Alex Hardy

Spurred on by an article called Google Analytics Tagging Demystified by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, I decided to start tagging links to help track the relative success of my promotional activities. I ran into a problem almost straight away though!

The value of adding tags to a link (for meta information such as which marketing campaign it was part of) is indisputable. As Lurie puts it:

Tags are your most powerful, flexible analytics tool. With them, your analytics software delivers statistics on every ad buy, keyword, ad version and campaign. Without them, your analytics software is stuck in 1996.

Google URL Builder provides an easy form to construct the URL for you.

The issue I had was peculiar to my situation. One approach I’ve used to create awareness and traffic for my simpleContact application has been to list it on script directories such as Hot Scripts. This has worked very well, but when I entered a suitably tagged URL it exceeded the maximum length allowed by the site.

Enter TinyURL. Popular among Twitter users, TinyURL does what it says on the tin. It takes a long URL and generates a (very) short redirect link. Problem solved.

I look forward to using tagging more extensively – it is clearly a killer feature.

I bought TextMate last night. While I use Dreamweaver at work, TextMate is now my editor of choice at home for my personal projects. It completes a trio of shareware development tools which also includes CSSEdit and Transmit.

My reasoning is simple: I don’t like Dreamweaver very much. To say that its feature set exceeds my requirements and it has performance and stability issues is probably the kindest way I can express my feelings about it. It’s also very expensive.

If you are a Mac-based web developer, these three apps are a winning combination.

Check out Trism, an upcoming puzzle game by Steve of Demiforce. GameSetWatch have posted an interview with him. It looks like the accelerometer may do for the iPhone what the stylus did for the Nintendo DS.

If people like him can create gems like this with no tools, documentation or support from Apple then I can’t wait to see what appears once the SDK is released.

I’ve added a support forum to this website. I refer to this as a “soft launch” because I haven’t integrated it with the rest of the site, graphically or in the navigation. The only exception is a link on the footer for the downloads page.

My reasons for this are simple:

• I wanted to add a forum to help support current users of simpleContact 1.2
• To get it live before releasing simpleContact 2.0 Pro, so I can document it
• I didn’t want to be sidetracked from building ‘Pro to make the forums purdy

You’ll find sections for FAQs, installation, troubleshooting, requests, miscellaneous and a section that I’ve called “Out and About”. This is where you can earn yourself some link-love by posting about your simpleContact powered website.

Let’s get a discussion going

UPDATE: Added a link to the contact page.

Cabel Sasser has released the JavaScript image zoom used on his blog and Panic’s website as FancyZoom. It provides a nice smooth zoom effect, caption and drop shadow.

Free for non-commercial use or $39 per domain.

Some may find the price a little steep for what is no more than a slick alternative to Lightbox (which I use myself) or Thickbox, but I can see it being popular with people who want a web gallery to be über cool.

I thought I’d mention a Wordpress plugin that I installed today: Sociable. It’s an easy way to add social bookmarking links to posts in a similar way to the good ol’ Beeb.

Choose the networks you want to link to and you can also set the circumstances under which those little badges appear. I’ve set mine to only appear inside a post, because I think it looks tacky to have a page filled with icons.

I took the liberty of modifying the plugin to add support for Facebook and 9rules and have submitted the changes back to developer Peter Harkins for general release.

Via MacUser:

Microsoft have decided to relax their previous stance on virtualisation, where only Windows Vista Business and Ultimate editions were permitted to run inside a virtual environment such as Parallels or VMware.

This may not seem like a big deal since you could run it under Boot Camp. Anyone who has used Boot Camp will tell you that it’s great option for processor intensive activities (like playing games), but a total pain in the ass if you have to regularly restart between platforms when working.

I found this recently when building a CD-ROM using Adobe Flash on Mac OS X and Zinc on Windows Vista.

This won’t cost them anything in the long run. It may help to shift a lot of copies of Windows Vista to Mac users. This is a straightforward response to customer demand and should be applauded.

All I want now is an IE6 testing solution for developers and I’m happy

Mac users are sensitive little souls. Artistic types. We love our beautifully designed computers and software, but poking around in the guts of our operating system doesn’t come quite as naturally to us as to our PC using friends.

Sometimes though that can be a very worthwhile exercise, such as installing a dev server. Perhaps you have a laptop, and need to be able to work or present when you don’t have internet access (eg: while travelling). Here’s how…

Good news, everyone!

The Apache web server and PHP are already installed as part of Mac OS X and only need to be turned on. The MySQL database server will have to be downloaded and installed, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

This is an easier job than it used to be and doesn’t have to involve typing code into the Terminal. Marc Liyanage does a fantastic job of creating PHP installer packages if you want to keep your installation bang up to date, but for most purposes the instructions below should be sufficient.

Note: I have used Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and MySQL 5.0.45 (the latest at the time of writing) on a MacBook Pro. I used TextMate to edit text.

Part 1 – Apache and PHP

1. 

   Start by editing the Apache config file to enable PHP. This file is hidden by default, but you can access it from the Finder’s “Go” menu. Enter /etc/apache2 and confirm to make the folder appear.

2. 

   Open httpd.conf in a text editor. Find the line that says:

   #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

   Uncomment it by removing the hash. Save the file (you will be asked to enter your admin password).

3. 

   Open System Preferences and go into “Sharing” (under “Internet & Network”).

   Turn on ”Web Sharing”. You now have an active Apache server with PHP. Test this by typing localhost into your browser. You should see the default Apache page.

4. 

   If you feel curious, create a PHP file with the phpinfo() function call in it to see the details of your installation.

   Place your own files in /Library/WebServer/Documents

Part 2 – MySQL

1. 

   First things first: Head on over to MySQL.com and download MySQL Community Server and the GUI Tools.

   As their names indicate, the former is the database software itself while the latter is a collection of graphical tools to make the task of administering MySQL easy for those of us that find the Terminal a bit too scary.

2. 

   I use an Intel Mac, so I got the Mac OS X 10.4 (x86) builds. Take care to download the most appropriate build for your computer and OS version.

   I recommend that you always use the latest GUI tools for the latest features and stability improvements.

3. Mount the MySQL disk image and run the main package first, then install the startup item, finally the prefpane. I needed to restart before MySQL would turn on.

4. 

   Open System Preferences and go into “MySQL” (under “Other”). Tick the box to automatically start MySQL on startup.

   You can install the GUI Tools by dragging them from their disk image to your Applications folder. Nearly there now!

5. It is crucial that you now set a password for the MySQL “root” account. Open MySQL Administrator and log into localhost with root (no password). Under “Accounts” you can assign a password to root, as well as create other database users.

   Avoid using the root account in your applications – use it only for administration.

   That’s it! You can start creating databases and coding the PHP applications that will run on them.

Recommended Reading

If PHP and MySQL are new to you, I recommend PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide by Larry Ullman. In common with other books in the series, this book gives you a solid grounding in the subject, with plain English examples.

If you are already familiar with HTML and maybe a scripting language or two, you should hit the ground running!

If this guide was useful to you or you would like me to elaborate further, please feel free to comment. I’m thinking about writing a series of how-tos in this manner and your feedback would be appreciated.

If you work on a Mac and make zip files to share with Windows users, you’ll know what a nuisance it can be when invisible files from Mac OS X find their way in.

Resource forks and ._DS_Store files (which store data such as icons, associations and view preferences) are redundant and visible in other systems, and not only confuse users but inflate the zip file with unnecessary data. It becomes a manual task (on a Windows PC) to remove these files.

So I thought I’d share a little app I discovered the other day: Compress Files by Apimac. Two little checkboxes instruct it to remove these files and you have a nice clean zip ready to send. The $9.95 asking price is nothing compared to how much time it will save you.

Panic and the Iconfactory released CandyBar 3 this week, and must be excited by the prospect of all the licenses they are going to sell. It has been widely remarked that the new icons in Mac OS X Leopard leave much to be desired, so they are well placed with this excellent app.

They also appear to be redesigning their website, one product microsite at a time…

Combining the feature sets of CandyBar (an icon customisation utility) and Pixadex (“iPhoto for icons”), CandyBar 3 makes great use of Leopard features like Quick Look and 512 pixel icons.

It even allows you to customise your dock. Some might argue that being able to replace the silly reflective dock with a “simple” version is worth the $29 all by itself.

I think Panic epitomise what is best about the Mac software market. They build thoughtfully designed, useful apps that do their job well and aren’t bloated out of all proportion. Coda is a viable alternative to Dreamweaver and will save you hundreds of dollars and megabytes of disk space.

They embarrass the efforts of much larger companies and do it all with a sense of fun and none of the arrogance of web app developer 37signals, who are really starting to believe their own press.

Heaven help Adobe if they ever decided to create an image editor or Flash IDE.