We recently started using a service called Pingdom to constantly monitor all the websites we host for downtime. Pingdom checks our sites as frequently as every minute and provides instant notifications of downtime via its iPhone app. This a great feature that guarantees that we will know about your website being down before you or your clients do. The sites we host with Rackspace rarely go down, but this service allows us to monitor all our client’s sites whether we are hosting them or not.

In addition to downtime alerts, Pingdom also logs website response time. This helps us monitor the health of our servers and assess the need for balancing site traffic over a greater network. This is a great tool in assessing how your site visitors are viewing your site. Are they waiting 2 minutes for large images to load? Are they leaving before you get complete page loads?

All these features allow us to take care of our client’s online marketing. They can focus on running their business and not worry about their number one marketing tool being unavailable.

Check out Pingdom for more info.

The concept that more people contributing to small parts to one common goal will create something exceedingly better then a project created by an individual. This is the reason why at Floodlight we are PHP developers and contribute to the open source community as much as possible.

This week the largest PHP web application made a huge contribution to the open source community. Facebook has spent the last 2 years re-writing PHP to make it run 10x faster then it currently does. Now that they have completed the project they released the code to the open source community. They hope that all the developers that access it make their release that much better and find new ways to utilize this technology.

This concept applies to business as well. How are you investing in your business community? How can you help your partners?

Invest in your community

How is your website protected?  Does your web developer or host create daily/weekly/monthly backups of your site files and database?  Typically clients don’t tend to ask these questions until the damage is already done.  It’s good to ask sooner rather then later.

Our hosting partner Rackspace, does perform daily backups, but only saves that data for 3 days.  We extend this protection by providing daily/weekly/monthly backups for all our site using a simple perl script.  When you see how simple it is you will implore your developer to implement a similar script.

Ready?  Here’s the quick explanation…

Line 2 – Sets up the timestamp for use in file names

Line 3 – Gets a MySQL dump of the database content and saves it

Line 4 – Compresses the MySQL dump file

Line 4 – Copies the full web content directory, compresses the files, and saves it

Line 6 – Finds backups that are older more then 7 days ago and deletes them.

This script will keep daily backups for a week and then automatically delete the older files. Pretty neat huh?

So the next time you have your web developer on the phone make sure you ask them about how your site is being backed up and refer him to this post for a simple perl script to do just that.

Happy Surfing!

We work with Rackspace to provide clients the best possible hosting experience.  Rackspace offers their fanatical support via chat, twitter, phone, email, and now a new ticketing system.  Basically if you have a problem and need to reach out they’ve got you covered.  This is a huge difference from a host that lists an 800 number that goes directly to a messaging system.  I typically interface with them via chat and am greeted with a server engineer that I have yet to stump.  If you choose to call you won’t get long automated menus, but you will get a server specialist that works with you to solve your issue.  No scripts, no pdf manual, a real person working through your issue.

As far as reliability goes Rackspace offers a 100% uptime guarantee.  Thats right, no 99.999999% garbage. Fully committed and backed 100% site uptime.   I’ve yet to have to use this feature of getting a refund because of downtime and I’m glad.  They are following through on their commitment to their clients.  MediaTemple used to be our web-host of choice, but because of their repeated downtime failures we looked for better for our clients.

Rackspace really works hard at creating a UI for their site management that makes sense to users.  It has been refined over the last 6 months and allows new users to create sites in minutes.  This saves us time as we setup accounts for our clients and makes the overall management process extremely intuitive. Their control panel allows us to perform hosting operations on behalf of our clients as well as giving clients their own login and control. This 2-tiered administration setup gives our clients independence yet provides the security of us being able to save-the-day when necessary.

In addition to all this, file backups are run on a twice daily schedule and have saved our clients in multiple situations.  Working with them is like having another whole department in our company that takes care of our client’s servers.  Thats how dedicated they are.

Are you going to pay 4 bucks a month for this?  No. But think about what you are getting for your investment.  Not having to worry about the availability of your number one marketing tool is priceless.

So, why would I, a graphic designer, want to intern at a web development firm? My answer is this: Design and development should not be mutually exclusive. The web is, by far, the most heavily used medium for communicating, so it seems silly for one profession to avoid (or fear) the other.

Designers need developers to communicate their message online, and developers need designers to give them a message. But what about capabilities? A print designer probably has no idea why it would be tricky to tile a background image and throw a gradient over it, or why they can’t use a typeface other than Verdana or Georgia. Likewise, a coder sees beauty in Monaco–faultlessly tabbed, but it’s doubtful that one would see the beauty in perfect kerning and elegant leading, neither of which can be found in any coded page (they translate, respectively, into “letter-spacing” and “line-height”).

When I started here I had no idea what “W3C” was, much less why it’s important to be compliant with their standards, so It’s been a tremendous help to understand the web from both sides of the equation. I understand that “creatives” thinking code and coders thinking creative can sometimes, in rare cases, cause head trauma, so I recommend exercising caution. But the more these two fields can be integrated, the more streamlined and painless things will become for everyone. That is of course, excluding the dreadful IE6 with all it’s random pitfalls and senseless hurdles.

From my time here at Floodlight, my advice for other students, both graphic designers and developers, is to invest a little time getting to know each others’ profession. It helps a great deal even if you only know the language! If others could share my experience I believe that communication between these two “factions” would no longer be lost in translation.

This past year our client’s are becoming more tech savy and more over-worked than ever. Many have elected to use twitter, SMS, or brief emails to communicate. Gone are the days of the 2hr lunches to discuss new projects.

This shift in communication methods as well as work whizzing by at 100 mph creates opportunity for mis-interpreting their needs. We have had the experience of creating additional work for ourselves multiple times because of an assumption or mis-read directive. Through these projects we have learned that it is better to be redundant than to be brief. Even though a client may get frustrated with additional clarifying questions it can potentially save hours of your time and theirs. Lately we’ve been focusing on writing clearer emails, asking more questions, and listening actively.

Hopefully our experience saves you some time and encourages you to pause and ask that one more question before launching in an off-base direction.

AJAX is an acronym for multiple web programing languages that are used in conjunction with each other. Literally AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. Simply put, this is a method of using javascript to fetch data from an XML data stream and inserting that data into a web page without redirecting to a new URL. Understanding what this looks like is best shown by an example.

If you use Gmail or Facebook you have used websites that utilize AJAX technology. For starters, in Gmail, the inbox is refreshed using an AJAX call. To see this, if you let your Gmail inbox sit idly on your screen and you receive a new message the inbox will update to show the new message without you refreshing the screen. How do they do this you ask? The web page is using javascript to consistently check a database for new messages. No action is needed on your part and only the new data will be reloaded. Pretty slick? This is the reason that this technology has become so prevalent on the web in the past year.

One draw-back of this new technology is the amount of processing that is required of the client’s computer and web browser. This is why you will see many people switching to browsers better suited to handle complex javascript requests (Google Chrome, FF, Safari). These newer browsers process javascript much faster and help the interface be that much more enjoyable.

So, go ahead, download an updated browser and enjoy sites that love utilizing the latest in web technologies.

Working with designers has given me an increased sensitivity in the differences between viewing websites in browsers verses their PSD blueprints. One slight difference we have frequently seen is a dull color shift from the PSDs to the finished sites.

I used to always believe this had to do with saving images “as web”. And in some ways it does, but there is a way to configure your photoshop install to eliminate this shift. There is much debate about using the correct color profiles and this may not be the best solution if you also design print work, but it works for and I’ve been using this setup for a while now.

The first step is to set your color profile for Photoshop as a whole. With no file open goto Edit -> Color Settings -> Select Monitor Color for the settings and check the profile mismatches box. Next goto View -> Proof Setup -> Select Monitor RGB. The final step is to open up an image goto File -> Save for Web -> select the jpg profile and uncheck the sRGB box. This will completely remove all color profiles from your image files.

You can check this using the digital color meter tool on your saved for web jpegs when viewed in browser. Let us know if this helps alleviate some of your web color based frustration.

That being said this convenience comes at a cost.  The cost is that all these web-based services that are aggregating your content have no obligation to continue doing so.  Imagine if one day facebook, twitter, MySpace, and ning all decided to shut down….what could we do?  Actually legally we could do very little as these services claim to own the content that you upload to them.  That’s right.  The images from your last 5 vacations that you uploaded to facebook could vanish and you’d have no way to get them back.

Though these services shutting down is unlikely it is always good to consider the implications of such a move, especially if you are using these services for your business.  One way to mitigate this risk is to always backup your content.  Have an offline copy of everything you post online.  Hard disk space is becoming cheaper daily (you can get a super small 400GB external here for $100). Another option for businesses utilizing social media to promote their brand is to integrate with a social network API such as KickApps. KickApps always gives all rights of content to their users and will allow you to export database backups of your content. Is also integrates well with many popular content management systems such as Joomla and Wordpress. Check out some interesting sites using KickApps today…

The Food Network

Slurpee Nation

National Geographic

National Geographic

Harley Social

Jump on over to KickApps and check it out their features.

Today, the social media giant opened up its home stream API so now developers can directly access status updates and post new messages just like they were using the web interface.

Check out the new Adobe Air app that Facebook created to demonstrate this functionality:
Facebook App

Full press release: Facebook Press Release