What is the True Cost of Shared Hosting?
CMS systems for small and medium scale sites using WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others mostly use shared hosting. That is where your website shares a CPU & Supporting Software, memory, diskspace and Internet bandwidth with 2-4 other websites on the same machine in which all of these assets are “time-shared”. This has been and currently […]
ClassicPress: Why a WordPress Clone?
ClassicPress is a GPLv2[Free Software Foundation] clone of WordPress version 4.9.x – any theme, plugin or website that runs on WordPress 4.9 will run on ClassicPress. The ClassicPress FAQ page provides key insights into the reason for ClassicPress: ClassicPress is a community-led fork of the WordPress content management system that preserves the classic TinyMCE editor […]
Oxygen and the WordPress ThemeBuilders
WordPress has seen a wave of Themebuilders over the past few years and coming from two sources – themes with builtin PageBuilders and PageBuilders taking over many theme functions. On the theme side there are 7 popular themes which come with PageBuilders as part of the package – Avada with Fusion Builder, X with Cornerstone, Monstroid2 with Power Page Builder, Strata with an included […]
GDPR Key Requirements and Rules
There are two very useful studies that examine the nature of GDPR. The first is the Enterprise approach of IBM which has a five point plan that is matched to the GDPR regulations on both data protection as well as data privacy. There is a strong opening Assessment/Audit of the current usage of personal data throughout an organization’s web […]
How Gutenberg is Shaking WordPress UI Foundations
But It Is Theme And PageBuilder Vendors Who Are Currently Transforming How WordPress UI Design Is Actually Done Let us be clear, Gutenberg is by itself having a profound effect on WordPress UI Design and Development. Here are some of the major trends. Gutenberg brings the 3rd Generation JavaScript frameworks to WordPress. In the case […]
Speed Wins: Why WordPress Adopted JavaScript
Why More of WordPress UI is written in JavaScript not PHP With the announcement of Calypso, a JavaScript based UI in November of 2015 and then the launch of the Gutenberg project in 2016 using React.js, WordPress Head Honcho Matt Mullenweg tripped off a lot of conjectures as to why the departures from WordPress’ primary […]
Website Key Success Factors
If you are considering implementing a new website or making substantial revisions to an existing site, here are 4 key success factors in order of scheduling and then importance: Clarify the Website’s Mission and Strategy Decide on a Web Presence and Implementation Plan Choose a Hosting Service and a Programming ToolKit Manage the Web Change […]
CSI Members’ Websites: Insights Into Small Business Web Development
CSI-Centre for Social Innovation provides co-working space and collaboration tools for Toronto small businesses and non-profits. As of mid-August 2017 CSI had 517 member websites of which 35% are small businesses, 55% are non-profits, and 10% are government or special offices. Given the composition of its members, CSI provides an excellent opportunity to study small business […]
CSI Best Website: GreenMajority.ca
GreenMajority.ca is an example of excellence in small business, non-profit websites at Toronto’s CSI- Centre for Social Innovation. Here is is a screenshot of GreenMajority.ca : What makes CSI-Centre for Social Innovation interesting is that it supplies co-working space and collaboration tools for small businesses [about 35% of members] and non-profit organizations [about 55% of […]
JavaScript Arriving in WordPress Stealthily
With Calypso and Gutenberg, clearly JavaScript is arriving onto WordPress in a big way. Here are seven reasons why: Gutenberg is not just the new Visual Editor but is the “official” WordPress PageBuilder; But Gutenberg goes beyond page building and is a complete Web canvas builder – header, content, footer, sidebar plus any popups and […]
Gutenberg Page Builder: A September UI Autopsy
Matt Mullenweg has written a detailed post on Gutenberg, the upcoming WordPress PageBuilder plugin. Within the post is a critical commitment by Matt: WordPress has always been about websites, but it’s not just about websites. It’s about freedom, about possibility, and about carving out your own livelihood, whether it’s by making a living through your […]
Elementor: Top WordPress PageBuilder
In the past three years WordPress 3rd party developers have produced some of the best Post and PageBuilders available. And even more remarkable, two of the top ranked Pagebuilders are FREE plugins – Site Origin PageBuilder and Elementor. The OpenSourcery will look at these two largely free Pagebuilders [both tools now have a small set […]
CiviCRM: CMS Integration Example
I discovered CiviCRM this past Tuesday at The Social Impact Meetup at CSI [The Centre for Social Innnovation]. What makes CiviCRM compelling is that it is a complete Customer Relationship Management system integrated well with some of the most popular CMS software – Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. CMS systems have taken off in the past […]
SquareSpace vs WordPress : A Second Look
A review of SquareSpace vs WordPress in the WPMUDev blog raises the question of whether web development reviews are becoming as partisan as politics. Jenni McKinnon in writing 27 Reasons Why WordPress Crushes Squarespace Every Time has committed to print a yuge number of Trumpian fallacies which knocks the review way off balance. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org Distinction […]
Agile, Scrum and WordPress
Agile Methods using the Scrum Process seem built for WordPress Development Agile methods have a manifesto and development methodology which is gaining traction not just in software development but broader project planning. Agile methods are geared to handling the rapid change required in modern project planning but also to accomodate fast changing tools and methods […]
Discovered at WordCamp 2015 TO: Content Modeling
Jamie Schmid came to WordCamp Toronto all the way from Portland Oregon. And as you can see from the slides of her presentation she certainly delivered the goods on content strategy. Now the neglected underside of WordPress is how to harness the presentation power of the WP platform. As the maintainer of 5 blogs about […]
Two SEO Overview Presentations
Imagine you are the Chief Technology Officer at Google Search or Microsoft Bing or Yahoo Search. You have to go to over 1 Billion websites with an average of about 250 pages per website = 250 Billion web pages and you have to rank or value those website’s content in over 100 languages for 2.4 […]
Python Renaissance
Python is enjoying a sort of renaissance – and I am not talking about all those foundling pet pythons in the swamps of Florida. This open source, cross platform programming language has been popular in academic circles for its simple syntax but robust functional programming. Here is the the key philosophy of Python: “PEP 20 (The […]
I Just Signed up for the Free Online MIT Electronic Circuits Course and You Can Too
Here is the course I am taking: 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is an experimental on-line adaptation of MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course: 6.002. This course will run, free of charge, for students worldwide from March 5, 2012 through June 8, 2012. You too can signup for the course here. Here are the Requirements In […]
Year Ahead in Client Computing I
Robert Scoble said this at the BBC Year-end Technology Forecast about client computing: On the train here I was with an executive from General Electric, and he said a year ago they were very anti-iPad. But in January at their global meeting they’re going to hand out iPads. It is crazy to think about a company […]
Mozilla and Opera: Signs of Open Source Problems
ZDNet is running a series of much too early obituary articles for Firefox and Mozilla – and by implication, Opera. Ed Bott sees the money supply running out because a search sharing deal with Google [80%+ of Mozilla’s revenues] has run out and the negotiations have not produced a new accord. Steven Vaughn-Nichols picks up […]
As Internet Explorer Dwindles
In a searching article, Ars Technica describes the state of the browser market and the withering away of Internet Explorer. After 12 years in which which IE reached an apex at 95% browser market share in 2004, IE crossed the line on October 2011 at less than 50% overall [desktop+mobile]market share according ArsTechnica. However, if […]
Muse-like Tools for Fast Website Development
Adobe’s new Muse website design tool has garnered attention as Adobe invades the website design market. The tool has some real attractive features but also some big gaps as seen in the preview here. So this post looks at two tools that have occupied the same space and their features. First, there is Xara Web […]
IBM Missing from Forbes List of Top 100 Innovators
There is a great hue and cry that IBM was not on the recent Forbes list of top 100 US innovators. eWeek led the protest among IT publications – citing the treasure trove of patents, the great inventions of a decade ago, and the promise of Watson and other new patents. And that is the […]
Google Apps Versus Microsoft Office 365
Two reviews catch the changed landscape for Microsoft in the Cloud. Information Week sees Google Apps ahead of Office 365 on 4 telling counts, Gartner is more cautious about the features but sees some problems; and the Guardian sees improved features over BPOS, the proceeding Microsoft Office Suite available on the Web. But no one clearly answers […]
Google Gmail Motion Mocks Microsoft Kinect
After taking a slap on the face from Microsoft with Redmond’s antitrust complaint yesterday, , Google returns fire with its superior GMail Motion on April 1. The Redmond UI experts who are working feverishly on a Wii to get Kinect into the Windows UI will be weeping and gnashing their teeth – or just LOLing […]
WebOS on all HP PCs
Leo Apotheker, the new CEO of HP announced yesterday that all HP PCs will be loaded with webOS – not just HP tablets and smartphones. Note that webOS will defer to Windows 7 in the case of desktop PCs and laptops. Nonetheless, this is marks two important milestones: 1)the continued cracking of the Windows PC […]
Steve Jobs Post-PC Era:The Computing Divides
Steve Jobs in his announcement of the Apple iPad 2 emphasized that client computing has reached a Post-PC era. In fact, Jobs cited the complete product line of Apple iDevices as leading the way into the new Post-PC era of computing . Nowhere has this Computing Divide of the Post-PC Era been made more apparent than in a […]
Did IBMs Watson Cheat?
Most assuredly Watson … or rather its IBM masters cheated. IBM got the dispensation that Watson did not have to read or listen to the clues as Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter did. Understanding a spoken question is no mean feat -as viewers see in the annual National Spelling Bee. In fact IBM used to have […]
HTML5 Up and Running
This review is doing double duty. It evaluates the book HTML5: Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim from the O’Reilly Press while also doing review of the status of the HTML5 standard itself. Keep an Open Eye acknowledges that Mark’s HTML5 : Up and Running and also Diving into HTML5 have been invaluable resources for […]
Client Software Development – 3 Added Degrees of Complexity
There is no doubt that the classic Computing World is fragmenting. No more the Wintel monopoly as it is losing its 90% market share dominance of the personal computing client scene to upstart Apple iDevices, Android smartphones plus a wave of RIM,Dell, Samsung, Archos and other tablets. The PC, even in laptop form, is no […]
Google Outages: Cloud Computing Implications
For the past half year at least, Google Search and often all of Google services have been “out” – just not available while other search engine and Web services such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Yahoo Mail and others are up and running. This has implications for Cloud Computing adoption. It also has to be of […]
Google’s Impact
Google has just released an Economic Impact Statement – Google has attempted to measure what impact Google’s search engine and other services has had on the US and by implication, World economics. But as well there is the impact of Google on the basic technology of the Internet and therefore global communication. Google seems to […]
Computing Chip Trends: Memresistors
Moore’s Law is not a law but rather an astute observation that has stood the test of time – it has predicted the rate of change in computing power for the past 50 years with uncanny accuracy: Computing power will double in capacity for the same cost every 18-20 months. This “law” is now running […]
GPUs and Multicore CPUs
For the next year or two the biggest software battleground among major interface vendors like Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and others will be over a)who takes advantage of all the underutilized GPU and extra core CPU power available on PCs especially but also cameras, mobiles, tablets, etc. For example, in todays announcement […]
Java + LAMP Hosting:Stallmanned
I just finished an all day seminar on BIRT the partially Open Source report writing package available from Actuate[the Core is open, the extended services are closed and the two packages are, according to Actuate people, moving in different directions – More on this in a later posting]. BIRT software is impressive especially with its […]
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on Censorship
The Guardian and Financial Times in England have been covering the China vs Google story much more closely than US media. So when the Guardian published a story about Bill Gates reactions to the conflict , curious, I took a look: After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft […]
Web 2.0 RAIA GUI: Better Than the Desktop?
Some people believe that Web GUI operations cannot even remotely match those available on the desktop – be that Windows 7 with its Aero goodies or Apple Snow Leopard with its refined look and often copied navigational features. I would beg to differ. Desktop GUI is playing catch up to mobile and the Web. Gestures […]
WordPress is Best Overall CMS of 2009
Okay, I will admit a bias toward WordPress because I have been using it on 5 of my own blogs and dozens of other projects. But I use Drupal, Joomla. Gallery, PHPBB and Coppermine too. No one CMS is clearly dominant – you fit each CMS strengths to the tasks at hand. Interestingly, WordPress has […]
Google Go
As a developer I have always anticipated programming languages adding 3D operations or APL-like vector and array operations or event handling [more beyond the current Try-Catch paradigm]. Extensions that would become universal. But that has not happened except in a perverse way – the huge functional libraries associated with all the major languages from C/Pascal/ […]
Enterprise Browser Analysis: IE8 As Laggard
eWeek’s Jim Rapoza has done a comprehensive survey of Web browsers evaluating their suitability for Enterprise Applications. This is ever more important in the business world as Cloud Computing accelerates and Web 2.0 programs dominate new Enterprise Applications . Also Netbooks/Smartphones are becoming ever more prevalent with much better browser and Web connections. So businesses […]
Linux Conquers: On IBM Mainframes
While we labor and wring hands over the success (or lack there of ) for Linux on the Desktop – lo and behold Linux has gained not just a beachead but large chunks of application share on IBM z-Series mainframes. Just take a look at the article here. IBM has seen more than half of […]
Pay for Information?
The old adage “you get what you pay for” is getting a real workout as two philosophical viewpoints on the Internet vie for dominance in the Web marketplace. First, there is the journalistic community which is arguing it cannot rely on the current payment model which cnow uses primarily advertising and a few special services […]
IBM Stream Computing
Just two weeks ago, our report on Semi-Structured data processing had a major gap – no real IBM presence. True enough, the IBM/Cognos, IBM FileNet and other IBM BI offerings certainly dealt with some aspects of semi-structured data ,particularly FileNet’s positions in Content Management and Record Archiving. But the integration across platforms through semi-structured data […]
Health IT: Government Produces Positive Change?
There is an article in today’s NYTimes about the profound changes that are occurring in the Health Record business now that the Obama government has added incentives of $40,000 per physician for adopting electronic health records. Players like Google, IBM, and Microsoft have tossed their Health Record technologies into the ring. But the most important factor is […]
Windows 7 Short Sightings
Frank Ohlhorst at Ziff Davis Enterprise has written a size up of Windows 7 for ChannelInsider (Is Microsoft Windows 7 the Obama of the OS World?) that is a bit short sighted about the depth of the problems with Windows 7’s predecessor Microsoft Vista – and therefore he tends to over-rate Windows 7. Here are two quotes […]
Semi-Structured Data; Some New Servers
The big trend in database is the effort to XML-ize Semi- structured data. This is like a big SOAP project in both senses of the Word. Many of the control structures and procedural setting borrow from SOAP. But it is also an attempt by the major Relational Database vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and […]
Oracle:Left Coast Big Blue
I thought of titling this posting as “Sam P. ? Is that a Sunny Yolk on You?” – but I didn’t. Instead I would like to ask Barrons to reconsider elevating Sam P. to the exhalted ranks of Best of Barrons CEOs. Also I would like to ask the IBM Board to riddle me this […]
AAPL and MSFT Tipping Points
Rapid developments in smartphones and the emergence of Netbooks would suggest that Apple-AAPL and Microsoft-MSFT are reaching tipping points in their respective industries. However, the probability of when and the nature of the Tip may be different. But first before considering anything else, lets take a look at each company’s financial condition: Both from Google […]
Sun Setting on Open Java?
The Serverside is reporting that Sun is effectively making Java two tiered – an Open Java – and then the latest JDK with all the bells and whistles. See the article here for the almost Machiavellian machinations. These actions by Sun may be motivated by three considerations: 1)The Open Source community (and the whole non-Sun […]