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Hardware Fax Solutions

Faxing is something you don’t really hear many people talking about these days. Now do you really blame them? With the advent of email, what’s really the point, right? But there’s a hybrid: there are high tech businesses that live in a world of fiber optics and T1 lines, but they also need to send and receive faxes. Are they really going to just stick a phone line in there, and slap an old school fax machine on there?

No, they’re going to hook up a Fax Server and use a Fax Over IP solution for their business. This allows something that allows unlimited users, integrates with Outlook and much more. Yeah at $4,800 a pop for the VOIP version, it’s a bit steep, but just think of sending several thousand faxes a month over a phone line.

It’s a brave new world; nice to see Fax Software stepping into the light.

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By Kevin Lloyd – October 5, 2007

Finally We’ve Moved To DreamHost – Quality Web Hosting

MovingThis has been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally decided to move this blog (and a few other things I’m hosting) to DreamHost. Why DreamHost? Because they offer a great package, what can I say? I’ve been hosting at 1and1 for over a year, but after a few bad experiences, I’ve decided to move to something a bit more robust.

Although it’s not really fair to compare DreamHost to 1and1 Hosting, let’s give it a shot:

Cron Jobs

I use these for my MySQL backups. Download a nice PHP script and set up a cron job to run said script at a scheduled time. Without cron jobs, I have to go through the hoopla of running some PsuedoCron stuff, which basically runs a script if a user visits your website after the script has been scheduled to run. This is fine for small scripts, but didn’t really fly much for my database backups, since the poor sap that happened to trigger the script would have to sit and wait for it’s completion, as it would appear to be something the website was loading.

Ruby On Rails

After working so much with CakePHP, I can’t help but be curious. I really doubt that I’m going to jump ship, but it’s good to have an environment to play with.

Space and Bandwidth

You got 500 GB of disk space to play with, and 5.0 TB of monthly bandwidth. This is enough to host at least a few good sized sites under one account. The unlimited Domains makes this a breeze.

Posted in General, MySQL.

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By Kevin Lloyd – October 4, 2007

Web Development 2.0 Carnival – September 24, 2007

Welcome to the September 24, 2007 edition of web development 2.0.

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor) posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.

General

Paul presents Make Web Site Development Easy posted at BigTechnical, saying, “Great CSS tools and more.” Although I don’t really dig the Blueprint CSS framework, the tips on Nifty Corners and gradients are good.

Don Albrecht presents Why Are CSS Frameworks Important to AJAX Development posted at Ajax Bestiary, saying, “It’s way to easy to get burned in AJAX development when you don’t start with a good foundation. Here’s an exploration of why CSS Frameworks can give your entire development process a leg up. Even the javascript.” Again, I’m not a fan of CSS frameworks, but to each his own.

John W. Furst presents Use Safe Identifiers In Your Web Templates posted at E-Biz Booster Blog, saying, “I wrote this, because I was getting tired of looking up the specifics in different specs all the time. You might find it to be a helpful resource for your readers.”

Posted in General.

2 comments

By Kevin Lloyd – September 24, 2007

Reward Your Regular Readers – Skip The Ads

Now I know you’ve read about this and it’s usually a good idea: concentrate most of your ads on your older posts and hide ads from your regular visitors. I mean, they come here everyday, reward them with a little bit of clean content.

But also, if you’re like me, you’re lazy and haven’t gotten around to coding this yet. Well here you go, a WordPress plugin that I’ve stumbled upon: Who See’s Ads?.

First of all, you can display anything in these blocks: HTML, JavaScript, even PHP. The ad blocks are controlled by certain contexts. It’s a lil’ bit like coding if you think about it. You still a bunch of if statements together to determine whether or not your content is displayed. These include:

  • Regular visitors – Which you can define by those who’ve viewed your content a certain number of times within a certain period (eg. twice in 10 days).
  • Coming from search engine – Self explanatory I hope.
  • Posts older than a defined number of days
  • Logged in visitors
  • Between a particular date period
  • If the ad was viewed a certain number of times – You could set and expiration duration

Posted in General.

4 comments

By Kevin Lloyd – September 20, 2007

Review: StaticPageBuilder

Introduction

These guys make it a point of duty to try their hardest to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to drive traffic. Who benefits from this service? Based on the name of this service, you can see that it’s not for your average blogger. This service will benefit folks with eCommerce sites or some other type of static content.

They specialize in SEO for static pages. They use targeted key words, to help you build key word rich content for your website to drive the most traffic to it.

Design

As I do with every site I review, I have to give my commentary on their web design. At first, it struck me as relatively cool, even a lil’ Web 2.0 (ish). There are some nice Web 2.0 buttons, a basic logo with some reflections. But then I looked at the source and was gravely disappointed by the number of tables there were.

Conclusion

This is a fairly new search engine optimization company, give them a try and let me know what you think. At $0.10 per static page, what do you have to lose?

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By Kevin Lloyd – September 18, 2007

Give Me 15 Minutes and I’ll Make You A jQuery Expert

Introduction

jQuery - Write Less, Do MoreIn the spirit of rapid web development, I’ve stumbled upon jQuery. Here’s a testimonial from a jQuery user:

You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it’s down to two or three lines and it couldn’t get any shorter unless it read your mind.”

In my experience it’s been more like five (5) lines of jQuery.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

I’ve found jQuery great for the following reasons:

  • Simple Ajax in a breeze
  • Search for elements in the DOM is made easy
  • The helper function [ $() ] is a pleasure to use
  • Most importantly: it handles cross browser compatibility.

Here We Go – Tutorials Galore

Your first step will be to Download jQuery 1.2.1 and include it in the head of your web page. After this you need to start reading some tutorials. Don’t worry, it’s going to take 15 minutes tops for you to start writing usable code:

Posted in Ajax, CakePHP, JavaScript.

3 comments

By Kevin Lloyd – September 18, 2007

I Hate Internet Explorer With A Passion

I jsut realized that my brand new WordPress theme sucks in Internet Explorer 7. My footer doesn’t show up, and my sidebar is all the way to the bottom.

I remember when I first started with this them, I went through the whole cross browser thing and everything looked fine. I tweaked everything to my liking and was satisfied. Now I have to go backwards, one element at a time and try to isolate which tweak, new content, post, or plugin that has caused this to happen.

Or I may just find a new theme. But in the mean while, I’ll continue hating IE. Why doesn’t stuff just work as it’s supposed to?

 I realized this problem at the worst possible time, Monday morning at 1:41AM, so who knows when I’ll get to it.

Posted in General, Work.

10 comments

By Kevin Lloyd – September 10, 2007

Web Development 2.0 Carnival – September 8, 2007

I am proud to present the first edition of Carnival of Web Development 2.0. This is my first time hosting one of these things, so enjoy:

General

  1. Doug Boude presents DEMYSTIFYING JSON posted at Doug Boude (rhymes with ‘loud’)
  2. sylv3rblade presents Stages of Software Development posted at Atma Xplorer, saying, “My take on the process of software development”
  3. prakash presents A2Z Informative-Technology, Software, Internet, Tips, Ideas posted at A2Z Informative, saying, “Identifying the color code of an image on the screen is not an easy task. Usually it involves a multi step process and is time consuming. But this tool is able to find out HTML, RGB or HEX color of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. This little tool is very useful for webmasters.”
  4. Thorsten Ott presents Sourcebench – freelancer sites reviews posted at Sourcebench – building a better web.
  5. Scott H presents 15 Web Sites College Students Can’t Live Without posted at College and Finance, saying, “Not specifically about design, but has a great list of web sites students love, including StumbleUpon which, in terms of developing a web site, can be quite useful.”

Posted in Carnival, General, JavaScript, MySQL, PHP.

2 comments

By Kevin Lloyd – September 8, 2007