How often have you had to change your Layout, your db organization, or your business logic because the client had “forgotten a tiny detail”. Which obviously is not tiny, and in a lot of cases creates a lot of cascading changes to your application.

Of course we can plan things ahead. But you can’t take into consideration every possible modification. Also that would mean to trade off speed for flexibility. A more rigid system is often a more optimized one. How much compromises are you ready to make?

I wish *fingers crossed* i could get that Perfect Spec for every project.
Or only that the client had its mind made up once, and sticks with it.

Before you contract a web agency, read this article called If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers, it might be easier to understand why its important to know what you want

I’m sick of websites that do not work using their domain name. Websites that require you to type an additional 4 characters in front of the actual domain name to work.

I see that there are old initiatives in this area, such as http://no-www.org/ that seems to go back to 2003.
If this is considered to be redundant, why do we still use it today?
Why do we get stuck with a meme and don’t change anything even if it will make things easier in the long run for us?

I can only say that this is stupidity. It can’t be laziness. We could say that we are being lazy now, and don’t want to change our habits.  But in the long run, laziness  would tell us that we made the wrong choice.

Please,

drop the www

*I still create a www subdomain, and redirect it to the regular tld.

Present

Google has announced a new OS.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Specific details have not been released yet. But I’m fairly certain it will work togheter closely with other Google services (such as Gmail, Gdocs etc). It will actually be more of a browser, directly integrated with the hardware (so we can actually remove the traditional OS layer).

That would probably mean a lower resource usage. And if we think how much of our daily computer time is actually spent browsing the web, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Technology

Technical data is not available yet, but most probably we will have native Javascript support (it could be that the OS will be operated by Javascript). And there is a big chance that all the OS UI will be rendered using HTML and CSS (Webkit at the OS level?). The boundries between desktop and web are furthere diminished.

Future

This is indeed a great time to be working in the web industry. The web slowly moves into Clouds and into Personal Computers. Bridging them is ongoing (as we see with this OS).

For some time now i have been saying that the future OS will be the browser. It seems that i was right on the money with that prediction.

So hone your HTML, CSS and Javascript skills as they will play a huge part in tommorrows computer (and mobile) landscape.
Just think  that you could have widgets (or full blown programs) running at the OS level written as a jQuery plugin.

For the last year i have tried a variety of different frameworks and Content Management Systems, based on different platforms and different scripting languages. I have, since then, returned to Typo3 because it offers a great deal of functionality, it is extensible and customizable (altough it has some drawbacks in the form of a steep learning curve – for developers and for content editors, and a complex (and maybe a bit bloated) backend design.

Today i want to get you through the basic functionality that a CMS has to offer, and how it should behave. Bear in mind that this is my personal opinion based on building and maintaining a site. This is greatly insipired by Typo3, but also on the Netlogiq CMS (asp.NET based in-house built and used cms solution) and various other …

Core Functionality

This is the bare minimum or the skeleton, that a CMS solution should have. It should meet the following criteria:

• be enough to support presentation sites
• extensible: have a plug-and-play system in place for extensions
• easy to create a site using it
• fully customizable front-end design
  • little-to-none convetions for the front-end structure
• easy to manage content

1. Structure

Tree like structure. This is good because everyone is familiar with a folder-tree structure. Easy to grasp and to navigate. Page-based structure.

2. Content

Each page from the structure has regions and content. Each content element should be appointed to a region. A content element may be anything, from text, to an image, to a navigation element. And each content element needs to have the ability to cascade (be inherited by its ancestors).

3. Internationalisation

Typo3 based i18n and localisation tehniques.

1. Define available languages on the root-level
2. Create translated content based on the default language content

4. Template system

Some sort of marker-based template system, where markers and regions are linked togheter.

With this Core we can create most presentation sites.
For more functionlity we should apply to the extension system.

Extensions

An extension will at the most basic level add custom content types to the Pages. Examples of this could be:

• time based entries (news, blog etc)
• photo gallery
• forms
• etc

Of course there are other components that we have not touched, such as user management, caching etc
This post is just a reminder for me as I plan to build something like this with Django on top of GAE. I have something similar (but very, and i mean very basic on Django 1.0 and have used it for 2 sites), but i need a more simpler solution to typo3 for more simpler projects.

And GAE offers free hosting (for the types of sites that would be build with this CMS)