Wozia Blog - Web Development

Happy Holidays!

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:28:01 +0000

We all at Wozia wish you Happy Holidays!

As a present, we decided to lower SiteLog's prices about 50% for an undetermined amount of time, so sign up now and enjoy your free 30-day trial + reduced price!! No contracts, no commitments !

I'm Driving (Android) is now Open Source!

Sun, 4 Dec 2011 20:53:11 +0000

So, since we already got I'm Driving to a point of no bugs and good functionality, with lots of downloads, we decided we should take a step further to help other developers to build their own apps.

As such, we decided to release I'm Driving (Android) as Open Source.

You can find all three versions (Free, Lite and Full) available at GitHub.

We will continue to release bug and security fixes to the app if/when needed.

How to make the terminal sexy on Mac OS X

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 20:57:01 +0000

For many years, there's been one app we all love in a certain way — the terminal.

From Linux to Mac OS X, our terminal has always been sexy and making other people envy by looking at it, and got asked many times to share our settings, so we decided to finally share it with you.

On most current Linux distributions, the terminal comes by default with a very similar look to what we use, but the Mac OS X has always looked very... unfriendly, which we don't like.

Here's a quick tutorial to make your Mac OS X terminal look as sexy as ours!

Open Terminal (Using Alfred, Spotlight, Launchpad, or whatever you prefer)
Click on Preferences (should open on Settings tab, if it doesn't, click it)
Create a new theme (should look like the ugly white default one), name it whatever you want
Change the font to "Monaco", 13pt.
Change the text and bold color to white
Click on the Window sub-tab, still inside the Settings tab
Change the background color to black, with 65% opacity, and 20% blur
Click on the Startup tab and make it open by default your new theme
Close the preferences window and all open terminal windows, followed by ⌘Q
Open a new terminal and behold your new theme!

Note: If the new theme doesn't open, try using the menu: Shell -> New Window -> select your theme

That's it!

SiteLog: Round Two!

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:39:08 +0000

Ok. So we were very eager to launch SiteLog, and while we thought it worked good enough to keep using it (and 100+ clients seem to agree!), we weren't thrilled with how many things we wanted to change in it (and some things didn't work as perfectly as we wanted), and specially how hard it was going to be to add features and scale it in the future.

So, we decided: Let's do a Version 2.0, from scratch! (crazy, right?)

And that's what we did. Some of the new features:

Finally, a much nicer, cleaner design
Have you seen the website? Awesome, aye?
No more false positives (we implemented a world-wide multi-server check for failed services)!
Nyan Cat on Homepage!
Improved blog with RSS feed
Credit Card payments (using PayPal)
New support page, on Wozia's centralized Support Central
... And we'll leave you to figure out the rest!

We won't remove the "Beta" tag until we get no complaints at all, and we'll give it at least a couple of months after that, but anyway, this version is super-stable (don't ask us how's that possible!).

Try it, share it, promote it, talk good things about it, and if you have bad things to say, tell us, not other people!

Here's the link: http://siteloghq.com

Also, you may want to check the original blog post, for the first version of SiteLog.

Simple website/server monitoring, near you.

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:02:00 +0100

We manage quite a few servers, and it has always been a pain in the a** to monitor them all with a cost-effective solution.

Most solutions are way too hard to setup and/or maintain, and also rarely affordable for most people.

That's why we decided to develop our own SaaS (Software as a Service) for that, so you don't have to install anything and don't worry about having to monitor/manage the monitoring tool (redundancy intended)!

This service is great, simple, easy and more than enough for over 95% of people who need to monitor servers, because it doesn't require you to install anything on the server (it won't check your load or memory usage, but we have some very helpful scripts available for free to help you out with that if you need).

Currently it only supports alerts/notifications by email, but we have plans to add SMS functionality.

If you're looking for a boatload of features, you haven't come to the right place. One of the worst things on many alternatives is the super complex interfaces, loads of features only 5% (or less) of people use, and we don't want that. We actually want you to signup and have everything setup in less than 5 minutes. For real!

Every plan has a 30-days free trial, and billing is done monthly (Credit Card, PayPal or whatever you want). You've got nothing to lose to try it out, and we're pretty sure you'll LOVE IT! (if you don't, tell us why, but everytime someone dislikes SiteLog, a unicorn dies... luckily none died yet! -- there are only a few in the world, you know?)

Since you have the 30-days free trial, we don't even ask you for anything besides name and email, until the trial ends!

You're still here?! Sign up now, damn it!. It's actually good for your health ('cause you worry less)!

If you have no freaking idea of what we're talking about here, this is a service to know if your website is currently available or not ('cause goblins come and put servers down, the bastards). We basically check every X minutes to know if all's good or not.

Why a Budget matters in a Quote

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:25:06 +0100

Most clients don't understand why we ask for the budget when being asked for a quote.

The thing is, we're not selling houses or cars, where there's a common understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of having certain features.

You know that if a car has 200 h.p., it has more power than a 60 h.p. car. If it runs on electricity, you may prefer over a diesel or gasoline one. Most people understand these differences and what they mean.

You know and understand that a house with 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms with over 5000 sq. ft. (around 465 m²) of landscape is more expensive than a studio with around 500 sq. ft. (46.5 m²), of course, if we're taking in account the same location (another thing most people understand why there's a price variation on).

This is tough to explain to most people that don't really understand how websites and web applications work.

Let's take a look at an example, for you to understand how the "same" website can have multiple costs, thus the importance of providing your budget when asking for a quote:

Twitter.

Twitter, in its essence and most simplistic form, it isn't a very complex website. It's basically a place for you to send a public message and follow other users (and thus their messages). If you follow each other, then you can send a private message. Of course it's much more than this now (with the lists and all), but for the sake of keeping this explanation simple, we'll ignore that.

Now imagine a cost for that type of website. Not that expensive, right? Now think about the optimizations, API, etc. the site had to have so it could be so successful. That's way more expensive... but the essense, it's the same...

So, to explain it in a way anyone can understand: We need to know your budget, so we know if we should present you a quote for a Porsche GT3 RS, a Mercedes CLS or a BMW Series 1 (yeah, we don't go lower than that, we have standards, you know?). Simple as that.

If you give us no budget, what will probably happen is we'll give you a quote for a Mercedes CLS and you'll find it too cheap if you wanted a Porsche GT3 RS, or too expensive if you wanted a BMW Series 1. No one wins with that.

A Challenge Appears!

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:27:00 +0100

Market leader and in a software Lock-in, Secretplaces needed to redesign and develop from scratch their own website and system concept, in order to be able to improve and bring their business to the level they wanted.

A great challenge, since besides having to use their current data (over 700 hotels), we had to replicate and improve the current website functionalities.

Besides the new layout, design and functionalities, we also focused on SEO (which before wasn't very good, but due to having great content, it still allowed Secretplaces to be placed at top positions on all major search engines), and are now getting even better results, placements and also for keywords they weren't (well) positioned before.

One of the most complex parts of this project was (and is) actually the signup process for Hotels, because they are usually invited (though they can now suggest themselves or be suggested by people), but still go through a very thorough process to get into the Secretplaces' listing. Also, they have to provide a lot of information and we had to make it in a way so it worked quickly without any glitches and also being easy to understand, because the people filling that form aren't usually the most computer-knowledgeable people (no harm intended).

Sadly, since the booking system is still to be developed, they're using their current one (that used to also dynamically generate their static website), so there are some very important screens that have to use iframes.

Most information you see on both sides of the website is always specifially adapted and related to what you're seeing (being it a search results list, a map for a country/region/province/city, travelogue, a specific hotel, etc.), a bit like 1-to-1 marketing.

Since Secretplaces also focus on 3 main markets (English/Global, Germany and Spain), it's been very important that everything is translated (even to more languages like Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.), not only the places names, but also the URLs, so Google can like it even more and rank the places properly per region.

A sitemap generator had to run for over 40 hours to get a complete sitemap for the .com... that says a bit :)

Also, since they've got a very decent amount of visits, the database, webserver and bookings system are in different servers, which was also fun to handle, specially because two are Linux (Debian, our server distro of choice) and one is Windows (not our fault!).

We could tell you so much more stuff about this awesome project, but then it'd probably become boring for you. This way you get the essential.

A New Website, baby!

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:20:00 +0100

We've changed our target markets, target audience, and quite a few other things. It was kind of obvious we were going to change our website, right?

Our previous website (still accessible, for web hosting customers to be able to manage their services/products) was completely focused on the Web Hosting services we provided and for Portugal only, something we stopped doing.

Now, we're focusing on presenting work and information simply and without any clutter (it helps that now we don't need FAQ's, Terms of Service, Client Area and all that boring stuff).

This website is not meant to impress with its complexity, etc. (if you do take a look at the source code, though, you may find some funny & somewhat complex stuff), but rather blow your minds away with the quality of our information and work (and products, since we're now introducing SaaS products).

Oh, and if you didn't notice, it's in English only, so we don't have to write every article twice (in English and Portuguese), when our new target audience (what really matters) does have to understand this one...

So don't be afraid to let us know what you think about it, and also our work!

wCaptcha - A Better Captcha Alternative - jQuery Captcha Plugin

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:31:20 +0100

UPDATE: The version available here is 1.1. If you want the latest version (now supporting mobile devices), you can download it at Binpress!

You'll also be able to buy a license with support, besides the free license.

---

Captcha is a great thing, it makes it more difficult (hopefully impossible) for bots to submit forms "blindly", creating/sending junk to mails/databases.

However, through time, we've become more and more aware it doesn't work as expected. It difficults communication, and as such, people make mistakes often in the common Captcha forms, making it sometimes a reason for giving up filling a form (specially when the form is big and it doesn't refill the sent information).

So, we thought: "wouldn't it be great to find a way to make a Captcha work better for humans and still be impossible to be submitted automatically by bots?"

We found a great concept for this answer at Ajax Fancy Captcha - jQuery Plugin, but also found in it a few bugs and easy ways for bots to "learn" how to bypass it. As there was nothing really good and innovative as we wanted it, we built our own!

It's called wCaptcha (w stands for Wozia).

It consists in several files, here's the structure:

sample.php : PHP File with the Form
inc/wcaptcha.class.php : The wCaptcha Class itself
inc/jspacker.class.php : Great JavaScript Packer Class ( Dean Edward's PHP Javascript Packer ), used to make it near-impossible for bots to read javascript code and thus "guess" the correct image to drag by analysing it.
images/wcaptcha/* : Images with the objects to drag.

You can download it here: wCaptcha.tar.gz

Or check the script working at: http://wcaptcha.wozia.pt/sample.php

REQUIREMENTS:

For the script to work, jQuery (1.3+ tested) with jQuery UI (1.8 tested) is required, as well as inc/wcaptcha.class.php, inc/jspacker.class.php and the images in images/wcaptcha/* (which can be changed to whatever you want)

USAGE:

We have it prepared to be setup in an Horizontal or Vertical way (css changes and the number of images showing). Type 0 is Horizontal and 1 is Vertical. By default, Horizontal is applied, so if you want to show it vertically, you can use:

printCaptcha('frm_sample',1);

The sample is in English (for distribution reasons), but we also have the circle image in Portuguese (change in inc/wcaptcha.class.php the css line where you see circulo-en.png to circulo-pt.png - line 109 in 1.0, 121 in 1.1). If you wish to make it support other languages or multi-language, it's easy to implement, in any way you prefer.

If you have any doubts, you can post them here, and we'll be happy to help you out!

THANKS TO/SOURCES:

Dean Edward's PHP Javascript Packer (javascript obfuscator)

Images from Hamburg Pack @ PC.DE (by Patricia Clausnitzer) (images to drag)

Ajax Fancy Captcha - jQuery Plugin (concept)

wCaptcha by Wozia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

UPDATES:

2011.12.17 - Released stable version 2.1 (now you can drag out and in options without needing to refresh).

2011.08.18 - Released stable version 2.0 (improved security and support for mobile devices, using tap/touch).

2011.06.20 - Released stable version 1.2 (different file organization - more easy to customize - and optional license with 1 year of support).

2011.03.12 - Released stable version 1.1 with improved security.

2010.09.29 - Released stable version 1.0.

StopUsingIE - Stop Using Internet Explorer

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:16:08 +0100

We just launched a new project - Stop Using IE.

This project appeared due to the fact that, in the last years, we felt Internet Explorer delayed the Web's development and evolution. Instead of developing better websites with more innovative technologies, we have to lose time making them Internet Explorer compatible, sometimes limiting their functionalities.

This works, lastly, in a product of lesser quality than it could be.

The objective of this project is to:

For Internet Explorer users:

Alert them about the various security and stability problems present in Internet Explorer 7 (and older versions), acknowledged by Microsoft itself
Educate them to choose with more and better knowledge their browser

For web developers and webmasters:

End the preoccupation of having to make the website Internet Explorer compatible, warning users that access with it to switch and/or update their browser

More information

You can get more informations at www.stopusingie.com, including references to news, articles about known problems of Internet Explorer, etc.