Web Architecture, Management and Marketing

I think all web forms should look the same. What’s the goal of a web form? Its goal should be to collect information from the user. Whenever possible, we should get things to the point where users don’t need to think about what steps they need to take to perform a task. So why should we as architects, designers and developers ever attempt to reinvent the form. It would be great for us all to settle on a form library.

It looks like there’s a whole movement devoted to design standards like this, Microformats.

Specifically, I really like the direction of Uni-Form. The forms look fluid, error handling is clear and graceful, it’s clear what field you’re on. I love it.

I’m looking to use this library for all form development. Maybe this is worth building a CFC to extend the tag?

The RoundCube webmail project does look pretty slick. The developers look to have a solid roadmap lined up and a good, conservative set of features coming up. I’d signed up for the dev list and am considering helping out in some capacity.

Update 6/12/07: I’ve been using Roundcube inhouse for the past couple of weeks now. It’s awesome. I think this is the best webmail client out there. Others have more features but not more functionality. Roundcube does exactly what I need it to do.

I’m currently testing out Atmail from CalaCode, located right here in good ol’ Chicago.

The install process is painless, but so far I’m not seeing huge improvements over something like RoundCube. I’m just comparing webmail clients here. Roundcube is quite basic right now and actually that’s nice. Something like Horde is very robust but most clients look at that and get a little overwhelmed.

I just came across this cool article from the SEOmoz folks who interviewed several well known SEO’s, asking them to weight the various SEO best practices in use today. I also have personal confirmation from a good buddy of mine, responsible for millions in online revenue that this info is on the level. I’m considering signing up for the paid service for more articles and tools. If I do, I’ll post any interesting thoughts.

Speaking of SEO, nichelaunch.com is a friend’s directory service. It will be worth the effort to get your name out there.

I’m at the cf.Objective conference now. Ben Forta is about to give a talk about the newest release of ColdFusion codenamed Scorpio. The CF Product Manager, Jason Delmore has given several talks about the new features of CF8. It seems like ColdFusion is about to catch up with php

Seriously though, the new image manipulation features sound very useful. As well, the inclusion of the FCKEditor into text form fields is going to be sweet. CF8 should be a great platform for building flexible, custom content management systems.

As well, the new file i/o functions, inclusion of sftp support and some of the other stuff I use often as a Linux geek are going to be handy. As I move further away from coding into management, ColdFusion seems like a solid direction to take for my coding needs.

Ben’s into his talk now. Let’s see if there’s anything groundbreaking …

Cool … Ben is announcing features of CF that involve integration into the IDE CFEclipse plugin.

New CF + Eclipse features:

1. CF / Ajax Application Wizard. Ben is demoing this right now. Very slick. This is similar to the Flex wizard. So far looks like a rich feature set. And … woah, the ability to debug, in realtime, right within the Ajax client. Hmm, this is idiot proof.

2. New Eclipse based ColdFusion debugger. This will include step through debugging, access to variables and the ability to do breakpoints. Heh heh, Jason McKinney whom I work with at Aslan Interactive just leaned to me and mentioned how this is going to make FusionDebug useless (the FusionDebug guys are here and just raffled away a couple licenses).

Flex Data Services (fighting data clobbering):

This is slick, Ben is demoing how a Flex Data Services is maintaining the relationship of between the client and the state of the data theyre looking at. In his example, two users are editing the same product data. As one changes the price of a product, the other is notified right away that the data they’re looking at has been updated and there is now a conflict with the data they have on their screen and the updated data. This second user now has options on updating or ignoring. As well there looks to be some heavy performance boosts along with ease of installation. The CF8 installer will ask if you want to install LCDS (Life Cycle Data Services … new name), and that’s pretty much it.

When?

Sounds like this will all be coming out in the summer or early fall. Adobe Max 2007 is going to be in Chicago (my home) at the end of September. I assume this is going to be all out by then.

I’m back and logging. And sure enough, after letting the domain expire and it falling under new ownership, I’ve got usercore.com back. Time to continue where I left off back in 2000.

Design? Well I’ll get to it some day. A designer is the one thing I am not. So please be nice. Thanks to Ray Camden for the yellow