Remember the old age (not far behind… just few years ago) where you had to type a whole bunch of codes just to add a new row to your HTML table ? I’ve almost forgotten that era with the convenience added through some of these libraries.
Earlier this week, Google posted on how to make PHP performance better as step of their campaign to “make the web faster”, but has given some noteworthy tips (such as avoiding SQL querying within a loop) as well as some insignificant ideas.
This may have been ignored if it was published in some other source, but since it’s endorsed by Google, PHP community has taken a special interest and rebuffed some of these so called tips.
A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices
Make the Web Faster – Google groups
PHP performance tips from Google
Interesting twist to CSS and PHP.
Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of using PHP with websites, is getting variables into CSS. Having variables stored in an ini file, config file or even a database can make the updating of the look and feel of a site simple, however, CSS files, by default, do not parse PHP.
PHP V5′s object-oriented features give you the ability to implement design patterns to improve your code’s design. When you improve your code’s design in this way, it becomes more readable, more maintainable, and more robust to absorb changes.
We’ve been keeping close watch on Magento Commerce from it’s release. It has really filled the void of an open source e-commerce system. However, it seems there are several concerns when it is to be used in production.
Magento Commerce has been criticized in the past for being too bloated. I agree it is. A single, uncached page load takes as much as 20MB of memory, which is a bit much for a web application. While Magento can be criticized for being too bloated, many other popular apps are bloated, and that bloat can generally be solved by server tuning and hardware. The issue of Magento extends further to a much more important issue: security vulnerabilities in the administration panel.
Work is being done to incorporate Windows binaries for PECL extensions into pecl.php.net and will hopefully be ready early 2009
As a Catholic, to me, Christmas has always been about giving. Of course, this time around I thought I’d go the extra mile and share some virtual love with geeks everywhere. Inspired by 24 Ways, I decided to do my part this season by writing an article a day on something that is very dear to me – Ruby.
Focused on tips, tricks and hacks to try out during these few weeks, Ruby Advent aims to be a resource for newbies and veterans alike. As we reflect on the year gone by, and spend time with the people we care about this holiday season, it’s also good to look to the future, and exercise our collective brain power in anticipation of one of the most challenging years ahead. Ruby Advent is a chance to make some friends, hack some code, and stay in the spirit of the season throughout.
Of course, the main focus of Ruby Advent is community, and in this vein I’d like to thank the people who linked, and these guys who contributed, and many, many others for getting behind us and powering this project through.
Whether you’re a hobbyist, hacker or code machine extraordinaire, it should be obvious by now that the Ruby community has hacks and hugs galore to give this season. Join the party at Ruby Advent and see what we’re talking about!
We know most of you enjoy using CurdBee for your business’ billing needs. Being a small team from Sri Lanka, we’re always spiffed to see a tool we built to scratch our itch helps thousands of others across the globe. Of course, we also love listening to you and and adding new features. As we push out this new update, here are some of the new bells and whistles you should be looking for.
Total Billed
Many of you requested this feature, mentioning how convenient it would be for you when making your balance sheets. We’ve added an extra column in the invoices section that shows the total amount billed.
Your Name on All Notifications
Did invoices sent through CurdBee confuse your clients and end up in their spam folder? From now on all invoice notifications will use your business name when sending email.
Format your Item Descriptions
Need your invoices to be more descriptive? Now you have the freedom to do basic formatting on item descriptions (using Textile syntax) such as adding line-breaks, emphasizing text and even adding links.
Custom Due Dates
Don’t you wish your clients would pay up on time so you can throw that massive New Year’s Eve party? With this newest update, you can now specify custom due-dates for your invoices. Click away, and party hard!
Better custom branding
Worried about your company colour not being in the colour pallete? With this update we introduce a new color picker which allows you to create custom tints and shades. Now it’s even easier to make sure those colours keep flying!
Please let us know if you experience any issues with these new additions. We love squashing bugs (but not bees, obviously) with large objects. As always, we’re also looking for more suggestions on how to make CurdBee better. Our support mail box and forum are always open, and we love hearing from you, so please write in! As for us, we’ll be here as usual, hacking away.
Stay tuned for more great releases from the CurdBee team!
We are back to the normal work routine after enjoying (a rather exhausting) run on Rails Rumble. The challenge was to build a web application from scratch using Ruby On Rails, within 48 hours. Though we are still grasshoppers when it comes to the web app arena, we thought the experience gained by participating in such a challenge would help us in the long run. Besides, we had several concepts lying in our idea wallet for sometime, and this sounded like the perfect opportunity to get the ball rolling. Generally, our ideas emerge from real life problems we have, and so we knew that implementing one of them would at least scratch our own itch, and perhaps help a few others like us. We decided early on that the project we start should be sustainable beyond the rumble.
After a few brainstorming sessions we selected the idea of building a social conference management application, which we would code name MyConf. We started the challenge at exactly 5.30 am local time on Saturday. Some quick mocks were drawn based on our ideas and we picked one to proceed with. So Amila and myself started coding the application, while Laknath managed the VPS setup at Linode. Of course, as is often the case with new projects, the task was not as easy as we anticipated. We had to face many new challenges as we dived deeper and deeper into the process. Also, bad weather, and problems with electricity and internet connections also interrupted work flow, especially since we’ve been operating from our homes since of late.Yet, we managed to hold our nerve till the end. Unfortunately, when the time came for pencils down, we weren’t quite ready with the full version and had to tag a half baked release of the app.
Screenshot of MyConf
Lessons Learned
It’s true that we couldn’t complete the app as we had planned, but that’s fine. We tested ourselves against a tough standard, and gained some great experience and exposure. To us, Rails Rumble was always much more than just winning the competition. Working under such a tight deadline, it required some quick decision making and getting things done right from the word go. Agile development practices, such as rapid prototyping, pair programming and continuous integration had to be used extensively. It was all about doing “git pull, commit and push” throughout.
Secondly, the scope of MyConf was bit a broad for this kind of a competition. We could have done better if we focused on producing a few selected features, as opposed to a full app. Though we started writing test cases at the beginning, we ignored it as the competition progressed. However, we realised that if we continued with test driven development, we would have saved the hours wasted in debugging unwanted issues. Something else we learned is that you should never experiment with new tricks or try to use new tools when working under such tight deadlines. No matter how productive and efficient they may eventually be, using them will most probably lead to lot of trouble. So always trust your old bag of tricks and tools.
On the bright side, we came to know the real strength and capability of our team. The whole team was able to keep their morale and stamina up, even under pressure, a characteristic which I think will help us as we engage in more challenging endeavours in the future.
What’s next?
We have the current version of MyConf running at http://www.myconfapp.com. If you feel like casting a vote for the work we have done so far, please do by visiting the RailsRumble site.
Like I said, we will continue to develop MyConf and have plans to offer it to you as a FOSS product. We would soon like to see you running your conferences on MyConf very soon!
Last week we released a multiple currency billing feature for our product, CurdBee – making online billing a possibility for more clients worldwide.
Word started to spread and the overall response was pretty positive, with more feedback and requests coming in for support for more currencies such as the South African Rand and the Swedish Krona. Thanks for all the comments! As always, we’re on these feature requests, and are looking forward to implementing some of them soon.
While Lakshan analysed what people wanted the most, and decided which feature to hack up next, our friend Seanwrote to me saying he got the opportunity to meet a friend at LifeHacker and mention Vesess, and Curdbee.
Since we knew Lifehacker had a strong business related readership, consisting of many SME owners and online entrepreneurs, we were crossing our fingers for a post about Curdbee – we knew it would give us the right exposure, with the right people.
Then, it happened. There was Lakshan doing his nightly twitter round before bed, when suddenly the hits started rolling in. Two hundred new accounts in less than an hour. Bookmarks on del.icio.us leading to more viral traffic. More hits, more sign ups. You guys were all over us.
Boom. A little after midnight local time, our server died.
Of course, Lakshan was on it. Doubling the RAM, he rebooted, and we were up again in under an hour. Since then, everything has been pretty smooth, even with our sign ups going through the roof yesterday. Curdbee should be chugging happily along now, but if you have any complaints, comments or feedback, please feel free to drop us a line.
In conclusion, we’d just like to say – thanks Sean, thanks Lifehacker, and thank you everyone who signed up – you really made our day!
© 2004 - 2008 Vesess™. Web Design & Web Application Development Company
