People often believe that cloud hosting solutions like Amazon’s EC2 offering are a platinum bullet when it comes to reliable and infinite web scaling and while this might be true for some, the recent Barack Obama AMA on Reddit which is powered by Amazon’s EC2 cloud hosting platform has shown that even EC2 doesn’t offer a direct out-of-the-box solution to capable hosting, at least not without assistance and manual intervention.
In-case you didn’t already hear, Michael Sippey of Twitter has just announced drastic changes to Twitter which will affect pretty much every single decent 3rd party app that uses the Twitter API. Essentially what Twitter have done is taken a 10 inch piece of steel and rammed it as hard and far as it will go right up the anal passages of the very developers who have contributed to the success of Twitter.
The general consensus of a lot of places I’ve worked at whether it be the opinion of a manager or old way of thinking directly from the top is that if you don’t have an IDE open on your screen or web browser instance of a work related website or project you’re slacking off. It’s this kind of thinking that destroys companies, blows out budgets and makes it difficult to establish a credible and capable team that isn’t comprised of disposable employee’s.
It seems like every single other aspect of the web has evolved and or is constantly evolving but when it comes to stopping spam the immediate staple choice is a hard to read text or image captcha. Most of the time using hard to distinguish letters and numbers, abstract background shapes & patterns and sometimes hard to read colours. Makes you really wonder if it’s the only way or there is room for a player in the market to revolutionise captchas. Even the Recaptcha service which gives you two words and helps Google digitise books throws hard to read words your way, well almost constantly.
First time Woocommerce user, long time WP-Ecommerce user. I recently built a store using WordPress to sell some t-shirts online as a work project via my employer which had basic variations, bulk pricing and you pay via Paypal – sounds simple enough right? I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about Woocommerce, this was a HUGE mistake. Seriously, if you are considering Woocommerce by all means reconsider unless you have deep pockets. In comparison to WP-Ecommerce (whom I have no affiliation with) Woocommerce feels like a cash grab more than it does an e-commerce solution for WordPress.
The only way to succeed in life is to fail, and you will fail more than once.
WordPress is a fantastic CMS, it makes my day-to-day job easy because I know it inside and out really well, any site I can build using WordPress I will because it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. There is however a downside to using WordPress, updates. Being one of the worlds most popular content management systems, WordPress like the very language it is built upon PHP, has encountered some pretty serious bugs over the years. It’s inevitable when developing any kind of application: new features = new bugs, new vulnerbilities and new ways hackers can destroy your site. WordPress has defnitely had its fair share of issues, but security updates are generally pretty fast.
When I first of Github for Windows being announced I exclaimed, “Well it’s about time someone released a nice looking Windows application for interfacing with Git” after installing it and encountering a couple of crashes (I can live with that, I was still smitten) I merely restarted Github but then once the crashes kept happening I went looking for a way to log a issue somewhere and surprisingly couldn’t find anything.
Recently I worked on a project that required a form to be duplicated into an iframe for AJAX uploading of an image on a WordPress website. When triggering a submit action on my form I encountered the error: “Property ‘submit’ of object # is not a function” It took me believe it or not two days to fix this solution. The problem is caused by having an input element with the ID of “submit” the solution is easy, just make sure you have no form elements with the ID “submit” and you shouldn’t encounter this issue.
Blizzard only let you own one game licence per account, but when you launch Diablo 3 the launch screen prompts you to buy Diablo 3 even though you already own it and are launching it. Kind of weird, right?