Check this comprehensive guide to split testing from Smashing Magazine, how it works, how to create a split test for your site(s), dos and don’ts and additional resources. I found the case studies very interesting: what are the two ‘magic words’ that will increase your conversions?
Creativefan.com has a nice list of dozens of HTML5 resources just waiting for you to bookmark it for future reference.
In one of the most impressive articles that I have ever seen posted in blog form, Jessica Bordeau gives us a comprehensively researched and beautifully-written piece on writing systems and calligraphy of the world. If you have an interest in typography and different alphabets, check out this post to learn all about East Asian writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters and the Vietnamese writing system), along with a look at Arabic and Indic scripts and many of their sub-variants, along with resources for integrating these languages into your website.
Duvet-dayz has an outstanding tip sheet on firebug (via dzone) with keyboard shortcuts and mouse actions arranged by Windows, Linux and Apple operating systems.
If you use the firebug addon a lot, Digital Media Minute has done articles before on firebug tips as well a very popular post on debugging JavaScript with firebug for Firefox.
Developers who run Apache Tomcat, the most popular Java application server, have a new resource. Have you heard about the new tomcatexpert.com, which bills itself as an Enterprise Tomcat community? Brought to you by SpringSource, with a blog, a Knowledge Base, and an ‘ask the expert’ feature, the idea for TomcatExpert is to fill in gaps not provided by apache.org, which focuses more on documentation and mailing lists than a community.
(via dzone)
It looks like there’s a new kid on the block when it comes to monitoring your website uptime: uptimerobot.com. It has advantages over some of the established players in that it is a free service that allows you to monitor up to 50 of your websites. There’s no limit on the number of SMS notifications they will give you whenever you’re experiencing downtime, and Twitter and RSS notifications are coming soon.
While we’re on the subject, here’s a quick look at some of the other options you have when it comes to keeping an eye on the uptime of your sites (and if I’ve missed any that you’d care to give feedback on, please let me know in the comments):
Host-tracker.com offers uptime monitoring of two URLs for free, but checks them at 30 minute intervals only. The paid plans do check at one minute intervals but for $30 a month for instance, I still only may monitor 20 websites. Also with that plan I only get 50 free SMS notifications each month.
Basicstate.com is free and checks an unlimited number of sites every 15 minutes if I have a “non-professional” version. Basicstate can also monitor uptime of websites that are integral to your online operations, such as credit card payment processing gateways, and advertising and affiliate networks.
With siteuptime.com, I can check one site every 30 to 60 minutes for free, while the $10 a month plan lets me look at six sites every 5 to 15 minutes, with SMS alerts.
Uptimedog.com will check every two minutes to make sure one site is up, and notify you by e-mail if it is down. They are a free service, but do require that you link back to them.
The aptly named aremysitesup.com website uptime monitoring offers a free plan that checks five of your sites a minimum of 25 times each day. Includes unlimited email and SMS notifications and they provide the HTML status error code that can tell you why your site was down in the first place.
Joshua over at binarycanary.com insisted on telling us about the company in a comment, so I promoted ‘em to the post! They offer free web monitoring accounts with 5 monitored check locations on a 15-minute frequency. They have a wide feature list and continue to work on new upgrades and features. They often refer to their users and ask them what they want to see in our services. Their Hyper plan features advanced voice notifications by telephone, with the ability to escalate and acknowledge failure alerts when they are issued. Thanks for letting Digital Media Minute readers know, Joshua!
This was just a brief overview, but for a site that appears to have been online for only a matter of days, uptimerobot.com already appears to be one of your best options for monitoring your websites’ uptime.
Thinking about exploring Ruby on Rails on a Windows computer, but haven’t taken the plunge because you were afraid installation would turn into a time-sink? Digital Media Minute did a post on Ruby on Rails Development Environment for Windows a while back, but with the growing popularity of Rails, I thought a short list of installation tutorials might be helpful. There should be a tutorial here to get you up and running.
1) Complete with screen shots and a little humor, this tutorial from SuckLessAtRails.com is very easy to follow.
2) Over at wiki.rubyonrails.org there’s a clear, concise walk-through, including installing SQLite and MySQL.
3) Here’s a concise, recent tutorial by Joseph Symon over at Bobcares.com.
4) If positive comments are any indication, this installaton tutorial for Vista users by Michael Wales is very well-done and detailed.
5) Sitepoint has really become a place to find a wide range of outstanding tutorials and screencasts, and not only for noobs. Here’s one for installing ror on Windows by Kevin Yank, and it will cost you only the time it takes to enter your email address.
6) Sam Saffron has a brief tutorial at his site, with a lot of extra reference material for you at the end.
7) If you are an Eclipse user, www.napcs.com has a tutorial by Brian Hogan for creating an IDE for Rails development using Eclipse.
Here’s a little piece of help. If you find yourself having to extract multiple zip files frequently, you’d be well-served giving ExtractNow a shot. It’s not new but I found helpful for a recent task, and it worked as advertised. Simple to use, and supports ZIP, RAR and other compression formats.
