Joshua Jacobs
Get your fresh cup of WordPress 3.0 over at http://wordpress.org/! I just upgraded this site and so far everything migrated perfectly. For me, WordPress is the killer app for PHP. In other words, it’s the primary reason that I use PHP at all. With the critical mass of the WP community, it’s a compelling technology [...]
Get your fresh cup of WordPress 3.0 over at http://wordpress.org/! I just upgraded this site and so far everything migrated perfectly. For me, WordPress is the killer app for PHP. In other words, it’s the primary reason that I use PHP at all. With the critical mass of the WP community, it’s a compelling technology that gets the job done.
Tagged with: wordpress blog
What a glorious day..
What a glorious day..
Tonight’s topic is web navigation. Details are here: http://www.techmaine.com/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=93
Got here late and hungry–there’s no pizza tonight! The presenter, Mabel Ney, will post her slides, so I can catch up with that.
Link recommended for user persona discussion: http://www.cooper.com/
Site organization
Each bit of content or page, get’s a post-it note. Find a big wall [...]
Tonight’s topic is web navigation. Details are here: http://www.techmaine.com/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=93
Got here late and hungry–there’s no pizza tonight! The presenter, Mabel Ney, will post her slides, so I can catch up with that.
Link recommended for user persona discussion: http://www.cooper.com/
Site organization
Each bit of content or page, get’s a post-it note. Find a big wall and get idealized users of the system to help sort the post-its. Try to do it in 30 minutes with 3-5 participants from each audience segment.
Sample Sorting
Mabel presented list of items to sort as an example. The items looked to me like flavors, but the list included sunflowers! The intention was flavors of ice cream, but without a context, the sorting was difficult.
Navigational Models
Suggested mint.com as a site with hierarchical navigation. You go down into features, and then back up. There’s a lot of content (check the sitemap). But this content flows nicely into a hierarchical model. Ande Mabel loves the copy-writing.
NYC transit map example
This is a metaphor for different navigational systems. I.e product search is like the express train.
Idexx site (idexx.com)
Related link model
Musicovery
A competitor to Pandora. Interesting navigation. It’s very graphical. You can choose era, mood, range of time, or genre. It’s as if you get to your stop and then can jump to different dimensions.
MyRecipes
More different ways of looking at navigation that are, in some ways, content centric.
How to determine the navigation scheme
how deep do you need to go?
how savy are your users?
what is the nature of the content?
Measuring
Review documents
Vision statement validation
Persona validation
5 second test
User testing
Heuristic review
What is a 5 second test?
Are key messages & links readily seen?
Allow participants to view page for 5 seconds
Answers in less than 10 minutes
Patterns emerge with very few users
onebythefive.com
I remember: logo, bed, sleep, menu, purple, night time,
I felt: curious feeling
Mabel asked users to explain what they saw and felt. The goal is to determine if the vision statement is reflected in users impressions.
Marriot Site jdvhotels.com/tomo
I remember: Joie de vivre, pictures that I couldn’t interpret easily, Hotel Tomo
I felt: irritated by the clutter
thepodhotel.com
I remember: Young people, the word “Pod”, washed out colors
I felt: confused by number of images, confused about whether this was a hotel or ipod customization technique
Usability Evaluations
What are strengths & weaknesses
Do research, get users
Minimum of 3 per segment
Settings may vary
Allow developers and product stakeholders to observe
Did “speed dating” quickly using different example sites
Mabel’s office performs weekly focus groups. Other times they perform analysis in houses. People are often motivated by free pizza!
Question: What do you ask users?
Answer: For example, for pets and tics, asked users for historical medical information. Then asked user to try using the website to solve the problem. Try to get user to perform a task that they are actually interested in.
Usability Preparation
Recruiting participants: get interested people, reate script, schedule, sometimes provide pre-work (example for site was to ask users to write an example of the best day with kids; to bring favorite kids book)
Script the session: create a welcome script, define tasks and rankings, create a thank you script
Usability Session
Report and rank findings
Work with development team
Update personas
Heuristic Review
What can we fix without recruiting users
Expert review best performed by experts
Maine IXDA provides feedback
Vision Statement Template
For:
Who are seeking:
Our product is:
That provides:
Unlike:
We have:
More sites
http://boxesandarrows.com
http://adaptivepath.com (includes webinars)
http://uie.com (includes webinars)
http://useit.com
This morning I read an article on Linux Magazine (Ten Things You Didn’t Know Apache 2.2 Could Do | Linux Magazine). Two features really jumped out at me.
Server Name Indication (SNI): Allows a single IP address to support multiple SSL certificates. This is great because not only does it usually cost more for [...]
This morning I read an article on Linux Magazine (Ten Things You Didn’t Know Apache 2.2 Could Do | Linux Magazine). Two features really jumped out at me.
Server Name Indication (SNI): Allows a single IP address to support multiple SSL certificates. This is great because not only does it usually cost more for more IPs, but it starts to get harder to manage. Documentation for this functionality is in the docs wiki, at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/NameBasedSSLVHostsWithSNI.
mod_proxy_balancer: Allows apache to function as a front-end load balancer. More docs are here http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html. I’m imagining using this to boost performance and reliability LAMP apps, in particular Moodle. Imagine this configuration:
Load Balancer: Dual OpenBSD with CARP shared IP addresses, running Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy_balancer. This way the proxy is always fail-safe.
Application Servers: VMware installation, perhaps ESXi and multiple CentOS running Apache and PHP, etc.
SAN: Dedicated file storage to share application files, configurations, all date but not database.
Database Servers: WMware or straight installation on hardware running CentOS and MySQL or PostgreSQL. Two servers running with database replication should work.
Summary: Fault tolerant, high availability configuration using standard apps with little to no “cleverness” or kernel. I really want to try this!
Question for readers:
Can anyone experienced with mod_proxy_balancer tell me if it would support geographic load balancing?
As the article below states, Boston College has stopped offering e-mail accounts to new students, as of 2009. They have, instead, created an e-mail forwarding service so, for example, josh@mandala-designs.com would forward to my hotmail, gmail, yahoo, whatever account I wanted to use.
This is an interesting trend. I wish I were at the meetings [...]
As the article below states, Boston College has stopped offering e-mail accounts to new students, as of 2009. They have, instead, created an e-mail forwarding service so, for example, josh@mandala-designs.com would forward to my hotmail, gmail, yahoo, whatever account I wanted to use.
This is an interesting trend. I wish I were at the meetings where this decision got made!
When setting up passwordless logins I always seem to miss a step. The following link is a useful resource.
When setting up passwordless logins I always seem to miss a step. The following link is a useful resource.
I need to find all the records that were last modified more than one month ago, and delete them. How do I create the date dynamically with MS SQL?
dateadd(month, -1, current_timestamp)
To see it in action run this:
select dateadd(month, -1, current_timestamp)
For more information, see the MS docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186819.aspx
I need to find all the records that were last modified more than one month ago, and delete them. How do I create the date dynamically with MS SQL?
dateadd(month, -1, current_timestamp)
To see it in action run this:
select dateadd(month, -1, current_timestamp)
For more information, see the MS docs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186819.aspx
This little script will remove all SVN dirs from a directory tree:
find . -name “.svn” -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
Credit to http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2486
This little script will remove all SVN dirs from a directory tree:
find . -name “.svn” -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
Credit to http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/2486
According to Pingdom, Amazon S3 uptime for 8/9/2009 was 32.84%! Downtime today is already at 12h 44m. That’s pretty disturbing. I ran a google news search and found nothing related to this outage: http://news.google.com/news?q=amazon%20s3%20downtime&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wn
Here are some links that were forwarded from my colleague, Len.
Regarding a PayPal outage: http://www.businessinsider.com/outage-costs-paypal-users-at-least-7-million-2009-8
Regarding an Amazon [...]
According to Pingdom, Amazon S3 uptime for 8/9/2009 was 32.84%! Downtime today is already at 12h 44m. That’s pretty disturbing. I ran a google news search and found nothing related to this outage: http://news.google.com/news?q=amazon%20s3%20downtime&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wn
Here are some links that were forwarded from my colleague, Len.
Regarding a PayPal outage: http://www.businessinsider.com/outage-costs-paypal-users-at-least-7-million-2009-8
Regarding an Amazon bug with international shipping: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10304824-2.html
Regarding previous outages: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/19/outage-for-amazon-web-services/
You can see the diagnostics for yourself here: Pingdom – Web site monitoring for 100% uptime. Measure your downtime..
Why do I care?
As a web developer and a web host, uptime challenges are an ongoing concern. People bandy about terms like 5-nines uptime like it’s an industry standard. The reality, as demonstrated by those with the deepest pockets, is that despite our best efforts Internet fabric is more brittle that we would like to tolerate. For example, when I read about Amazon’s S3 and related AWS services I was pretty sure that geographical load balancing was one of the perks. However, if that were true, how could lightning strike cause any meaningful downtime.
What Is A Cloud, Anyway?
A physical server is tied to hardware. CPU fails, and the OS is toast: all the services running on the machine fail. As the services move to virtual machines, what is changing? Certainly there’s a decoupling of the OS from the physical hardware. Virtualization does this and we’ve been happily running VMWare for years. But at what point does the VM become a cloud? I had imagined that a cloud was always distributed from any single VM. I suppose that I’m wrong about that. Does anyone else have ideas on what makes a cloud a cloud and not just a virtual environment?
Tagged with: amazon uptime
SugarCrm is one of the most recent software apps to catch my attention. I’ve heard a lot about it in the past, but until recently have not played with it. Recently, we installed on our server garden and I’ve been very impressed. While it starts as a contact management system, it has some design features [...]
SugarCrm is one of the most recent software apps to catch my attention. I’ve heard a lot about it in the past, but until recently have not played with it. Recently, we installed on our server garden and I’ve been very impressed. While it starts as a contact management system, it has some design features that allow you to extend the data model, creating modules that include full CRUD capabilities (from what I’ve seen so far at least). I’ll write more on that later. Right now I want to focus on what I found about the different features.
Evaluating commercial open source software lately has been a bit disappointing because at least in one case, Alfresco, the sales team explicitly state that they would never consider a production installation of the OS version. That shocked me. What was equally shocking was the number of end-user bugs we discovered in the OS GA release. To add insult, the community was essentially non-responsive to wiki posts. Evaluating SugarCrm, I wanted to make sure that I know what I’m getting into.
After listening to this podcast from SugarCrm, I’m encouraged by what I heard. Commercial adds the following value to the community edition:
Commercial Only Support
Standard: E-mail, portal, forums; extended, or premium support includes phone support.
Commercial Only Functions
Quotes, contacts, sales forecasting, contracts, partition data among teams, sales reporting, workflow development for processes, word and wireless updating
Professional Services
SugarCrm professional services only work with commercial customers.
I think the core of SugarCrm should be enough for 110% of what I’m looking for, which makes me happy because the commercial version is not cheap. Perhaps that’s the way to do it: make the community version very high quality, but limited in certain ways; make the commercial version expensive enough to support the entire project and make a profit. Sounds like a win-win to me.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Do you use SugarCrm? What do you like about it? Dislike? What version did you chose and why?
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