Autor: Tim Strehle

Jakob Nielsen has advice for B2B websites: „Build a reputation for being easy to do business with and for standing by your products with great service. This is where the Web shines: you can provide excellent post-sales support online at a fraction of the cost of older methods. Unfortunately, most of the support sites we’ve…

Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts, in a National Business Review article: „We were originally developing with Java and .JSP, and only using PHP for prototyping. Eventually we realised that the PHP prototypes worked better than the .JSP versions, so we dropped .JSP with relief; and we’ve never looked back.“

Looks like a great localization resource: The Common Locale Data Repository Project already did the job of translating language and country names for you and me, and they’re defining common date, time and currency formats per language/country. So if you need to know what’s the Thai word for „Hungarian“, just look here! „The purpose of…

Great article: Mike Duigou writes about Complexity. „What could make JXTA or any technology complicated for new users? There are far too many possibilities: * Installation hell * Configuration hell * Starting hell * Documentation hell * API hell * More hells“ Most problems he describes can happen with any programming language, but this one…

Old (May 2000), but Kent Fitch’s thoughts about Topic Maps Visualisation are still interesting: „This document presents some ideas on how a topic map based structure could be browsed by an end-user. It isn’t meant to define a proposed interface – just explore the benefits and drawbacks of one simple option based on the Windows…

Jon Udell on Proxy power: „[…] I’ve been experimenting with a local Web proxy that XHTML-izes and transforms Web pages on the fly. […] Given such a database, the on-the-fly filter could do some clever correlation. Suppose that for the pages I read — and maybe also for each link in those pages — the…

„It’s my Open Source project and I’ll code what I want to.“ Michelle Levesque discusses Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development: „I’ve found the five most important flaws with Open Source software development to be as follows: 1) User interface design 2) Documentation 3) Feature-centric development 4) Programming for the self 5) Religious blindness“

This looks like I should read it once I have the time to do so: Software Engineering for Internet Applications by Eve Andersson, Philip Greenspun, and Andrew Grumet.

Short, but funny: Sam Ruby’s Survival guide to i18n „OK, so we’ve established that you’ve got a tool that you want to ensure is internationalized. The first thing I want you to do is to copy the string Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn into your tool and observe what comes out the other side. If you have a weblogging…

A long paper by Lars Marius Garshol: Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! – Making sense of it all „To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the…