Sparrowtail

I've been doing some interesting work lately using Google Website Optimizer to help with our signup page on Analytics SEO. The full gory details are over on the Analytics SEO Blog.

I had an interesting problem this morning. One of our team had been demonstrating Analytics SEO to a potential reseller, and had forgotten to log out of the site at the end of the demo. He didn't really want to leave them with access to his account (which is a rather powerful administrator-type account), but also didn't really want to phone them and ask them to log out. The reseller is in South Africa, so I can't exactly sneak in and delete their login cookie either.

Bit of a weird problem this week about our customers not being able to access our pre-production websites. We have a test server in our office which we use to host websites during development so our customers can see progress and add their own content. Our internet access and networking is (mostly)  handled by a consumer-grade Netgear router/firewall/ADSL modem job, which is configured to route inbound http requests to our test server. All worked fine.

It's been said before, but good judgement comes with experience, but experience comes from bad judgement

We all know the golden rules on database backups:

1. do backups
2. test that you can restore from those backups

But how many of us actually do that second part? I've recently gained some experience (ahem!) on the importance of step 2.

Our latest venture, www.analyticsseo.com, is a pretty complex app for a Drupal site. There are two parts to the system:

1. a back-end application, which crawls the web, analyses sites and competitors, and does all kinds of clever stuff
2. a front-end application, which summarises this data, generates tasks, and manages workloads

Fortunately, Drupal makes it really easy to work with multiple databases. Simply add two database connection strings in the settings.php:

An interesting problem for today. I was trying to fix a fairly trivial bug in one of our websites, but when I try to load a page from my webserver I get a Drupal error:

Having been a happy user of GooSync for keeping my Google Calendar synced with my Pixon phone, I decided it was time to centralise my address book too. GooSync claims to be able to sync Google Mail contacts too, so that seemed like a good way to go.

Sadly, once I'd got all my contacts into my Google Mail address book, running GooSync on the phone did two things:

For the past 16 months, I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal to build websites, and I've got pretty good with it. However, I'm always conscious of the old adage that "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", so in the interests of expanding my toolbox, I'm taking a look at Ruby on Rails.

As a web developer, one of the jobs I enjoy least is making sure that the sites I build are going to look good to all our visitors, not just to me. Like most developers, I develop my website for Firefox, then check it's OK in other popular browsers. Given our relatively low visitor volumes (at least so far) and limited time available for testing, in practice, this means testing Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and hoping that Opera, Chrome and Safari are as standards-compliant as Firefox (which is a fairly safe assumption).

Back in January I treated myself to a new mobile phone. Of course I looked at the iPhone, but there were three big drawbacks:

1. the price
2. they're getting kinda common (1 million sold in the UK!)
3. you can't use it as a 3G modem