The open source ethos is growing fast, and it has finally made its way to website template designs: www.oswd.org. No longer does one have to go to Template Monster or the likes and pay $40-$100 for a cool web design![1]. This guy ROCKS! His name is Francis J. Skettino and he’s from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Do …
The Weborati
Just who are the “Weborati“[1] you ask? And where does the term come from? Well, to answer the latter question, It’s a neologism that just made up; please don’t shoot me for it. :) As for the former, they are people who either created – starting with Tim Berners-Lee – who have passionately shepherded the …
About me and Xtras, Inc.
A little history about me. In March 1994 I launched Xtras, Inc. as VBxtras, Inc. VBxtras was a catalog/mail-order reseller of 3rd party components and tools for developers using Visual Basic versions 3.0 through 6.0. I later changed our brand’s name to "Xtras.Net" as an Internet reseller of 3rd party components and tools for .NET …
Conventional Wisdom, Assumptions, and Pot Roast
Conventional wisdom is filled with assumptions. One of the things that makes conventional wisdom right most of the time is that those assumptions are usually valid. But sometimes they are not. One of my favorite little anecdotes that illustrates this is the tale of the pot roast: A newly-wed husband noticed that every time his …
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No Purchase Required; It’s the Law!
I normally write about programming and Internet technologies, so this post about marketing and the law is a bit out of left field. But since I’ve had to consider the issue many times while running my prior company, and many of my readers are small business entrepreneurs, I thought this topic might be helpful. If …
Quick Reference for Web Developers
I just noticed today in my blog logs that I’ve been getting referrals to my Well Designed URLs blog post from a website called LOCALHOST80.com. I checked it out and it’s a pretty nice list of resources on a whole ranges of topics of interest to web developers, listed below. It appears they handpicked some …
Clean URLs in dasBlog
After many long years of being annoyed by the URLs for dasBlog, I finally decided to spend the several hours required to fix them. I am using ISAPI Rewrite which I’ve spoken about in the past to allow me to clean up the URLs for my blog here that is running dasBlog. The solution is …
My Amazon aStore
Amazon recently came up with a really simple idea for their associates but one that is so obvious I’m surprised they hadn’t thought of it before. Basically they let their associates specify a list of products and then they generate a mini-store for them. They call these mini-stores an "aStore." Amazon even provides a clean …
Wrox’s Professional Web 2.0 Programming
I’m excited as I just got my express delivery of Wrox’s Professional Web 2.0 Programming by Eric van der Vlist, Danny Ayers, Erik Bruchez, Joe Fawcett, and Alessandro Vernet. I’m anxious to read it to learn their take on programming for Web 2.0. I first learned of the book when I noticed in my logs …
What is a RESTafarian?
A RESTifarian is a zealous proponent of the REST software architectural style as defined by Roy T. Fielding in Chapter 5 of his PhD. dissertation at UCIrvine. You can find RESTifarians in the wild on the REST-discuss mailing list. But be careful, RESTifarians can be extremely meticulous when discussing the finer points of REST, as …