I recently found UserFly.com, a service which will record videos of the visitors to your site, allowing you to play them back and watch where users go (and how they move their mouse around on the screen).
I was flabbergasted at how easy this was to use – I tried the free version and had recordings [...]

Posted in CSS, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Software, Testing, Web 2 Comments »

I had the pleasure of seeing Josh Holmes keynote CodeStock Saturday morning.  His presentation, “The Lost Art of Simplicity,” was very well done.  Very broad topic, but very applicable to likely everyone in the room.  Certainly I took away many good points.  In some ways, it’s a lot of points that we *know* at an [...]

Posted in Business, Conferences, Software, Testing, Tools 2 Comments »

I’ve wanted a way to record cell phone conversations for *years*.  With the proliferation of smart phones, you’d think we’d have this by now, but it’s still not a feature widely available (and, reportedly, blocked by some device manufacturers).  So, to scratch my own initial itch, I’ve put together a service to allow me to [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Software, Testing, Tools, Web 3 Comments »

I’ve been taking on a lot of small projects lately, and have been noticing the same problems over and over.  I’ve seen these for years, but I’ve dealt with far more projects in a short time than I ever did in the past.
The checklist below wouldn’t necessarily determine if I’d take a project or not, [...]

Posted in Design, Development, PHP, Software, Testing, Web 4 Comments »

These deserves more than a twitter…
1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book – I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.
2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about [...]

Posted in Blogging, Book, Development, Flash/Flex, Grails, Groovy, Software, Testing, Web 1 Comment »

The codemash organizers have graciously donated a free pass to the upcoming Codemash conference to be given away to one lucky webdevradio.com listener.  To enter in to the drawing, listen to the codemash episode interview podcast on webdevradio with Jim Holmes, follow the instructions, and hope your name is drawn.

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Database, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Podcasts, Software, Testing, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I just got back from our new Refresh* meeting (”Refresh The Triangle”) – http://refreshthetriangle.org/. This was held at Viget Labs, and they were the initial organizers. We had a stab at a Refresh group a year ago, but it didn’t get off the ground. There were something like 30 people at tonight’s [...]

Posted in Design, Development, RefreshTheTriangle., Software, Testing, Web No Comments »

I put together a small utility to generate random user data several months back. I realized yesterday that I hadn’t released the source code – I thought I had. This generates plausible names, addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. The phone number area codes don’t generally match up with the address, [...]

Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, MySQL, PHP, Software, Testing, Web, opensource 4 Comments »

Wow – the connection to my server from the convention center just died yesterday.  I could traceroute all the way to something internal to the data center, but it just stopped.  I need to determine if some iptables crap triggered to block me out (why would that have happened?)
So, yesterday afternoon was great.  I had [...]

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, PHP, SOLR, Software, Testing, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07 No Comments »

This is one I wish I’d just recorded straight from the board.  This testing framework looks pretty awesome, and one that may have a big impact on how people do AJAX/web testing in the coming months.  While it’s been ‘out’ for awhile, this was basically a public launch here at OSCON.  I’m going to see [...]

Posted in Conferences, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, opensource, oscon, oscon07 1 Comment »