As a developer I’ve always subscribed to a couple of theories and one of those is something that was drilled into me in Maths in high school; Show your working out. It’s all very well to have the answer, but if you don’t understand how you got there, you have failed.

This is the number one thing I hate that software developers do, they overly abstract/dry code up until it’s no longer easily readable. They sacrifice all their readability, for dry, abstracted code.

The inherited_resources gem is a prime example of this, your controllers are left looking empty; It completely reverses the expected convention of having to define those restful methods. So when Newbie Programmer A arrives at your controller, there’s a whole heap of things going on he just doesn’t know about or understand.

By all means write dry, abstracted code, but think twice before abstracting every last inch out. Just like a lot of things in the world, abstracting and drying up your code is great when used in moderation.

If you need to work out what’s going on and how to fix it, head over and check out the post describing it. In the mean time I’ll be releasing an updated 0.5.2 later this evening with that fix and maybe a few extras.

The system now works around the shortag [itunes] with the following attributes:

• url – a mandatory attribute, this a clean itms store url, fetched via link maker or your itunes client
• title – the string in this field is passed into the output link as the alt tag on the image/title of the link
• content – if you don’t use this field, the itms link image from the settings page is displayed, if you do use this attribute the string is output instead.

Saying all that you don’t need to type this stuff anyway, because that’s the beauty of the button being in both editors. Select text (it’ll be output as the content attribute) or don’t, click the button, search for what you want (or click manual url) and be quickly prompted through the process.  If you enter nothing in the box? It’ll still enter someting like <Artist Name>-<Album name> out for you.

I think this is a nice step forward for the plugin, your feedback is appreciated, the general consensus seems to be to drop feedback over at the article page but i’m now closing that, so please leave your feedback on this post.

1. I got the feeling PayPal loves the buyer more than the Merchant, something seems backwards there
2. PayPal want you to think “outside the box” but still do things their way?  I must say though, being forced to do things their way is sometimes a good thing, othertimes not so much.
3. Criticism is generally met with spin – some products were criticised or lack of products and spin spin “maybe we will, maybe we’ll do something else” just answer the question, if you don’t know you don’t know.
4. They failed to engage our local web community as a whole, due to this the turnout was terrible, next time get in touch with the AWIA.
5. My security key won’t activate, i called on the phone for help (i’ll never be calling PayPal again, just because your primary business is online, it doesn’t mean your phone support can be TERRIBLE, yes that’s right my experience was TERRIBLE)

I want to expand upon that last point, at the event we were told we could activate the security keys onto our accounts, upon trying to do this when i got back to work it just wouldn’t activate.  The error eventually told me to call the 1800 number, which i did.  After waiting on hold i spoke to a girl who basically kept telling me I had no card associate with my account and i didn’t order it, after i repeatidly told her how i aquired it free at the Developer Day.  She then asked me if it was an eBay security key, which i told her it wasn’t, she then told me it was an eBay security key because thats the only way i can get a free one and that i needed to call eBay.  After 15 minutes of this back and forth over the card i gave up, fairwelled the young lady, tweeted to @PayPalAustralia to try get help (still waiting but thats ok, it’s friday night) and now have a very negative perception of the kind of service my customers are going to receive when they phone PayPal with an issue.

Later in the afternoon i thought i’d try my hand at another call (after all the website did tell me to call that number to sort it out).  This time, the prompter forwarded me to another line that basically went like this “We’re experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment, most questions can be answered by visting the help link at the top of every page, Thank You for calling PayPal, have a nice day *hang up*”.  Ummm, if the call centre your IVR is targetting me to doesn’t have enough lines to take my call, that’s possibly the worst way you can handle the situtation.

All in all the developer day itself was great and i hope they come back next year if only so everyone can come next time.  But I feel PayPal Australia still have a bit more to do in Australia to win people over, they still have a very negative perception amongst alot of users (just because they’re active users, doesn’t mean they’re happy users), but they definately look to be taking steps towards changing how they’re perceived.

So heres the deal, Woopra is Live analytics for web site, just like google analytics all you do is add a javascript code. Then while i sit here with my Woopra desktop client open on my computer (this is the first win), i see you hitting the websites i have registered, i see it all while it’s happening and i see where you came from. Theres something weird about this, it creates a strange sensation for the developer of a website, the power of knowing someone is on your site RIGHT NOW!

I find i lose or disregard alot of the data that is in google analytics, purely because of the fact i go and “check it” and filter through it all. In Woopra i find myself rarely checking and just leaving it open on a screen at times to watch, due to this i find i’m noticing things about the websites i’ve not been paying attention too that REALLY need some attention.

In it’s current incarnation Woopra doesn’t seem to be doing alot more than Google Analytics, but that’s ok because they’re doing some of it better and talking about the future features. Some extras that make it that little bit better:

• Visitor Tagging – obviously in all analytics programs each user is ‘unique’ so that they can see the difference between unique hits and page views. Woopra takes it one step further allowing you to Tag certain users. Of course i’m tagging repeat customers so i can see what they’re doing..why wouldn’t i? It’d be nice if woopra allowed me to add a default link on the tag so say if i wrote the tag as “
• Live Geographical Overview – The kind of thing you push to displays and put around the office to watch
• API’s for data access – Whats that i can build my own shiney live geographical overview using my data from your servers? take that google! (and weeks after i wrote this, google released their data api)

So there you have it, my first impressions of Woopra. I’ll be posting more again on Woopra as they get the current version out of Release Candidate. If you want to check out Woopra head over to their website to check out more.

The plugin adds an itunes button to the visual editor which when clicked brings forward a dialog containing a search for the iTunes store link maker.

After searching, clicking on any link will ask for a title for the link and insert it into the content editor. The link also enables the ability to directly link to albums, something the standard link generator does not normally do.

Enough gaff, if you want it, it’s here.  It’ll be on wordpress.org soon enough.

We do a lot of online stores and one thing they have a lot of, is IMAGES.  One thing we do people hate us for, is store these in the database.  “It’s slow” they say, “It’s flexible” i say and we argue back and forth for hours.  Here’s the thing though, it’s only ever noticeably slow when you’re re-sizing them on the fly, otherwise the page load times are fine.

The problem only comes in to play when people are hammering your server and your image retrieval scripts are querying for images over and over again for images the users seen thousands of times before and already have a copy of in their local cache.  All because every piece of image display code you ever read for PHP never EVER includes local cache control, so everytime the person refreshes the page they get all 20 or so images again, for no reason.

So heres the secret, timestamp every row in your database with a last modified date, excessive? perhaps.. usefull? you betcha! Now, as early on in your application, as soon as you can, before doing excessive tasks that take time, check the date that corresponds to your page/image/whatever and send a Last-Modified: header value of that time.  This tells the web browser that you want to cache this file and that next time, it should send an If-Modified-Since: header in it’s request.

If-Modified-Since: is where the beauty lies, before you output the Last-Modified header and while you have the dates from your database, check them against each other, if the database is newer than If-Modified-Since, continue on as you would serving the site, but if not, fire off a HTTP 304 Status code and exit(); the application.

Why serve it if you don’t need to? the local cache is there for a reason.  Coming next, examples.

The first comic that came to be was The Landscaper, this is a comic that deals with a very prevelant issue in todays society, the fact that people at a certain age are totally untouchable by the law.  Hopefully the comics’ way of handling this is a bit different from how it would be handled in reality.

The second comic is Visual Assault, which kind of came about as an accident.  The story behind Visual Assault is one of waring factions of eyes, competing to control the territory known as F.A.C.E.  Alot of the journey to and from work is usually spent by Chris and I discussing far-out stupid ideas, sometimes we bring them to life in the form of Visual Assault.

The two comics differ completely in style and thats probably why we’re both so comfortable moving between them.  The Landscaper is a graphic novel with a big storyline and a really rigid structure with humour as a small addition, where as Visual Assault is a panel-by-panel comic, with a small storyline, a very loose structure and is all about the humour.

Anyway, check out our comics and if you’re totally into them, we’ve created Facebook applications for both which you can see using the links below.  If you’re having trouble adding our applications, try using the NEW facebook, you may aswell get used to it now because over the next few months it WILL become the default.

• The Landscaper Facebook Application
• Visual Assault Facebook Application

As a short side-note for other Comicpress publishers checking out our comics, i’ve been working on a facebook application that integrates the comicpress system into facebook via a wordpress plugin.  If you’re interested in seeing this, drop me a line.

The basics is that the widget will sit in your sidebar and display specific information from your steam community page, theres more in the works, but i’ll fill you in on that a bit more later on. Check it out at http://ignite.digitalignition.net/articlesexamples/scw/ and let me know what you think.

Nick Watson from Adobe UK brought us a whole heap of Adobe goodies, for which we are thankful and also did a great presentation to boot. Adam Lehmann also gave us 2 highly informal presentations and kept my brain entertained over lunchtime sandwiches.

Thanks again to all the speakers and everyone involved, every time i leave one of these Cold Fusion meetups or conferences i walk away feeling that little bit happier that Cold Fusion isn’t dead and is going somewhere, somewhere great!