Internet

Google App Engine

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:00:35 GMT

Huge...this is my first reaction when I first saw it a few days ago. Yes, I missed the release day so I wasn't able to enroll in to the first 10,000 candidate to get the first hand experience. That's ok, because I have no experience of using Python either.

Hosting web apps in Google would really hurts those small web hosting companies or whoever doing this type of business. Who wants to run their critical websites on higher downtime percentage while there is a better one out there like Google? Google manages the uptime, backups, and more, it hosts your sites virtually across hundreds of servers so you don't need to care if one of them are down. How often do you see this offered by many other web hosting companies? You either have to share the resources with many others for lower cost or exclusively use one dedicated server but without back-up standby.

However, in order to gain all these benefits you will need to over a few gotchas, as Bex Huff pointed out.

It only supports apps written in Python. No Java, no C, no .NET. Although, Python rocks...
The best web application framework option is Django... which is an awesomely elegant framework, similar in philosophy to Ruby On Rails. Existing Django apps can be ported in minutes.
You cannot write to the file system, you have to use the Google Datastore API
If your web request takes more than a few seconds to respond, Google will kill the process, and send back an error... so I don't know how they do batch processes...
Google owns your ass even more.

I am a .Net guy so it would be quite a bit of work to switch around. And first of first, I need to pick up Python if I want to go this direction. It's still in Preview Release right now and I am in the waiting list at the moment but will see how it goes later.

IE 8 beta is out for test now

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:57:18 GMT

I am not a fan of IE so I would pass and just wait until the final version comes if there are no new big hits like the new pro-standards role in IE 8. It was released recently with some pretty exciting improvements and features. And I am testing it now, same as many of others, to wish this new promised to be standard-compliant version of browser would be as good as it was promised. It is sure that the biggest achievement of this version of IE is the new pro-standards role but it also has some neat features like activities and webslices that sound should bring us the some new experience when surfing the web.

So far, after doing some quick test, it seems faster than IE 7 but some of my websites don't display normally as they do in Firefox but I haven't dug that far to discover what caused it.

Should links open in a new window?

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:26:45 GMT

There is really no absolute answer to this small usability question, and it depends on the various situation. Some of users like to have the links opened in a new window/tab but some don't, and some don't bother because they always either middle click or right click to open in new tab/window whenever they want the link to open in a new window/tab. But the web designer essentially needs to decide what the behavior would be in the first place. And different designer has the different favor too. In my personal point of view, here is my guild line:

1. Internal links go to the same page;

2. Internal help info links open in a new window or pop up the modal in the same page with close button in it.

3. External links go to the new window or tab;

I also subscribe the snapshots add-on on my blog for external links so it adds another layer for users to take a quick look before actually clicking through.

However, there are quite a lot debate in David Direy's recent same post, in which a lot of people commented that all link should open in the same window, no matter whether the link is internal or external. They claimed that this is something that should leave for the reader to decide. It makes some sense but why? Why would people like the idea to give their readers chances to leave their site for something else? This quote from one of the commenter might be one of the reasons.

However, for not so tech-savvy people’s sake, it’s best not to open links in a new window. They really get lost with the disabled Back button. I was opening links in a new window for one of my client’s sites, until I started getting calls from her, asking how can she get back to the previous page.

It's true. Small usability issues like this does bother a lot to non-tech-savvy people, and we need to put more weight on them when determining which behavior we should be taking.

By the way, a quick guide of When to Open Web-Based Applications in a New Window is a pretty good reference to check.

<update date="Feb 8, 2008">
It appears that having links to popup via Javascript isn't a smart idea either because 1) it might be blocked by popup blocker; 2) it's not so search friendly; 3) it breaks the common rule to open the link, i.e. no middle-button, and open in new tab disappeared from right-click context. There will be no JavaScript type popup on my site anymore.
</update>

$10 Million a year from 10 hours work a week

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:17:10 GMT

Wow...$10 Million a year from 10 hours work a week, a story from NY Times but happened locally right in where I live, Vancouver. What a dream job!!!

For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year.

Scobleizer apparently knows Markus and realized his work way back in 2006, and revealed what the secret is to make Markus so successful.

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Ahh, yet another example of anti-marketing marketing.

Was he joking about it? Not really. The site was designed to be easy to use, fast to load, and uncluttered. I believe these are the keys truly to his success. Look at Google, Craig's List, or even Amazon and eBay. None of them look pretty but all designed in simplicity and fast.

Markus picked ASP.Net because, according to what he says, it's trivial and easy, and gets the job done. His stuck with what he knew and got really really good at it attitude is also saving his a lot of time and using these time to concentrate on things that are more profitable. He did spend a lot of time studying SEO, which is probably another big factor to become the #1 Adsense user in Canada.

Does it ring a bell to you? It does a lot to me!!

Add Task Management System into Gmail

Kent J. Chen — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:44:58 GMT

Managing your tasks right in your Gmail sounds very cool...but since Gmail has no such thing how can we do it? RTM, aka Remember The Milk, recently Introduced Remember The Milk for Gmail which offers this feature. The Tasks panel in the right side of the window looks sweet.

It works beautifully in my regular Gmail account but I am using email with Google Apps most of the time which doesn't seem to work with RTM. So I emailed RTM asking if there is any way we can implement this into my Google Apps email. Their reply came back in such a surprisingly fast way. And yes, turning on the option "Turn on new application features to my domain before they are rolled out to all Google Apps customers" in Domain Settings in Domain Manager definitely did the trick. I will be enjoying it for sure.

WriteMaps - A tool to create site map

Kent J. Chen — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:13:01 GMT

A web-Ajax-based tool, WriteMaps, that you can use to create website site map online, such a brilliant idea and awesome web application.

WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and share sitemaps online. As a WriteMaps user, you and your team will be able to build and access your sitemaps from anywhere, without having to rely on proprietary desktop apps and static files.

I believe that it would be pretty useful to me who works as a solo web developer quite often. Time to put all my sitemaps on now.

HELO warning

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 08:18:50 GMT

One user reported one day last week that an email replied to her customer got bounced back with 550 error code in it. After checking everything at our end without any luck I ended up asking the other party to check what has happened. It turned out the email got bounced because of the wrong value in the HELO on our Exchange based email server. The IT guy explained that the HELO should be using the real domain name rather than using the internal domain name, and claimed that they check HELO for RFC compliance due to the volume of spam they got with the following link.

http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/1123/90.htm

This is kind something new to me as I never had any trouble sending email from this 5-year-old mail server because of invalid value in HELO. Yes, I did use internal domain name in HELO but, according to what the link he referred to me, it shouldn't be the reason why the email was rejected.

5.2.5 HELO Command: RFC-821 Section 3.5

The sender-SMTP MUST ensure that the <domain> parameter in a HELO command is a valid principal host domain name for the client host. As a result, the receiver-SMTP will not have to perform MX resolution on this name in order to validate the HELO parameter.

The HELO receiver MAY verify that the HELO parameter really corresponds to the IP address of the sender. However, the receiver MUST NOT refuse to accept a message, even if the sender's HELO command fails verification.

Anyway, in order to avoid the trouble like this and follow the RFC compliance, I took the advice and changed our HELO to the valid domain name.

Breakthrough technology redefines spam protection

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:58:34 GMT

My boss forwarded this link the other day and commented that hopefully it's true. Yes, I hope it is true too but will it really become true?

The majority of today's anti-spam products on the market detect spam by analyzing the sender, i.e. DNSBL, SPF, Header Checking, etc., or email content, i.e. Bayesian. This so-called breakthrough technology developed by Abaca didn't use any of those, instead, it detects the spam based on its new, unique, and revolutionary receiver-reputation formula. It works quite awesome according to what the testimonials say on its website.

I have been fighting with Spam for last past 5 years by utilizing various technologies and tools. It's way less than perfect but still manageable, which is why I hope a new revolutionary system like this that dumped all old technologies would win the game overall.

The art of hyperlinking

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:19:59 GMT

Philipp Lenssen's recent 11 Link Usability Tips reveals a pretty good guideline when coding the links in the web html page, which was claimed as The art of hyperlinking by Jeff Atwood.

Ensure your links are large enough to easily click.
The first link is the most important one.
Don't link everything.
Don't radically alter link behavior. Very good point that I don't follow all time but will be from now on.
Don't title your link "Click Here".
Don't link things the user might want to select and copy.
Don't include icons on every link.
Don't make your content depend on links to work. Good point too. Not everyone will click on the hyperlinks. Either they're too busy to click every single link you put in front of them, or maybe they're reading your article in another format where they can't click on the links: print, offline, or mobile. Either way, it's important to provide the context necessary to make your content understandable without the need to visit whatever is behind those hyperlinks.
Don't hide your link. Give them a distinct style, or underline them all time.
Don't mix advertising and links. Single-underline is for the hyperlinks while double-underline is for advertisements.
Don't obfuscate your URLs.

Jeff also mentioned that Keyvan Nayyeri's Simplify your URLs would be a fantastic starting point. And using DecentURL to polish the ugly URL.

YSlow

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 07:16:50 GMT

There might be tons of ways to improve your website performance but what are the most efficient ways of doing so? Yahoo reveals Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site, which is awesome and really should be added on the checklist when testing the new website you are about to release.

Exceptional Performance : Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Use a Content Delivery Network
Add an Expires Header
Gzip Components
Put CSS at the Top
Move Scripts to the Bottom
Avoid CSS Expressions
Make JavaScript and CSS External
Reduce DNS Lookups
Minify JavaScript
Avoid Redirects
Remove Duplicate Scripts
Configure ETags

Now, how do we check to make sure the website we are building actually follows these simple rules? No worry, developers from Yahoo know what we want and won't just tell you the principles and leave us no way to prove how bad performance our websites are. They developed YSlow, a Firefox add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool, which analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites.

Coding Horror's YSlow: Yahoo's Problems Are Not Your Problems also reveals this tool in great detail.

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