Best of the Web: September

Best of the Web: September

on Oct 12th 2009 with 24 comments

September was yet another exciting month for web developers. New Javascript libraries, major acquisitions, and monster open source projects were some of the things that happened as Summer died out. And that’s not including the usual plethora of excellent tips and articles published from top-notch web development sites.

Read on for some of September’s highlights in web development.

  • The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server

    FriendFeed Launches Tornado

    Friendfeed made an announcement last month that has a major impact on developers: they have open sourced the Tornado web server and accompanying framework that powers FriendFeed. The framework is non-blocking and blazing fast, and can handle thousands of simultaneous connections. Read the article to learn more about Tornado.

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  • If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

    If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers

    Frustrated with the lack of understanding of the web design and development field? Here’s an amusing look at what might happen if architects had the same interactions with web design clients.

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  • What Not To Do When Starting Out as a Freelancer

    What Not To Do When Starting Out as a Freelancer

    Creating a freelance business is a quite a challenge, especially in this economic climate. Learn from other’s mistakes with this excellent resource for freelancers.

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  • 50 Inspiring Web Application and Service Web Site Designs

    50 Inspiring Web Application and Service Web Site Designs

    Simplicity has become the new hotness when creating a winning web app design. Last month Speckyboy reviewed some of the most effective site designs on the Net and clues us in as to why they’re so effective.

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  • How Google Taught Me to Cache and Cash-In

    How Google Taught Me to Cache and Cash-In

    A former Google employee shares what he learned on scaling large web applications. Some incredible advice in here that namely follows this core performancing principle: Cache everything you can.

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  • How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox

    How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox

    In response to a challenge, Carsonified’s Jenna Smith has created a non-javascript version of the lightbox, and has kindly shared the source code with the rest of us. You can see the lightbox in action here.

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  • HTML 5 Visual Cheat Sheet by Woork

    HTML 5 Visual Cheat Sheet by Woork

    Here’s a simple cheat sheet to showcase what is the same and what’s changed since HTML 4.01. Available in JPEG or PDF quality.

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  • The Ultimate Guide to Version Control for Designers

    The Ultimate Guide to Version Control for Designers

    While programmers may have already been using version control, designers aren’t typically as quick to adopt the practice and instead use Photoshop history or some other solution. Here’s the one-stop guide for designers to adopt version control, complete with tools and other handy resources.

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  • 7 Steps for Systematizing The Design & Build Process

    7 Steps for Systematizing The Design & Build Process

    Developers are all about making systems more streamlined and effective in their programming. But what about streamlining the design side of development? Nuope shows us how the design and build process could be simplified and streamlined to make development much quicker.

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  • Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber

    Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber

    Psychologists at the University of Stirling in Scotland released data showing that children between the ages of 11 and 14 had significant improvement in their memory by using Facebook, while using Twitter and YouTube actually hurt the children’s working memory.

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  • Parse XML using Ruby

    Parse XML using Ruby

    The Yahoo! Developer Network shared how to parse XML in Ruby with REXML.

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  • Why I’m Done Making Desktop Applications

    Why I’m Done Making Desktop Applications

    The founder of Bingo Card Creator gives us many good reasons why he’s stopped developing desktop applications. His main reason: Shareware gives many more opportunities for the developer to fail.

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  • VanadiumJS

    VanadiumJS

    VanadiumJS is a simple javascript library that has powerful client-side validation for forms. It’s simple and easy to integrate, and a nice compliment to any web form.

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  • The 10 most important skills for future programmers

    The 10 Most Important Skills for Future Programmers

    Venu Thomas breaks down what he thinks are the wave of the future (or the next five years) for aspiring programmers. What do you think?

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  • Flickr Finally Goes Native With An iPhone App

    Flickr Finally Goes Native With An iPhone App

    Flickr announced last month that they had finally created a native iPhone app for their popular image sharing service. The application mirrors much of the flickr.com functionality, and allows for direct uploading of photos, as opposed to the previous method of emailing the photos via the phone.

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  • WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud

    WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud

    Early in September WordPress.com rolled out a feature that turns on real-time updates to RSS feeds from Dave Winer’s RSSCloud. This is potentially huge for RSS and web developers, as half a million new blogs each month that are created at WordPress.com.

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  • How Colour Communicates Meaning

    How Colour Communicates Meaning

    Did you know how much color makes a different in your site designs and layouts? There are many ways that color can communicate meaning, thanks to the many things different colors can represent. Political parties, religions and even moods are symbolized by certain colors. Carsonified has an excellent article on what each color represents to different people, and we’d all do well to take that into account the next time we determine a color scheme for a site.

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  • CAPTCHAs' Effect on Conversion Rates

    CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates

    The SEOMoz blog published an interesting study across 50 different sites showing the increase in sales when the writer turned captions off his 50 sites.

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  • 7 Rules for Mixing Multiple Fonts in Good Web Design

    7 Rules for Mixing Multiple Fonts in Good Web Design

    Creating layouts with multiple fonts can be tricky, as there’s no hard and fast rule as to how many fonts to use, how similar the different fonts should be, and many other variables. This article outlines some best practices for mixing multiple fonts.

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  • Programming in the Cloud. Some remarkable Online IDEs

    Programming in the Cloud: Some remarkable Online IDEs

    Jeez has an excellent roundup of online IDE’ for nearly all types of development: image editing, HTML and Javascript, Flash, PHP, and more.

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  • WidgetPad

    WidgetPad.com

    September saw the release of WidgetPad.com, a “collaborative development environment for developers to develop fully-interactive, stand-alone, downloadable SmartPhone applications in HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript”. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

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  • What’s Your BHAG? How to Create a Big Hairy Audacious Goal

    What’s Your BHAG? How to Create a Big Hairy Audacious Goal

    Sitepoint had an excellent article on finding your B.H.A.G., or “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”. No matter what your field, you should always have a giant goal to be working towards, and this article gives you a plan to create and execute a successful B.H.A.G.

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  • Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

    Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

    In acquisition news, Google acquired the innovative and popular CAPTCHA service reCAPTCHA last month. Who says spam isn’t profitable?

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  • Ravelry scales 10 million request

    How Ravelry Scales to 10 Million Requests Using Rails

    Rails is often the whipping boy for performance issues (read: Twitter), but more often than not performance issues reside in the database. Ravelry creator Casey Forbes gave an interview on how he created the site in 4 months of nights and weekends, and how he continues to scale it without any funding. An incredible and inspiring read for any programmer or entrepreneur.

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  • 60 Resources for the Frugal Web Developer

    60 Resources for the Frugal Web Developer

    Needing a way to reduce costs while developing a project? Here are 60 resources (some common, some more rare) that any web developer could utilize instead of spending the unneeded coin on expensive software.

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  • Things to ask before you redo your website

    Things to Ask Before you Redo your Website

    Marketing juggernaut Seth Godin has a lengthy list of questions to ask yourself (or have your client ask themselves) before they create a new design for their site.

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  • 101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School

    101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School

    Here’s an interesting blog that’s centered around interaction design, with aspects of development that nearly all developers are familiar with. The blog is easily digestible, displayed in small nuggets of information. “Be wary of projects with ill-defined scope”, “People are good at recognizing shapes”, and “functionality is the enemy of usability” are some example nuggets found on the blog.

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  • Why You Should Switch from Subversion to Git

    Why You Should Switch from Subversion to Git

    Carsonified has a very in-depth article on the benefits that Git can provide over the other popular versioning system Subversion. For those who are thinking about switching things up with your version control systems, this is a very convincing piece.

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Glen Stansberry is a web developer and blogger. You can read more tips on web development at his blog Web Jackalope or follow him on Twitter.  

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  • http://www.twitter.com/tylorskory Tylor

    Awesome roundup! Thanks

  • http://nasibg.info Nasi Veselinov

    Great tutrial! Thanks :)

  • http://www.dev-hq.co.uk Joe

    Nice List!

  • http://www.paulolyslager.com Paul Olyslager

    Always liked those summaries! Thank you.

  • http://www.circuitbomb.com Dustin

    Another great round-up

  • Ijaas

    aww man i could not stop laughing at the “If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers” piece.

    nice round-up btw.

  • http://www.brianswebdesign.com Brian Temecula

    Nice one this month. Twitter makes you dumber … HA! I knew it!

  • Alex

    Thanks, a good round up! I do like the idea of using internet apps instead of making web-apps (sorta)

  • http://www.ifadey.com iFadey

    “The 10 Most Important Skills for Future Programmers”
    This guy is thief. This article is already written by ASP.NET expert Joe Stagner :(

    Here’s the link:

    http://misfitgeek.com/blog/news/10-skills-developers-will-need-in-the-next-five-years/

  • http://trixsolution.com Tanish

    Your link appears broken http://misfitgeek.com/blog/news/10-skills-developers-will-need-in-the-next-five-years/

    Really cool links up there. Gbookmarked a few.

  • http://www.nicepricewebsites.com Luke

    good work guys – again! another really useful list that’s sure to keep me occupied for a few hours.

  • http://zektek.com eric

    Nice list! Amazing so much happened last month.

  • http://www.demogeek.com DemoGeek

    I started liking these collections more and more…very well done!

  • http://www.atakinteractive.com/ Los Angeles Web Design

    Well, yes I agree with the rest, its a nice list of articles and keeps to attracted enough to go through the entire list and also read most of the articles.

  • http://www.bloggerthemes.net Asker

    amazing roundup!

  • http://www.crearedesign.co.uk Stephen Webb

    Another excellent range of articles for designers and developers of any level. The “CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates” article is particularly interesting considering the widespread usage of this method, and it’s obvious pitfalls! After reading this it’s clear it may actually be of benefit to not have any spam security, in a trade-off to guarantee you receive all the form submissions.

    ‘How to Create a Valid Non-Javascript Lightbox’ is another key article as this is usually an area that causes many errors when trying to validate pages as XHTML compliant, especially with the IE code that has to be included.

    I will be keeping this page on file and refer to its many articles time and again. These ‘best of the web’ features are very useful, please continue the excellent work!

  • http://www.widgetpad.com Satoshi Nakajima

    Thank you for writing about widgetpad. We really appreciate it!

  • Nuruzzaman Sheikh

    @Webb,
    You are absolutely correct. And I also want to add “Casey Forbes” as this is a example of tough, laborious and good work.

    And Glen you did a great job for all of us thankx.

  • http://des.1ld.ru des-

    gr8+) thx!

  • http://www.aqibmushtaq.co.uk Aqib Mushtaq

    AWESOME!!!

  • http://www.scottdarby.com Scott Darby

    Great round-up, thanks!

  • http://www.vmalni.com Buzzlair Voufincci

    thanks. i need coffee and 3 hours of no disturbance.

  • Mike

    Ironic. As an Architect who DOES web design about half that stuff actually DOES happen to us.

  • http://www.fraakz.com Fraakz

    Well out of all these tutorials the one that catches my attention rapidly is “101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School”. I guess all the articles are useful but this headline really catches attention.