Someone on LinkedIn asked for my advice about entering the online storage market, what follows are my opinions on the subject that I gave her. Dropbox has been done. Box.net is a good competitor. Going up against them as a me-too competitor is a waste of time and not very likely to succeed. What has not been done however is a hardware box that you host at your office that provides file sharing which then backs up to the internet. So locally you have all your files available, but they are also avaialble online. This box should also have the ability to backup to the internet using local encryption so that you can be sure your files are 100% safe as the encryption key never leaves your box. It should also have the ability to sync some folders online that are not encrypted for file sharing purposes much like dropbox… which a similar sort of windows client. This right here then is a killer app that should make you millions — make sure you send me a check when you …

Blogging There are numerous sites like WordPress where you can blog for free. This can serve as your platform to promote your brand(s). It’s your choice to sell directly or indirectly. Article marketing The key in this marketing tool is writing contents that are of use to your target readers. Share a tip or two about web designing. Embedding links to the articles is helpful. This will direct your visitors to your sites. Video marketing People who are into web designing are more often than not visual types. Videos of you treating them with helpful web designing tricks and tips would surely be a hit for them. Post the videos on your sites or upload it to YouTube and other popular sites. Making use of social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites are so “in” so why don’t you jump into the bandwagon and make use of its fame.

Every year, WordPress comes out with a new theme to serve as the default theme for its growing population of bloggers. For this year, the WordPress team has come up with the Twenty Twelve, which numerous users have described as being infinitely readable and, best of all, remarkably responsive – a welcomed quality considering how Internet users today rely on a wide variety of sites to manage their blogs . From Blogs to CMS Today, more and more users are turning to WordPress not for blogging but to provide them a free and easy-to-use CMS or content management system. With CMS sites, the main purpose is to have a simpler way of organizing content. Certainly, the new Twenty Twelve layout was designed to make WordPress more CMS-friendly. The homepage provides a great way to introduce readers to what the site is all about, with the upper portion providing all the necessary facts that a reader must know. These can include text, photos, music, and videos. The lower portion may then consist of widgets you have personally selected for your site. …

A client recently asked us why we would recommend Drupal instead of WordPress for migrating a custom content management system to Drupal. This is a multilingual site for an IPTV company. Below is our answer. Now each client is different, and the factors mentioned below were important to the specific client. Drupal is more secure than WordPress Drupal’s security record speaks for itself. Seldom does Drupal have any glaring bugs or security holes that might lead to Drupal-based sites being compromised. The few bugs that it does have are identified by a dedicated security team which identifies security problems in core and in third-party contributed modules. These are usually immediately patched. Current version of Drupal will be supported until Drupal 9 comes out, which should not be for another 3 years as 8 has yet to be released. This essentially means that if you invest in a site, you don’t have to worry about it too much for a few years. With WordPress you essentially have to keep on top of the updates, because of its track record, there may …

These days, web developers and their customers love to see websites accessible through mobile phones. The use of tablets and smart phones has made it easier to access internet anywhere, so there is great demand for web developers to refresh existing websites and equip them with the ability to be accessed through an iPad, an iPhone or an Android. Nobody wants to miss out on sweet, sweet mobile traffic. When it comes to mobile traffic there are two ways of going about making your website available to mobile users. The first way is to have websites detect the browser of the user and then redirect them to the sub-domains that have mobile in the first part of the address/url which for example looks like this: xxx.com will add a sub-domain like mobile.xxx.com. However, this is far from ideal. Upkeep of a separate site for mobile users is not something that any web developer wants to do… It just doubles the work. (We’ll get to more of this below). The second way, the better way, is to use a theme that …

I had a problem. My problem was simple and was this. I had a bunch of pages that I wanted normal permalinks for and a bunch of blog posts that I wanted to be prefixed with ‘blog/’. Well there is a plugin called Post Format Permalink that will fix this problem for you. Simply install it using WordPress. Then go to Settings > Post Format Permalink and in the input field type ‘blog’. Then go to Settings > Permalink and type ‘/%format%/%postname%/’ under the Custom input field. All you blog posts now should fall under /blog/post-name rather than just post-name. All the pages should remain in the same location.

Found this excellent execution of a marketing meme on Reddit. It’s for a company that manufacturers razors. Notice that nothing but the text is posted, no images or hubris. And it is tolerated by the community without too much blow back.

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We are partially a Drupal web development shop (we like to use the right tool for the job), and we have done quite a bit of work using Drupal. These days the community is quickly becoming more and more commercialized by various companies each offering to solve a problem. And while this is not a bad thing, we often feel that many of the problems that are being solved are problems with Drupal itself in the way its design and development decisions are approached. As of version 8, we don’t see hopes of the problems addressed here improving. Scalability Drupal has a massive problem with scalability. For example one of the problems with its design is hooks. Now hooks in theory sound like a great idea… however, in practice they are anything but. The reason for this is that because of hooks, every single piece of code must be loaded at each point. PHP has something called auto-loading, however Drupal can not, as of at least 6.0, take advantage of this. Instead, Drupal loads every bit of code on each …