One thing we talk a lot about is how important it is, for costs, to stick to problems which have already been solved. Get fancy and do something new, and your costs have rocketed away.
A developer has just done a nice little piece on spellchecking. In 1984 it was ferociously hard. In fact, if you wanted a decent spellchecker in your custom application you had to pay dearly for the priviledge. Today it can be accomplished in a few lines of code. Read more
It’s hard to measure the cost of code. Simple stuff can be ferociously time-consuming to develop, and bad coders often produce reams of poorly structured code.
But let’s assume you’re dealing with a typical, decent developer who doesn’t take the long route, or dangerous shortcuts. Read more
I just read an interesting article in A List Apart about how browsers that are forgiving of bad markup and css are bad for the web.
And I totally get it.
In fact, a failure of how standards apply to web pages is one of the reasons why, until really quite recently, I’d avoided having anything to do with Web Design. I hated it. I hated that even if you structured your code correctly it would look right only in half the browsers you tested in.
Well, this is going to change over the coming five years. Standards will become far more important, and odd hacks will slowly fade into the background. Browsers, my friends, are going to have to become a whole lot less forgiving.
And there lies the rub – with tougher browsers, building websites will become a lot harder for non-technical types. In fact, it could become near impossible. On the upside, tools like WordPress will be able to offer more choices to the user because the code will know that what it outputs to the browser will work.
So the internet’s going to get a lot better in the coming years… but if you’re not prepared to work hard at it then becoming a web developer or designer is going to become far tougher.
You may find passwords to be an unecessary chore. But they’re important. However, inventing strong passwords is difficult… and they’re hard to remember.
So you need to be able to generate passwords on the go and the solution is Password Maker – a great way to have safe, difficult to crack passwords which works beautifully as browser plugins. Read more
Want to know how we keep track of all those websites and bugs?
It’s quite simple – we use Mantis Bug Tracker. It’s not as powerful as some, but we’re a three man company – a more heavy solution would probably simply be going over the top with things and would carry a support load that we simply wouldn’t be happy with.
In other words, it’s a great fit for our needs and requirements today, and for the next few years.
I was reading through some project management methodology just now (yay! My life is full of joy at last!) and came across the phrase “The Wicked Problem” in this line on Wikipedia:
Steve McConnell in Code Complete (a book which criticizes the widespread use of the waterfall model) refers to design as a “wicked problem” – a problem whose requirements and limitations cannot be entirely known before completion. The implication is that it is impossible to get one phase of software development “perfected” before time is spent in “reconnaissance” working out exactly where and what the big problems are.
I’m going to shamelessly nick a few images here from a site we designed, manage and host (Sniff Petrol) , but which is run and written by someone else. In finding this he showed a great example of why you should think about any new features you add to a website.
The idea seemed good enough – Car Magazine added a search terms Cloud, rather like a tag cloud, to their website to show what people were searching for. Problem is though, with any user generated content you have to watch carefully for abuse.
First off, they seeded the search cloud with a few terms that they obviously felt the aspirational and tasteful visitors would like – such as Aston Martin Vanquish, BMW M1, Ferrari and so on:
So far so good. Read more
