An in interview with O’Reilly, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson had an excellent response to the obligatory twitter question. To paraphrase, he says that the kind of person that users the A is B, B is C, therefore A is C logic that “Twitter runs on Rails, Twitter Can’t Scale, so Rails can’t scale” simply illustrates their shallow level of technical knowledge.
Why you should test your ad campaigns
Matt / July 29, 2008, 12:38 pm
I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
- Agree campaign budget
- Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
- Take a sack of money
- Move to top of building
- Shake money out of sack
- Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
- Agree budget
- Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
- Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
- Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
- Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
- Put this live
- Spend the other 95% of the budget
Font Conference
Tsam / July 23, 2008, 10:03 am
Funny to see fonts personified though I’m not sure if I agree with Comic Sans as superman…
The desktop, literally
Matt / July 22, 2008, 4:14 pm
“Layered Desktop,” by Gabriel Radic.
The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion.
For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder in a new Finder window, creating a cascade of windows that quickly became unmanageable? That was a literal interpretation of folders on your actual desktop. Fortunately, we now browse the contents of multiple folders within a single Finder window, an activity that doesn’t transfer to the stack of folders sitting next to me.
I found the wallpaper above really interesting: someone created a solution for organizing desktop icons which makes your computer screen look more like a desk, even though the design trend has been to move away from such literal interpretations. It’s not right or wrong—lots of people find it useful, judging by the comments—it’s a creative solution to a desktop organization problem.
Using Google as your address bar
Matt / July 17, 2008, 1:47 pm
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my mom do this. From ReadWriteWeb:
More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar - what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?
Amazon invests in Engine Yard to take Rails further into the cloud
Nathan / July 15, 2008, 9:35 am
Engine Yard has just closed a second round of funding for $15m, including contributions from Amazon, with the focus on increasing their hosting platform and community-driven open source projects. According to Ezra, “We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.” Some of the exciting developments coming out of Engine Yard these days are the merb framework, which is a leaner/quicker Ruby framework insipired by Rails and Rubinius, a pure Ruby implementation of the Ruby virtual machine which aims to solve some of the current performance issues with Ruby. Perhaps most interesting is the yet to be unveiled Vertebra project that has been described as “a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP”. Rails developers can sleep a bit easier knowing that EY has 80 employees and some of the smartest minds in the community cranking away on the remaining pain points in the Ruby platform (hosting, performance)
Flash to get better indexing in search engines
Caleb / July 1, 2008, 8:26 am
Adobe has finally publicly acknowledged their very important problem with SEO and Flash and has made an effort to make Flash content easier for search engines (specifically Yahoo! and Google) to index by collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!.
From the press release:
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
Read more in the press release
While I do see this as an great thing, I would still recommend developers use SWFAddress to ensure deep linking to your content. I can see how both search engines would be able to pick up the content properly, but it would surprise me if the indexing is able to tell a user where that content lives within the site. It will be interesting to see how the content is indexed.
Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, speaks about web marketing and social media
Jason / June 27, 2008, 10:10 am
Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, was a featured panelist discussing web marketing and social media for a Small Business Networking Event sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.
The Panel was moderated by Peter Shankman, and also featured Robert Hordt, Managing Editor of Crain’s New York Business and Charlotte Eichna, Executive Editor of Our Town and West Side Spirit, part of Manhattan Media.
The “tight collaboration” that created TimesPeople
Matt / June 25, 2008, 12:32 pm
Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:
TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.
From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)