tijs.org

Yahoo! posted some examples of how businesses are using their S3 storage servers and i must say i’m very impressed at their little list. I was enthusiastic when they first opened the service to the public and even started work on a little wordpress storage plugin (which i never finished) but i didn’t know the service was already as widely used as it seems to be. It’s great to see a service that is equally useful for little web startups, allowing them to grow, and Microsoft at the same time. This also proves there is a real market for commercial API based services as long as they are affordable and can scale.

Vers online op de Nederlandse Techcrunch, BlueAce: Startups zonder bubbels, mijn welgemeende advies voor mensen die erover denken een internet startup te beginnen, developers die (te) vaak de zin en onzin van web 2.0 buzzwords moeten uitleggen, en verder eigenlijk iedereen die geen genoeg kan krijgen van hippe afkortingen.

The fine(est) Javascript toolkit Dojo was just updated to release-0.3.0, clicky the link for the release builds. This release is a great improvement, from mundane bug fixes and general code cleanup to the wild and wacky new options like client side file storage. Watch the Dojo Toolkit homepage for the offical writeup.

Ismael Ghalimi has compiled a list of web based productivity software with which you could potentially bring your whole office software suite to the web; Office 2.0 Database.

Of this list i actively use DabbleDB (CRM and list manager), Linkedin (contacts) and (as soon as they fix some issues) Blinksale (invoicing) for my own business. And Gmail (webmail), Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Pixoh (photo editing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Wordpress (blogging) personally.

Digg PHP’s Scalability and Performance - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog:

Several weeks ago there was a notable bit of controversy over some comments made by James Gosling, father of the Java programming language. He has since addressed the flame war that erupted, but the whole ordeal got me thinking seriously about PHP and its scalability and performance abilities compared to Java. I knew that several hugely popular Web 2.0 applications were written in scripting languages like PHP, so I contacted Owen Byrne - Senior Software Engineer at digg.com to learn how he addressed any problems they encountered during their meteoric growth. This article addresses the all-to-common false assumptions about the cost of scalability and performance in PHP applications.

Sinds enige tijd heeft Plazes een nieuwe en erg verbeterde launcher uitgebracht. Het eerste wat mij opviel was dat deze versie ook werkt door de office firewall van mijn huidige klant maar er is heel veel ander moois te melden. Plazer (de nieuwe naam van de launcher) ondersteunt nu het editen van je locatie binnen het programma zelf. Je kan zoeken naar bepaalde locaties in de buurt; b.v. alle lokaties met gratis wifi binnen een straal van 1 km (handig!) en het programma heeft gewoon een betere vormgeving gekregen.

I just finished a largish web project with multiple developers and we thought it would be a good idea to use SVN for our central repository. I guess it was had we planned the use of a versioning system a little better. We didn’t so eventually we ended up just FTPing stuff to a test server. Web projects have a few properties that make them hard to version control like dependencies on server configurations and databases. Furthermore it requires a lot of discipline from the people involved so plan carefully. If you are wondering if your project might need versioning read this primer first and then decide if you are up for it. Planning the process beforehand will save you lots of headaches.

Using SVN for Web Development.

I am looking at a beta of videobomb and it’s pretty neat. Actually it’s exactly like one of the startup ideas i had; a vote based internet video channel that you can subscribe to with RSS (dump the tv, get itunes!). You know what they say though; it isn’t a good idea if 20 other people haven’t thought of it too. I’m glad that somebody at least found the time to build it and i like that it’s built by the good people of the participatory culture foundation. Can’t blog about any of the details though, sorry.

retrievr is the image search tool designers (and me too!) dreamed of. It doesn’t work flawlessly yet but the results it returns now are fantastic already.

Yahoo! Search blog: Great Tastes That Go Great Together. Damn, the web app wars are really on aren’t they?

(image: Factoryjoe)