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No doubt some people feel “basic” coding is beneath them. They feel they should be focusing on Java, JavaScript, UI Design, UX, etc. etc. Coding that PSD to valid, cross browser XHTML? Complete with CSS styling? Dealing with whatever browsers you want to support? Funk that, especially when we have dozens of businesses fighting to do this for us (for cheap!). Prolific competition and cheap? How can I lose! Yes, much like that extended warranty you bought, how could you lose? Very easily! Generally speaking, it seems you get what you pay for. But sometimes you have to realize that doing research is the best ROI. In the age of the internet, one man shops quickly get bought out by the competition, so that we can go very quickly from “my friend runs this” to “he sold it for more than it’s worth, and now it’s a shit service.” It happens, as I had dug up old reviews and contacted people - which I suggest you do. Never rely on sites and written reviews (they could be paid reviews and not disclosed, and some people will rant and rave after one use, and quickly change their mind after two uses!). In 2006 they were hot shit! So they still are…right? No my friend, they are not. Like I said, any time you see a review for a service, research it. Their are prolific sites that offer up reviews but I’ve noticed a lot of them allow ballot stuffing (it seems all you need is an email address to post, and those are quite easy to get). So you can see they have some heavy negative reviews followed by dozens of similar “OMG, these guys saved me, they rock so hard!” First thing you need to realize, you are outsourcing, and more than likely this work is going overseas - and generally outsourcing is a mixed bag of issues. From the services I checked out, they claimed to be “based” in the United States, but I noticed some of their class names held Russian words, another I noticed some Norwegian - and it’s most important that as I worked with some of these companies, I “figured out” how best to work with them - regardless of who they were. The Secret to Working with Third Party PSD to XHTML Services It’s simple, really:

Do not rely on their order forms to tell them everything. Do not make assumptions on what they will/won’t do.

You combat this by:

Giving them requirements if it’s not on the order form! If they offer money back guarantees and you aren’t happy - USE THEM.

Tell them exactly what you expect - if you think certain areas should have 10 pixels of padding around them (maybe you think it’s common sense) but they may not! You may have selected CSS sprites - but do you want it done a certain way? Did you want certain headings to be clickable? TELL THEM. I guess this ultimately falls down to communication skills as it often does - overcommunication is better than too little, and it’ll save you headaches in the long run! How to Deliver your PSDs No doubt, sometimes you may be working under deadlines so you may spread your work out into batches - this is a dangerous approach if you think “oh we can tweak certain fundamental aspects of our designs as we send them.” Bad, bad, bad. If you are planning batch approach, communicate this before hand so your potential partner services understands, and make sure the basics of your templates are SOLID before you send them out! I suggest having your templates done first (so you can reuse the code and maybe not need to have every PSD sent out to be done) and make sure your sidebar and navigation areas are solid (and this is where you describe how large the click areas are). Once these areas are solid, I’d make sure all future PSDs follow these pixel perfect hand-offs to insure an easy transition with the future PSDs sent off, and it’ll also save you a lot of pain. Have you used any services like this? Got any tips or tricks? Let us know! Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

EDIT: So I talked to Toby Miller and he helped clarify some issues I was having - the script has been updated below!

So I’ve been discussing compression - I’m a fiend for it. It’s like a drug to me. I squeeze every byte out of production code. I’d compress HTML into a single line - I’m just that phucked up. Maybe it’s my OCD, maybe I’m just nutty, but GZIPping seems like a no brainer to me. 1-2-3 COMPRESS! What’s GZIP? I’m glad you asked, friend! According to the never-wrong wikipedia article on GZIP: gzip is a software application used for file compression. gzip is short for GNU zip; the program is a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, intended for use by the GNU Project. What this basically does is compress your files and let the client unzip them. We’re talking about massive decreases in bandwidth, so that 200k website suddenly shrinks down. No More Optimizing, YAY! NO NO NO! I’m sorry friend, but GZIP is not an excuse to get lazy. You can use GZIP on Javascript Frameworks so that compressed 60k core file can become a 15k file. Wow. Just take that in. 75% reduction of an already compressed file! That’s awesome. 101k html text file can be compressed to 15k. Frickin’ badass. So naturally, why wouldn’t I want to enable this on my Dreamhost sites? The GZIP Code Please note: As I’m using Apache2, we’re calling mod_deflate instead of mod_gzip. I’ve added this to my .htaccess files:

BEGIN GZIP

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript </ifmodule>

END GZIP

Danger, Will Robinson! Naturally, their are a few caveats from GZIP, as better explained by BetterExplained.com (heh):

Older browsers: Yes, Virginia, no doubt you may be asked to support crappy browsers. We’re talking old-school-extreme, like Netscape 1.0 on Windows 95. Apache mod_deflate has some rules to avoid compression for older browsers. Already-compressed content: As BetterExplained.com details, you probably only need to compress the “big 3″ (HTML, CSS and Javascript) as images/flash/etc are usually already compressed. Usually. CPU-load: Compressing content on-the-fly uses CPU time and saves bandwidth. Usually this is a great tradeoff given the speed of compression. There are ways to pre-compress static content and send over the compressed versions. This requires more configuration; even if it’s not possible, compressing output may still be a net win. Using CPU cycles for a faster user experience is well worth it, given the short attention spans on the web.

So enjoy the benefits friends, pass on the glory of GZIP! Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

You know - I’m so vain. It’s like looking into a mirror online, and sucking in all the beauty that is the information super highway - to you young’ns that’s what we called the Intertubes back in the day - through a wonderful tool called Google Alerts. I’ve got an addiction, and it feels so good. It starts out with subjects - I follow ATG, Arts Technology Group, Mootools and jQuery. I get flooded with the latest news and blog postings around those topics because they interest me, and, I suppose, naturally, after hearing a lot of people talk of googling themselves, I set up a google alert on my name: Keith Baker to see what’ll come up. In the ideals of personal branding I tend to most of my online diction and commenting under keif because there are quite a few Keith Baker’s that me beat in terms of popularity (like the Yale Physics Professor working with CERN, a Dungeons and Dragons Author, a drummer (who also a a Japanese fan site?), a photographer, a children’s book illustrator) - so I set up an alert on that, as well - this way I know most often if my real name creeps up in an alert it deserves a lot more attention. So what’s the point? A quick shill for Google Alerts? No, I bring this up, because an interesting alert fell into my inbox today - Silliman’s blog post about Issue 1, a 3,785 page e-book of poetry. Wow. With 3,164 authors, you’re sure to find something you like, right? Well, as it turns out, a lot of people published in this book are finding out they’re in this book for the first time (plagiarism!) - except, perhaps captured most eloquently by Silliman: Ed Baker put it so elegantly in the comments stream to For Godot, I DIDN’T FUCKING WRITE THIS GARBAGE! As I certainly did not write the text associated with my name on page 1849. And I doubt seriously that my nephew Dan wrote the one-line poem associated with his name in here either

Now, as is pointed out in the comments, it’s possible that the “author” of said shit poem may merely be - by chance - someone who happens to also write poetry and has your name. Someone later points out the possibility of an automated script being the source - the author may be crediting the original authors as more of a “tribute” or perhaps suffers from a misplaced decimal in the code (hey, it happens - ‘feet instead of meters’). So what can you do to control this? Cease and desist? Threaten litigation that your shiny reputation as a poet could be tarnished being associated with some crap tagged with your name? I know I’m not a poet, but I figure on ecould make a few assumptions… If no one asks - does it matter? People in this world exist with the same name. Someone else can write poetry with your name and get it published - you may think they suck, but they’re published and you’re not (or may not be). If you have one iota of fame, I have a feeling that you have an established style or diction - people who are your fans will no doubt read something attributed to you incorrectly and either think you’ve quit smoking pot and switched to heroin, or that this isn’t you. The point is - let it go! Life’s too short to be worked up over an automated program/persons/whatever incorrectly attributing crap poetry to ‘your name’ and NOT YOU DIRECTLY. If you advertise when you publish (”I’m in this journal/blog/magazine”), I doubt someone will find a random person’s work (not you, with your name) and assume you just don’t want people to know you wrote it. Would you be upset if someone, with your name, with your “passion,” started getting attention in your field?You know - I’m so vain. It’s like looking into a mirror online, and sucking in all the beauty that is the information super highway - to you young’ns that’s what we called the Intertubes back in the day - through a wonderful tool called Google Alerts. Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

I get it. You joined Twitter because it’s the new thing. But do you really need to add 1000+ people when your first tweet is “trying out twitter?” Twitter: The Basics If you’re trying it out, start out small. Add the people you know. That was like ten or so people for me. Then, add the blogs you love (notice the LOVE - not just casually read or have in your favorite RSS reader). They may not follow you back, but people will get that, at least, when you have 30 people you’re following and only 10 follow back.e Now, test out twitter. Tweet a bit. It doesn’t have to be relevant or interesting. Have you read my tweets? I bitch, I whine, I moan, I question, I ask, I inform. I’m all over the map. It’s a total mind dump. Why people follow me at all is a mystery - at least to me. Twitter: Slightly more advanced. So you’ve tweeted for a little while. You’ve picked out your favorite clients - maybe TweetDeck or its groups, or maybe Twhirl for its integration with friendfeed. That’s why I tend to use the two. My cell phone doesn’t support twitter, so I don’t bother with mobile clients (for now). So - you’re following people. Maybe a few people (that aren’t spammers) are following you. What now? Research, baby! I suggest using Twellow aka TwellowPages to find tweeters that are interested in similar topics as yourself. Maybe using Twitter’s Search (integrated from Summize) to find key words you like. I’ve done searches on mootools, analytics, metrics, social media, and a few others as they are all topics that interest me. I haven’t ruled out others, and I usually re-run the query. Keep an eye on your ratio of followers to following. This makes you look like a spammer if you’re following, say, a 1,000 plus people and only a hand-full are following you back (spammers get lucky if the users are utilizing TweetLater.com - a tweet scheduler/auto follower. I use it to automatically thank followers. It’s one step less I need to do to thank people for being interested enough to follow my dumbass. It gets interesting when other peple use it so it becomes a two-step loop of “thanks for following!” “thanks for following!” It’s possible that you really dig a thousand people on twitter - you really want to read those tweets! But it just makes you look bad. Please refrain. Slowly add a few dozen daily so people aren’t freaked out by your spam-like addiction (seriously, I’m almost to 2,500 tweets in a short time - imagine me times one thousand). Think before you act. Contribute. Response. Ask. Blog. I know, this Twitter stuff is pretty basic. But that’s kind of the point - twitter is pretty basic. Don’t make it harder or more complex than it needs to be! Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

So Mark @ Mashable wrote about YouTube updating their community guidelines against Hate speech. He points out the obvious - people on the internet are retarded and this change means they are censoring us all, and we are fucked because all censorship is evil, and they have won because they can’t say their evil words online. Freedom of speech is absolute. If we can’t beat them without silencing their message, we obviously aren’t being convincing enough to those they are converting. Fight them with our own free speech and expression.

Overall - it’s a good read. YouTube doing a political nod (gee, just like Google did for China, and then did with Law Enforcement Agencies). My only real issue with the article is the wrap-up: We Need to be Smart About This As Uncle Ben used to say, with great power comes great responsibility… If we want to keep it safe from the grubby paws of governmental intervention, companies like Google must implement and enforce standards of policing the community.  Otherwise, the government will do that for us, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we do not want that.

Google isn’t the little shop down the street. They’re a huge-ass corporation. If MSN was doing this people would be calling for Bill Gates head. If Steve Jobs did it, people would make shiny new logos promoting how innovative and forward thinking he’s being. Instead, YouTube (which was purchased by Google) is taking it into their own hands. This shows the error of their “Do No Evil” slogan - nothing is really black and white. They can do something that a lot of people can consider evil - collecting user data, censoring hate speech, censoring anti-hate speech. I do not welcome our new Internet Overlords. Benjamin Franklin once said, They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

We continue to do so, and turn a blind eye to it. We say it’s for the best. It’s better this way. Think of the children. To me, this just shows how freaking worthless our rights are becoming. Services talk about how they’re for everything, but what’s going to happen in the future? For a citizen to express their discontentment, they’ll have to make a video, encrypt it, send it to a friend over seas to upload it to a “video sharing site” hosted on a derilect oil tanker in international waters that’s under siege by the U.S. Government for posting a video of someone saying “The Bill of Rights is an illusion.” So what - how did I get all of this off a little YouTube censorship? Because Google was supposed to be that Little Big company. They’re supposed to be those guys that got big being good, making Microsoft look foolish for ever putting DRM on your computer. Instead they’re slowly transforming into “will this be good for the company?” type double-speak they can throw around in marketing and PR to make themselves look good. How long until Google starts telling you what to write on your blog? “You said not nice things about Google, so we’re giving you a PR of 1, unless you delete those articles. By the way, we bought the rights to your domain, so when it expires, it’s ours unless you comply.” Those who have the power, make the rules. Those that get the information can make their power. I know, I know, a bit paranoidal-freakish, but hey, political season stupidity always riles me up. Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

As a web developer, I get the wonderful job of constantly improving myself and my coding. I research, I test, I experiment, and I try to come up with consistent methods that, in my opinion, are a best practice in my work, and can be shown to other people to help them improve their skills. That being said, sometimes you are so damn busy you seldom have the time you’d like to properly coach (and be coached). Personally, I love constructive criticism. I really, really, really, do. It’s an excellent way to accurately better yourself - someone else critiques you. It’s even better when the person is someone you admire and respect - because then you’re more likely to take it to heart. I know I’ve written bad code in the past (haven’t we all at some point?) and I know sometimes I’ll work on a bit of code and see a way to better myself, or improve upon others work (as I often do with mootools scripts, and jquery/javascript conversions). But I don’t just lock it away. I post on forums and groups. I send out emails to friends and colleagues. I ask for feedback, and I take feedback even when I don’t ask for it. Because I have a desire to better myself. Because I recognize I am not perfect, and I can improve. I could get all zen on you and go into a personal rant, but that’ll have to hold off for another day. The point is - especially as a web developer in this new media age - you need to get criticism, give criticism, and improve your coding abilities. You can specialize - front-end, back-end, ATG, CSS, XHTML, WTF-Kung-Fu-BBQ, RoR, etc. etc. and so on and so on… but… …unless you work on improving yourself you’ll always end up at the bottom rung. Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana

It seems today everyone has a blog, and war over what software is better. Everyone and their brother’s mother has an opinion and which is best, but that’s another post altogether (for the record, I’ve used LiveJournal and currently utilize WordPress, and love it). Right now, I want to briefly discuss e-commerce shopping cart software. My most recent experience has been SquirrelCart. Squirrelcart PHP Shopping Cart software is a fully customizable, robust php shopping cart, designed with the advanced developer and web novice in mind. That’s a mouth full. Now, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t using the latest and greatest. Nor was I using untouched code, so I can’t fully comment on the software or the quality of its code - but I can comment on the quality of the prior developer, and the usefulness of subversion content repositories for any business. When I entered the game for Client X, it was a lot of little tweaks here and there. It was fixing up code and optimization. Simple tasks, until I started looking at the code (and by all means I can’t take the credit, I work with some bad-ass developers that I get to bounce ideas off of). The Good: They commented the hell out of the code! TONS of comments. Personalization’s well labeled. Identifiers all over the place.  The Bad: Only bad thing about the comments - he listed the changes made to files, but they were meaningless. “Changed C for Y to do Z” is useless if I can’t see what was changed or for what. That’s where a good SVN comes in. A lot of bad code. Bad math. Functions being called and executed that did nothing or returned nothing of value. Recursion. A TON of edits to account for bugs. A lot of ‘hacks’ that were seemingly done because the previous developer didn’t know why he needed them. The Ugly: A ton of the hacks put in place were fixed in subsequent upgrades of SquirrelCart - security considerations, optimizations, compatibilities - except now I was no longer working with solid software. I was working with second-hand code, customized and tweaked, so an upgrade could totally break the site. The Bonus: SquirrelCart’s support and staff are bad-ass. I still think it’s a one-man shop - but the documentation is well-done and every e-mail and question was quickly answered (accurately & politely). That makes it a winner, and I’ve considered sending some business their way Magento - E-Commerce Platform for Growth …and it’s open source! Magento E-commerce Software was mentioned to me by Toby one day. As I haven’t developed on it (yet) I can’t call it any real pros and cons as I did with working on second-hand code above. The Good: Open source! Excellent blog with useful tidbits. Constantly trying to keep its community “in the know” and it shows. Their code seems to be structured where it’s easier to add on to the package, instead of editing core files- something I encountered in other projects. Extend your platform, don’t override it, that way you can upgrade with ease! The Bad: Open source scares people. People feel like if it’s open, it’s more vulnerable (because hackers can get to the core code, they can more easily exploit it - which is true of bad code - from what I’ve seen so far, Magento is lacking in the “been hacked” area). They also feel like if they get it for free it’s just not as powerful as paid software. The Bonus: Open source! They’re on Twitter! And you all know how much people whine and complain on there - so it’s a good sign they’re monitoring word on their stuff (and when you’ve got an open-source project that relies on people paying you for support rather than your software, word is everything!) All in all, I’m hoping to create a site utilizing Magento - but as usual, side projects often get thrown aside for school work and paid work, so a future of an affair with Magento may be a ways off for now :-/ Copyright © 2008 iKeif - tech and social media geek, mootools fan, and a ton of links. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal@ikeif.net so we can take legal action immediately.Plugin by Taragana