This isn’t really the proper forum to be blogging about political preference, however, I stumbled upon a key difference in the three presidential candidates Obama, Hillary, and McCain with regards to the language they chose to program their campaign websites with. A quick browse through the links on the McCain site shows that they use ASP as you can see from this link:

http://www.johnmccain.com/ActionCenter/registertovote/information.aspx

A similar search through Hillary’s site confirms the same. They use ASP and you can see from this link:

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/video/158.aspx

Now, saving the best for last, Obama has a smarter approach to technology and uses PHP instead as you can see here:

http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

Based solely on programming language choice for their web development which candidate would you choose? Given that I’m a Rails and PHP developer (albeit I once programmed in ASP for a paycheck) I think I’m going to have to go with the better language choice. It says something about where your head is.

Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.

Google punishes sites heavily for 404 errors. By the time you realize your site has an error its usually too late and you’re already being punished for them. I suggest you stay proactive on your 404 errors and use a link checker. I found this extremely useful tool. Xenu’s Link Sleuth. It basically crawls your entire site for every single internal and external link. You can chose to ignore external links if you want as well and just focus on internal links. It even visits images and mailto and just about anything that has a ’src’ or ‘href’ in the html of your site. I considered it a nice toy when I first used it but when it quickly found numerous serious 404 issues on a few of my sites I upgraded the importance of this tool in my toolbox. This will keep you ahead of the curve instead of constantly playing catchup. Try it out on your site and I guarantee you’ll find 404s you had no idea existed. It shows you all the sites that have the bad links on them as well so you know where to go to correct the problem. Best of all this software is free! Its a Windows application unfortunately but any self respecting web developer has virtual machines with different operating systems on them, Windows being one of them, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem if you’re a serious developer.

I’ve been searching for a free uml diagramming tool for Linux for a long time. There are plenty of options but nothing really stable or good enough for what I need it for. I stumbled on Gliffy today. Its an online diagramming tool written in Flash. Best of all you can use it free given some minor limitations. I tried it out and its exactly what I’ve been looking for to help collaboration between remote developers. I definitely suggest you check it out.

Over this past summer I’ve been working on a project for my wife Laura. She’s the technology teacher at school and needed an easy way for her teachers to create their own classroom webpage. Before Webster’s Classroom she had to manually create every teacher’s page and ftp it to a county server downtown. Needless to say, no one had websites.

We created an easy way for teachers to do this by using Webster’s Classroom. Best of all, we’re offering it to teachers absolutely FREE. Laura got a warm reception from her peers when she demonstrated our software during the first few days of school. A number of teachers have already used our software to setup their own customized classroom webpage and appear enthusiastic about using it throughout the year. We have many plans for additional features in the next year. So far we are getting very positive feedback on the site and we are excited to add new features to the site. We will be aggressively marketing it at the software matures over the coming months and I’ll be sure to post updates every so often on it.

I’ve started doing more web design work lately and as such am in frequent need of decent color palettes for my sites. Unfortunately I’m not keen on developing them myself. I can tell which ones I like and which ones I don’t but creating the palette is difficult for me. Luckily there are people out there that are good at blending colors together so they look good. I did a quick search and came up with a nice site that I really like. Its not spammy and it has tons of palettes to choose from. They are searchable and easily display the hex for each color in the palette so its a simple matter of copy and paste into my css file. Colour Lovers is the site and I suggest you take a look if you’re interested in finding some good color palettes.