using_thinkfree

Just when I thought that I have everything figured out, dumped GoogleDocs in favor of Zoho and things started to settle, I discover ThinkFree. It would be more fair to say, rediscover, because I knew about them for quite some time, but it didn’t left some impression that would make me return I guess. I read recently blog post about them and I wanted to check them out. It turns out, their offering, however lesser in features especially compared to Zoho, is very polished and can replace MS Office for real. I had a problem when I get MS Office file that I can’t easily open it in Zoho. Actually I can just I didn’t want to install extensions I guess. Anyway, the way ThinkFree does it makes more sense to me at the moment. And it is great that I have so much choice and alternatives available.
Zoho still stays my main suite but I can see myself using ThinkFree for certain tasks. This blog post is written using ThinkFree Note.

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New WordPress 2.5

New WordPress is out. Download it here. It is obvious that they spent a lot of effort to make it more easy to use. New admin interface is really good, I was used to old one but I can see how this one can help new and inexperienced blogger find things.

Lame attacks on WordPress from TypePad? founder just show how out of touch someone can be. WordPress is currently the best platform for personal publishing,period.

We at Dakic OnLine, love to use WP to produce websites, it gives better functionality and more power to our clients. It is not for every site, but quite often it is great choice. Just recently we made http://lokater.net , which is still on old version, however I have one new site almost done and I used RC something version which was upgraded to full version seamlessly. I will not tell url because it is not done completely. I can only say that it works great, new interface is well organized and also version 2.5 works with plugins I used well.

StatCounter extends free service

StatCounter.com one of a premier website statistics providers, one that we love and prefer to use just became better. They increased log size to 500 for free accounts, it was 100 before.

StatCounter has great service that enables people to monitor multiple sites and get easy to read results. They offer more drill down services for those paying accounts and size of log enables people to drill down. Previously for free accounts it was 100 which honestly left few things to be desired, now with 500 it is almost there. I think 1000 last hits is enough for a website to be able to track what is happening, so with 500 they are almost there, and frankly I should open up finally and pay.

Discussion innovates (aka Web2.0)

I read rave reviews of Tangler australian startup company. I had to check it out, but I was skeptical all along, how come discussion can be innovated, I suspected it will be mish-mash of all things web2.0 .

It turns out that it has enought web2.0 features, but in a way that is not burning your eyes when you see them. I love how they handle discussion, even without ability to post video or image files to discussion.

Discussion flows naturally at Tangler, it has everything that it needs to make true innovation on web-forum. It is genuine step forward which actually facilitate social interactions, instead of bloating it with excessive features.

I love everything about it and this is one of the apps when you see it, you think ‘Why couldn’t I think of something like that.

If there is any feature I wish they have, and they most likely have it in another form, that would be ability to create mini-Tanglers. So that I can create Tangler for topic areas I would like to discuss and that I can influence design and appearance and layout. That way Tangler could be integrated into existing discussion groups (they can keep the topic and upgrade the software) and would probably help spread it more.

Springwise for ideas

Each week I get email from Springwise with new and innovative ideas, trends and information about business. These are really innovative approaches, fresh views and also information about what people are doing and how they are innovating in other countries, mostly western Europe.

I find it refreshing to read and would heartily recommend it.

Technorati Universal

News is out, Technorati is still premier blog search but when you open it’s redesigned page you will not be able to tell that. It is much simplified design, less clutter and better organization. I like it a lot and might even start using it more.

Cache-ing Rails apps

Rails have a lot of neat features as you most likely already well know. One thing that could improve in my view is cache-ing. In ColdFusion for example you can cache things and tell it how long you would like it to be cached before expiring. In Rails, you need to set a cron job that would delete files if you want to achieve similar effect. Which is far from great.

Here is simple example, let’s say I have site like this blog and for some reason million of people daily hit it. I can be very productive and post updates every few minutes. So instead of hitting database every moment with millions of queries, I would cache pages and let them expire every minute. Result is that you get updates as you would with direct access and DB get’s just several hits per minute.

Anyway, Tobias Luetke have article on how to set something similar in Rails here. I really like his approach and it solves a lot of hardship with cacheing.

Capistrano for PHP

Just found really neat post about using Capistrano for PHP deployment.

Capistrano is tool for deploying Rails applications which makes whole process very easy and automated. Since beggining of Rails, people were envious for a number of tools, my favorite is migrations, but Capistrano is certainly one of the great ones. With Capistrano deploying daily is no longer a time-waster.

Rails Envy videocasts

Let me upfront say that I really like PHP as well as Rails. When done right PHP can be great. Good example how even Rails can go bad is that very popular service Twitter is having problems with handling all of the visitors and many wonder if Rails contributed to it and if it would have that problems if it was done in PHP. I had some problems with getting Rails to run well as well, which I wouldn’t have with PHP ever, but still I wouldn’t complain, Rails makes this up million time when I use migrations for example. I can’t find a link on TechCrunch discussion about Twitter, sorry.

While amuzing, I find it really distastefull to focus that much on PHP (most likely authors of Rails Envy don’t know Java much).

Anyway, here is a link to videocast.

Have Ajax? Some issues with javascript libraries

Strange thing is that often when you see something strange that other people hype about you will think that you might not understand it well. Doing Ajax and visual effects on the sites have come a long way from time when google maps essentially brought focus to whole concept (it was used before by Microsoft in Hotmail however no-one really wanted to notice it).

I recently went on to refresh my knowledge of main javascript libraries that are used, Prototype, Moo and JQuery. While working I discovered that I don’t really like too much to use Moo, Prototype is default in Rails so I didn’t give it much thought, but I really liked JQuery now when I think about it. It is really neat and light. While there are a lot of similarities and overlap, JQuery for now is my favorite and I really enjoy using it.

I was really thrilled to learn that JQuery can work nicely with Rails and then went on to read criticism of using Prototype in web projects. It makes a lot of sense as it brings quite an overhead and when people are using it indiscriminately no wander people complain. From user perspective that overhead is loaded just initially but it can be taxing on the server and bandwidth.

Reason to get custom software

It might be obvious, however as makers of custom software we are often faced with people who are trying to avoid to pay the full price, usually by using or trying to use off the shelf software for things it was never intended to be used.

Sometimes it can be great. On good example is when you use blog software as CMS for simple site. It has a lot of sense to use that and it can only make site better. There are other / most occasions when this is not the case and when I see companies and enterpreneurs trying to use sw and trying to rationalize why this is ok. It is not. Business needs custom software and people like us at Dakic OnLine are perfect when you need that kind of services, mostly because we have a lot of experience in both commercial ie. Microsoft tools and open source one and we can use ones that are perfectly matching your business goals.

Anyway, reason for writing this is actually that one of my favorite online places has a piece on why business need custom software.

Please read on at Trizle – When Your Company Needs Custom Software

PopFly – Microsoft finally does something great

Most of the world still yawns at Windows Vista, which honestly is really good but not worth the money they are asking, some other people at MS were busy working on really simple and great product.

PopFly is new service that is still in Alpha and I would love to get an invite (to use Kevin Rose move). Did I say I would love to get an invite?

Anyway, it is great product, really simplifies creating of mashups, makes whole process visual and also ads some code, which I suspect will show it’s full power very soon. What is even more interesting, it actually features Microsoft’s new technology Silverlight that is made to complement Flash (isn’t that put politely or what) for making Rich Internet Apps. Some features of Silverlight make it very appealing for developers as it will support number of .Net languages, as well as Python and Ruby if I understood it correctly.

Again PopFly is really great, I assume hosting that app will produce server problems and I will monitor to see how MS people will deal with it, but overall great product and has great future potential and growth. This is one of the apps that you wish you were somehow responsible making it. I was thinking for a long time along similar lines of Yahoo Pipes or now MS PopFly. I was of course thinking on something much smaller and simpler. Both of them are great products, Pipes are now ahead as they are working product but PopFly has probably more potential of growth. If people associate it with Silverlight, I think this technology will have great future.

Ruby 1.8.6 released!

it’s my first post into Zeljko blog, and i’m lucky for bring this news out

while i was searching for a good way to compile gems source into windows binary i come across new Ruby release which include internal compiler/build tools like Visual C++ 8 SP1 for Windows Users like me.

not only this, but they included new methods as long it was frequently asked, Like.

Kernel#instance_variable_defined?
Module#class_variable_defined?

I’m expecting new features, while they’ll start development for 1.8.7 after fixing critical bugs and security vulnerabilities in the current release.

I know you are eager to hookup so I’ll not talk more.

ruby-1.8.6.tar.bz2 (3.8 MB)

md5: e558a0e00ae318d43bf6ff9af452bad2
sha256: 0fc6ad0b31d8ec3997db2a56a2ac1c235283a3607abb876300fc711b3f8e3dd7

ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz (4.4 MB)

md5: 23d2494aa94e7ae1ecbbb8c5e1507683
sha256: 3ef37fb961d04471a1aef2c8079d6fab09932e3281d79859d5cd5d426bde0868

ruby-1.8.6.zip (5.3 MB)

md5: 5f4b82cec8f437634e05a3ce9bb3ca67
sha256: c4b011d66b3f7e3bddbdf61a7404120d5ac80c6b742ad08e7e75b6d14ee56e76

Enjoy.

Kids play

Communication

Image says it all:

http://www.linuxkungfu.org/images/fun/geek/project.jpg

Sufice to say, we at Dakic OnLine are trying to make a difference.