Top 10 links for December Week 1 – 2008

Here is the first installment of our top 10 links for the week – a selection of ten links we see as being very useful and important to the web development/business crowd.  This list covers both technical articles for developers and higher level business ones.

1. 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks for Wordpress – Smashingmagazine
   Great tips for any user of wordpress that relies on RSS for syndicating content.  Most of these tips show you how to gain more control over your RSS feeds.
2. 5 good programming habits in PHP
   General rules of thumbs for php programmers.   Some of the rules may make you think twice, like the rule of “Never copy and paste”.
3. What is More Important To Succeed Online:  Business or Technical Skills?
   A question for the ages, at least in the IT field, is it more important to be business or technical minded?  A very interesting article on how these skills have attributed to the success of several companies.
4. Firefox 3.1 beta news – web workers
   A CNET article on Firefox 3.1.  The interesting part is how “web workers” can process work in the background.  Background processing would push the RIA movement further and I’m sure would lead to some very novel ideas from early adopters.
5. How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for free – with Ubuntu
   A practical and useful article on how to setup a web server.  This is a very well written article that shows how far Linux has come in terms of ease of use.
6. How to use Twitter as a tool
   An article by Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter for productivity.  It’s a very detailed post and for those new to Twitter, it explains the utility factor of Twitter beyond just being a gossip tool.
7. Online Advertising and Its Impact on Web Design
   An excellent article from Smashing Magazine on how online advertising affects web design.  It’s an interesting topic as web advertising is a primary means of revenue for the majority of blogs.
8. Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008
   A list of some of the biggest “mistakes” we’ve seen on the web this year.
9. Who Protects The Internet?
   Who does protect the Internet?  This article should be of interest to anyone who uses the Internet, so that’s a lot of people.  Techcrunch takes a go at reviewing where we are with the Internet.
10. Referrer Detector Wordpress Plugin
    A great wordpress tool to greet your users coming from specific sites.

I hope you find these articles useful.  You can contribute your own links by visiting this buncholink which groups related links together in a useful manner.

How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 3: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Design

A couple weeks ago we took a look at some of the first steps to take when selecting an open source publishing platform. From starting off with doing some guerilla market research and viewing source code to figure out what tools others are using, moving on to trying to gauge your internal capacity for carrying out the web development work required to set up and extend your installation, the next step we’re going to cover is how to assess your internal capacity to carry out the design work needed to create the web user experience you’re looking for out of your open source site.

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How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 2: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Development Work

In the last post on selecting an open source publishing platform we offered a pretty simple tip to help you get started: take a look at the source code of other sites in your field and see what tools they’re using. Once you’ve figured that part out, the next step is to determine whether you have what it takes to roll out an installation of the tool yourself. What extra plugins or modules are required for the full feature-set you’re looking for? How active is the community in using those particular plugins and modules? How confident are you that you can maintain these in the future, particularly once your site is up live?

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How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 1: Research Your Market

Over the last few years, open source web applications have gained real traction on the web. From individuals to small businesses, non-profit organizations to public institutions and large corporate agencies, all across the board a growing number of websites are using open source technologies to turn the gears.

But what works for one, won’t work for all, and quite often the sucess of your site may depend on that very first decision you make in selecting one tool over another. So how do you choose which tool(s) to use?

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