This made me chuckle today, it is a website aimed at helping people develop their social media strategy.

Whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com

Sadly the paragraphs contained within it reflect the type of guff you read on many corporate websites.

Related Posts

1. Google Tells Us What A Browser Is
2. Uptime Robot
3. Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design

Robin Christopherson works at Abilitynet and gave an excellent talk last year at FOWA Dublin 2009 about some of the traps to avoid to keep your website accessible to all.

This year he was talking about pretty much exactly the same thing, which would be annoying only the need for accessible websites hasn't went away and people are still making the same mistakes.

I won't go through every example he gave but here are some of the important notes I took from his talk entitled Accessibility in Web Design.

• Adobe Flash is getting more accessible but a lot of the older sites are still completely out of reach.
• Youtube is in the process of moving to HTML5, whilst it is still using flash it is unaccessible.
• Chrome currently doesn't play well with screen readers.
• Google allows you to add captions in Youtube videos really really easily, this would really improve the experience of video for people who are hard of hearing.
• Lots of mobile websites such as m.facebook.com are very accessible because they need to be for mobile devices.

One really cool thing I learned was that Opera Mini as a force single column mode, I have been a user of Opera Mini for ages and didn't know about this, one setting change and my experience on most websites using that browser has improved dramatically, vertical scrolling is basically eliminated.

Robin talked about Project Canvas, the following snippet is from their website and it seems like an interesting an worthwhile project.

Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform, subject to BBC Trust approval.

Finally here are a few links he shared with us;

• Make Your Site Mobile Friendly in 2 Minutes
• Text Captcha
• Total Validator

He mentioned some really valuable stuff and it was a very enjoyable presentation.

Related Posts

1. Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps
2. Google Tells Us What A Browser Is
3. Owen DeLong – Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6

Onto number 5 with my run down and onto a talk by Owen DeLong entitled Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6.

Owen is an IPv6 Evangelist with Hurricane Electric who gave a rather worrying talk about how we are going to need to move to IPv6 sooner rather than later.

Networking is a very dry subject matter and even an Evangelist like Owen could do little to spark up too much in the way of excitement about the topic but it is very important and something we need to be paying attention to.

Basically his talk focused on the fact that IPv4 addresses are running out and could be gone in 2011.  What this means is ISPs and hosting companies have very little time to get their infrastructure sorted in order to deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

The main action point I took from the talk was that I need to contact hosting providers for my websites and find out what provisions they have made for IPv6, because it was clear from the talk that the days of IPv4 are drawing to a close and whilst there will be IPv4 legacy systems in place for some time it will begin to get phased out sooner rather than later.

Owen hosted a University session later on in the day which covered how you can prepare your servers which I will talk about in a later post.

Related Posts

1. Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps
2. Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design
3. Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor – Sexy or Meaningful

My fourth post about FOWA is about a University Session that was organised during the first break, it was given by Microsoft's Martha Rotter and was on their new tool Pivot.

Martha is a developer and part of the Platform team at Microsoft Ireland and gave a pretty interesting live demo of the Pivot system.

Essentially Pivot is a free tool from Microsoft that can take huge datasets and display them in a user-friendly way.  I don't want to talk too much about the tool because I haven't played about with it myself but it is ran on Silverlight and therefore will work on anything from Vista up on Windows and OSX.  The website for finding out more is getPivot.com

After some preamble about the product Martha gave a live demo, which as I said was pretty interesting and whilst I can't see a good reason to use the product myself I can see the benefit of creating the datasets required by Pivot to allow other users to access your information via this tool (so long as there was a solid user base behind it).

Martha delivered the demo well (even with the occasional technical hiccup) and it was refreshing seeing a Microsoft employee running Windows 7 via a virtual machine on a mac.

It will be interesting to see how Pivot develops in the coming months and what the general publics opinion of it is.

Related Posts

1. Bloody Windows…
2. Allowing your own From header with sSMTP
3. Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design

The third talk at FOWA Dublin 2010 was by Renier Lemmens, the GM of PayPal Europe.

You may think it odd that a PayPal head would be invited to talk at a developer conference (Apart from the fact they were the main sponsor of the event) but early on in the talk Renier proved his tech-chops by listed some past things he had done (he has a background in computing) and even made light of the fact that he was no longer creating cool things on the web. (Paypal, on the other hand, have created some really cool new things which I will be talking about in a later post).

The mobile space isn't somewhere I have played in really but we all know it has huge potential, Renier emphasised this by through out some mind blowing figures and projections (which unfortunately I didn't take down with any context... If I can get my hands on the presentation I will update this).

One point he made which I don't think can be stressed enough is that the online and offline world is blurring into one, very few people are ever truly offline and it is because of this that developers and creatives need to take advantage of the mobile revolution and that there would be some serious downsides to ignoring it.

One stat I did note down was that a figure of $400 Billion has been thrown up as a projected worth of mobile commerce, although nobody really knows what its full potential could be.  This figure leads on to what I believe has to be the main point of Renier's talk (or at least the main thing I took from it), which is that you need to make it as simple as possible for that $400 Billion to come your way, you need to remove any barriers between the user and them parting with their money on your mobile site.

You can achieve this by keeping one eye on the mobile world as you create your ecommerce processes and design your interfaces.  One example given was iPhone apps which make you fill in all this information before saying you need to be at a computer to create your account.

Overall I thought this talk was interesting but I already had an idea that the mobile market was huge and that there are different things to consider when designing say shopping carts on mobile devices than you would on the web.

Related Posts

1. Robin Christopherson – Accessibility in Web Design
2. Owen DeLong – Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6
3. Simon Wardley – What is the cloud?

The next talk I want to write up from FOWA was by Simon Wardly.  Simon works for Canonical and is a bit of an expert on complex systems.

Simon was an excellent speaker with plenty of enthusiasm and stage presence; the title of his presentation was Situation Normal, Everything Must Change.  Talking about cloud computing by trying to first of all give it a definition.

What we learnt throughout the course of his talk was that you can't really give one definition to cloud computing because it isn't a thing, it is a shift.  Much in the same way the Industrial Revolution doesn't have an exact definition because it is a description of a shit of several things.

Simon talked in depth about the path that most commercial entities undergo as their popularity increases;

• Innovation leads to
• Custom built products which leads to
• Generic products which finally leads to
• Commodities or Services

Cloud computing is simply the shift from generic products to commodities.

In order for something to make the jump from product to commodity there are four things that need to be in place;

• There needs to be the concept (The idea needs to be there)
• There needs to be the right attitude (People need to be accepting of the idea and see a need for it)
• You need to have the right technology (To support the move from product to service)
• Suitability (Not everything suits being made into a commodity)

Simon believes that it isn't a case of if you start using the cloud it is when, I have to agree with him that it is certainly the way things are going.  The issue with not using the cloud is that if everyone else is using cloud services and you are developing products you are immediately behind the competition.

Simon's company sponsors Ubuntu who have an enterprise cloud solution that can be found at ubuntu.com/cloud, whilst I haven't tried playing with it yet apparently it is stupidly easy to set up and I think it is something I will be trying very shortly.

Finally I have noted some myths of the cloud that Simon busted;

• The cloud is not necessarily green - the more efficient it is the more we will use it.
• The cloud will not save you money - as above.
• Not all IT is the same - there are many aspects to IT.
• Not all IT will become cloud - not all aspects of IT is suitable for changing to the service.

Related Posts

1. Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps
2. Uptime Robot
3. Martha Rotter – Too Much Information [University Session]

I decided subscribing to a service that monitors websites I have a stake in was well overdue, and with a host of free services out there that can do this it seemed silly not to dive in and try one.

The site I decided to trail first is Uptime Robot.

I had two main reasons for trying this one, first it is free which immediately sets it apart from all other sites when all I want is a quick check done and an email sent out if it fails.  The second reason was that it's name had Robot in it you can have up to 50 websites being monitored, which is more than enough for me.

As well as email alerts you can set up SMS alerts that will only cost you what your operator charges - sadly there are currently no UK network operators listed, this isn't a huge concern for me because I am always emailed up anyway.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I can report back and say how awesome this service is and how much money it has made/saved me.  Until then I would love to hear your opinions on different tools you use for uptime monitoring.

Related Posts

1. Uptime Robot Monitors From Multiple Locations
2. Help with your Social Media Strategy
3. Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps

Here are a selection of online resources that I use when developing.  Some I use far too often, and some I have to say I use far too little!

This list is by no means comprehensive, and I will be updating it over time.

I am always on the look out for new sites like these, so please feel free to comment this post with your suggestions.

codingforums.com
I am a bit of a sucker for forums and have found this one to have a good bunch of people behind it, they are willing to help and very welcoming.

php.net
Self explanatory really, the docs on this site tell you how each and every PHP method should be used with some excellent community based examples.

stackoverflow.com
Think of a free version of Experts Exchange aimed directly at programmers and about 10 times better, that is what Stack Overflow is.  Sign up for a free account and ask questions (from the very very simple, to the very very complex, all levels are catered for).

tizag.com
A very basic tutorial website covering a range of languages, for when you have a bit of a brain freeze and know the solution is way too simple to ask for help!

validator.w3.org
Valid HTML is happy HTML (you can also validate your CSS there too).

w3schools.com
Much like Tizag only much more established.

Related Posts

1. Martha Rotter – Too Much Information [University Session]
2. YayQuery – My new favourite podcast?
3. Help with your Social Media Strategy

Google recently launched WhatBrowser.org, a website aimed at informing people about what web browser they are using and what a web browser is.  At first I figured it was going to be a thinly disguised advert for Chrome, or perhaps the new Google Chrome Frame but it genuinely seems to be just for information, indeed it doesn't even list Chrome first when listing the main browsers out there.

Here is a short video from the site:

Very basic stuff of course but I think it is great that Google are taking the time out to educate people about what they are doing.  What is greater still is that pretty much everyone who is not using Internet Explorer has chosen not to use Internet Explorer so knows about the different browsers out there and have found something better, which means the people who are going to find this website the most interesting (and therefore are the people most likely to follow the websites call to action) are Internet Explorer users.  And the fewer people we have using that browser the better!

I am not one of these elitist types and I understand perfectly well that for most users Internet Explorer (even 6) works perfectly well and it is our job as web developers to make sure it does work perfectly well for them, however I must admit I was pretty shocked to read that IE6 still has about a 25% market share.  I was positive that it was sitting around 16% but evidently not!

Anyway, I digress!  I am really interested to see how Google market this new site of theirs and if it gets more people experimenting with different browsers.  I am also interested to know if there is some kind of hidden agenda that I am clearly missing, if you have any thoughts please do let me know in the comments.

Related Posts

1. Internet Explorer 8 Checkbox Issues
2. New Google Search
3. Browser History Fix (Ajax)

I heard about Tweet Miner a couple of weeks ago via the techZing! podcast.  I have been using it for about a week now and thought I would post my feelings on it.

First, here is a bit of an introduction to the service.  Tweet Miner is a pre-beta twitter web app that allows you to quickly and easily manage your tweets so that people following you get actual benefit.  Created by Justin Vincent to allow him to solve one specific problem he was having it has only fairly recently been allowed out for the public to play with it.

The core features of Tweet Miner that I find useful or different are;

Multiple Accounts

The multiple accounts is obviously a fairly common feature of a lot of twitter apps already out there, what I like about this one though (and I admit I haven't played with too many others so this may be commonplace)  is that you can easily and quickly identify which account you are in.  This is important because obviously there are tweets that you would happily post to one group of people that you may think twice about posting to another.

RSS Feed Integration

The RSS feed integration is something I haven't seen or heard any other twitter client claim to do and it is really neat, basically you subscribe to your favourite RSS feeds via this app and then you can quickly create a tweet based on the content, it takes care of the URL shortening as well so it is just a really quick way of getting your content out there.

Scheduling of Tweets

Scheduling of tweets is something I have only just got into and I am loving it, maybe you have 10 articles you want to share with the world, but you don't want to overload your followers all at once, or maybe you are heading out in 5 minutes for the rest of the day but have some content you want to spread around, really handy and quick to do.  One thing I have used it for (which is incredibly geeky and lazy, and I promise to never ever do it again!) was to get one account to tweet another account with an @reply at a specific time to remind me to do something.  And do you know what, it worked!

Rolling Schedule of Tweets

The rolling schedule isn't something I have looked at in length because personally I don't want to use it as I am afraid as coming of as a bit spammy, but basically this feature allows you to say 'Every 60 minutes post this tweet' I guess if you know something is always going to happen at a set interval and it is useful to people then this would be a useful way of promoting that fact.

URL shortening Service

Everything has a URL shorting service built into it these days but one thing I have noticed with a lot of the twitter clients I have used in the past is that if you have a URL that along with your content breaches the 140 length, it won't get posted even if after the shortening you fall well under the 140 limit.  Tweet Miner allows you to shorten the URL in real time before posting, which has other benefits as well, like seeing you have extra space for a hashtag or a 'RT plz!'

It is a Website

This final point is probably a totally personal thing to me, but with the range of applications and firefox plugins out there that monitor everything for you, I find there is less and less need to actually browse the web anymore.  There has to come a time when tab space in your browser is less of a premium than space a long your toolbar for all these little apps.  Nothing to install and nothing to slow down firefox even more.

I am beginning to really love using this site and can't wait until it is officially released.  I strongly urge people to sign up for a free account now.

Related Posts

1. @justinvincent
2. Raffi Krikorian – How to use Geolocation in your web app
3. Renier Lemmens – The future of Mobile Apps