Web Development
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Tradeshift announces a raft of new partners, API opening up soon
Tradeshift , which has been described as the “Skype for invoicing”, has announced a raft of new partners in the SaaS accounting space, along with plans to open up its API to enable more third-parties to tie into its free invoicing system. The launch partners who have had access to a beta version of Tradeshift’s API include: ERPLY (free ERP system), E-conomics (a SaaS accounting solution provider), Workbook (a specialized platform for the media business), Office123 (an open-source ERP system), Continia (bank payments systems), Winfinans (Windows-based desktop accounting), and Ibistic (the leading e-invoicing workflow system in Scandinavia). This, says the company, in which early Skype investor Morten Lund is an adviser , puts it on track to bring “directly integrated electronic invoicing” to more than 100,000 small European businesses over the next 6 months.
The post on Hacker News today about FireSheep , a Firefox addon which lets you trivially compromise the web application cookies/sessions of anyone on the same wireless network, gave me the much-needed impetus to upgrade my business to SSL security. For the last several years, I haven’t encrypted traffic between the server and the user. My theory was that my customer’s didn’t store anything security critical in their elementary school bingo card games, but the increasing amount of information available to the admin (me) plus a customer support story from this morning convinced me that compromise would be a Very Bad Thing. Implementing SSL in Rails was very painful and resulted in my site being down or unusable for a large portion of my customers for much of the day.
How To Use SSL To Secure Your Rails App Against FireSheep And Other Evils: MicroISV on a Shoestring
At VinSol, we have been developing and deploying Rails applications for more than four years. During this period, we have identified some best practices that we prefer to follow while deploying rails application to production server. Below is the checklist of these practices: 1.
11 Things to Consider Before Deploying Your Ruby on Rails Application | Vinsol - Leading Ruby on Rails Development and Consulting Firm in India
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The new Firefox plug-in Firesheep is a tool that a public WiFi hotspot user can implement to snoop on the activities of other users of that hotspot. Mozilla says the flaw Firesheep exploits is not found in Firefox per se, but rather in the lax security standards to which many popular websites adhere. Firesheep will make it easier for malicious hackers to do their dirty work, but it also may motivate improvements. Freelance software developer Eric Butler has released Firesheep, a plug-in to the Firefox Web browser that lets anyone capture cookies from an open WiFi network and possibly steal their owners' identities. Firesheep is free and open source program available for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms.
Float basics
What is a float? When you float an element it becomes a block box. This box can then be shifted to the left or right on the current line. The markup options are "float: left", "float: right" or "float: none". A floated box is laid out according to the normal flow, then taken out of the flow and shifted to the left or right as far as possible. Content can flow down the right side of a left-floated box and down the left side of a right-floated box.Posted by jallspaw | Filed under infrastructure , operations , people , philosophy Walter's Mystery Control Panel, by Telstar Logistics, on Flickr (Note: this post is a largely non-technical discussion about technical issues. It’s mainly written for the shoppers and sellers on Etsy, but I’m posting it on our engineering blog because I think engineers might be interested.) The other night we had an outage . Put frankly: outages suck.
Frank Talk About Site Outages
5 ways to increase deliverability
This week email services company Return Path released its Q2 2008 Reputation Benchmark Report. The results highlight the fact that for many b2b marketers, deliverability may still be an issue. According to the report, emails sent from “legitimate” email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; 20% were rejected and 8% went into some type of filter. The rest—16%—were bounces. In other words, almost half of the time, email marketers’ messages aren’t getting through. There are ways to increase deliverability, though, according to George Bilbrey, Return Path’s general manager of delivery assurance.
The huge variety of addons is the main reason why I am a stubborn FireFox adopter. It is fun to watch how Google Chrome is quickly catching up in that respect. This week I am looking at a cool SEO extension for Google Chrome you will want to check out. The utility has a pretty unique name – SEO Site Tools and here’s the full round-up of its features ( mind it that all stats mentioned below can be expanded by clicking the link to the full report at each provider’s site ). 1.
The SEO Tool That May Make You Switch to Google Chrome | SEO Facts
One of my favourite parts of creating web apps is being able to make subtle changes to our sales pages and see the impact it has on our signups. With CareLogger being a side project, our time available for marketing is limited. We found conversion optimization to be a good way to spend 30 minutes once a week refining our pitch to customers. It also maximizes the amount of signups so we have access to more people to conduct customer development with. After these 3 experiments our free signup conversion rate went from 14.5% to 25%, a 72% improvement . 1) Including a pain point in our headline
Dan McGrady - dMix - Toronto Startup, Ruby Developer and Designer
Critique a Web Page in 30 Seconds or Less by Bryan May 11, 2010 in Interaction Design , Business and Startups , Notable comments When you're ready to launch your website, you'll want to give visitors the best user experience possible. Learning to evaluate a website effectively is part art and part science, but it's a skill that can be learned. To develop an eye for what works on a website and what doesn't, there are few simple techniques that help you critique your website in 30 seconds or less. Note where your eyes go first - Type in your URL, then close your eyes before the page loads.
Critique a Web Page in 30 Seconds or Less
43 Essential Controls for Web Applications
Designing a web application? Familiarize yourself with Rich Internet Application technologies and the best UI controls for creating your application. Rich Internet Application technology has empowered us to create really amazing user experiences.The Rails Way: File Downloads Done Right
Getting your file downloads right is one of the most important parts of your File Management functionality. A poorly implemented download function can make your application painful to use, not just for downloaders, but for everyone else too. Thankfully it’s also one of the easiest things to get right. The simple version For the purposes of this article let’s assume that your application needs to provide access to a large zip file, but that access should be restricted to logged in users.How To Engage Customers In Your E-Commerce Website - Smashing Magazine
One of the most influential factors in our buying decisions is the opinions of our friends and relatives. Likewise, a large majority of online shoppers now trust what other customers say about the products they buy more than the e-tailers themselves. The reason is that we trust people who are “on our side,” even if we do not know them personally.Blog - Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results
Google has been touting their new Instant search as giving users “better search results, faster”. But it seems that organic search results have suffered. Here’s a search test I did using the phrase Insurance Quotes . This is a pretty highly advertised for search term.Overview The following is an extremely simplified view of how SSL is implemented and what part the certificate plays in the entire process. Normal web traffic is sent unencrypted over the Internet. That is, anyone with access to the right tools can snoop all of that traffic. Obviously, this can lead to problems, especially where security and privacy is necessary, such as in credit card data and bank transactions.