The article is good in its entirety but this is the best bit of this ThinkVitamin article Kevin Hale of Wufoo talks UX, Funding, Startups and API integration…

Because we’re a small team that desires to stay a small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats in our company and that includes manning the inbox and doing customer support every single week. One of the interesting side effects of having a company where everyone has to answer support emails, is that everyone has a stake in making sure application is as easy to use as possible. We actually call this approach to designing software Support Driven Development and it’s been really great for us.

The priorities and desire for simplicity and clarity are actually the result of people wanting to make their weekly support interactions as few and positive as possible. Getting a feature into Wufoo that adds unnecessary complexity is a big no-no in our company. In fact, we make adding any element to the interface the hardest thing possible in our design process. Every button, every word, every link, every switch is scrutinized to make sure it’s absolutely necessary and won’t generate a future support request.

Additionally, users are also really bad at both explaining what they need and what other people need. It’s just part of human nature to justify biases rather than consider needs objectively from the vantage point of what’s good for the community and the future of the app itself. This is not to say you shouldn’t bother with your users (or your designer’s intuition) when you’re building your product or considering new features.

I sincerely believe that users are the key (and intuition does help), but you have to realize that user interface studies have shown time and again that what you have to trust is what the users DO and not what they SAY, which is why getting an interface out there quickly and used in an observable way is crucial. After that, it’s all just successful iterations based on feedback from those on the ground.

“Whatever” says I. As long as there are people who need to make things go whiz-bang then – authoring tools like Adobe’s Flash – and people that know how to use them will stay in demand.

Today I was hit with a fine example of flash advertising. Not groundbreaking – but well crafed – and aimed at me – web designer-developer who’s been on the lookout for hosting. It points at a pan-european German based web host called Strato. If my trial month with WebFusion doesn’t go well I might give them a go. But so far I’ve got to say I like WebFusion and their support… TBC

Cloud enabled local web development? That’s an oxymoron — right? Explain. I prefer to develop/design using MAMP as it’s quicker and doesn’t rely on a sketchy internet connection. While I have a main powerhouse of a Mac Pro under my desk I also use a very capable little MacBook Pro.*

Anyway

I was on the road today – and finally felt the full advantage of getting myself fully into The Cloud.

The main issue? Synchronising my digital self across more than one computer. Storage and email are the main issues…

While according to some Apple’s dot Mac/MobileMe may well be the current cream of cloud subscription services in North America – out here in backwater Europe performance is sh*te. Particularly iDisk. While Apple’s webmail is good – it’s trying too hard to be a desktop application and failing.

For storage I can’t recommend Dropbox enough and for e-mail there’s Gmail…

Dropbox

Now I’ve got my Sites folder (and  a few salient folders of Work In Progress) in Amazon’s S3 cloud via Dropbox. The free service is great (2GB) and the paid versions (50/100GB) are not expensive…

• It’s easy.
• It’s speedy. One of the technical features of the system is that files are stored as blobs of hashed deltas (wikipedia says it betterer )… popular files are recognized and appear online without having to be transferred – for example some reference books and software libraries that uploaded very smartly.
• It’s nimble. As the thing works with deltas and blobs it’s also quick to mirror things when you’ve just been making minor edits or rearranging things.
• 30 days of versioning for all your files - TimeMachine in the Cloud!

Syncing external folders (e.g. ~/Sites ) across multiple machines with Dropbox

Thanks to this post I found the answer…

[NB - your short user name needs to be the same on all your Macs! If not then go here and read part three "The Full Monty"...]

The steps to synchronising your ~/Sites folder (or any folder that you don’t want to move into the Dropbox watched folder ) between two or more Macs are:

1. temporarily turn off Dropbox on both machines
2. make your first sync manually between them (use a direct connection – or load up a USB stick/external HD)
3. create symlinks into your Dropbox folder on both machines. Create the symlink by typing a command into a Terminal window… it goes a little something like this: ln -s  /path/to/folder/name_desired_folder ~/Dropbox/desired-folder
4. then restart Dropbox on both machines

Now I’m coding on the go with hassle-free syncing and backup. That is nice.

Email

Well I’ve become a Gmail man. It may not be pretty but Gmail has threaded conversations done properly and labels. Took me a while to get used to threaded conversations [takes me a while to get most things!] but now I find them indispensable. Gmail’s generally very good at keeping quoted text out of your face making the threads very readable. Obviously threaded conversations aren’t so useful if people veer off-track or forsake the reply button in favour of the new message. Offline access was not robust in Safari and now it’s not an option as Mac OS 10.6 won’t have it.  So I still use Mail.app as a backup.

Still on MobileMe/dotMac

The missing links… I’m still on Mobile Me and using it for Address Book, Calendar and Keychain synching. [My FTP favourites too thank's to Panic's Mobile Me implementation in their FTP app Transmit]. Tied into this is Apple’s iSync application which is keeping my mobiles in step. Until Google’s address book improves drastically I’m not considering a move.

*Not just for the occasional bit Road Warrior stuff but also we do sometimes vacate this town for more than a couple of days plus mains power is also a bit of an issue round here! Sometime I need to use my laptop in the office (I do have a UPS but it doesn’t last very long with the beast.)

Use both. (As recommended by Mr WordPress himself…)

The WordPress.com Stats WordPress plugin provides all the basic daily dose of stats you need – and all easily accessible from the WordPress Dashboard.  Google Analytics gives you that extra oompf when you need it and will of course tie in with any Google advertising you have going on.

Yesterday I was being an eedgit. For the life of me couldn’t figure out why I was getting a 403 error “Remote file returned error response 403 Forbidden”. I was trying, and failing, to get image attachments to import from a WordPress.com XML export file into a self hosted WordPress installation.

I wracked my brains and Google but I couldn’t figure it out. Helpfully the blog I was working on [it's revamp of my friend Stewart Andersen's Homes and Travel site - now live ] is based on the excellent Carrington Framework by Crowd Favorite. Whilst researching it I’d noticed a link to their WordPress Help Center on their forums. I thought I’d have a shot at it and hoped it could be sorted within the three minutes of free help they offer…

Talking it through with them I realised what I’d done. To avoid duplicate content issues I’d set the WordPress.com blog to private before I finished the import. That simple. WordPress.com was deying access to the new blog based on the instructions I’d given. I was logged in so everything looked fie but the new site.

The answer: Make sure your WordPress.com privacy settings are not set to private!

I guess it’s the sort of stupid thing people don’t admit to – so until now no Google results to find.

Anyway many thanks to Matt Walters and the WordPress Help Center…

When you’re stuck, talk to the bear or give the WordPress Help Center a shout… [thanks guys!]

I’m a lover of Google Analytics – once you get the hang of the thing it’s a very powerful tool and enables quick reporting on visitor metrics with quite some granularity. [Did I really just say that? Oh dear.]

Especially useful are custom Advanced Segments. I’ve used UTM codes to track responses from email campaigns – very handy but requires you to craft your URLs. If you want to track incoming links for a particular website – or referrer, without control of URLs that actually link to you – it’s very easy – just not well documented – or easy to find with a Google search.

Advanced Segment based on referrer:

1. set up a new advanced segment
2. add “Source” from the Dimensions/Traffic Sources/
3. add the domain that need tracking into the value field.

It’s that easy!

Today I had to transfer 700Mb from one server to another in the same data center: SSH in to server #1 to grab the files from server #2 – but “a” wasn’t working as an answer to mget as it usually does – meaning “get all” – when prompted for each file if you really want to download it. 

I really didn’t fancy having to watch/wait/click as 1400 files got copied over. 

Easy answer: type “prompt” in your ftp shell to toggle the prompting on and off.

Job done.

All files sent over in a jiffy without having to do a 4,000 km round trip – and freeing up my rather stuffed internet connection in the meantime.


ssh user@host.com
cd path/to/your/files
ftp ftp.host.com
cd path/to/your/files
prompt
mget *
bye
exit


[Found in a referenced post linked to by Laura Carlson's excellent [webdev] reference pages (subscribe to the list server here)…]

…the secret, as explained by “Web Teacher” here, is simply to wrap the items you want to group  in the select list with

<optgroup label="group_title"> and </optgroup>

Another good point made there is that to make a select list multiple choice you just need to add the attribute multiple="multiple" into the opening select tag (and make it clear to the users that this is the case as well as how to actually select mulitiple items…)

Main contenders:

1. for jQuery: jquery.corner.js from rc.rctonline.nl
2. for jQuery: jquery.corner.js from malsup.com
3. for jQuery: cornerz
4. stand alone: curvycorners

Using #1 at the moment. Would like to try them all again in the light of the IE8 workaround below. Gotta say I now think #3 (cornerz) looks most promising in terms of size and ability. Going to have another look to see which ones look to CSS first (for those browsers that are modern – and not Internet Explorer) before turning to JavaScript.

Problem with most of these is IE8 doesn’t play nice… fix seems simply to add the behave like IE7 meta tag: <tt><meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ /></tt>

First impressions:

1. good, non-transparent outside corner
2. good,
3. throws errors in IE7, non-transparent outside corner
4. slow in IE,