Chris Stormer » Software

End of An Error

Chris Stormer — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:11:11 +0000

The moment also marks a turning point in the history of the world’s biggest software company, as Microsoft turns its attention more fully towards a future software industry that is likely to look very different. It is probably the end of an era, or… error depending on how you look at it.

The methods Microsoft has relied on to develop and to deliver software – including the latest releases of Windows and the Office suite of applications, which also goes on sale today – are going through a fundamental change. That is partly because of the internal “trauma” caused by its struggles with Vista. Neve again, Microsoft will release less ambitious, and more frequent, updates to Windows. However, it also reflects a deeper change in how the software business works.

With “software as a service” the industry’s new mantra – referring to the way companies such as Google and Thinking Grove deliver a service over the internet that is powered by software running on their own servers – a post-Vista Microsoft will refocus its efforts towards online services.

End of An Error is a post from: Chris Stormer

Loyalty – Love that.

Chris Stormer — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:27:00 +0000

Part of searching for new customers is occasionally encountering those who hold you at arm’s length because of their loyalty to a current supplier. Inevitably they will tell you stories about how their current vendors have gone the extra mile for them. Our instinct, when attempting ot get business, is to be defensive and try to overcome that statement of loyalty. That is the exact wrong thing to do and it will do nothing more than alienate that prospect, which means that it’s unlikely you will ever get their business.

The first thing to do when someone describes his or her loyalty is to compliment them. If you really think about it, it is a good character trait. Would you like all of your customers to be so loyal that they throw all competition out the door? Second, explain to them that loyalty is a rar commodity, and it is all too often missing in business today. Remember, loyalty comes from customer delight. I fyou do it, they’ll want it. Make sure you are ready to catch them when they fall, and you’ll have a new loyal customer.

Loyalty – Love that. is a post from: Chris Stormer

Wordcamp & Wordpress 2.1

Chris Stormer — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 20:42:35 +0000

Wordcamp happened this weekend.
Here’s my quick-and-dirty list of new stuff.

Spellchecker in TinyMCE. (YES)
Exporter. (Ugh)
Pages can be private and draft.
Pages have their own caps.
A Page can be used as the front page.
Latest posts can be moved off the front page and on to another page.
Pseudo-cron is used for future posting. No more NOW().
Link manager overhauled.
Links can have subcategories.
New login screen.
More AJAX to avoid page reloads.
Blog privacy. Turn off pinging and tell robots to go away.
User paging and searching.
WP_Error class.
Include files reorganized.
Lots of new API.
Script loader.

Wordcamp & Wordpress 2.1 is a post from: Chris Stormer

The 1% Rule

Chris Stormer — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 16:10:00 +0000

Charles Arthur, from Guardian Unlimited released an article about the 1% rule, which uncovers some suprising statistics about users in the Web 2.0 world. Basically, only 1% of users will contribute content to an application or website while only 10% of users will comment or offer improvements. The other 89% will simply look at it. This is seen at YouTube, where there are �1,538 downloads per upload and 20m unique users per month�, and at Wikipedia, where an estimated 70% of articles are written by 1.8% of the users.

This figure may be frightening to web businesses that rely solely on user generated content or developer interaction. They’re essentially competing for a fraction of the 1% of traffic out there that’s willing to actively contribute anything to any cause. I believe this adds to the importance of reaching early adopters and technologically savvy users early in an application’s life. We�ve also noticed that active bloggers seem to play around with products and experiments a little more than the average user.

If your application isn’t driven by user created content, maybe allowing users to help out isn�t such a bad idea. Salesforce.com, for example, is experiencing success with their application sharing program, AppExchange. In order to get the builders building, they offer a share of the profits and some name recognition in exchange for applications that Salesforce users can quickly download and integrate into their workflow. It seems to be doing pretty well. Even though there are only 280 applications, tens of thousands of users have downloaded the pre-made apps. If you can somehow tap in to the 1% of your builders effectively to create content 89% of your users want, you might be on to something.

Originally from Particletree RSS Digest reBlogged on Jul 20, 2006, 6:25PM

The 1% Rule is a post from: Chris Stormer

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers

Chris Stormer — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 18:08:10 +0000

What makes a good extension?

In my opinion there are tons and tons of extensions out there that do “cool things” like tell you the weather.. but does anybody really have to know the weather every second of every day.. maybe but most people probably can go to a weather site each day, check the weather for the day and they are cool. I’m all for intergration but not at the cost of performance and wasting precious browser space for the weather seems a little silly to me. All this being said, I think the best Firefox extensions are ones that do actions that you might need to do over and over and over again. Mine are specifically tailored to SEO and Programming because these can be redudent tasks.

HTML Validator
TML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.

Total Validation
This is like a HTML Validator above but also tests spelling, and accessbility.

Measure It
Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

Web Designer Toolbar
The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

PDF Download
This extension, every time you click on a link, checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case let you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside or outside Firefox, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML).

Firefox Extensions for Web Developers is a post from: Chris Stormer

WP-Cache – Is it worth it?

Chris Stormer — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 13:11:44 +0000

One of the most popular plug-in’s for wordpress is wp-cache which basically stores a copy of all your pages already created to serve up to the world so the server doesn’t need to create these pages everytime a new visitor comes to your site. This is a completely great plugin if your getting hundreds, thousdands of visitors a day but the truth is, it also had some drawbacks, like the need to clear the cache everytime you update your design and test for validation. It has made the process of making my site British Disability Friendly significantly slower. So unless your serving up thousdands of pages per day… or not working on your design at all, turn off wp-cache, your design lwife will be significaltly less frustraiting.

WP-Cache – Is it worth it? is a post from: Chris Stormer

Basecamp’s Latest & Greatest

Chris Stormer — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 21:27:32 +0000

Basecamp from 37 signals is by far the most useful software I’ve used in my life. It helps me organize thousands of communications, dozens of projects and countless files and lists…. and now they have gone and intergrated their amazingly cool campfire chat RIGHT into basecamp. Now.. in realtime I can communicate with designers, we can share files and make comments… it was a step forward when I could message through the system, and then a bigger stepforward when I could put files in the system and comment on them.. and now I can do it in real time. For those of you who don’t know the power of basecamp or think it’s a little confusing at first. Take your time, learn it. It will save you thousands of hours of hassle, money and time on future projects.

Basecamp’s Latest & Greatest is a post from: Chris Stormer

Spam Gmail Isn’t Stopping

Chris Stormer — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 21:10:36 +0000

So.. over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a complete increase in spam that is defeating googles spam filters. The premise is simple.. take an image and embed your spam into that image.. the spam filiters can only read the file name.. the file names usually look fairly common. Here is an example:

I’ve been pondering this issue this morning.. and google is going to be HARD pressed to be able to filter this spam if the spambots use a large enough sample of servers.. about the only possible way for google to eventually stop this type of spam is to develop the ability to quickly read text on an image.. and even then just think of all the garbled insanity that is sent on a daily basis through images.. it seems to me that could really lead a large number of legit emails being filtered.

Spam Gmail Isn’t Stopping is a post from: Chris Stormer

Bad Behavior + Wp-cache + Gzip Solution

Chris Stormer — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 06:58:00 +0000

So while installing some nice spam protection, I came across some interesting conflicts between.

1. Bad Behavior (The spam filter plugin)
2. WP-Cache (The Speed the site up plugin)
3. GZIP (The zip the page and server it to you faster feature built into Wordpress).

Basically wp-cache doesn’t work with gzip and bad behavior doesn’t work with wp-cache.. how to fix this?

1st: Go out and download the newest versions of both wp-cache 2 & Bad Behavior

2nd: Turn off gzip in the options.

3rd: Edit: wp-cache-phase1.php
Add This line:
if ( extension_loaded(‘zlib’) ) ob_start(‘ob_gzhandler’);

Before this:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {
header($header);

4th: Edit: /wp-content/advanced-cache.php

Add:
if ( extension_loaded(‘zlib’) ) ob_start(‘ob_gzhandler’);

Before this:
foreach ($meta->headers as $header) {

Now everything shouldu play together nice. Your site should BLAZE and be protected.

Enjoy :)

Bad Behavior + Wp-cache + Gzip Solution is a post from: Chris Stormer

Pandora’s Box

Chris Stormer — Sun, 28 May 2006 23:51:53 +0000

First, if you haven�t heard about Pandora yet, you should definitely give it a try. It rocks so hard. There are a ton of cool mashups, plugins and hacks for Pandora but today I’m going to focus on a legal, simple one. What will you need for this hookup? First you need to make sure you are using Firefox, second you will need to setup an account at Pandora and third you will need to snag the FoxyTunes Plugin. Basically after you grab those three things restart your browser and you can now use pandora from the status bar of firefox. Since basically I usually spend my days listening to Pandora, this plugin is just so sweet.. and mad props to the foxytunes peeps for incorporating Pandora support into their plugin.

Pandora’s Box is a post from: Chris Stormer