The anatomy of a perfect website
I’ve received this link by email : http://www.roimedia.co.za/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-website/ . It contains some interesting statistics and graphics on websites.
For example did you know that more then 85% of people use higher resolutions then 1024×768 ? In spite of this most of the websites have a resolution of 1024×768!
The browser statistics for example show us that Google Chrome is already second after IE as market share on the market.
For other statistics head over to the link above!
New TYPO3 Security Guide
The TYPO3 community released an new TYPO3 Security Guide! This is the most comprehensive security guide on TYPO3 ever released and its a must read for anyone working with TYPO3. And to quote something from the announcement which caught my attention:
Security is not a state that you can reach and stop worrying about. It is an ongoing process of constant improvement
So its not enough to read this guide and forget it. It must be in your mind all the time.
TYPO3 Usergroup Romania Meetup 2011–schedule
On the 3rd of December 2011, TYPO3 Usergroup Romania (sponsored by Arxia) organizes the second edition of the TYPO3 Usergroup Romania Meetup. The event aims to bring TYPO3 developers from Romania together for a day of presentations, talks, networking and open discussions about TYPO3 and related subjects.
The event features the first ever TYPO3 Certification event in Romania, a good opportunity for developers to get certified by an official TYPO3 examiner from the TYPO3 Association.
Schedule
Location: Hotel Royal Classic (Str. Liviu Rebreanu nr.39)
Date: Saturday 03 December 2011
Start: 09.00
09.00 – 09.10 Opening by Daniel Homorodean
09.10 – 09.50 TypoGento (Andreea Radu and Cornelia Iclanzan)
TypoGento is a service that connects TYPO3 to the Magento e-commerce applicaton
09.50 – 10.30 Apache Solr in TYPO3 (Ioana Cucuruzan)
This is the search engine you were looking for with special features such as faceted Search or Synonym Support, and incredibly fast response times of results within milliseconds.
The presentation is build around a working example of Apache Solr implemented within a Typo3 project.
10.30 – 11.10 Mobile Versions for TYPO3 websites (Calin Borz)
Implementing mobile versions for TYPO3 websites using TemplaVoila
11.10 – 11.40 Coffee break
11.40 – 12.20 Test Driven Development (Tiberiu Contiu)
TDD is a technique to approach software design bottom up along with zero regression. You write a test, you write the code to make it pass and then you refactor the code. The session shows an overview of TDD and talks about usefulness of implementing TDD as a standard in your team.
12.20 – 13.00 FLOW3 – reliable foundation for complex applications (Dan Homorodean and Horea Negru)
FLOW 3 responds to the need to have a full-stack PHP framework for creating complex applications that use advanced programming techniques and paradigms like Domain Driven Design, Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming. Fluid comes as a completion to this stack, being a powerful and extensible templating engine. The presentation describes the concepts and illustrates their implementation in FLOW3
13.00 – 13.40 – Introduction to Extbase programming (Bodor László)
Extbase offers a new way of building TYPO3 extensions for TYPO3 v4.x, a completely object oriented and a modern MVC approach that opens the path for the upcoming TYPO3 v.5 and FLOW3
13.40 – 14.30 – Open discussions
14.30 – 16.00 – Lunch break
16.00 – 18.00 TYPO3 Certification Exam
Those who didn’t register yet can still do it by sending an email to bodor [at] arxia [dot] com
We have a limited number of places left so we will give them away in order of receiving your registration emails
Hope to see you on saturday!
Please note!
The sessions will be held in romanian language.
Dude i’m creative!
I couldn’t resist sharing this Samsung Galaxy S II commercial. It’s epic!
TYPO3 Usergroup Romania–Meetup 2011
As you know, last year we had a great TYPO3 Usergroup Romania Meetup. The good news is that TYPO3 Usergroup Romania organizes the second of this kind of Meetups on the 3rd of December 2011 in Cluj Napoca, Romania. This event will be a good opportunity for presentations, discussions, exchange of ideas and networking among the members of the Romanian TYPO3 community.
Some of the presentations will be in Romanian, some of them will be in English. The full list of presentations will be announced at a later date and those interested in making a presentation are required to send an email to bodor@arxia.com until the evening of 23 November 2011.
This Meetup will be also the first time that a TYPO3 Certification event takes place in Romania. The Certification Exam will be held at the event location at 14.00 hours by the official certification team of the TYPO3 Association. For more information on how can you take the exam head over to the certification website.
Where ?
The meetup and the certification will be held at the conference hall of the Royal Classic Hotel (str. Liviu Rebreanu nr.39 – Cluj Napoca, Romania). The starting hour is set at 09.00 though it can still be modified if needed.
Want to participate ?
You can attend for free but you still need to send an email because the number of seats is limited!
To participate in this meetup please send an email to bodor@arxia.com If you want to take the certification exam then please head over to the certification website and register there for the certification.
For more information on this meetup you can contact me, and i will be glad to offer you more details on any question you might have.
My two cents on the new Google layouts
Lately Google started to change the layout of all its products to the so called Google+ layout. Actually its not a layout specially made for Google+ but rather it was the first product to use this new theme.
Well, i don’t like this new layout but it really didn’t bothered me too much either. This is until yesterday when Google Reader switched to this layout. And Google Reader looks awful with this theme. And not only it is uglier but its less usable.
For example its rather hard to distinguish between individual posts in the feeds, the options on the bottom of each post are also less visible (harder to find). There is too much white space everywhere, it is like the thing has no design at all.
I think if you put a few first grade school kids they do a better design. And the worst part is that they are feeding it to me and i have nothing to do but accept or change the product, which will i do shortly.
Actually i’m planning to switch from most of Google’s products to something else. Not because of the layout but also for other reasons. Soon i will write a post about the alternatives to all Google products and to many people’s surprise, there are quite a few good alternatives!
TYPO3 4.6 Release Party in Cluj Napoca
Some of you may already know that TYPO3 4.6 is being released today. This is quite a big event as this version comes with lots of new improvements and features. I won’t list now the features because they are available on the TYPO3 website. What i want to confirm is that yes, there is a release party also here in Cluj where i live and i intend to participate this evening.
I know its really last minute but, If someone lives near by and want to come then please sign up here.
Location: Bistro Viena
Time: 20.00 LOCAL TIME
Organizer: TYPO3 Usergroup Romania
Your content or Facebook’s content ?
Lately i have seen so much integration between Facebook and a large number of other sites that i’m starting to be annoyed by this fact. I don’t know about others but i will never comment on a website that has the Facebook commenting system.
From a website owner’s perspective, why would you want to use Facebook’s commenting system ? I personally think that its a bad practice for your business. Facebook owns all the comments on your website and it will do whatever it desires with them. You are not the owner of that content anymore, although it was generated on your website.
What about the photos you upload there ? The nice little baby pictures or the pictures from your last vacation that you put up so everyone can see them ? What happens with those if Facebook closes down ? Or decides that you must pay for their storage ? Or something else ?
I prefer to store my pictures in Picasa from Google where i pay an annual fee and i know how much space i have and the company i’m paying to store them is accountable to some extent.
Another aspect of the problem is that Facebook is not known to have a very stable API. I read complaints all the time from people who invested lots of time, energy and money in developing something with the Facebook API just to learn that Facebook changed its mind about that API and made modifications that will break your application. And there are the API’s that get discontinued for good without too much explanations.
Either way from their perspective its your fault that you used them and didn’t read their Platform Policies where it is explained what are YOUR responsibilities, that you have only obligations and they have none to you. They can change anything, anytime with 3 or 7 days notice and you must comply. You have no choice. Go ahead and read the Platform Policies and pay attention to the sentences written with CAPS LOCK ON (article 15, section 3)
Investing in a platform that is not yours is not a good strategy. Social networks come and go. Facebook is now on the wave. But how long it will last ? Does the name MySpace ring a bell ?
Eventually people will get bored with Facebook too. When they will have more friends then they can process and will get news from the 1001+ websites/brands they have liked or befriended they will not be able to follow everything and/or this will become a burden. And then Facebook will fade away and something new will come.
So could someone explain what’s up with this Facebook mania ?
FLOW3 beta1 released
FLOW3 the PHP framework that will be the basis for the new TYPO3 v5 got a major update today by the release of the first beta version. The FLOW3 team worked eight months on this release and from the announcement we can see that lot’s of things have changed. Especially important its the fact that this is not a backwards compatible release. They promise that from now on releases will be backwards compatible!
Other important changes include:
- a new proxy class building mechanism
- a new Doctrine2 based persistence layer
- improved command line support
- a new tutorial
- switch from DocBook to reStructured Text for the documentation\
Although the FLOW3 Team says that you could use FLOW3 for projects which have deadlines a couple of months ahead i would say that this FLOW3 release should be regarded as it is, namely a beta package, not ready for primetime use. It will be good for tinkering with it, testing stuff, getting things right and then when the final release will be available and we will have also some performance benchmarks, then we can think about using this in real life projects.
In order to download FLOW3 or read the full announcement click here
Why software is eating the world
An excellent article published in the Wall Street Journal, written by Marc Andressen who is co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz. He also co-founded Netscape, one of the first browser companies and now is in the board of HP.
The article points out a few key facts from what today the software industry became and what its role is in modern society. Education is also mentioned and i fully agree that this one is the key for every individual who is alive and will be born in this society. Without education you have no chance in today’s world.
At the end of the article Andressen says that “I know where I’m putting my money.” Well i also knew for a time now that software, software products and support for software is the place where future is.
An excerpt from the article:
Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.
On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.
and another one
Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There’s no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.
Gmail man :)
Microsoft fires another salvo in Google’s direction.
Although Google is doing this from the beginnings of Gmail, many didn’t realize this until now. Maybe because Gmail’s adoption wasn’t as big as it is now. Anyway, interesting times are ahead of us.
Is your extension compatible with TYPO3 4.6 ?
TYPO3 4.6 will be released this fall and this version comes with a few compatibility issues with older extensions. Every extension developer should check if his/her extension is compatible with this new major version and if not then there are a few months left to fix these issues.
But how you might ask. Well i’ve just discovered a nice intro tutorial on the TYPO3 Wiki about this. You can see it here. Beware that this is just the first article of the tutorial and probably there is more to come, so watch the wiki and the mailing lists.
Thank you again Servint!
Just last year i was thanking my hosting provider Servint for their great service and regular upgrades on their infrastructure. Upgrades that are greatly valued by us – the customers. Now its time for another round of great news from Servint. They have completed the largest VPS RAM, disk space and processing power upgrade in their history and thanks to that my VPS now has more RAM more disk space and more processing power then ever.
Last year i had an Essential VPS, now i’m on a Signature which means that i have 90 GB of storage, 1.5 TB monthly transfer, 2 GB guaranteed (4 GB burst) RAM. If you’re interested then you can consult the full product matrix here.
This upgrade means that my websites should load faster and/or i can host more websites. I was already contemplating on a few new websites and i think this upgrade comes just in the right time and gives me a push to go ahead and build them.
P.S.
If you are interested in hosting a website but you are not yet ready for renting a full VPS then let me know and maybe i find a little spot for your website on this upgraded VPS. If you have a non profit organization/cause or if you’re a person/organization from my hometown Covasna and you’re not building the next Youtube then i will host your website free of charge.
TYPO3 4.6 alpha3 released
So the newest alpha of TYPO3 4.6 has been released. Check out the features here and download it here
Oops, an error occured!
I’ve just upgraded the TYPO3 source on my website Ropedia.ro from 4.4.5 to 4.5.3 and after that a strange error appeared when trying to submit the registration form (made with sr_feuser_register 2.6.1). It was just saying:
Oops, an error occured!
Validation failed for : Ropedia.ro
These kind of error messages are quite annoying because they are not very descriptive about what the problem really is. So i started digging and it took only a few minutes to find out that this is a problem of TYPO3 4.5 and there is a workaround for this.
Actually you need to insert in typo3conf/localconf.php the following line:
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['MAIL']['substituteOldMailAPI'] = ’0′;
Or you can just access the Install Tool and uncheck the substituteOldMailAPI checkbox. After you’ve done any of these steps the sr_feuser_register extension should work again. Obviously this is a temporary workaround until either TYPO3 or sr_feuser_register gets patched to solve this problem.
There are reports that tt_products 2.6.x is having the same issue and it can be fixed the same way!