We here at the Zoom Creates Nerd Herd (the development team) have always loved the modX CMS tool. It’s extremely flexible, has a great system for templates and code chunks, and is limited only by your imagination. We’ve been using it for sites since before the code base was at a stable 1.0 release, probably since around late 0.8 beta releases. There are many great plugins that help with breadcrumbs, dynamic navigation and menus, AJAX requests, search engine friendly URLs and more. Today I’d like to point out some of the features and changes of their latest release, Revolution 2.0.4.
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Posts Tagged ‘web’
MODx Update: Fantastic new administration panel
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010Top 5 Free Resources For Business Tweeps
Friday, September 3rd, 2010
As of the writing of this post, there are 7,682,986 registered users on Twitter. Once your business has made the leap in to the Twitterverse, you’ll need to have some resources at-hand to monitor and contribute to this additional way of sharing yourself. Your adoring customers, clients, fan-boys, and industry peers will begin following you. How do you stay on top of the flow of followers, and keep everyone engaged?
For businesses to grab a share of those potential customers, they need tools to research, track, and position themselves correctly. Here is the short-list of business-oriented resources you should be using for Twitter.
TwitterGrader
Find out what your business rank/grade is on Twitter. Great tool to start your research.
TwitterCounter
Register for this free tool to begin tracking your subscribers, get weekly reports, predictions, and advice on who you should be following. You can also overlay your competitors in the graph to see how you compare.
HootSuite
The “do-it-all” tool for business tweeps. Register and set up scheduled tweets to be posted days, weeks, and months in advance.
LocaFollow
Geo-located Twitter happenings in a specific area. Set it up to track your city or neighborhood, and keep an eye on what is trending near you.
TweetScan
Similar to Summize (AKA Twitter Search), get reports on topics which affect your business. Sign up to generate email alerts. Find out who is talking about your business or brand instantly or report daily and become aware of how your brand is viewed by the Twitter masses.
If you incorporate some or all of the above resources into your Twitter endeavors, you will definitely see better results than if you hadn’t done any at all. How much of a difference will it make? No one can say for sure, but at least you’ll be able to see how your numbers and metrics are being affected and what measures you’re taking that seem to be paying off. Happy Tweeting!
Jolicloud 1.0 – Social Netbook OS
Friday, August 6th, 2010
Have you heard of Jolicloud? No? Well, if you’re like me, running around the world with a tiny netbook, you may want to give this recently-released (August 4th) 1.0 operating system a look. It’s simple to use, responsive, and has a really nice GUI (that’s the interface, for those not familiar). Jolicloud is geared towards people who have a netbook, but you can try it out even if you’re running Windows/Mac/Other.
I had a spare partition on my machine, and decided to install Jolicloud in its own area. There’s an option for running it under Windows 7, but I wanted the full boot-up experience. Bad news is I ran through the install a bit too quickly, and wrecked my Windows 7 install. Boo!! I started from scratch, and now I have dual boot options at start-up. Good news is that I’ve been using Jolicloud now for 2 days, and I am very happy with it. As my work inside “the cloud” draws closer to 100%, I am excited to see where these operating systems designed for the cloud are going. This could very well be my core OS, and I’ll just need to switch over to Win7 when absolutely necessary.
NOTE: This post written while using Jolicloud
Download Jolicloud now and try it yourself
[More reading] Engadget post: Read it
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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010I’ve been having major cell-phone trouble. I couldn’t make a call longer than 5 minutes and I was unable to send out more than a couple texts at a time before my battery fully drained and my phone just shut down. It’s a horrible feeling being so disconnected. The solution: I needed a new battery. I wasn’t about to try to go to the Verizon store (I’m not much for waiting in line for hours) so I tried problem solving using good ol’ Google. I found a couple of online stores with batteries selling from $8.99-$49.99. I’m not sure why the battery pricing was so across the board, but I wasn’t about to pay over $30, and don’t even get me started about the additional shipping fees involved.
Amazon Review
In my search I found the holy grail of cheap batteries online for $3.99-$10.99 on Amazon. “How could this possibly be so cheap?” I asked myself. I of course was drawn to the cheapest battery ($3.99 new), but went straight to the buyer reviews, because how could such a sweet deal exist? Well, to my dismay…it doesn’t. I found out that some people (out of 21 reviews) had luck, but the majority found the product to look used, be scratched, and the new battery would still not hold a charge. So what did I do? I went for the $4.99 (new) version with the more positive reviews.
User reviews can definitely be a valuable resource for users and sellers. Reviews help build trust in a product; They let us see how a product will look or work in real life by someone who has actually experienced it first hand. A buyer can learn if their potential purchase will be reliable and good quality. A review can also help narrow down all of the other potential choices out there (such as my million other battery options). If a product is perceived as favorable by a consumer, product sales can take off. And vice-versa, a negative review can impact how much you sell (like the $3.99 battery). (more…)
This web site asks the simple question:
Friday, July 9th, 2010
Simply type in a password, one at a time, in to the box provided. When you’re finished, the site tells you approximately how many seconds/minutes/days/months/years it would take to “crack” your password. The estimate is based on a fancy algorithm which takes in to account the number of characters typed, the frequency of characters being re-used, upper & lower case, numbers, and special characters. Then, it calculates how long the average repulsive script kitty or 1337 |-|4x0r5 would spend trying to crack it. It’s just like what you would find on any other web site registration page which displays how “weak” or “strong” your password is. However, this one doesn’t submit or store any data, and doesn’t require you to sign up for anything. Also, according to the site, it works by utilizing “50% mathematics, 51% witchcraft”.
Check it out. It may help you decide to change one of your not-too-secure passwords, or you might high-five yourself for having a password which wouldn’t be cracked for “three-hundred thousand years”.
Visit: How Secure Is My Password?
Do spam bots use mice?
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
The typical solution to avoiding spam bots from abusing your online forms is to use a CAPTCHA test. You know – the hard to read, wavy text that you must type in correctly to prove to the web page that you are human and capable of making sense out of the non-sense. Well, spammers have used OCR (optical character recognition) algorithms to have their bots read the messy text and complete the test. Since then, there have been lots of alternatives to the text CAPTCHA test. Some involve selecting an image from a list given its name or description, or answering simple math problems. However, I didn’t find one that I really liked. So we started to build our own on the assumption that spam bots don’t use mice.
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Kayak Explore
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Ready to plan your next vacation? This clever tool from Kayak is just the tool to assist with seeing how far your travel dollars can take you. Open up http://www.kayak.com/explore/ to take a look. The web site will pick up your current location, and pinpoint a local airport (based on IP address). You can, of course, enter a different starting location in the top toolbar. Then, use the slider at the top to choose how much is in your budget to spend on a round-trip flight. As you move the slider upwards, you’ll see more locations opening up around the world; listing the current bottom-out round-trip airline ticket price (per seat) you would have to pay for travel. Click on any of the price tags to see details on the flight, including total flight time and number of stops. Some locations will even tie in hotel deals and ratings. To further trim down results, you can select the time of year you plan to travel, as the default is “any time”.
The map is powered using Google Maps, and takes advantage of all the wonderful features built-in to their interface. Kayak partners with dozens of airlines, hotels, rental cars, and other online travel companies to bring this information to you. Their model is no-pay advertising, so the use of their site remains free to the consumer via ad space and affiliates.
Cufon vs CSS3 vs Google Font API
Thursday, June 10th, 2010Dynamic
Fonts are fun!
(this box built with CSS)
As Greg has mentioned in a previous post, using Google’s Font API you’re are no longer limited to “web-safe” fonts! We all love Arial and Times, but there are thousands of other really cool fonts to play with too. Here I’ll compare some options for using custom fonts on the web.
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NoSQL, the new database?
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
Relational databases are the bomb. It makes handling your storage fast, easy and stable. Pretty much if you have a database as part of your website, and you aren’t eBay, then your data is most likely stored in some sort of relational database. Basically it works like this: Each piece of data is stored in a different database table. When we need to look up data, we can look up how many pieces of data belong to a category, or look every piece of data sorting by category name, or whatever. It’s pretty ingenious, and has been the standard for many, many years.
As of late, some big websites have been going against the flow and have started implementing NoSQL systems. These are basically databases that are set up in extremely simple structures. XML databases and key/pair systems are driving some of the most frequently visited websites. It’s interesting seeing where the future of databases is headed, especially in the online realm. So far, the most interesting sounding NoSQL solution to me is Cassandra (and not only because it shares it’s name with the hot chick from Wayne’s World). It runs some of the largest websites including Digg, FaceBook and Twitter. It’s open source, under the Apache license, and was made that way in 2008.
To learn more about NoSQL, check out the wikipedia page, and this great article. If you wanna get really nerdy, check this page out and read up on all the different NoSQL solutions the web has to offer.
Solving Problems with Patterns
Friday, May 28th, 2010
Pattern Tap pattern collections
Designers are big problem solvers. We hunt down solutions to make a layout not only eye-catching, but also functional for a viewer or user. When designing for the web, we often come across common usability problems, such as deciding on what navigational format will work best, button style, background type, etc. For insight and help solving these problems, we can look at design patterns—general solutions solving common and reoccurring problems of interface design.
Of course, there are always various ways to approach these problems, and designers before us have explored multiple solutions to resolve them. Reusing these functional patterns can help avoid unwanted issues with the usability of our designs and give us awareness of best practices, inspiration, and real-world examples of how people are solving these issues. This way, we can design the best solution for our project needs. There are a variety of websites out there offering great pattern libraries with examples from everything from sign-in box style to table design. I definitely would suggest giving these sites a look, especially if you want to see a large variety of a single web element without racing around the web to see examples of how something is used. Below is a list of my fav’s along with a few new finds. Enjoy!
Pattern Tap
UI Patterns
Design Snips
Yahoo Design Pattern Library
UI Pattern Factory
CSS Bake
