The Cloud

Just about anything these days that aims to demystify the misunderstandings of ambiguous internet terminology almost always starts with a wikipedia definition. So, who am I to go against the grain?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

- Wikipedia

So, what does it actually mean, and why You should care?

We are all familiar that the evolutionary rate of electronics and computers is about 6 months (give or take). Meaning just about every six months, that brand new computer you bought is loosing value and could possibly be obsolete. The life of the internet is even faster, new technology emerges on a daily basis. What this means is that your business needs to stay with the time. We are in the digital revolution and life is only going to become more connected.

With cloud computing, the days of hardware upgrades, software installation, and software updates are gone. The software to run your business could be built in a matter of weeks and you only need to open a web browser to access it. Best of all, its available on your work computer, home computer, your iPhone or Droid, and even on your iPad. No installation needed, no configuration, no testing, etc. It’s always available, where ever you are.

With all the connectivity and availability, one might be motivated to ask, “Is the Cloud secure?”

This would be a very relevant question to ask, because after all… your business information is stored in a database on multiple servers somewhere. Is it possible that that information could be accessed without your knowledge? Absolutely. I’m sorry to say it, but there is no such thing as absolute security. If its on a network, it could theoretically be hacked. Even government servers have been hacked. However, this is not to say your information is not secure. Because it very well is. For everyday internet operations, your business information is probably about 99% secure. Most of the ‘major’ hacker associations likely do not care about the information you have.

To conclude this article, cloud computing brings your business to new levels of connectivity, allowing for greater potential and lower overhead costs. Is it risky, well, yea. Everything on the internet is risky. But I wouldn’t let that dissuade you from pushing forward. As long as the best practices are followed, such as not giving out your username and password, you’ll be safe.

Your website should earn

If your spending a bunch of your budget on professional web development services, your website should do it’s job.

What is it’s job? It’s different for every business, but it usually boils down to getting you more clients. More clients = more revenue. And more revenue leads to a much better ROI for your web presence.

Your website needs to be a profit center…

Now, let’s take a step back for a moment. Just because your hired a web developer doesn’t exactly mean your site is going to work for you out of the box. It does require specific routine steps on your part as the business owner.

Think of your website as the hub of your web presence. Every thing from lead generation, social media strategy, SEO campaign, email marketing, ppc, and whatever else your using all lead here. Your website should be the Times Square of your web presence.

To get a better advantage and move in the right direction, you need to get a better understanding of a few things first. You may know all of this already, but that’s ok. Sometimes, you may just need to see things from a separate angle to get a different understanding.

You have to attract attention to your website.

The more people you have visiting your site, the more chances of lead generation. Obviously this sounds incredibly simple. And it is, but with a catch. If your site looks like it was designed more than 4 years ago, it’s likely already been far surpassed in the technology of the internet. Make sure you have a good design. And by good design, that means something you will like and will attract visitors. Without getting too off topic, your site should a) Look good, b) be functionally easy to use and understand, & c) be up to date.

Provide an incentive for your visitor’s loyalty. Start a blog!

If you start regularly educating your visitors with good information. You can quickly be seen as an expert in your field, increasing the chances that a visitor will come to you for service because you have the answers. Blogs create dynamic content on your site, allowing new, relevant information to be available much easier. These days the word blog can seem overused, almost ignored when mentioned. But, if you provide quality content – you can build a following.

A properly developed site these days (at the time of writing it is the last quarter of 2011) should be built into some type of Content Management System – or CMS, simply makes it easier & more efficient to update the data on your site.

Wikipedia has a real complicated definition of what a CMS is, but all you need to know is this – They are simple to operate and most importantly, You should have one. This topic goes beyond the scope of this article, however you can read an upcoming article.

The bottom line is this. Look at your website as an investment. With time and appropriately spent funding you should see additional gains for your business.

Back to where I started… I created my new Ubuntu setup with a default LAMP stack. But I wanted to add this blog for several reasons. The wordpress install went smooth as ever, however once I changed the permalinks, the posts and pages defaulted to a 404 error. And thus I was stuck. The .htaccess file was properly setup and all file permissions were correct, but still couldn’t figure it out.

Google turned up with many responses to the exact same problem which all seemed to be related to mod_rewrite not being enabled in apache. The response was mostly to run this command:

a2enmod rewrite

However, in my situation the module rewrite was already enabled. So this did not solve my problem.

So it dawned on me… In my VirtualHost setup was the problem. You might need to check your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file for this.

<Directory />
 Options FollowSymLinks
 AllowOverride None
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
</Directory>

There’s the culprit: AllowOverride None – change this to:

AllowOverride All

There are two locations to change this, so make sure you modify both. That’s it, it should work afterwards.

If it doesn't make sense, or it's not spelled correct... change it!

Let me begin by saying this is not a How To post on creating an HTML page from a PSD. There are plenty of other really good sources and tutorials out there. This is simply a best practices guideline that I have been wanting to put together for some time now. In my day to day work, I often have to outsource certain jobs like PSD to HTML to contractors. It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, but more like, I shouldn’t have to do it. I focus more on writing heavy PHP framework based applications with database integration. So, needless to say my time is better spent programing rather than slicing a psd file. So if your a freelancer, contractor, just starting out, or whatever and you find yourself converting PSD’s to HTML… PLEASE USE THIS GUIDELINE!

There is nothing worse than handing a job off to someone, only to get it back and have to decipher it. My job is to take the newly created HTML page and make it dynamic, work it into my framework so that it is now a pseudo life form (in the interwebs speaking of course). I shouldn’t have to re-write or significantly modify this code, it defeats the purpose of delegating it in the first place. Some modification is understandable, almost necessary. But some things, should be looked at with a broader eye or sifted through with a finer tooth comb. We’ll go in no particular order…

1. Make Sure All Classes and ID names make sense.
   

   If it doesn't make sense, or it's not spelled correct... change it!

   This might seem like a no brainer to some, but it happens way to often when I hire a new contractor.
   Don’t use tag names such as “block-75″, “layer56″, etc. This doesn’t help someone reading the code attempting to make an update. The tags should be descriptive, they should tell whoever is looking at the code exactly what element it is they are looking at. Something descriptive can be as easy as “sidebar”, “footer”, “header-navigation”, “right-panel”, “content”, etc.
   And, here is the biggest pet peeve of it all… by all means, please, and I mean pretty please Spell The Words Correctly! There is nothing more frustrating that working with code that has spelling errors in it. Even if the misspellings are consistent, and the site throws no errors… it’s just difficult to read. Properly written code should require very few comments, because it can be read and understood easily.

2. Indent your code for clarity.
   There is nothing more annoying than code that is not indented. It makes it difficult to read. Take a look at the following code:
   

   The difference between the two is measurable by the extra amount of time spent attempting to figure it out

   Clarity in your code can literally save another developer (and yourself) a lot of time when it comes to debugging, modifying, or updating the code. Keep it neat, and formatted. Each containing element’s children should be indented by 1 tab, thus showing that it is essentially contained ‘inside’ of that element. The next point can be incorporated with this, but it has its own importance.

3. Label your closing tags…
   If you have 985 lines of code on a single page, that is a lot of code to read. If you open the tag div id="container"> on line 5, but don’t close that <div> tag until line 974, that closing tag can get lost and deleted by mistake if your not careful. Instead, make it easy to understand what each closing tag is by adding a comment to the end of the tag. For example, your closing tag for the <div id="container"> should look something like this: </div><!– EOF #container –>. The EOF simply stands for ‘End of’ and you don’t have to use it, but I’d recommend it. The next part is the actual tag identification a # for id, and a .(period) for classes, followed by the name. Just as you would for a css declaration.
4. Create a basic template system, it’ll keep things consistent.
   Short of writing an entire tutorial on creating a basic template, just understand that taking advantage of 1 very simple PHP function, you can write 1 header file that has the static content of your website, such as the navigation. This way, if your navigation is complicated and has over 5 links to other areas of the site, you only have to update 1 file to make a change as opposed to 5+ files. Modifying 1 page leaves less room for error, and cuts your time down to a fraction of what it would have taken you. This also applies to the footer.
   Take the navigation section of your html page and cut/paste it into a blank page. Save this page as header.php and don’t worry if you know nothing about php, because you won’t have to. In the original file you cut the code out of, go ahead and rename the extension to .php. This will allow us to take advantage of the include_once();function. In the area where you cut the code out of add this code:

   <?php include_once('path/to/header.php'); ?>
   

   Make sure what goes inside the singe quotes is the filepath to the header.php page. And when the browser parses the site, it’ll render the page as though that code were still there.