<center>
</center>
Congratulations to Wises on being adwarded the hitwise Online traffic award for travel maps in 2005.
Our thanks also go to Wises for providing us with extra motivation to build the best online map site for New Zealand.
I meet a lot of New Zealanders – young and old – who do some web development projects on the side. I thought I’d put up a post I can point them to that serves as introduction to some of the “web 2.0” tools and concepts we use.
Rails
Ruby is an awesome programming language, Rails is a fantastic framework. Stop doing PHP / ASP now and start doing rails. Today. Now. Right now. Install it!
Databases
Use mysql or postgresql (we use pg) and get phppgadmin / phpmyadmin so that you can easily modify the database. Normalize everything you can. It makes housekeeping simple. Keep everything in a db – don’t store any data (except for BLOBS/images) outside of the DB.
CSS
Don’t use tables for layout. Don’t put any style tags into your layout either – use CSS all the way.
Javascript
Use Javascript (aka AJAX) sparingly to make your site better. Don’t put in any javascript until you’ve got the site working in a non-javascript way first. Use javascript to reduce ultra-annoying round-trips to the server. Use behaviour to apply your styles.
Design
We like the design of flickr / odeo / 43things and Digg.
The fundamentals are big fonts – minimum of layout or markup. Make your site fun to use. I play Super Mario or Donkey Kong to warm myself up to UI design – I like being reminded of all the simple rewards you get for exploring the game. Your site should be the same – reward people for using it.
Staying current
Get a bloglines account and subscribe to some blogs that discuss topics you’re interested in. Set up your own blog and post to it regularly – even if it’s just rubbish like I post to my blog – it builds up a profile of you on the net – so that potential partners / employers / etc can see that you’ve been around the block.
Join NZ2.0 and chat with the other nz entrepeneurs. And finally – bowl up to Creative HQ on a friday afternoon and come say hello.
There’s always someone around who’s keen to chat. Especially if you’ve got something live on the net to show us! 
Here is a great article by Robert Scoble on why Google is leading the pack and the rest are following.
Robert has hit the nail on the head with his analysis of the role of influentials in the uptake of new technology. Understanding your users and their needs is critical to those businesses who want to be exceptional.
My favourite part of the article is…
(Referring to Microsoft) We don’t know how to thrill influentials. Google does. Maybe by accident. Maybe by plan. I don’t care anymore. They found a way to bring us a little better search with advertising that sucked a lot less. That’s really why they are on fire.
How did they do it? They didn’t do it by doing committee meetings. By doing focus groups. By studying millions of users. They did it by understanding the leading edge of users and serving them well. They did NOT serve my dad well in the early days. It took me two years to switch my dad from AltaVista to Google. They DID serve ME well, though. On every user study I’ve seen I’m way off the end of the bell curve. But Google groks people like me. They serve people like me. And they romance people like me in a way that no other company does.
Hint: Google is still not doing things for my dad. They are doing things like Google Talk. For me. Things like Google video. For me. Not for the mass markets, but for the influentials.
So, when you see Microsoft not supporting Firefox out of the gate, you are seeing that we don’t get the role of influentials in gathering audiences.
I have been testing the performance of our apache webserver over the last couple of days. Using apachebench I managed to get approx. 80 php requests / sec fetching dyanmic and static pages from apache. The box was really struggling. The load on the machine was over 100 and apache maxed out with 250 processes!
I wasn’t very happy with those results, so I thought I would port our application across to using lighttpd. After a little bit of mucking around with the configuration, I managed to get our application working under lighttpd. The difference in performance was enormous.
The tests shows the following results – approx. 1100 requests / sec for 2K static page and 350 requests / second for a php page! I still wasn’t convinced so I tested a 15K static page and it delivered over 700 requests a second! The amazing thing is lighttpd only opened 5 processes and the load tipped out at 1.5! That’s pretty damn amazing!
To be fair, lighttpd is using fastcgi built in. Still, apache has become very bloated. I configured lighttpd “out of the box” and received a massive performance increase. I have been using apache for a long time and been really happy with the performance. Now I realise that there is a much better way!
Apache is DEAD! Long live the new King – Lighttpd!
I’m moving some pretty big datasets around at the moment – and seeing 120mb data files being uncompressed in a few seconds makes my head spin a bit.
I remember when I got my first 120mb drive – and that was less than 10 years ago.
I’m working away on the executive summary of our first product (coming out early next month). I’m planning to display the summary as a mini slideshow – so I started with some paper-based sketches.
Converting these half dozen A4-sized papers into a cohesive online presentation is a real challenge. It’s easy to focus on font sizes, colors and spacing too early on.
It’s classic Content vs Design. You think that the page doesn’t look right because your fonts are 2px off.
But it’s usually not the font size – it’s your content. Get the content right and the rest comes together.
So.. I’m off to get the content right.
Cartoon from Ok/cancel
<a href=
””http://www.jnd.org”>Don Norman has a very insightful look at Google’s web design in his latest essay – The truth about Google’s so called “Simplicity”
Here’s a snippet from his article…
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages.
Google isn’t the only one to suffer this fate. I can remember when Amazon had dozens of category tabs on the top of their page. Thank god they fixed that! Amazon have recently added AJAX enabled tabs which let you browse all their categories.
This is a poignant reminder that we all need to be careful in design our interfaces, as things are always going to change!
I spent a bit of this afternoon setting up the Projectx website. Some of the technologies we used:
One of the great things about Typo is that it has support for static pages – so you can use it as a basic Content Management System (CMS). This means we can host both our company website and weblog with one software package.
And the best bit? Typo uses Ruby on Rails.
I’ve been a fan of CSS based design for a long time. Using CSS the layout instructions for projectx.co.nz are only 100 lines of code. It helps that Typo outputs clean xhtml markup.
We host all our sites on Linux and use Subversion to manage deployment. Because we’re using Ruby for most of our web applications – we use Lighttpd, a fast and modern webserver that works well for hosting applications on FastCGI.
Ruby, Lighttpd, Linux and Postgresql. It’s the LAMP stack for Web 2.0 companies.
I was using one of the local job sites the other day.
I entered Usability into the search box as one of the keywords. To my surprise the results were returning matches to the word “use”. I wasn’t interest in any those matches, just in the word “usability”. I tried putting the word within quotes, but that made no difference to the results. That’s so wrong!
Hmmm… I know stemming is a powerful part of search technology, but you need to rank the results properly. I think it would have been better a list of alternative matches – like Google’s “Did you mean….” technology.
On a related note, here is a really good report from 37 signals on the search capability of several US ecommerce sites. It provides some great insight on what is important when building search technology. Enjoy.