Tag Archives: Open Source

4 Great Books for Increasing Revenue From Your Website

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Right now I am reading two books on the benefits of collective intelligence, and have just finished two others with focus on optimizing your website technically, in conversion rates, through usability and performance.

All these books are of interest to people who takes a scientific approach to developing and tuning the website he/she is running.

High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders

Steve Souders covers all the different sections from YSlow on how to speed up your website. He shows that you will get most effect from putting your efforts into perfomance tune the frontend before working on backend tuning. I found this book really worth reading as it is spot on on every issue, and very focused on describing gains and implementation details for each and every single section of performance tuning on the frontend. I really recommend this book because I feel that for a serious website owner this book will pay itself in a couple of weeks with more generated sales and less used bandwidth.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Website Optimization by Andrew B. King

Andrew B. King also focus on optimization and tuning of your website, but the focus is on SEO, PPC-campaigns and Conversion Rate Optimization. He also tries to write some chapters on performance tuning, but when it comes to frontend performance tuning I recommend Steve Souders book instead. This book is really good for people who would like to learn more about optimizing PPC-campaigns and start tracking and incread conversion rates. I recommend this book for those chapters, which are really good and have help me increase incomes on the websites I have PPC-campaigns for.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran

Toby Segaran guides us in building smarter web applications based on Collective Intelligence. The book mixes theory and practice and shows how “easy” it is to actually create applications with community based product recommendation system and other intelligent solutions. I found this book interesting as a starting point on how to technically implement some of the web 2.0 features users have become used to use online.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Wikinomics is the book I have just started reading and it focus on how the community trend will change the enterprises. The focus is on how the masses create something of big value through collaboration. An interesting thing of course is the fact that a lot of people interact in larger communities building a greater value (Wikipedia, Youtube, Linux etc, etc) without getting paid, still the quality of the outcome often exceeds the alternatives built traditionally with labour and investment banks.

Buy this book on Amazon.com

Some Web Development Links for You

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Not a big update. 

John Resig is writing a new selector engine, sizzle, interesting

I wonder when John have the time to write code, write books, write documentation, write for his blog AND work for Mozilla. He is one productive client side coding entrepreneur. Sizzle is Work In Progress, but John claims it is 4 times faster than the jQuery Selector Engine.

YUI has a new Interaction Pattern in their library

I do not know how many times I have been part of discussions about how to implement a sign in procedure the best way. This new pattern from YUI tries to describe the characteristics of the problem. I really like Yahoo’s initiative with YUI trying to help designers and likes from revinventing the wheel time after time.

Parallax scrolling made easy with JavaScript

10 years ago something, we believed DHTML and JavaScript where the solution to everything, and there are solutions I am proud of from that time, and solutions I wouldnt mention even under torture. These days all client side stuff is focused on availability, usability and other non-relevant bilities ;-) . Where is all the cool stuff? jParallax is cool, and from a first point of view, somewhat useless, but hey, keep em coming.

Blueprint CSS 

I hate CSS. No I like separation of content, design and behaviour. But lets be honest, CSS is repetetive and often you find yourself chasing browser bugs hitting CTRL+S, ALT-TAB, CTRL-R, ALT-TAB …. That is why I believe we must minimize the rows of CSS we are actually writing, just as we try to do that with JavaScript using libraries such as jQuery, Prototype or Mootools. Blueprint CSS is interesting, I am thinking of implementing it into my mindset as the default CSS-library together with jQuery for JavaScript and Smarty for templating.

YAML (Yet Another Multicolumn Layout)

This one looks interesting as well, but the only reason I list this is because the name is the same as the configuration language YAML I will talk about below. 

YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language)

Before I have used XML for configuration, moving more and more over to JSON, because of the benefits parsing and using it. But YAML is what I have started using for some types of configuration, because of its easiness to read, write and share. Look into it. I love it for configuring navigations.

 

DOMAssistant 2.7 released with unicode support

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Robert Nyman announced that DOMAssistant 2.7 was released today. They have some good competiton from jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Ext and all the others. Interesting to see that DOMAssistant is the first library to actually take things like Unicode-support seriously. Of course localisation and full unicode support will be added to jQuery and Prototype in some way, either as plugins or in the core. I would like to see developers who actually used DOMAssistant in a live project to share their thoughts on it. Why should someone switch from jQuery?

There is a strong team that works on DOMAssistant, maybe it would have been better to actually add these efforts into a library that has more users in order to build a “standard” library.

In order to choose the correct library for your front end architecture it is crucial that you take aspects such as traffic, security, maintenance and competence into account.

10 reasons to choose jquery

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I have been thinking a lot lately about why some open source projects gain momentum and some, though the quality is very good, do not.

jQuery is a typical example of a open source project that has gained enormous momentum the last year. It started out as a good idea, merged from other good ideas in other similar projects. Now, hundreds of developers, architects, designers and other web professionals helps the project, making it bigger, better and faster.

I tried to understand why jQuery achieved this kind of momentum the last year. I put down a list for myself trying to pinpoint the things that forms a good open source project.

10 reasons why jQuery will be the de-facto JavaScript library late 2007

  1. John Resig

    I believe that in order for an open source project to succeed it is crucial to have a front figure that is focused, talented and driven. John is all that. John is a big factor in jQuerys success.

  2. Marketing

    For an open source project to gain momentum, it has to draw attention to the product. This is crucial since attention makes interest bigger and bigger interest makes more intelligent people wanting to share their knowledge, thoughts and help in the future roadmap of the project. jQuery has really been good the last 4-6 months within this area.

  3. Community

    From the beginning it has been easy to get answers from other users of jQuery. jQuery do not have a forum, and thats a good thing in my opinion. Forum tends to create an elite and that makes user with less cred or knowledge more likely to not join the discussion. jQuerys main discussion is done on the discussion e-mail list together with the wiki. And the jQuery-community is a friendly community, no question is left unanswered. There is also a development list for project discussions.

  4. Architecture

    jQuerys architecture has evolved. It is easy for developers to get into the architecture and start developing plugins and add-ons to jquery. The architecture has evolved since its early releases. Add-ons and plugins must use the correct (according to coding-standards) namespace (jQuery), in order to attach to the architecture. I believe that the current architecture will benefit the evolution of the jQuery library.

  5. Library

    jQuery is a library, not a framework. Framework decides everything for you, libraries exposes solutions to you, but doesnt say anything about your potential implementation of the problem. Libraries gets more users in the developer community.

  6. Documentation

    jQuery has a great set of documentation. You have the wiki, the jquery e-mail list and the jquery developer e-mail list. Above that, you have a community that is focused on showing the rest of the world the power and potential of the library, it doesnt get any better than that.

  7. Configuration Management

    The releases of jQuery is very well communicated in the blog, community and e-mail-lists. Minor version updates is minor version updates and major updates is major updates. As a site-owner you do not have to worry that jquery 1.8 is totally different to 1.9. John takes good care of the users he has.

  8. Team

    The users developing jQuery are a group of people enjoying what they are doing, and they are good at what they are doing. I know a couple of guys in the team, and I have 100% confidence in them doing the right thing.

  9. Joint Ventures

    The jQuery inner circle (John, Rey ++) connects to the correct people, maing the library even stronger. Drupal, Jack Slocum and other software developers big in the open source community.

  10. Focus

    John Resig has not lost focus. I think it is important to see where the open source project you are promoting is aiming. John has had a great focus for jquery, it is a JavaScript library focusing at making it easier for developers and designers creating DOM-scripts that creates a greater and richer experience to the end-user.

Choosing the correct JavaScript Library is one of the important thing that has to be taken into account when building your front end architecture. Choosing jQuery is from our point of view, the future friendly way to go.