofreading after the translation, depending on the type of document you are delivering.

And if it’s marketing or other commercial text, the translator needs to know how to write copy, too.

I am sure that in Brussels, where everyone and their dog have a translator in their rolodex (as just about everything is translated into more than 20 of EU’s official languages), this is a pressing issue.

There is a huge demand for cost-cutting through Machine Translation and Crowdsourced Translation – it’s one of those markets where the right solution can make a lot of people rich instantly – but we are not quite there yet.

We are still in the era of machine-aided human translation.

This means that the areas where money can be made right now are:

Translation corpuses (example: http://evrokorpus.gov.si/)
Translation memory tools (example: Trados)
Seamless integration of dictionaries, thesauri, …
Various tools for translators (e.g. tools that hide HTML and other tags in web pages)

Natural language processing, machine translation and various semantic technologies are already having beneficial effects on productivity in writing, research and language learning (look at Lingro, Zemanta, Google Translate, Systran), but we are still years away from being able to deliver quality localizations without an experienced human translator.

Fun fact: this post would cost about 25-50 EUR to translate by a professional

Disclosure: I used to do freelance translation and nowadays still occasionally do business as an agent and proofreader

Woopra – Live Web Analytics and More?

Tadej Gregorcic — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:53:30 +0000

I got my Woopra private beta login today and I’m impressed!

Woopra is an installable (Windows, Linux and Mac) application that displays web site analytics in real time, like a real (and beautifully designed) web general’s HUD.

You see users popping up as they visit your web site and move from page to page, you can tag them (give them a name) and follow them over a series of sessions, and you can even message individual users.

The way this works is that a small window pops up at the bottom of the user’s screen and you are able to chat with them LivePerson-style.

I’ve noticed that I can often see when a user gets stuck on a page and needs help … *HINT*

GoDaddy.me

Tadej Gregorcic — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:59:36 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Since Montenegro’s independence and the news of the highly lucrative .me top-level domain name assignation, a lot of people have been standing in line in hope that they’d be able to register their kiss.me, sex.me, call.me, find.me and whatnot.me domains.

Go home, people – GoDaddy’s got the contract with the government of Montenegro (here the contract in Serbian … ukhm … Montenegrian? – published last month).

This explains the mysterious delays in getting these domains to the market – I have been trying to get some news (in vain) from the people at nic.me for the last couple of months.

Yup – domains = $$$.

SocNets – Ending The Schizophrenia

Tadej Gregorcic — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 17:33:59 +0000

| View | Upload your own

A nice presentation throwing out a couple of ideas of how social networks are likely to interoperate in the near future.

Although having multiple personae can often benefit one’s personal branding endeavours, I’m sure everyone is getting tired of having to maintain their profiles across Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo or even Twitter and the like.

The technological aspects have pretty much been figured out, let’s see how the business side follows.

Good thing that the web, in all of its loosely coupled grace, allows for more than one standard to hit home run without consumers ever noticing it (compared to e.g. the blueray vs. HD-DVD debacle IRL .

Apache+MySQL+PHP on Vista/XP in 3 minutes

Tadej Gregorcic — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:48:58 +0000

I’ve just installed XAMPP 1.6.5 for Windows for PHP development on my Vista machine.It only takes a couple of minutes to get it all up and running with the installation wizard and you get:

Apache HTTPD 2.2.6 + Openssl 0.9.8g
MySQL 5.0.51
PHP 5.2.5
PHP 4.4.7
phpMyAdmin 2.11.3
FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.24
Mercury Mail Transport System 4.52

Basically everything you need for testing PHP code, Wordpress blogging engines, Drupal, Pligg, etc. on Windows.

XAMPP comes with a nice control panel that lets you start and stop the individual system services and a web interface with a lot of functions that most developers will need right away.

After some basic testing, I have discovered no significant problems and I would definitely recommend PHP developers using Windows to try it out.

Hat tip to the guys at Apache Friends for this very useful toolset!

And the link: the official XAMP site

Amazon S3 and Flash widgets

Tadej Gregorcic — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:08:23 +0000

Today, I wanted to load a Flash widget of mine and its corresponding XML configuration file to Amazon S3.

What appeared to be a trivial task turned into 3 hours of struggle with browser cache problems, security issues and other whatnots.

So to summarise what did the job eventually:

*updated to support IE7*

The address of the Flash file is: http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucketname/flashfile.swf

In order to be able to load the XML and other files, I had to add this to Actionscript (at the beginning of the movie):

System.security.allowDomain( ‘*’ );

This allows cross-domain scripting, of course you can substitute the * with a specific domain name.

Some references: link1, link2

Move Your Multimedia Content to S3

Tadej Gregorcic — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:37:06 +0000

In order to save me some trouble from my hosting provider, I recently decided to move all my multimedia content to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.

Scalable and affordable serving of large files to an expanding number of visitors indeed has become a commodity, as a GB of storage per month costs only $0.15, with $0.18 per GB for the first TB of transfered data (check all the prices here).

What you need for a simple start is:

Sign up for Amazon Web Services (link)
Under Your web services account, you will find you AWS Access Identifiers
Save your Access Key ID (public) and your secret access key somewhere safe
Get a tool like Bucket Explorer, which servers as a UI for S3 (buckets are like folders in S3)
Sign in with your keys
Start uploading content and setting access rights

Once you’ve given read access for All users to a file within a bucket, it will become available from a web browser/service at such an address:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/file_name.extension

Choose The Right Fonts

Tadej Gregorcic — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:55:52 +0000

This cool web app lets you compare 3 columns of text side-by-side using the types you choose.

This could come quite handy when developing the CSS for a new web site.

Loading Animation Generator For AJAX Apps

Tadej Gregorcic — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 18:11:12 +0000

If you’re looking for cool GIF animations for your AJAX-powered web application, this site does it all for you.

It’s got a nice interface where you can choose the type and color of the animation, and you can even make it transparent.

I’m definitely going to use this for a while, at least until something better comes along.

True – the web space is increasingly full of clichés, ranging from loading animations, reflections, “beta” versions, to at times unintuitive social collaboration.

But heck – I’m not quite ready to start worrying about this just yet – all in all, if we are moving our desktops to the web, we might as well get comfortable with a set of easily recognizable visual elements.