Sitesquak Blog, News & Commentary

April Fools 2010 - the top 5 geeky ones

There is a smorgasbord of good April Fools jokes in this cycle of silliness.  Here were the best, IMHO.  To count down…

#5: France bans the phrase “2.0”

Beware the major upgrade involved in a web redesign. http://rogerstrukhoff.ulitzer.com/node/1341066

#4: The CrunchPad kit – how-to video.

Yeesh, I have plunked down my credit card for this one. I had no idea I could use those old laptops for this. http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/31/introducing-the-do-it-yourself-crunchpad-kit-video/

#3: Postgres goes NoSQL

Nothing like jumping on the bandwagon. All those joins are really kind of hard to follow anyway. http://pgsnake.blogspot.com/2010/04/postgres-91-release-theme.html

#2: RFC for a CCC: (Cosmetic Carbon Copy) email quasi-header.

Yes, indeed, I want to simulate more social acuity than I really have. Finally, the email system might well catch up with that desire. http://www.ietfng.org/draft-jhuacm-cosmetic-carbon-copy-01.txt

#1: A CLI for XKCD.com.

Finally, an interface which I can understand and automate! Why did it take so long? Probably because that damn web browser called “Mosiac” made everyone so reliant on pictures and stuff. Oh, wait a minute. Comics are pictures and stuff. Hm. http://xkcd.com/unixkcd/

Honorable mentions: Gmail’s vowel outage, and YouTube’s text videos.

Read more …  Comments

Sitesquad.net is back, finally.

Our website returned to full operating mode today after a rather lengthy hiatus. We wanted to share a few highlights:

• It’s an ExpressionEngine site and probably our best one to date given some of the extensions we put to work. But it’ll surely be the last 1.6 site we do with EE 2.0 on the near horizon.
• LG Better Meta was used for Search Engine Optimization (SE0). This extension made it much easier to do a number of tactical things which will hopefully improve our visibility.
• Gypsy: Gypsy allowed us to re-use fields from a single default field group selectively for specific weblogs. We didn’t have to create a multitude of custom field groups with, inevitably, tons of redundant text and textarea fields. Gypy’s big, IMO.
• Structure: We chose to Structure instead of EE’s own Pages module. It was a good choice.
• Playa: We want to relate content entries all over the place to one another. Playa was a must.

Can’t forget our own hosting platform, the Sitesquad Cloud.

• Joyent Accelerators: These are our front-end web servers.
• Joyent Accelerator for MySQL: This is our MySQL database.

Read more …  Comments