Author: Tom Wayson

For Human Eyes Only

Useful resources on what should be in your robots.txt file.

Here are some useful resources on what should be in your robots.txt file – which is one of those things I can never seem to find the time for…

Web-Based Productivity Tools

This post goes out to my friends Brian and Jeremy who endured a lengthy discussion with me last night about web-based productivity tools. It’s also a follow up to my earlier post on Web-Based Project Management Tools.

First thanks to Jeremy who told me about Google Notebook, which allows you to copy text and images from any web site to a “note” that lives on Google’s servers and is accessible via your Google login. So far I can see using this like an extension of my backpack account which doesn’t allow me to upload images.

It just so happens that after last night’s discussion, this morning I listened to a Hanselminutes podcast about micro-increases in productivity (like when it takes too long for the start menu to come up) and he mentioned the TiddlyWiki. This has been blowing my mind all day. Essentially it’s a wiki that you can run anywhere (at home, at the office, on your web site if you have one) because it’s just an HTML page with embeded javascript code that does all the work. I’ve been tiddlyWiking all day and comparing it side by side with my backpack pages to see which is better at managing my project data.

Some TiddlyPros:

Some TiddlyCons:

  • There’s no database – and you know javascript is going to bail while trying to save a file on your local machine at least once (esp. as those files get large).
  • It’s not a great tool for more than one user, or for publishing data publicly.
  • It’s best suited for tech savvy folks who can handle any issues that come when, say, you want to upgrade or extend your page and all of your data, business logic, and presentation settings are stored in a single file.

So far, I’m impressed though. The TiddlyWiki is truely a software revolution.

Ruby on Rails in 5min

Using an unbelievable RoR environment for PCs called InstantRails I had created my first RoR app in just a few minutes.

As the majority of posts on this blog will tell you, I’m a .Net guy, but some recent experiences working on web sites I created a while back in PHP have left me with some second thoughts about the universaility of ASP.Net as a web development tool. Couple that with the recent Hanselminutes podcast on RoR, and the fact that my PHP hosting company just started fully supporting RoR, I decided to write my very own RoR “Hello World”.

Turns out I didn’t even need to wait for my hosting company to come around, since there is an unbelievable environment for PCs called InstantRails, which installs not only Rails and Ruby, but MySQL and Apache! With the help of Matt Griffith’s screencast on how to install the environment I had created my first RoR app in just a few minutes. The only glitch I ran into was not having Ruby’s bin folder location in my PATH variable – do that before walking through the screencast and it should work like a charm.

Next you’ll want to check out these screencasts from 37Signals. They illustrate how to take advantage of RoR’s built-in features like ActiveRecords, scaffolding, and migrations – the reason for using RoR in the first place. They even have a screen cast on how to consume the Flikr API w/ Ajax.

All in all, I can’t believe how quickly I was able to get something up and running, especially considering how daunting the installation instructions from my hosting company were.

The Ultimate SEO Checklist

An excellent article on search engine optimization: The Ultimate SEO Checklist.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something I generally don’t worry about too much since most of my projects have been intranet-only, or someone else on the project worried about that “soft” marketing stuff. However, now I’m working on a site where I am that person (gulp).

That’s how I came to find this excellent article, The Ultimate SEO Checklist, on sitepoint. In addition to giving detailed advice on how to optimize your site for search engines, Shirley Kaiser makes a good point that your SEO strategy should be part of your design from the beginning because it impacts the site’s information architecture and technical implementation – not just the copy text.

Web-Based Project Management Tools

activeCollab vs. Basecamp and Backpack

I’ve been using Backpack from 37signals to keep both my personal and professional lives organized. Right now, my backpack is bursting at the seams as I’m pushing it to the limits of what it was intended to do, so I’ve been considering moving to 37signals‘s full-fledged project management tool, Basecamp. Then I found out my hosting company already provides the open source port of Basecamp, activeCollab for free.

I’ve been giving activeCollab a test drive, and all in all, I’d have to say it’s OK. I think they got the big stuff right: managing projects, clients, users, milestones, and lists is straightforward enough. What activeCollab is missing is the warm and fuzzy, ajaxy features that make 37Signals a hit with non-technical users (including my wife and mother-in-law). Since that set of users includes my clients, I won’t be switching over activeCollab yet.