Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

My LiveJournal is no more

This is just a quick update to let all of you know that I deleted my LiveJournal account.  It’s been a long while since I used it.  I didn’t see any value in it anymore. And it was getting so much spam that I decided to get rid of it altogether.  All entries in my journal were deleted, while all community posts and comments that I made are still there.  From now on, if I ever want to comment on someone’s LiveJournal entry, I’ll use my Twitter or Facebook or WordPress or Google credentials.

Hopefully, this will give me a little more time to update my blog, Twitter, Google+, and whatever else I will meet on the way. Thank you for understanding.  Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Incapsula – fast, secure and reasonably priced CDN

A month and a half ago I blogged about CloudFlare – a Content Delivery Network with security concerns and simple users in mind.   CloudFlare is flexible for webmasters and they make it easy for us to take advantage of all the benefits they offer. I have moved several of my sites to CloudFlare and I am pretty happy with the service they provide.  One of the things that I didn’t do at the time (or every since) though is a review or research for some alternatives.  I mean, of course, we all know about Akamai and that big guns use it.  We also know that Akamai is one of the most expensive services on the Web.  But who else is out there?

Today I received an email from Incapsula. In essence, they offer a service which is similar to CloudFlare.  They do caching, global delivery, and security.  They do also offer a free plan for small, personal websites.  They also have a few packages of varying prices and features.

As I mentioned earlier, I do run all of my important sites now through CloudFlare.  And I don’t feel like moving to Incapsula just yet.  However, I do want to try them out.  I have a couple of new projects coming up, and I think I will use Incapsula for them just to see all the features they are offering and to compare with other alternatives out there.  I’d be interested to hear the reviews, if you’ve tried the service.  Especially, how they compare to the others and if they offer anything cool that nobody else does.

As a side note, website performance is becoming more and more important – with increased competition, impatient users and more weight to search results metrics in Google.  Also, web application security is becoming increasing complex – it takes so much time and effort even for trained technical people such as myself, that I can’t imagine how huge of a task it is for “normal” people to maintain common sense security levels for their websites.  It’s nice to see that there are more and more services and applications that take care of all the infrastructure problems, leaving more time to do the cool stuff – blogging, sharing, communicating, etc.

P.S.: Reading about Six Great Human and Computer Collaborations will expose you to new technology developments.

Twitter WTF of the day

Here is my WTF moment of the day.  I directed my browser (Google Chrome, if you must know) to open Twitter.com.  What did I see?  Not a Twitter page.  Not even a famour Twitter fail whale.  I saw an empty page with this error message.

Can someone throw an idea or two as to what that might mean?  I’m just curious, you know…

More Picasa Web Albums space for Google+ users

Google Operating System blog tells:

Picasa Web Albums offers more free storage if you are a Google+ user. According to Picasa Web’s help center, “photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage”. If you upload photos from Google+, they’re automatically resized to 2048 pixels on their longest edge, so they don’t use the 1 GB of free storage that’s available in Picasa Web Albums.

For those of you not on Google+ yet, only pictures up to 800×800 pixels won’t count up on your storage.  You really should let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.

Google+ – yet another social network

The rumors of a new social network from Google were confirmed yesterday with the announcement of Google+.  There are quite a few interesting ideas there.

Firstly, I’d been waiting for a proper social network from Google for ages.  Google Wave was more of a collaboration tool, which failed.  Google Buzz, even though useful, is not enough.  I am using Google for plenty of other things – search, email, news reading, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing of documents, etc – it only makes more sense to wrap it all around with a social network.

Secondly, I’m glad to see that Google is trying to solve the major problem that I have with each and every other social network in use today – sharing with specific groups of people.  I was born in one country, but currently live in another.  I speak two languages, which are not shared by most of my connections.  I have a number of different interests.  I’ve worked with many people in a few companies across several industries.  I desperately need a way to share with only specific groups of people.  I know that some social networks tried to provide the functionality – Facebook and Flickr, for example – but it’s not trivial.  I need more automation and control for that process.   Google+ has something called Circles, which looks and sounds like what I need.

Thirdly, video conferencing.  It’s been long overdue.  And the only real option there is now is Skype, which I’d rather stop using altogether.

Fourthly, group chats. Especially on the mobile.  There are a few alternatives that were developed in the last couple of years, but it’s hard to migrate all your contacts to yet another protocol.  Enough of my contacts are using Google, so this sounds promising.

Too bad, Google+ is still not available to everyone – it’s invitation only.  Hopefully, Google won’t repeat the mistake of the Google Wave, when they delayed the masses for so long that most people left before their friends joined.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, have a look this TechCrunch article and this GigaOm post.