Posts tagged with 'web'
Posted on 9th October 2007. Tagged as django, web, mampi, txtmyteam
I've been making some good progress recently on a few of my projects.
We're in the final stages of getting Mampi Hosting ready for launch. We've bought the hardware (lots of it), got the website ready, and our marketing campaign is prepared (we're going for an Adwords campaign, and a UK-only print campaign in a few magazines). We've been very lucky to have some great feedback from our thirty or so beta customers, so we're really looking forward to our launch. It should be great fun.
My personal side project, txtmyteam.com is also progressing well. From the outset I've tried to write a nice clean system for sending the group SMS messages which the application will need. It's been pretty well tested up to now (I've spent about £200 on SMS messages in the last three months :-P), and now it's time to move forward with building the site around the system. I've had a decent response on the beta signups, too.
Quite ridiculously, the site which I've made the most money from recently is allhailtechnoviking.com. Of course, anything which combines the fine flavours of both techno music and vikings was bound to be popular.
Posted on 6th September 2007. Tagged as web
Rob and I were talking about our reading lists expanding into good business and marketing blogs the other day, and I mentioned a few but didn't really come up anything concrete. So here it is, my current (short) daily reading list:
- programming.reddit.com - generally interesting, with lots of discussion of exotic language techniques and a great deal of material covering functional languages.
- codinghorror.com - interesting anecdotes, mainly about newer languages and the web.
- Raw Though - Aaron Swartz has always been the man.
- How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki is an interesting guy, and he has been around technology through several bubbles. Regardless of his own pedigree, he is also a talented journalist and the interviews he conducts are unusually frank.
- Techquila Shots - Daily (but getting less frequent) web application ideas. Most aren't groundbreaking, but most of the ideas do at least get me thinking at nine in the morning.
- Get Rich Slowly - Sensible investment advice, with a technology slant. It's US-centric, but the majority of strategies apply in the UK equally effectively.
- Seth Godin's Blog - This blog isn't particularly original, it's the usual mix of marketing and meta-blogging which is done elsewhere, but Seth seems to understand the behaviour of groups so well that most of what he says is priceless.
- TechCrunch - Well, obviously. I actually feel slightly embarrassed for starting to read this so long after everyone else did.
And just for comparison, here are a few sites which I stopped reading recently:
- Digg - Even when combined with idiot removal scripts, recently Digg has become such bilge that I only glance at it once every few weeks. It is all very well trusting journalism to the wisdom of the crowd, but you have to remember that 95% of the crowd are morons.
- Lifehacker - This used to be a great site, but it is past its prime; I've not read anything notable on Lifehacker for months, maybe its readers need to stop tweaking their working practices and just do some damn work.
- Signal vs Noise - A good framework and great hype, very little substance. Unfortunately, the rule of simplicity cannot apply in all situations; I can't see their otherwise good web applications gaining traction until they accept that some business processes can be complex, and simplistic software cannot be justified in that scenario. Persistently dismissing this fact has made the blog difficult to read recently.
Posted on 26th December 2007. Tagged as web, javascript, mobile
I'm currently using my T-Mobile 3G connection to do most of my web browsing, what with it being Christmas, and that I've been travelling around a lot without reliable WiFi.
In contrast to a few years ago, when the hardware support for laptop to phone connections was terrible, that is now incredibly simple. I paired my phone and my laptop, then chose 'Connect to network' from the Bluetooth menu. My phone asked if this was okay, and everything worked pretty much flawlessly (and incidentally, I get a better upload speed over 3G than I do over my DSL at home).
So, I was happily doing some lazy Boxing day web development,and I started to notice errors in my Javascript. Not errors because I'd had a few beers, or errors because I was using a library incorrectly, but errors appearing in functions which I hadn't even written.
I checked the source of my pages, and noticed that someone or something was inserting Javascript into my pages. Specifically, a script from http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js. The 'Oh shit, my server has been cracked' alarm went off pretty loudly, and after some peer-review, that changed to the 'Oh shit, someone has released a trojan for OSX for which I am very under prepared' alarm.
It turns out that T-Mobile (and Vodafone UK) think it is appropriate to insert their own Javascript into each page which I visit, which pipes all images through a proxy to degrade their quality. However, due to an improperly terminated newline, this script cannot be parsed by Firefox or Opera in conjunction with any XHTML 1.1 or XML documents.
This causes the sort of errors which break all subsequent Javascript. For sites with lots of Javascript, that is kind of a big deal. It isn't behaviour which I asked for, and clearly it hasn't been appropriately tested. Interestingly, script isn't even inserted when using Safari (come on, T-Mobile, browser sniffing is so very Nineties). In addition, it maps key events to Shift-R, which can cause problems with other web applications (for example, GMail), and access keys in Firefox.
This is a terrible solution to a problem which didn't really exist in the first place. I've paid for a data connection, so I expect the data I requested to be delivered to me as requested, not as T-Mobile think I should recieve it. If I download large images, then I'm happy to take responsibility for what I've done and pay the cost of those downloads. Very disappointing.
