Spacebug open source initiative

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IPWEditor - In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2.1 Released... IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing. Up until now IPWEditor did...

AutoSnippet - automatically generate HTML and javascript... Code snippets posted online are a great source of knowledge and simple way to share experience and to reuse code. As developers we always look to see if there is a 'code example' which we can modify...

Put Your Blog on The Map World's Blog Map Want to put your blog on the map? Ever wondered where does the blog your reading come from? Where are most Bloggers Located? How would a World Blog Map look like? Here is the first...

Ajax persistent Data Objects - AjaxDo 1.1 released! Release 1.1 adds a fully functional JAVA server-side implementation to the pre-existing PHP server-side implementation. Now, Ajaxdo, AJAX persistent Data Objects, enables applications can work in...

Type of Cloud-Based Offering

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 12-08-2010

Category : SAAS, web

The market is now buzzing with Clouds, it seems that everywhere you go in the hi-tech industry you see cloud application, cloud conferences and cloud offerings.

I was Asked by some friends – What you get out of this “cloud”?

In a high level, there are three types of cloud-based offering:

Software as a service (SaaS)

Sometimes referred to as “software on demand,” is software that is deployed over the internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers as a service on demand, through a subscription or a “pay-as-you-go” model.

Example of SAAS – Google apps, Microsoft BPOS

Platform as a service (PaaS)

The delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. PaaS offerings facilitate deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet.

Example of PAAS – Windows Azure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Delivers computer infrastructure, typically a platform virtualization environment as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The service is typically billed on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity. It is an evolution of virtual private server offerings.

Example of IAAS – Amazon EC2

Some of these offering could be implemented without cloud technologies. You could, for example, have a software-as-a-service hosted on a single computer in your garage, but in general these offerings are moving more and more to cloud-based infrastructure.

Ad Supported Open Source Site/Blogs – Poor Revenue Model

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 03-08-2010

Category : Open source, Opinion

If you are reading these lines, chances are you will not click on any of my ads.

In one of my previous articles, I have explored several revenue models for open source projects. I have promised to update on ad-supported revenue model as a way to make money from open source. In this article I report back on the relatively poor revenues you get out of this channel.

I have confirmed this fact with many open source bloggers and they all provide the same feedback – Software developers in general and open source developers even more so, are not interested in clicking on advertisement.

Spacebug, for example, is a dev-blog and has some open source projects hosted in it. Spacebug.com has moderate popularity – it gets about 60k unique visits a year. The revenues I see from it is about 100-200$ a year. It covers the expenses but is nothing to write home about.

These are some possible reasons why visitors to dev-blogs do not click ads:

Developers are not here to shop – they are not interested in anything other than free content provided in the site.
Developers are so accustomed to ad-supported websites the advertisement are transparent to them.
Developers use ad-blockers and do not get the ads served in the first place
Advertises and ad networks fail to deliver interesting content that fits the developer needs

I base these reasons on my behavior as a developer who visit dev-sites and from feedbacks from other open source bloggers

Hostmonster Sucks – Hostmonster Review and Warning

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 20-07-2010

Category : Reviews, Security, web, web hosting

After 4 years of suffering and apologising to my clients about hostmonster’s downtime, I am moving my sites out of there, and I am leaving Hostmonster for good. In this article I will explain why that is, and why you should stay away from Hostmonster.

This it a professional site, so I apologise for the language in the header, but most people look for ‘hosting-company-name sucks’ when they are looking for a review for a hosting company.

I have been using Hostmonster to host about 6-8 sites I own for the last 4 years (never for this site – spacebug has a dedicated account somewhere else)

Here are the reasons you should not consider Hostmonster as a hoster:

Low availability

Since day one my sites had more downtime in hostmonster then other hosting compenies I have worked with. There are some good weeks, but on average you get very low availability. You see it in downtime in the site, bounced incoming email, and flaky FTP connections.

Horrible performance

Sites run slowly on Hostmonster. This problem becomes worst with time (my guess is they overload the servers). This happens on plain HTML sites as well as PHP and MySQL driven sites.

Poor and unfriendly support

Contacting Hostmonster support is a waiting game, it takes forever for them to get back to you. what is worst is that when they do come back to you, they are never helpful.

Major security issues

This is not a joke – Hostmonster servers have been compromised several time. These have been a server-level attacks which affected multiple accounts. Personally speaking, it is a terrible feeling to have your site hacked into. The company required all accounts to change their passwords to strong password and two weeks later the attack happened again. If you do not want your site to be a place for virus distribution – stay away from hostmonster!

No communication of issues

They have never communicated any security/downtime/other (planed or otherwise) issues. They never admit it is something that they do wrong. When you tell then your server is down for the last 8 hours, they will say “it was done to improve future performance” or something like that.

Conclusion

I do not want to make any recommendation about other hosters, these things change from time to time. I have yet to find the perfect hosting company. But all the other companies I have worked with were, by far, much better.

Recommend Hostmonster only to your arch-enemy.

Cloud Services and Application Performance Monitoring

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 01-07-2010

Category : SAAS, Software development, web hosting

In his interesting article, Cloud Automation: problem & solution, Dor Juravski talks about Performance and SLA as key challenges to cloud based applications and services. Dor also suggests Application Performance Monitoring (APM) as a mitigation to this challenge.

When we move from in-house application to cloud-based application, we shift some of the responsibilities around SLA, DR and performance to the cloud service provider. Having said that, we still own the business risk of our application not been there for our clients/internal workers.

What will happen, it time, is that cloud services will be utilised like water and electricity today – we will use cloud services and not even think about performance or disaster recovery. Till that day will come, we will still need to be mindful and understand our cloud-provider’s SLA, performance policies and their alignment with our business KPIs. If needed we should consider APM tools to help us manage these KPIs.

Cloud services are the way of the future, we need to address the key challenges and be aware of the business and technical implications of the new order.

Blog Spam filter – Mollom vs Akismet

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 23-06-2010

Category : Drupal, Tips, Wordpress, blogs

Spam for bloggers is a big pain, you need to go over 20-80 spam comments to get a single genuine comment. There are, however, applications that automatically filter your comments. I have used Mollom and Akismet quite a bit, and in this article will try to explain the differences between them.

Both Mollom and Akismet try to automatically get rid of spam comments, but do it in a slightly different way.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. If Akismet thinks the comment is a spam it puts it in the spam queue, and you get no notification about it. I found Akismet to be very accurate in finding spam. I found 1 false positive (spam which was not really spam) out of thousands of spam messages.

Major strengths -

Well integrated with WordPress look and feel – provides a seamless experience to the user and blog owner.
Comes as default for WordPress – This is a very strong advantage, because most people use defaults.
Does not use CAPTCHA - some real users find CAPTCHA really hard to work with.

Major weaknesses -

Blog owners still needs to go though the spam queue and find genuine comments and empty the spam queue

Mollom

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. Mollom works very much like Akismet – the major difference is that if Mollom thinks the comment is spam, it provides the submitter of the comment a CAPTCHA challenge (and only when a possible spam is detected and not always like other CAPTCHA solutions). If the submitter fills in the CAPTCHA correctly, them Mollom sends the comment to the pending queue, no comments ever get to the spam queue.

Major strengths -

Near zero spam management, comments never get to your spam queue.
Integrates well with Drupal
Does not use CAPTCHA unless it absolutely needs to (users only see the CAPTCHA if Mollom thinks their comment is spam)

Major weaknesses -

The current Mollom WordPress plugin does not provide a seamless integration with WordPress theme - in cases were CAPTCHA is presented to the user, the CAPTCHA is shown in a separate pages that does not look like your blog.

Both Mollom and Akismet provide an amazing service to bloggers worldwide. The differences between them are subtle but important. For this blog I use Akismet because I want a seamless integration with the theme of the blog, but for an older blog I am maintaining, I use Mollom because I can’t be bothered to check its spam queue.

Think about your blog requirement and choose the best filter for you.

Schedule Post on WordPress and Enjoy Fiji

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 14-06-2010

Category : Best practices, Wordpress, blogs

While this post is being published, I am resting on the beach in a Fiji resort and have probably forgotten about computers, internet, R&D, and anything other than R&R.
How do I enjoy a vacation in Fiji while still keeping my “one post per week” rule? I use WordPress excellent Schedule build-in mechanisms. Here is how you can do it too -

PHP foreach is by default by value and not by reference

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 08-06-2010

Category : PHP, Software development

It is a little wired for Java and .NET developer, but PHP by default returns a copy of the iterated array item when running a foreach statement.

From the official PHP site – Note: Unless the array is referenced, foreach operates on a copy of the specified array and not the array itself. foreach has some side effects on the array pointer. Don’t rely on the array pointer during or after the foreach without resetting it.

Here is a wrong way to manipulate an item in an array:


$arr1 = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
$arr2 = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
$arr = array(arr1,arr2);
foreach ($arr as $value) {
   //add an element to the inner array
   $value[] =  5;
}

The $value is a copy of the item and the changed do not affect the item in the array itself.

Java and .NET developers, like myself, scratch their head and say “why doesn’t the foreach work?” or “what doesn’t the items in the foreach change?”

the answer is you need to use the & sign to let PHP know you need a reference rather then a value.

So here is the correct way to do the same thing:


$arr1 = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
$arr2 = array(1, 2, 3, 4);
$arr = array(arr1,arr2);
foreach ($arr as &$value) {
    //add an element to the inner array
   $value[] =  5;
}

Auto-suggest jQuery plugin

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 02-06-2010

Category : AJAX, Open source, jquery

What is auto complete and auto suggest?

Auto complete and auto suggest are a user interface feature that extend search functionality. It basically makes it easier and fast for the user to search structured data.

There is sometimes a mixups between Auto complete and Auto suggest. I will try to state what comes to my mind when talking about both. I also share a fix/midification I have done for a cool auto suggest jQuery plugin.
Continue Reading

The Role of the Software Architect as a Roadblock

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 25-05-2010

Category : Architecture, Opinion

A software architect has an impotent role in software development- he explores the business needs, chooses the right technologies, designs and aids in implementation. Amongst other things an architect serves as a quality gate in the organization, preventing bad technology decisions and mitigating technological risks. But what happens when a quality gate is raised to high and risk mitigation is more impotent than the needs for change? Then the architect becomes a roadblock to any change and innovation, the architect then becomes a person you need to “pass” rather than “consult with”.

Does Google prefer WordPress over Drupal?

Posted by Amir Shevat | Posted on 20-05-2010

Category : Drupal, Wordpress

Tags: google, SEO

After 2 weeks of hard work, I have ported spacebug from Drupal to WordPress. I still believe that these are both great web platforms and have their unique advantages in their domain. I am planning to do a technological comparison between Drupal and WordPress later on this month, but the major change I see is in terms of hits from Google.

I have noticed an immediate increase in hits from Google on the same content, using the same SEO principals and same links. The increase is significant (around 20% more traffic over the last 5 days)

Which makes me wonder:
Does Google prefer WordPress over Drupal?