pelago

Programmableweb.com year end summary and 2007 predictions:

2006 Year End Mashup Stats
Top 5 Mashup Questions for 2007

Google Trends is another voyeuristic tool to see what others are searching for. I decided to check a few key words in our industry. Here are the results:

Web Dev

Web Design

Ecommerce

Web Applications

Summary: A whole lot of over seas action…

Now that we’ve launched Intervals into beta — and are only weeks away from going live — there is only one thing left to do; order fleece vests with our logo on them.

Last week I attended a training session by Adaptive Path on user experience design and two nuggets stood out:

1. Adaptive Path has formulated a very powerful tool for explaining the components needed to build a successful web team.

» The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

This wasn’t the main point of their training, but I found it extremely valuable. We are a web only shop and sometimes our clients don’t fully appreciate what all that entails and what kind of expertise we bring to the table. The web is a multi-disciplinary animal and the 9 Pillars does a powerful job of showing the pieces. It’s also a great tool to think about your own career development and what may be missing from your team.

2. It’s great getting together with peers in the Web Development industry.

It’s rare that professionals from small and big companies, generalists and specialists, get together and talk shop. Our industry needs to make more efforts for collaboration and discussion. Maybe we should host an event in Santa Barbara?

-Michael

There are a healthy number of link checkers out there, but this free guy is pretty good. It also gives a nice summary report about the number of urls, etc. et al

Download Xenu’s Link Sleuth™ here



-Michael

On the heels of Ruby on Rails comes an array of MVC frameworks developed in PHP. WASP, Symfony, and Prado all look promising. The real challenge with any PHP framework is going to be building the scaffolding automation onto a proven MVC framework.

Symfony seems to be the most robust of these, but perhaps too complex for most basic web apps. Built around Mojavi, it is a fully robust framework. It’s main challenge will be in providing an easy to use scaffolding functionality that allows the developer to easily customize the resulting code.

WASP and Prado both are young and are developing the scaffolding alongside the core framework code. They could both evolve into strong frameworks.

Naturally, we at Pelago have found that there is no one-size-fits all framework. In the process of rolling our own framework, we’ve adapted the features we need from a variety of pre-existing frameworks. My guess is this will be the case for most web development shops building an app that goes beyond the basic app. I’m not saying that basic apps are bad, but i’m noticing a niche developing in the web app world. There are apps that do too much, which this new framework movement is rebelling against, and there are apps that do too little, which is all too often the aim of these new frameworks.

The success of these new frameworks will depend on providing a seamless setup experience for the basic web developer, while also allowing the more advanced web developer to customize and tweak the code to their needs.

Has this ever happened to you: You’ve ordered some new gee wiz gadget from an online store and find your self obsessively checking the UPS package tracking to see where your gee wiz gadget currently is? Ever wish you could see it on a map?

Take one look at poorly written code and you’ll see just one influence of art in computer programming. Strong visual skills are important for writing good code. On the flip side, understanding the inner workings of your medium will make you a better artist. It is important for a web designer to understand how a web site is built, so they can take advantage and push the limitations of the pixel. More on this from John Littler…

>> I regularly follow the Joel on Software blog and this manifesto on the best people and the best working conditions yielding the best software is definitely worth a read.

- Michael

“By Joel Spolsky
Monday, July 25, 2005

In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company:

The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.

For the last five years I’ve been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September, 2000 can be summarized in four steps:

Best working conditions >> Best Programmers >> Best Software >> Profit”

“Ever look at a product on a website and wonder if you could find it cheaper elsewhere? This script adds links & prices from other sites (Amazon, Buy, BN, Powell, Half) to the current book site you are at!”