EdgeCloud

I’ve been meaning to discuss this blog post about whether entrpeneurs (geeks, in general) should talk politics on their blog. I think such a notion is a personal decision that folks need to clearly make. Certainly, there is the possibility that you might turn off some of your regular readers but that may not matter much to you. Since EdgeCloud is basically a multi-author blog we don’t usually extend ourselves into the political blogosphere. I actually get my fix for discussing all things politically through my personal blog. Honestly, this just feels right. It allows me to keep my posts focused and I know in my mind there’s a clear strategy and voice depending on which blog I’m posting to. Ultimately, you can’t separate politics completely from who you are - that’s just the way it is and if you have opinions you should share them and we should be receptive to differing opinions. We cannot give way to the clearly divisive political strategies put forth by Washington and exacerbated by the MSM. Be who you are, speak loud and proud - it’s what a healthy democracy is all about. For the EdgeCloud blog, this will remain a purely technical dialogue.

Here’s an excellent post by Christopher Fahey about why he discusses politics on his blog (graphpaper).

I generally run screaming from web applications, open source or not, that seem to refuse to spend time on simple aesthetics. I’m not even talking usability here, I just like the thing to be pretty. Webmail is one of those areas where many of the user interfaces leave much to be desired. While Gmail is passable (mostly because of the wonderful functionality) it really is quite the beast especially if you compare it to it’s calendaring cousin (which is quite nice!). Zimbra seems to have a lot of play in blogosphere but I personally find it lacking. There is open webmail as well but why use icons that look like something out of Windows 3.1 Borland C++ icon land? And, of course, the reason I’m even talking about this is because SquirrelMail got hit with the ugly stick.

As a solution to the default webmail interface that dreamhost offers, I’ve installed roundcube. After looking at some detailed set up instructions (thanks, Paul!), I was able to set it up without a problem on my shared dreamhost account as an alternative for getting at mail via the web should the need arise. There seems to be a few caveats (for some reason, moving mail to trash seems to hang), but for just reading and responding to mail it works just fine. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get it to use SSL. It’s still in development but seems stable enough…and most important of all, it’s pretty.

Give it a try!

With all the attention Rails has received in the last year, there has been an enormous influx of people wanting to learn how to write web applications with it. Rails itself attempts to shepherd programmers along well-trod paths, to help them build well-designed applications “by default”. Alas, Rails’ conventions are not always enough.

This blog is our attempt to back up Rails’ opinions on what things should be done, with our own opinions on how things should be done.

The site will have updates by Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski (if you’ve done any Rails work at all, you know who these gents are). I think this type of site is important because it allows for a distillation of the process in building great rails sites. Having writers authoritative on the subject matter doesn’t hurt either. I’ve already subscribed to the feed…

Oh, for crying out loud…Firefox 2.0 released.

Let us pose the serious question. How many browsers do we developers need to cross-test in? Here’s the short list…(IMHO):

FF1.5, FF2.0, IE6, IE7, Safari 1.3 - and soon, Safari 2.0 (or whatever ships with Leopard)

Others might want to add Opera to this list (though I don’t). What’s the transition for us? Do we really need to test in all of these for the interim? Given that the updates will be mostly automatic for the recent builds (IE7 via Automatic Updates, for example) then what is the timeframe for the increased testing spectrum? I wonder if there is a user agent list we can sift through over time that can tell us what the penetration is for each of these browser versions for the coming months. That would be most helpful.

Since IE7 is coming via “High Priority” in Automatic Updates it is important to remember to turn them off. In my case, I turned it off in one of the VMs I have in Parallels that I use specifically for IE6 testing. This way you can be notified of updates but not get an IE7 surprise one morning. Alternatively, you can use the IE7 blocker toolkit - which I didn’t even know existed until I googled on this subject.

From the overview:

To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, Microsoft will distribute Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 soon after the final version of the browser is released (planned for fourth quarter 2006). Microsoft is making a non-expiring Blocker Toolkit available for those organizations that would like to block automatic delivery of Internet Explorer 7 to machines in environments where Automatic Updates is enabled.

I wonder how many IT departments will choose to go this route and what kind of penetration IE7 will get (especially with consumsers) via automatic updates. It’ll be interesting to watch the logs on user agent shift over to IE7 over time.

Shaun Inman asks an important question:

Have we really made a career of cleaning up Microsoft’s mess? Sigh.

Yes, Shaun, yes we have…

Firefox is simpy a better platform for development so most folks start there. Just the web developer toolbar alone is worth its weight in gold, but add to that firebug, color pickr (and a host of others) and you have a complete debugging environment for web design as well as tools to help on the scripting side. IE’s toolbar sucks and makes it crash more than usual — and what does it really do? Not much at all. Luckily, and I use this term loosely, IEs quirks are known entities and you can take most things into consideration when generating your layout — which really only ensures that you don’t paint yourself into a corner. Is it sad that the browser that most developers/designers hate to develop with (is ‘abhore’ too strong a word?) may yet be responsible for the extra job security and/or billable hours that keep them going? I’m sure the industry doesn’t intend for this to happen (that’s why we have standards), but the irony cannot be lost on us.

How many hours have you spent on fixing IE specific issues - or for that matter Safari, Opera and others if you support them?

Somehow I feel like IE7 will merely compound the problem. And that’s my optimistic point of of view on the impending release doom. But I will go on dutifully testing to ensure that my sites work well in all the big browsers. Honestly, the advent of Parallels on the Mac (where i can take advantage of multiple Windows VMs for testing IE 6 and IE7 - which I’m already doing) makes this much easier to digest.

Last month, EdgeCloud quietly helped launch picturefit.com. Picturefit was started by Lori MacNeill and Betsy Clements here in Austin, TX and they offer a range of services for those wishing to get their “picture house” in order. From the home page:

…we will develop a plan to organize and digitize your photos that best fits YOU. With our variety of customized photo products, now your cherished photos can be uniquely shared with family and friends for years to come.

We think that Lori and Betsy are on to something given the massive amounts of photos we have lying around flickr (not doing much of anything) and the (literally) closet full of old family photos that need some TLC. We hope know that the site (and the business) will be a success.

We are proud to present the picturefit.com website and hope that our efforts become part of the driving success of their business. Many thanks to picturefit for their hard work, late nights, great content and patience in helping to make picturefit.com become a reality in a very short time.

Visit picturefit.com

A plugin for Wordpress (v2) that helps you automatically build sitemap files for google so that you can index your site almost on-demand.

This plugin generates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. The Google sitemaps program is part of the “Google webmaster tools”.

I continue to be impressed by the variety of plugins available for WordPress. Not just that, but I have not had a problem with any of them at this point. All have been solid, reliable little chunks of code that get the job done.

Do you ever wonder about the politics of open source? I’ve seen some nasty splits (anyone run through the DBIx tussle on the perl side?). But I thought this entry from the author of the default backup plugin in WordPress was *very* interesting. Of course, it’s difficult to know the full story, especially being outside the beltway so to speak, but it raises some very interesting issues that developers deal with on a daily basis, especially the not created here syndrome that plagues many of them. Writing for open source code bases is a thank-less job to begin with and it’s only made worse by seemingly arbitrary moves that disengage the very people that are trying to support you. In these cases, diplomacy is just as important as coding prowess.

Head on over and cast your vote for panels for SXSWi 2007. There are some *great* topics in there and I have to say that it was very difficult to narrow down my choices to the requested limit of 10. Even being rigorous in my determination I had 20 in the list before I realized it! Sorting them out was even more difficult but here’s what I ended up with.

1. Rapid Javascript Development
2. User Research Smoke & Mirrors: Good Research and Bad Research
3. Thinking Like the Big Boys (and Girls)
4. How to Not Be Afraid of Lawyers
5. NetRoots 1.5: The Mid-Term Elections
6. Journalism in the Blogosphere: A Legal Guide to Internet “Press”
7. Create A Campaign In an Hour
8. High Class and Low Class Web Design
9. How to Easily Attract Your IDEAL Clients
10. Who’s Afraid Of A Little Free Speech

An electic mix, I know (politics, business, design and coding) but such is the current direction of things. Like I said, very difficult decision and many thanks to those who proprosed the panels. I’m very much looking forward to attending my first SXSWi!

Update: Not that you need more feeds added to your reader, but many of these folks have links to their sites/blogs and I’ve already found a couple of very interesting new reads for these very cherished topics. Look below each entry and there you’ll find the name with the link out. Enjoy!