With all of this App.net talk and Twitter fucking over third party developers I keep seeing comments like, “what about Identi.ca?” and “We don’t need a new service, Identi.ca already exists so lets just use that” first and foremost Identi.ca is the biggest steaming pile of shit you will ever lay your eyes upon and use.
My first thoughts upon visiting Identi.ca’s site are, “This site looks like shit” functionality aside, it’s the UX that matters in my opinion. People won’t use your service if it looks like junk, especially when sites like Twitter look far more attractive and user friendly. If you’re going to clone Twitter, do it right not half-assed and gross looking like a salad without dressing, it’s a salad but it’s not an awesome salad with tasty and zesty home made dressing like Twitter.
I love Google Chrome, it’s been my browser for a very long time now especially since Firefox failed to address the severe memory leaking issues it has had for years and only just recently did something about it.
One thing that taints the greatness of Google Chrome is the embedded copy of Flash that it comes installed with. The embedded version which has the filename, “pepflashplayer.dll” doesn’t work.
It seems the issue which has been one that comes and goes with each update has been happening for the last couple of weeks or so. Flashplayer uses minimum 25% of CPU, usually 50% and for some it uses 100% CPU. You can fix the issue by disabling the bundled version in Chrome via the chrome://plugins page but this only temporarily fixes the problem.
Due to recent developments in the Hacker News community and people raging over the questionable moderation and hate Paul Graham of Y Combinator has for anyone that crosses him by “hell-banning” them on the Hacker News website I decided to develop a quick and basic Hacker News clone called Zebra.
I have setup a Github repository which can be accessed here: https://github.com/Vheissu/Zebra
Now you can run your own Hacker News style website. At present it’s not really in a shape where you can use it to run a website but I am continuously building on-top of it and almost have it in a state where you can submit and vote on things. The core of the application is using Codeigniter, so if you’re familiar and want to help out by all means please do.
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.
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.