Shanti’s Dispatches

Strongspace launched with much hoopla but didn’t seem to gain much traction after its initial launch.

It’s priced fairly high, and for my tastes, a hosted Subversion repository (at TextDrive, the makers of Strongspace, nonetheless) does just fine.

Of course, for something more corporate, Strongspace could be well worth the extra few bucks each month.

You can even do automated backups with Transmit off your Mac onto your Strongspace account now.

I gues it was about time.

Joshua Strebel and the obuweb.com crew recently relaunched for the May 1st Reboot.

Def. check it out for a functional 2.0 style. I know Joshua was doing some swift business before the redesign but I’m sure they’ll be booked for a while now. If you are in the Phoenix area or anywhere, for that matter, and are in the market for a fresh new look for your site, or a fully functional Web App, you can request a quote from them online.

SEO and Design

Designers, seo professionals & bloggers - if you are serious about quality design & search engine optimization, I highly recommend the obuWeb standard for Seo Compatible Web Design:

Robot Friendly URLS - The website uses mod-rewrites or a flat file structure to ensure that urls are crawl-able. No index.php?varname=var etc…

Clean Code - Reduce code bloat by moving Javascript to external files, and limit the use of tables and other code heavy elements. You desire to have more content than code.

… and more!

Some of these things are second nature to us in the Web 2.0 world but are pretty much ignored in the general web development population. (I try not to sound elitist but it’s just so darn hard. )

Be sure to grab your buttons, too!!!

Chris has a great post over on The Big Act that talks about cost of living indexes:

Through my travels I am always interested in cost of living. Many different indexes exist and one of the most popular is the Big Mac index. This could be agood measure for you, if you eat at McDonald’s. I don’t, so it didn’t work for me. Around the Sproutit flat, we talk a bit about cafes and coffee, so we have the Espresso index. But, we have come to find that not all espresso is created equal…(I have a dream).

Read more here.

Take a look at these two, very similar queries for two alternative open source products:

postgresql backups

The top results for this query all seem to be forum posts. Wouldn’t a tutorial or link to the Postgres manual be nicer?

Now take a look at the mysql results:

mysql backups

There we go. That’s better - some tutorials and howtos from big name websites.

I love Postgres. It took a little while for me to be a believer, but it’s growing on me. This post on FeedLounge about them switching to Posty from MySQL pretty much sealed the deal.

Hopefully Postgres’ Google results pages will improve over time & be more welcoming to newbies. (like we all were *once*!)