If you’ve spent more than 34 seconds on The Nerdery’s website, you know we’re fans of stats. If this is your first 16 second here I’ll just let you know that if you surf around our site you can find out how many hours we’ve worked since 2003, how many miles nerds travelled last month, and how many cases of Ramen we consumed last month.
So now you can understand when I spied the piece about Panic’s Status Board over on Lifehacker my first reaction was “Holy crap, that’s awesome.”
And it is:
You can get the details about the board and how effective it’s been over at Panic’s blog.
Most online promotions, whether a new loyalty program or product launch, are short term and usually only require a massive amount of computing power during the first couple days when traffic is extremely high.
With traditional hosting and web applications you would pay for this computing power long after it is necessary. This is a problem that can be solved by using cloud computing and Google App Engine does a fantastic job at it.
GAE (Google App Engine) is a complete development stack that allows you to quickly build and host web applications that will automatically scale to your needs. It is built on the same infrastructure that runs all of Google’s web products including their search engine. 10 years of Google’s brightest ideas in scalability and performance driven systems literally given away for free. At least initially. You begin with free daily quotas for things such as number of requests, CPU time, datastore access, and data storage. Once your free quotas are up you pay for what you use. Each App Engine application comes with an administration panel which allows you to view and change the limits to increase your quotas.
This setup is ideal for short term promotions that will have a huge initial hit of visitors and then die down afterwards. The traffic from your returning visitors may even fall within the free daily quotas, in which case, you would only pay for the initial traffic hit.
App engine gives you the same cloud computing type scalability such as Amazon EC2 except there is no server configuration, maintenance or instance handling necessary. This means you won’t need to do these yourself or pay someone to do these things.
However, there are some drawbacks to GAE. You are confined to using the python or java programming languages and most of the popular frameworks for these languages aren’t compatible with the database GAE uses called Big Table. This isn’t to say that they won’t work, but that you need to build the app in a certain way which prevents it from being easily ported to a more traditional hosting environment if the need should arise.
Additionally, if your application requires connecting with a third party API through a firewall that needs to be setup with your server’s IP address GAE, like other cloud computing options, will not support this since your apps outgoing IP will change depending on how GAE is distributing its resources. However, if you control the firewall and the servers behind it you could use the Secure Data Connector for this task.
With the few caveats aside, GAE brings cloud computing to the masses in a way that is both accessible and competitive. It prevents the need to deal with servers and the hassle of setting up and choosing hosting plans. By forcing the development of scalable applications and having virtually no barriers for entry GAE is a very promising platform, not only for short term promotions, but for any type of web application whether large or small.
Tonight only, the Minnesota PHP user group graciously yields it usual first-Thursday-of-the-month slot at The Nerdery to make way for tomorrow’s Minneapolis-St. Paul Wordpress group meeting. Please note that Minnesota PHP will return to regularly scheduled programming in March.
Minnesota PHP, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 6-9 p.m.
PHP 5.3- Mike Willbanks will go over new features in PHP 5.3 (major and some minor you likely wouldn’t know about unless you troll the release logs) as well as anything to watch for in migrating.
Zend Framework Introduction to Zend Application- Nerdery rockstarJustin Hendrickson discusses Zend Framework and utilizing Zend Application.
By now, you’ve read all about the Apple’s new tablet, the iPad. You’ve watched the videos. You’ve maybe giggled about the product name; let’s be honest though, the Nintendo Wii’s name hasn’t hurt its popularity. You’ve either dismissed it as a big iPod Touch that won’t go anywhere, or, you’ve already smashed your piggy bank and have money in hand. Regardless, Apple has a pretty good track record with their latest products (iPod, iTunes, iPhone) and we don’t want our ad and marketing agency partners to be the last ones to the party.
First, the iPad debut doesn’t mean that our agency partners should stop making iPhone applications. All iPhone applications will work on the iPad out of the box.
But how does the iPad affect our agency partners who have already created applications for iPhone and now also want to take advantage of the bigger screen of the iPad? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as hitting an Easy button (trust me, I have one) and magically all your applications are reformatted for the iPad. The user interface will have to be redesigned to support multiple resolutions. It’s also not just relaying out the design for the larger screen; it’s also understanding what the iPad is, and designing an amazing user interface to take advantage of the new user interface features.
When looking at creating a new iPad application, our agency partners really have two options: target just the iPad or target the iPhone and the iPad. Targeting the only the iPad should have a similar development cycle and cost as developing an application just for the iPhone. If the choice is to target both devices, there will be some design layout changes, but the core of the application will stay the same. There will also be some additional time for our crack Quality Assurance team to make sure we release a great application.
If you don’t think the iPad is going anywhere, I present Steve Ballmer.
Then again, if you think Apple is infallible, I present the iPod Hi-Fi.
Either way, The Nerdery is ready to help you create great applications, no matter the platform.
So the much anticipated Apple tablet has been revealed to the world, and as with most any Apple product about half the people have already dubbed it the iDud and about half the people are fingering their credit cards ready to complete their transaction.
What’d you think?
The word magical seems a bit much. I’m not sure what a gadget would have to do at this point to seem magical, but I’m pretty sure the presentation of that magical device would not include spreadsheets (really, Apple).
The usual suspects have already started rolling in with their hands-on experiences (Gizmodo, Engadget, and ArsTechnica), and menstruation jokes overtake Twitter, but none of it feels magical or all that revolutionary yet.
As with most devices of this ilk, I always wait for the nerds and the fans to provide the real context. On its own a gadget is not magical, it’s what people can do with that’s magic. So far no magic, but that might be only a matter of time.
As a booknerd, I was really excited to hear about the e-book (or iBooks I guess they’re called now) functionality. I thought perhaps Apple could make me eschew books the way the iPod made me stop buying CDs and switch to downloads. So far, no dice. If there’s no multi-tasking or, that I saw, no way to annotate the iBook, I see little sense in switching since I’d still need a paper and pen to make notes. At least it looks better than the Kindle, right?
What’d you think? Are you lining up to get one, or will you wait and hope all those early adopters will bring Apple enough cash that they can announce a better, faster, cheaper version next year?
Promotors of last week’s Wordpress vs. Expression Engine webinar hinted that there could be blood. Two Nerdery programmers trained hard for this CMS bout. They drank raw eggs and ran stairs, and then a nationwide audience of agencies tuned in for what turned out to be a rather amicable exchange. Or was it? Watch Thursday’s rematch above.
Here is a list of recommended plug-ins for both content management systems, with Wordpress plug-ins submitted by (in this corner) Anthony Lukes, and Expression Engine plug-in faves from (challenger) Brian Litzinger.
Wordpress plug-ins:
Dagon Form Mailer - This is my (Anthony’s) personal favorite because it’s easy to customize and it supports file attachments. Another favorite of mine is Contact Form 7.
Flutter CMS - This plugin allows for easy assigning of different data types and for easy custom page templating.
Inline PHP - This allows you to insert php code into the text editor.
All in One SEO Pack - Pump up your SEO. Customize page titles, meta keywords, and descriptions. This works out of the box and can be fine-tuned for super-users.
Google XML Sitemaps - Generates an XML sitemap of your site to better your search rankings with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.
Akismet (comes with Wordpress) - This helps keep spammers from posting comments on your blog.
NextGEN Gallery - Great photo gallery plug-in. Not an essential for every site, but this is a really well built plug-in that’s too good not to mention.
And in this corner, recommended Expression Engine plug-ins:
Structure - It forgoes the current template_group/template setup and creates “static” and “listing” pages that can be edited through a tree sitemap view. Traditional page style content and multiple entry pages can live within the same area.
Image Sizer - Resizes images as specified in EE tag and caches the resized image in the cache folder. If you update the original image, a new resized version is created. If the image is not on the server the tag will not return anything. The architecture is setup to only process images when needed.
FieldFrame - A framework for rapid development of fieldtype extension, FieldFrame will be included as part of EE 2 core when 2.1 is released.
nGen File Field - nGen File Field is a field type for the FieldFrame framework thatadds a custom field type allowing you to upload files from the Publish/Edit interface, and also functions as part of the FF Matrix. This extension is useful for creating galleries and downloading libraries.
Many nerds waited with bated breath for the announcement of Google’s new phone, Nexus One, and it’s finally here! Wired already has a pretty in-depth review on the new phone and it looks slick. Mashable’s got a nice little bullet list of features.
As an iPhone user and devout Mac fangirl, I hope Apple’s paying attention. That threaded e-mail makes me jealous as does the dark interface. Sometimes it’s the little things people.
Do you want to learn Python but don’t know where to start? Have you heard about Django, Pylons, or Google App Engine and wonder if it is for your next project? Have you been using Python for a while and just want to talk shop to other Pythonists? If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you should come to The Nerdery tonight for PyMNtos, the Python Users Group of Minnesota at 7:00 p.m.
Tonight’s meeting is meant to be an introduction to Python for anyone new. We will introduce everyone and let anyone ask any questions they have. And don’t feel left out If you have a couple years of experience with Python under your belt. Someone has to help answer questions.
Finally, please RSVP at http://pymntos.eventbrite.com, so we have a good idea of how many plan to attend. This helps with getting enough snacks and drinks. If you have any questions about the meeting tonight, Python, or PyMNtos, feel free to join the Google Group at http://www.python.mn and ask away.
With a slew of iTablet rumors swirling for the better part of 2009, this one caught my attention because it’s on a book blog and not the usual nerd-blogs you’d expect to find it.
Frankly, I had no idea the Apple tablet/pad thing was being dubbed an e-reader. Interesting, very interesting. Do you think an Apple iPad/iTablet/e-reader could do to downloadable books what the iPod did to downloadable music?
And more importantly, as developers and designers are we ready for this?
Got some friends who like to nerd-out when chatting about web tools of choice? What you have there is a user group, waiting to happen. Here. What we have is a haven for that sort of thing. You are all welcome.
Next up is the newly formed Minnesota PHP group, Tuesday evening from 6:30 – 9:00 p.m., featuring PHP luminary Sebastian Bergmann.
From mnphp.org: Sebastian Bergmann holds a degree in Computer Science and is a pioneer in the field of quality assurance in PHP projects. His test framework PHPUnit is a de-facto standard. He is actively involved in the development of PHP and creator of various development tools. Sebastian Bergmann is an internationally sought-after expert. As an author he shares his long-standing experience in books and articles. He is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.
