Michael Sunarlim

The year is coming to an end. How many real posts I published in 2010? Only about ten, and the last one was almost 7 months ago. Where is my motivation to publish more stuff? Well now I just found a new web service / browser extension called Scribefire. The Idea is I can publish post more easily right from my browser and start writing right that minute. Will this encourage me to post more often? We’ll see….

By the way, ScribeFire works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Panic Coda

I have to admit it, Coda by Panic is really one of the best Mac apps ever. Not only it has finally given me the better direction in developing HTML/CSS correctly, it also makes it more fun! It is quite a shame that Panic has not been updating it for a few months now, but that does not make it less powerful.

Why? Because Coda supports third-party plug-ins to enable you add more functions on top on the ones that come with the application itself. No, those plug-ins will not automatically create a website for you.. Consider them like as WordPress plug-ins or widgets, simple and small functions but if collected and used properly can save you hours of development time.

You can get a long list of the officially supported plugin-ins on Panic’s Developer section. To help you in choosing the right ones, here are my favorites:

• Lorem Ipsum
  Generate 1 to 5 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum placeholder text.
• Remove Trailing Whitespace
  Trims whitespace from the ends of lines.
• Replace Special Characters
  Converts almost all special symbols and characters into HTML entities.
• TEA for Coda (not listed on Panic’s website)
  Text Editor Actions for Coda (formerly “Textmate Emulation Actions”, and always TEA for short) is a plugin that emulates some of my favorite Textmate HTML.bundle actions.
• CSS Tools
  Performs automatic reformatting of CSS.

If you have your own favorites, please feel free to share them below.

When you go to a really cool website and want to contact the person or company who runs it, what is your most preferred method? Email, instant message, social media (Twitter, Facebook), or via the contact form? Either one is good, but for most people contact form would probably the most convenient one.

Few web developers hesitate to include one because they think it will take too much time or effort to make it work, specially if they do not have any server-side programming basics. That is no longer the case, these tools will help you build nice contact form for any project quickly:

Contactable

Contactable is a jQuery plugin designed to make contact/feedback forms simpler and more accessible. This plugin will enable you to create a contact form on any page of a site with minimal effort. I also made a small modification of this great plugin to appear on the right side of the page instead the left, you can check it here.

Wufoo

Wufoo is one of the easiest form builder around. It helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code. Its free account is more than enough to create basic online forms, but you can easily upgrade to premium plans to fit your needs.

pForm

Similar with Wufoo, pForm comes with an online form builder with simple interface that will help you build forms of any kind. Integration with your existing web page might be a bit more complicated than Wufoo, but still more simple than building a custom form yourself.

MachForm

MachForm is developed by the same company as pForm. It is the server installable version. You have more options like: receive submission and save to database, send entries to email, send autoresponder email, validate inputs, and lot more.

I decided to write this post to remember my early years as a web developer when I only wanted to offer the best price for the client, including to suggest the cheapest web hosting provider without having a slightest clue how to qualify it as a ‘good’ or ‘better’ service. It might be just me back then, but web server was probably the last thing I would decide or search in the whole development process. They are just servers that are contantly connected to the Internet and host your websites so they are all pretty much the same, right?

Wrong. If you have the principle that a web project does not end after you launch a website and get the final payment, you should realize the extra work you need to do if you chose or suggested wrong hosting provider. You want your client to be happy with the website you built, not to get frustrated because it goes down every now and then while you can do nothing about it.

So, what makes the differences between the right providers with the rest? To me it would be quality, support and transparency. Put prices in consideration after you are confident with those three first. Remember, web hosting is a very competitive business. It is rarely a company is trying to overcharge you unless it has much better quality than the rest.

Now to the most important question: what type of server that you need?

Shared Hosting

Most companies and developers usually put this as the first option for a very reasonable reason: price. Nowadays, you can get the good shared hosting plans from $5-20/month. Are there differences between one with another that costs 4-5 times more? Most of the time, yes. Usually providers that offer more economical plans gain the profit by trying to sell more with the same server resources, this might mean they put more restrictions for the account like outgoing email and databases limitations.

When you are researching for a shared hosting plan, be sure to check on the limits for those. The next thing you might also want to know is SSH support.

The good things

• Economical
• Best money for disk capacity offered
• Can be set with minimal web server knowledge
• Easy to upgrade, although mostly only for space and bandwidth

What you might miss

• Limited resources
• Limited access

Things to check

• Disk space capacity
• Email, database, etc limitations
• SSH access support

Ideal for…

• Websites with minimal or no plan of expansion
• Static websites
• Companies or clients that plan to host many email accounts so require a big disk space

Recommendation

• BlueHost
• MediaTemple*

*Note: recently MT has been having stability and security issues on their gs (shared) plans, but I cannot overlook the fact that it has the nicest interface. This is important because it encourages the clients to browse through their control panel and do not get overwhelmed by it.

Virtual Private Server

This is the next upgrade for regular hosting, above this then it means you are developing a website in a very huge scale. Virtual Private Server gives you much more flexibility when it comes to resources and access. You can practically install anything that you can do on your local computer/server. It can easily be an overkill you opt for this if you only plan to host a simple company profile without any server-side processes.

When do you need to upgrade to dedicated virtual? When your blog is listed as the top 10 blogs to follow by Smashing Magazine, kidding. You should start considering it if you are developing a web project or installing a web app that requires more than average resources, like a newsletter system with thousands of subscribers or e-commerce system with many customers.

The good things

• Better flexibility
• Installable with almost any type of web based applications
• Can be reselled
• Guaranteed resources

What you might miss

• Cost more than shared hosting, usually with less disk space
• Simple access, more knowledge is needed

Things to check

• Type of server: unmanaged/semi-managed/managed
• Control Panel system: CPanel/Plesk/etc
• Disk space, actual memory, server processor

Ideal for…

• Websites with few applications installed
• Dynamic websites and blogs with very high daily traffic
• Companies or clients who are planning to expand the website with new sections and features
• If you want to host the projects from your clients yourself

Recommendation

• Linode (unmanaged)
• WiredTree (managed)

At the end, when comes the time to choose one, look for direct references and do your research to find the most suitable plan for. It is worth to mention about WebHostingTalk as one of the best source to find web hosting reviews and coupon codes and promotion!

I am sure you have your own opinions and suggestions about this, please feel free to post your comments.

Sendloop is a promising email marketing service with simple and easy user interface. It is developed by the guys from Octech who created Oempro, a popular email marketing software.

If you have been wanting to promote or manage an email marketing for your website or business, I would recommend to try it. With sleek web 2.0 look & feel, you can easily adjust yourself with the system. I dare to say this because the first email marketing software I used years ago just so hard to adapt, although it worked.

A screenshot of Sendloop's clean user interface

Now with Sendloop and other similar services, everyone can create and manage their own mailing lists for regular newsletter or occasional email blast. This is a hosted service, which means you do not need to install and set it up on your own server. You just need to manage your lists, create your campaigns and send them.

They only charge you when you send email to your list(s). For 1 cent per recipient, this is quite a bargain. If you have 1,000 of subscribed email addresses, you only need to budget $10 for your monthly newsletter. Of course if you have more than 10,000 addresses and you need to send them weekly, considering to install your own newsletter system is a good idea.

One last highlight why I have been following their news recently, because they have this one feature that integrates with Shopify’s webhooks. It will enable you to automatically import your customers email addresses to Sendloop.

More information can be found their website.

Always having a hard time to find the perfect loader for your AJAX scripts? Then you need to bookmark this site: Ajaxload.

Not only it provides a few dozens of animated GIF image for your loader, you can even customize it background and foreground colors. Nice!