willie jackson

Category: Technology

  • Building websites isn’t easy

    Not when you do it right, anyway. That’s why I geek out over things like HTML5Boilerplate, Twitter Bootstrap, and Thesis.

    Sure, you could deploy your site to WordPress.com in five minutes and call it a day, but that’s not an acceptable solution for some businesses. And there are no shortage of consultants who will happily sweat the details for businesses of any size.

    Some small businesses can’t afford to hire $300/hr developers, though. That’s is why projects like this one are so important for the web, small businesses, and people looking to build websites online without code.

    I’m biased because I know (and like) Alex, the guy behind the project, but that doesn’t of course diminish the utility of the work. Sure, the installation of it requires you to figure out a few terrifying things like FTP clients and options files, but the process has come a long way.

    And there are some very smart people working hard behind the scenes to take the pain out of these projects. (The web as we know is still a cobbled together mass of aging technologies and protocols doing things on a scale at which they were never intended.)

    Until the web is re-imagined (or rendered useless by our decidedly uninformed political overlords…), it’s imperative that projects making headway on important problems are recognized, supported, and funded.

  • The new barackobama.com

    President Obama’s website was recently updated, and it has design / development communities geeking out. Among the site’s highlights:

    • Modernizr — a Javascript library that allows for browser-specific feature detection
    • HTML5BoilerPlate — a framework for building cutting-edge, future-proof sites
    • Responsive design — content dynamically resized based on screen size
    • Rolling deployments — updates to the site pushed several times per day
    • Mobile-first — designed for mobile browsers first, then the desktop

    I love this quote from the behind the scenes post:

    First and foremost, it’s a tool.

    The site is beautiful without sacrificing utility. Also check out Designing Obama if the branding of the Obama campaign got you drooling in 2008.

  • High praise for Wufoo

    What can I say about Wufoo that hasn’t already been said?

    It’s an absolutely stellar product that has never failed me. In the redesign of my site that launched a few days ago, I was able to remove all friction from the process of engaging my services by integrating a payment gateway with my forms.

    So you can now hire and retain me.

    While I sleep.

    You’re invoiced immediately, and I get the details in my inbox at the same time. Groundbreaking? Absolutely not, but it doesn’t have to be. It just works.

  • WordPress Security: Sucuri to the rescue

    One of the most tragic issues to befall a blogger is a security breach.

    If you’ve been blogging for any length of time on a site that gets any kind of traffic, you’ve probably experienced a hack of some sort at one point or another.

    Many people point to WordPress as being insecure, but this isn’t entirely accurate (assuming a patched, up-to-date version of the application).
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  • Getting started in the Cloud

    Amazon has introduced a Free Usage Tier to their AWS line. This will allow developers, students, and hobbyists to begin developing applications for the cloud for a very attractive price: $0.

    Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

    I can’t wait to see what enterprising companies and school will take advantage of this. It’s a big deal.

  • Why WP Engine has already won

    Fast websites really do it for me. Over the past year or so, I’ve found myself gravitating toward the performance side of the WordPress world.

    I’ve actually become something of a hosting snob at this point. I enjoy building servers now that I know what I’m doing and although I’m very much a novice at these things, my interest in expanding my knowledge motivates me to dive deeper every week.

    It should come as no surprise to you that the announcement of WP Engine (aff link) last month made me excited in ways that technology shouldn’t excite a grown man.
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  • T-Mobile Rant

    I‘ve recently gone through three replacement phones: all MyTouch 3Gs. They exhibit the same symptoms: freezing, restarting, and general failure with respect to functioning as a phone. Through a bit of experimentation, I’ve come to determine that this is a memory issue.

    MyTouch 3Gs (along with most of T-Mobile’s Android-based phones) have 512MB of internal memory. Apparently, my Gmail account (what you use to authenticate against the device) is too large for the phone to sync with. I know this because signing into the phone with my Google Apps account (willie at williejackson) allows the phone to behave normally…for a while.
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  • The case for personal websites

    When you apply for a job, the first thing a recruiter or HR professional is going to do is Google you. In 2010, you are who Google says you are. For the forward-thinking employee, this represents a chance to get a leg up on (and even eliminate) the competition. There is no better way to impress a prospective employer than to put your best foot forward online without anyone asking you to. Have you registered www.yourname.com? What are you waiting for?

    Since 2005, I’ve maintained a personal website. It has grown from little more than a resume and a few links to what is now the hub of my online strategy and networking. I use it to hone my web development skills, position myself for key opportunities, and optimize the search results for my name. I’ve gotten countless unsolicited compliments, web design inquiries, and even a few job offers as a result of my website. What started with a class project (creating what we called an Interactive Resume) has turned into a service I now provide for clients across the nation.
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  • Enabling mod_rewrite in Apache

    This post is a bit geekier than usual but I have to share it because it’s something that was a bit frustrating until it was resolved.

    I built a simple LAMP server at Linode this week and was testing out a WordPress site on it. Everything worked fine aside from the links, which was more than a minor frustration. My custom permalink structure is as follows:

    I have the same permalink structure on my other servers. Nothing crazy.

    My /var/www/ directives were as follows:

    Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all

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  • Okay, I’m reloaded!

    That’s a Tony Montana Carlito’s Way quote, of course.

    This is just a quick post to announce my much anticipated (joke) redesign! I’ve been working on it for about a day now, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. The new focus is on a static homepage (which will be updated ad nauseum I’m sure) and less on the blog posts (which are visible in the footer). The new design is still built on the Thesis Theme Framework of course, but leverages a modified version of Dave Wilkinson‘s wonderful Osmotic premium skin. It’s actually a limited-edition skin that had sold out, save for a copy that Dave’s wife never used for her site.

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