Bogdan Pop : Web development , Photography , Dj

Now, web developers: programmers, copyrighters and all those of you who work in this business, are included.

Most of us have found themselves in this position many times. Now, you have the 10 reasons why your website will NOT be launched today!
1. The changes you sent to the design brief on Wednesday
2. The 150 images you sent to us yesterday
3. The text you sent to us yesterday…. in the post….. on paper
4. This is the first time your boss has seen it?
5. You never told us all your organisation used IE4
6. Yes, as we mentioned, 1024×768 won’t fit on your bosses smaller screen
7. What do you mean your logo is changing
8. So you’ve actually not got any content ready for sections 3,4,5,6 and 7?
9. Ah….. so you want sections 3,4,5 and 7 removed from the navigation….
10. The guy who controls your domain is leaving early today?

If you have any other reasons why your site will not be launched today, just feel free to post the comments.

Cheers!

I just couldn’t help it.

I’ve said it one year ago! I’ve said it hundreds of time since I said it one year ago. Well, that day has come today, and I started learning Ruby, Rails, all together ROR, or RubyOnRails. The name doesn’t really matter. What matters most is my first feeling I got after starting to read some chunks of ruby.

At first (couple of minutes), it seemed a bit harsh, but 15 minutes into reading an awesome book, I discovered that ruby is really easy! Of course, this depends on how skilled you are, perhaps, but for me it seemed very easy to understand. It has a very simple syntax, it is OOP, which is great for me, and I am really speechless when it comes to binding a ROR application to a database. This process is done by creating a database, however you like, changing connection configuration, and then creating models, and then running a simple: rake db:migrate in the command line. Of course, you need to specify some other small stuff, but the process is very very simple. If it happens you know SQL, than rails’s way in handling db creation, updating, altering etc. will seem like the cherry on top of the cake. It is simply beautiful.

What I also loved is that Jobs, Steve Jobs knew I will eventually need ruby, and bundled my MBP with ruby installed. I didn’t even had to install anything. I had ruby, I had mysql, I had apache.

4 hours later, 100 pages into a 600+ page book I feel like I knew ruby for a long time. Fascinating. Oh boy, oh boy. I will post my opinions, and feedback regarding ROR as I will go ahead into learning it, and testing it.

Wrap up:
1st day: 4 amazing hours. I already created an administration interface for products, with images, input validation and other features.

I was trying to find out the other day, due to the upcoming new release of webia, if there are any other people, talented ones, who just like to review websites, just like Web International Awards does, for free. This way I have found this review site. It is not something much, it is just a blog, but it contains so much good articles.

Of course, I stopped in the web 2.0 category, because that’s the one that interested me. This guy posts, I think, around 8 or 9 web 2.0 reviews each week. That is a lot. This is why so far he has a huge list of 140 websites in this category.

I saw in there Vimeo, Nabbr, MyWaves, The Standard and many many other powerful website. It is quite a good resource, just because those reviews are so objective. So, if you’re looking for web 2.0 websites, the above blog is the point to start looking, not Google.

Cheers!

A couple of years ago, I have registered a Romanian domain name, e-shopcenter.ro, which I planned and still plan to develop as a virtual mall. The idea is quite popular these days. The 2 basic issues such a platform has to deal with would be shopping comparison between not 2, but many many shop owners, which would probably offer the same products at varying prices. The other issue would be a global shopping cart, so that people can buy simultaneously from different providers. Just like in a real mall.

Therefor, I started to research into shopping comparison, to see how others have designed their user interfaces and their way to compare different online shopping stores. This is how I found Digxa. I stumbled upon their electronics category, and started to gather information.

At first, the category was empty, but upon selecting an inline category of electronics (camcorder accessories), the search narrowed, and the next step was me selecting a price range. Then I selected the brand I like most, and then the specific thing I was looking for. And I came up with 2 lens filters priced around 35$.

I spent 40 seconds in the process, a lot less than any other online store I have seen, and less than I would have spent in a real store asking an employer about my Canon 35$ priced lens filters.

Great website. Extraordinary experience!

Cheers!

I will start this article with the fact. Google search for modernbill acquired by parallels

. As you can see, my blog article regarding the acquisition of Modernbill is first result, just on top of Modernbill’s official website, while Parallels’s official site is further down, the last 2 items in the result page. So, this interesting article about Modernbill, Parallels (formerly SWsoft) which is top on Google is just another proof for me that my SEO skills are good. I think I will even create some print document regarding this to use in marketing here in Romania. Cheers!

So, few weeks ago I said how poor the support service of ModernBill is, and how badly their software (latest version) works. I must say in advance that ModernBill has been acquired by Parallels (formerly SWsoft).

I said above, in advance, as the official announcement is due to be posted only tomorrow, 27th of March, 2008.

Now, SWsoft specializes in virtualization, especially applications used in the hosting industry. I speak about the Virtuozzo VPS environments. What can I say? The experience of Parallels in the web hosting business will definitely make ModernBill a better product. At least I hope so. Hopefully, soon ModernBill will do more, and better on a hosting environment.

Cheers!

Ok. So back here in Romania, we have a little bit of an issue. Apple is present only by the means of it’s authorized resellers. Further more, the Iphone was released only in UK. Lots of my friends were eager to by Iphones. Most of them didn’t, a few did. Other were looking for other new Nokia smartphones, which unfortunately haven’t yet been released in Romania.

So, these days one of them sent me a link to imobileplaza. Imobile Plaza seems a great website, but I need a thorough review. The first thing that poped into my web dev eyes was hacker’s safe logo, placed right next to their own. I think it is a little to much. It could have well been on the footer, and somewhere in sight while checking out for payments etc.

They have that strangest effect for showing the mobile phones. They are somewhat grey shaded until you hover them, when they loose that effect and you can see their natural color. Clicking on each cellphone will get to a full description page, just as any other similar page on other site, with link to buy the cellphone etc.

It doesn’t seem much, but my friends wouldn’t have recommended it if they weren’t satisfied about it. So I guess they deserve some feedback. If I have them, I’ll soon post a review just like on Web Interntional Awards.

Cheers!

I should start this by saying that I really recommend my company for web development, including hosting services, right? Well, yes. And this is what I recommend you all. Apart from that, I look all the time on the net for websites that deal with reviewing web hosts. This is because sometime it is best to have a world wide (web) look before you sign up with any hosting company.

I suggest this as most of the time, you will not hear on public places the good things about a host, so the task for you is to find the host with the less bad reputation.

However, when my company switched datacenters, our new provider, didn’t have bad reputation at all (Softlayer). The company that does on site managing of the servers had some, but not too ugly.

A few hours ago, a friend of mine in US wanted a huge shared hosting plan. Those 1 Tb hosting plans that cost as much as a Macdonald’s cheesburger. So, I said to him to go on and look for offers, and when he is done, to let me know of the provider he chose. He chose Host Monster. But who wouldn’t choose them for shared services?

I then searched the web for related, linking sites to Host Monster and any other ways I could come up with bad information on Host Monster. I have found hundreds of web hosting reviews, articles and few interesting topics like “stay away from Host Monster” on ozzu. What can I say, Host Monster is as popular as Lindsay Lohan. Kiddin. You find them anywhere. So, perhaps they are really good when it comes to shared services, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been so many people to say how bad they are.

So, hypothetically, with 15% of customers complaining, there are hundreds of thousands of happy customers with Host Monster. You could be one of them.

Of course, Host Monster is just one example. Based on this idea, you can check you current host, or the ones you plan to move too. Or perhaps you can test like this any other service you benefit from.

Just remember, that the more complain, the more satisfied are there too. Take one corporate example: Microsoft. Not my favorite, but god to others.

Cheers!

Few weeks ago, I have posted an article regarding a complaint filed at European Commission against Microsoft by the Opera community, to force Microsoft to support open Web standards in its Web browser, Internet Explorer. (Will Microsoft be forced to make IE standard compliant?)

It turns out after the press release 5 days ago, that Microsoft’s new version of IE will be standard compliant. I really can’t wait to see it live kicking in action. This is not because I will use it, because I won’t, this is because I hope that this will make my work, and any other web developer’s work a lot easier, as building a cross-browser website will be more efficient and less time consuming, so our productivity will instantly rise a bit.

Cheers!