Jason Bedell - Interactive Marketing & Technology Blog

Using User Generated Code To Deliver Your Message

Some people say its not the tech that matters, its the message. And that is true, to a degree.

Web sites today commonly resemble full-blown web applications in sophistication and complexity. Anyone who is charged with the maintenance and development of new features and functionality understands that the underlying technology certainly plays a significant role in how responsive you can be to market demands and how expensive it is to respond and maintain.

So, when it comes to choosing a technology to deliver your message, I put my faith in open source.

To a developer, open source is the ultimate user generated content (UGC), or should I say user generated code. Just as we see the Internet being enriched and becoming a living, breathing thing, open source provides the same breath of fresh air to the global software development community.

Looking for a rock solid security framework? So have hundreds of thousands of others in the community, many of which are more specialized in security than anyone on your team. Odds are "they" have built something and offered it up to the community, free, for you to download and customize to your needs.

Looking for a presentation framework to deliver engaging interfaces that act predictably with performance. Yep, someone else in the world has too. And if you choose the right one, you will receive free updates and enhancements from the community, free.

Looking for a rock solid operating system? Well, we know how that story goes... ;)

Don't get me wrong. I deliver solutions for my clients built on the technology that makes the most since for them. If someone has a team of Microsoft .NET developers and Microsoft infrastructure, it absolutely makes since to use technology that will leverage their existing investments in equipment and people. But if the slate is relatively clean, and there is no significant investment in a technology strategy, I embrace the community in open source.

 

Consider SOA For Your New Website

If you are beginning the process to rebuild your website or have an opportunity to rebuild parts of it, you may want to consider a service oriented architecture (SOA).

A common approach to website development is to build pages with all the graphics, content, and fields you would expect along with all the programming/logic to pull data from a database, access information from an external systrem, or calculate a number from user input. This is considered a monolithic architecture and has a number of drawbacks, specifically reuse.

Since logic is being programmed right into a page, when that logic needs to be used in another part of the website, it will need to be copied to the other pages. This causes a problem when it comes time to make changes to a specific logic. The logic now needs to be changed in several locations instead of just one. Multiply this for several hundred logics across a thousand pages and the problem gets out of hand quickly (we call this a scalability issue).

An SOA approach to website development is about separation of concerns and isolating business logic from application logic (not to be confused with separation of code from content which is also supremely important). This means the logic used to pull data from a database, make calls to an external system, and do calculations is separated out from the rest of the website in what is called a 'service layer'. Web pages, in what is called the 'application layer', make calls to the service layer to retrieve or process information.This isolation of logic, separate from the pages, allows for the reuse of the logic across many pages.

Now there are many other aspects that go into taking a service oriented architecture and their are several others ways to factor logic out of pages. What is important is that the discussion of software architecture is taking place with some degree of emphasis and sophistication and an SOA approach is a great place to start.

Domain Name Scams To the Next Level

Well, it finally happened. You may have heard, or been the target of, a very popular domain registration scam that has been going around for some time. It's the email you get that says, "so-and-so is about to register [insert some derivation of your legitimately registered domain here]. Act now and we will register it in your name for [insert absorbinant price here]."

It appears this scam has been lucrative enough to warrant taking it to the next level. We received a phone call  today from a real person running this exact scam. I couldn't believe it.

I guess I always assumed a big part of the email version of the scam was automated. Their close rate much be much higher than expected if they are going to start employing phone banks of people to run it.

If you receive one of these communication, stay calm, write down what domain names are in question, and quietly ask yourself, "do I really care if someone else owned these directed them at porn sites?" If the answer is yes, go ahead and register them as you usually would through GoDaddy, NetSol, etc. They are still available and you can purchase them yourself.

It is a good idea to protect your brand with some coverage that goes beyond your primary domain name. I would certainly buy other top level domains (TLDs) that match your primary domain. For instance my primary domain is jasonbedell.com but I also own jasonbedell.org, jasonbedell.net, jasonbedell.us, and jasonbedell.biz.

If you really want to be covered, you can register the most common misspellings of your primary domain. This site feels kind of spammy but you can try the Type Generator - Misspelled Domains tool to help identify what they are. You can also check out the FTC's position on the issue here.

In the end, they will always be able to find a derivation of your domain, that is not registered, to threaten you with. You have to draw a line somewhere in terms of far you want to go with covering your primary domain.

Anyways, watch out, out there. Fight the fear tactic. And good luck.

Veeker Widget

So I am testing out this new service called Veeker. It is a mobile media sharing service that looks interesting. This is their "widget" that is suppose to allow visitors to this site to be able to pass me pics and videos as well as allow me to easily post pics and videos from my mobile device to this widget. I'll keep you updated on how it goes. Feel free to mess with this widget to send me stuff.

Ruban's Tube

This is just awesome and geeked. Check it...

Rubens Tube - video powered by Metacafe

Portal Mashups

Ok, so my buddy Dan, that I used to work with, hit me up today asking me about creating widgets and flakes. After my initial response of, "huh?", he explained by directing me towards Pageflakes and Netvibes. First off, very cool. I highly recommend you check it out.

Now I have worked with Portals in the past and have been watching the evolution of Java Portals, Portlet Containers, and even the JSR-168 portlet specification for some time. I even have a new favorite called Liferay (the first of many shameless plugs for open source products to come). But somewhere in my infinite geekdome, I was missing the rise of much simpler, more accessible, portal solutions popping up around the Web 2.0/Mashup craze of recent.

I have been a MyYahoo user for many years now and have been frustrated by what I feel is a lack of innovation and development of new portlets and the inability to create and submit my own custom portlets (portlets are the little widgets representing a very specific feature or function that constitute a portal). Netvibes and Pageflakes address this shortcoming. By publishing an SDK and creating an extensible platform for others to develop on top of, these solutions have exploded with literally hundreds of portlets submitted by the global web development community.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen other such portal solutions? Have you created or dreamed up any portlet ideas of your own?