Archive for the ‘Developing’ Category
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
The first thing I thought when I found out about the new Facebook Share button was: “Cool! I’m going to add it to my blog right away.”
The first thing I thought after I installed it was: “Why couldn’t they make the button height 15px like most of the other sharing buttons around???”
Yes, I was pretty annoyed by having buttons at the top of my blog posts with different heights, so I decided to try to modify the css of the button myself. Here’s the result:
.FBConnectButton {
height: 15px;
float: left;
background-position-y: -251px;
background-position-x: -1px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #1a356e;
}
.FBConnectButton_Text {
font-size: 8px ;
height: 9px;
}
.fb_share_count_inner {
height: 9px;
position: relative;
}
.fb_share_count .fb_share_count_right {
float: left;
}
Just copy and paste these few lines of code into your CSS file and your Facebook Share button should be the same size of your compact Tweetmeme button.
I may do more modifications in the future to improve the look of this reduced version, but for now this is usable enough for my blog.
Tags: CSS, Facebook, Facebook Connect, How to
Posted in Design, Developing | 1 Comment »
CSS 3: What is the fuss about
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Last night I gave a very basic presentation at the Design Miami Meetup about some of the new features offered by CSS 3. Here is the slide show:
If you want to learn more, you should look at these links:
And of course the most boring one
Tags: CSS 3, Meetup, Resources
Posted in Design, Developing | No Comments »
What can we learn from Tweetie 2?
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Last Friday, Atebits launched the new version of their popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2, which in just one day dominated the Top Paid and Top Grossing charts in the App Store. What can we learn from this?
Keep your interface clean and simple.
Tweetie 2’s interface is really clean and simple, almost as if Apple themself may have had a hand in designing it. Everything is easy to access and erroneous clicks are pretty rare.
Offer what users need, not everything.
For sure, Tweetie 2 doesn’t offer as many options as other clients. Twittelator, just to name one, offers a full array of integrations and functions, but this may only serve to confuse a new user.
Keep it open.
On the other hand, Tweetie 2 gives you the option of using whatever service you want for posting pictures and shortening URLs, which is great! Now I can use my own URL shortener, and I’m not forced to use Twittelator in order to use, in my opinion, the best picture service around: Pikchur. Actually, if you want to use Pikchur as well, here’s the API ending point you need to insert in Tweetie: http://api.pikchur.com/tweetie
Create good products and people will throw money at you.
Tweetie was a great product, but Tweetie 2 is even better. And when you create such great products, people won’t mind spending $3 for your application. Of course, that doesn’t come without work. You still need great PR, and you have to ensure that your product gets in front of the right eyes (like that of a Mashable or Techcrunch writer). I must say that this doesn’t happen too often; there are several great applications buried in the App Store, but the best ones hardly stay buried forever.
Tags: iPhone application, Tweetie, Twitter
Posted in Developing, Marketing, iPhone | 1 Comment »
Wordpress cheat sheet
Monday, September 28th, 2009
A while ago I thought about writing a simple cheat sheet for Wordpress, mainly because I find myself looking for the same template tags over and over again.
Few days ago I stumbled on a couple of very well done Wordpress cheat sheets that I’d like to share with you:
Liquidicity WordPress Help Sheet
Ekin Ertaç Wordpress Cheat Sheet
Tags: Cheat Sheet, Resources, Template, Theme, Wordpress
Posted in Developing | No Comments »
How to secure your Wordpress blog
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
A couple of days ago, I decided to add a small javascript in the footer of my blog and by accident I found out that there was a hidden div with hundreds of links. Obviously someone hacked into my blog, and added those links to increase their Page Rank at my expense.
After few minutes of panic and desperation, I decided it was time to start securing my blog (something I’ve honestly been overlooking for a long time). Luckily, there are a lot of cool plugins that can help with this, and I’d like to share them with you.
First of all, it’s important to have periodical backups of both your files and your Wordpress database. To accomplish this, you can use the very creatively named plugin called Wordpress Backup. It performs regular backups of your uploads (images included), current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and can also be e-mailed to a specified address.
To backup my Wordpress database I’m using WP DBManager, this plugin not only lets you backup, but it also allows you to optimize, repair, restore and delete your database, and manage your tables. This plugin, like the one previously mentioned, automatically schedules database backups and optimizations.
Now it’s time to check your blog for security vulnerabilities and take corrective actions. A very comprehensive tool is a plugin called WP Security Scan.
Here’s few things I learned from this experience:
- Always update your blog to the latest version as soon as possible. If the Wordpress folks found out about an exploit, be sure hackers did too.
- When you setup your database, change the prefix of your wordpress tables to something different than the default “wp_”
- Make sure your Wordpress version is hidden (some plugins, like Secure Wordpress), can do this for you.
- Check that your database errors are turned off (WP Security Scan will check that for you). If not, ask your hosting company to turn them off for you.
- Get rid of the Admin user. Just create a new one with admin privileges and use that to delete the Admin user.
- In the wp-config.php file of your blog there are three KEY phrases that can be changed. You won’t have to remember the phrases later, so make them long and complicated.
- Make sure you have granted the right permissions to your Wordpress folders (WP Security Scan will check that for you as well).
- If you’ve already been attacked, make sure you check for any suspicious files or scripts (in my case, there was a file called wp-atom2.php) that can be used as a backdoor, and change your passwords.
There are a lot more steps that could be taken, like protecting your admin area via .htaccess or using plugins like Login Lockdown to limit the number of login attempts by a particular IP adress.
Is your blog secure? Is there anything in particular that you have done to protect it from hackers?
Tags: Plugins, Security, Wordpress
Posted in Developing | 3 Comments »
What we learned from Tr.im’s (almost) surrender
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
There are several things that I never did like about the URL shortener business.
First of all, you never know how long these services will last. Tr.im’s surrender may lead to the If Tr.im kept their decision to shut down their service, we could have lost millions of links, unless some other company were to buy them out. You could try to use only extremely successful services like Bit.ly, but it will defeat its own purpose in the long run: Bit.ly is already using 5 characters after their URL, not making it that short anymore. If you go with less used services you might have shorter urls but you could end up using a service that, in few months, may be out of business.
On top of that, you are really wasting a lot of “link juice,” vital for ranking better on search engines. Even when you are linking to your own site, if you use these services, you are linking to them. And they can do whatever they want with that link. They can even decide to place your whole site into a frame, adding ugly ads at the top, or their own “toolbar,” like Digg did, without asking your permission; and there won’t be anything you can do about it.
The best solution to all these problems is to have your own shortener. You don’t need to be an expert developer to do it, you don’t even have to be a developer at all. There are several open source scripts and plugins to accomplish URL shortening. Here’s a short list of services I found:
- YOURLS – It’s probably my favorite and the one that will, very soon, power my own URL shortener. It supports custom keywords URLs, it has basic stats and an API. It also has its own Wordpress plugin, which can automatically shorten your posts and links.
- Shorty – This URL shortener had a nice-looking admin interface, where you can edit and delete your URLs. It offers simple stats as well.
- PHPurl – Super simple PHP & MySQL script, it offers the option of choosing a custom keyword.
- phurl – If you are thinking of offering your shortener to the public, this script features CAPTCHA and re-CAPTCHA, just in case you fear bots.
- TightURL – This script offers some public protection as well. It checks submitted and accepted URLs against spam databases to prevent abuse by the Bad People of the Internet.
Tags: Resources, Twitter, URL shortener
Posted in Developing | 4 Comments »
Integrating Facebook Connect in your iPhone app
Saturday, June 20th, 2009
For the June South Florida iPhone Meetup Ben Bloch, gave a very interesting presentation about the integration of Facebook Connect and iPhone applications.
I personally believe that the integration between iPhone apps and existing social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, could really play an important role in your marketing strategy for your applications. Some of my applications already let you post your scores on your Facebook wall and I’m planning to integrate Facebook Connect on almost all the remaining ones.
A special thanks to Mobuilt for sponsoring again our meetup.
Tags: Apple, Facebook Connect, iPhone application, Meetup
Posted in Developing, iPhone | 1 Comment »
How the iPhone 3G S will change the apps scenario
Monday, June 15th, 2009
Next friday the new iPhone 3G S will be available for sale and the iPhone OS 3.0 will be released. All this will have a huge impact on the iPhone applications’ market.
In-app purchases
This new feature will allow developers to keep making money even after selling an application and we’ll start seeing a lot of applications engineered to be expandable. Another (positive) effect is that it might “clean up” the iTunes store. Right now there are many applications that could be easily combined in a container application plus additional modules.
For my project Art for iPhone, in order to sell each individual artist, I had to release one application for each of them. Of course that made feel good the artist for having an application with their own name, but at the same time is much harder to promote the applications and to cross promote the artists.
In the iTunes store there are plenty of other examples like tourist guides or other applications that could work better if assembled in a single one. If I buy a tourist guide with the Italy module for it, next time I’ll have another trip I will most likely buy another module from the same application instead of going digging again between 50,000 applications to find another guide.
More power, less market
Yes, the new iPhone is an incredibly powerful portable gaming platform, and now software houses can start releasing games with even better graphics, but I don’t think they will go all the way with this. If they start releasing games that works only on the new iPhones they are cutting out a 40 millions devices market, and that would be plain stupid. So my guess is that they will wait until there will be more iPhone 3G S around, and that the iPod Touch will be updated.
Video support
A lot of application will have finally access to video recording. Right now the iPhone is the most used mobile device for uploading pictures to internet, also thank to a killer editing interface iMovie style.
I bet soon it will be also the most used device to upload videos. For sure there will be a massive number of updates from applications like Twitter clients, and that will make flourish a number of sites dedicated to short videos, space currently dominated by Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds.
GPS Navigation device
Thanks to the compass now the iPhone can finally be used as a full GPS Navigation device. this could be a big shift for all the GPS device companies out there as they will probably more software oriented than manufacturing hardware.
Do you think the iPhone 3G S will bring big changes to the mobile market? If so, how? Don’t be shy and leave a comment.
Tags: Apple, Mobile
Posted in Developing, Marketing, iPhone | 8 Comments »
SoFla iPhone Meetup: Eat Will Grow (I know it will)
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Last week (yes, I know, it took me a week to upload the videos, mea culpa), at the South Florida iPhone Meetup Group we had the pleasure to have Ben Hopkins present his iPhone game, Eat Will Grow (iTunes link).
Ben, who has been writing software for 14 years on a variety of platforms ranging from game consoles to desktop to mobile.
In his presentation, Ben also spill a couple of very good tips that I personally didn’t know, like places where to submit Apple related press releases or applications to check your daily rank.
I also had a chance to announce my next project, Get Apps Done, a no-frills job board where iPhone developers and people/companies who need iPhone applications developed can meet each other. If you in one of those two categories or you are just curious, please sign up at www.GetAppsDone.com to find out when we’ll go live or read our blog blog.getappsdone.com for more information.
If you are in South Florida and you are interested in iPhone developing (you don’t need to be a developer), don’t be shy and join us.
(more…)
Tags: Apple, iPhone application, Meetup
Posted in Developing | No Comments »
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