First of all a word of caution: I’m a Developer, not a Web Designer.

I’m a PHP and Java Developer who happens to make designs for clients’ websites as well. I’m in no way a Designer. I have null knowledge and education in principles like colors, shapes, interface usability, design and so on.

I seek tools that let me get the job done in the shortest time possible, with the least possible effort, while giving me the chance to come back to my work and easily make huge changes in little time.

Enough of a digression. Straight to the point.

Let me get this straight: if you’re still using Photoshop for Web Design, you’re either an amateur-self-taught-web-designer-wannabe (like, ironically, I am), or a masochist. In the latter case, try switching to GIMP (maybe on Windows) for greater pleasure (a software with the potential of wiping out the competition, but still flawed on so many levels).

My first encounter with Fireworks: greatly disappointed.

I started using Fireworks CS4 and I’ve been left disappointed. I felt it had the potential, but it couldn’t even finish the job. Put simply: it was a compilation of bugs, turned into an application. Only more than 700 bug fixes later, with CS5, I completely stopped using Photoshop for web design works.

Fireworks CS5: we’re not there yet, but it’s already kicking ass.

Now I have no doubt that Fireworks is superior to Photoshop (for webdesign): in just one PNG file you can have multiple pages; multiple states; you can set a master page; share layers to states and pages; you can edit whatever you want, because it’s all vector (gradients, shapes, effects…). You can even name your slices and have fireworks export them with the correct CSS classes (show a working prototype to a client, and you’ll see the light in his eyes).

Fireworks CS5 is for Web Design and Prototyping. Photoshop is for (mostly) bitmap image retouching. With simple websites, there’s no doubt you can get the work done with Ps, but with bigger projects, you’ll start doing different files, different copies of layers for pages or states (rollovers, modal windows, state changes…).

Guess what happens when you have to change just one common/shared detail in more than 6 pages: in fireworks it’s just a matter of editing a layer in one file. In Photoshop you’ll have to recreate the detail (because most likely it’s bitmap) and then copy/paste in different layers/files.

Unless you just edit that detail and export it in the html, leaving all the other graphical pages with the old element, bringing inconsistency into your workflow and creating what is commonly known as “mess”.

Photoshop is just the wrong tool for the job.

I like the analogy with those funny people using Notepad for development. Yeah, technically speaking, you can plan, architect and code a website the size of Facebook with the sole use of Notepad. Sure!

But I feel that features like syntax highlighting, code completion, function documentation, files and functions navigation, debugging and versioning integration could boost your development performances.

Just like Fireworks CS5 (and here I warn you: not any other previous version!) could boost your Web Design performances. I mean: good luck using the wrong tool for serious jobs.

Then again, a little education in the field of Web Design (which I lack, and it shows!) could be of help too.

After an upgrade I had issues with tearing and waves corrupting the desktop on my external monitor (no issues on my laptop screen). I decided to format and reinstall everything. It solved a tons of other small issues but not this one. External monitors (LCD or CRT) won’t work with Ubuntu 10.04 notebooks with Radeon cards (I have a Mobility radeon x1600). You’ll see a distorted image. Waving like the refresh rate is incorrect.

Solution

I just did the following (on a bare install of Ubuntu 10.04)
Fire up the terminal and type

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf

a blank file will open up. Type in the following.

options radeon modeset=0

Save, exit and reboot.

Beware that this solved my particular issue but it may not solve your own. My issue had to do with waves and refresh problems on an external monitor connected to a Notebook’s Ati Mobility Radeon x1600, running Ubuntu 10.04. That’s it. Your mileage may vary.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+source/linux/+bug/537640

Statistically, you’re not going to read this. That’s the name of the blog post that struck me today.

The concept behind the post is that writing for the web is different than writing books or printed articles. Been there, done that? Not really.

The idea in that post is introduced to the reader via a plain, simple truth: a great number of readers just skip reading and skim through the content. Then the author goes on with a couple of actions blog owner could take to avoid that, effectively easing the lecture process for readers.

The New Mediators

Here’s something I started to think about.

As the way we consume media evolves,
so must our method to communicate complexity

That’s the message conveyed by Jonathan Jarvis, in the video The New Mediators; a video that may seem unrelated at first but which shares the same approach to the communication paradigm: keeping it simple.

Complexity has to be mediated.
Complex ideas, complex mediums… they all have to be simplified.

Connectivism

The world wide web made a big contribution in simplifying ideas and concepts: Wikipedia alone gives you the opportunity to understand complex topics, simply by reading small blocks of information in different articles. That’s something in common with George Siemens’ Connectivism (A Learning Theory for the Digital Age).

Small packets of data your brain processes more easily than it would if you were to read a book (or article) from start to finish.

Ok, that’s not exactly Connectivism, but its concept may be stretched to fit my idea. Because we’re talking about effective communication (which may be applied to learning as well) through visual elements (because visual is direct).

Visual Connectivism?

If I give you small bits of data like sequential images and brief textual descriptions, your brain will create the connections necessary to extract information. If I give you a lengthy text (like this blog post) you’re likely going to skip it (all or in part) because the effort you brain makes to adapt my written thoughts to yours, to your way of storing information, is different.

Extremely stretched example: do you prefer listening to music or reading sheet music? Ok, I told you it was kind of extreme. But you get the point: reading means processing. Fatigue.

You have to make a conversion. It requires processing power.

That’s because you have to think about what I intended to say. That’s harder than just watching images and vector arrows moving. In that case you just make the connections by yourself, without converting my writings to visual images just to extrapolate my thoughts.

Visual is simpler. Visual is effective.

That’s why they created PowerPoint and mind maps in the first place.

Audience is dumb

When I say dumb, I do not mean to be offensive. Just provocative (and I don’t want to provoke flaming and trolling, I want to provoke thinking).

Dumb Riddle

Answer this question: who’s the one that

• Doesn’t speak too much
• Convey lack of intelligence
• Doesn’t seem to have the capability (or will) to process data

Answer: the one and only (passive) audience.

Television’s audience is mute. They remain silent while watching simple images and fancy colors bounce all around their 1080p, 65″ TV set. Why? Because it doesn’t require effort. It’s simple and you can absorb information passively. It doesn’t require language processing (not too much, anyway).

Reading is fatigue

The web, though, is different. You have to read. It requires effort. Analysis. Synthesis. Thinking.

But we don’t have time. Our brain processes information in a much faster way than we’re able to read: we need to go faster! We need to add the visual dimension. Moving or static images.

Discussion is effort

Writing to reply a comment, or writing a thoughtful blog article, requires effort too. Establishing a multi-way communication is not that immediate: you have to sit down, think, follow your thoughts from point A to point B. That’s almost impossible for Visual Thinkers (The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers). And I think that we’re becoming more and more visual thinkers (makes you think that we all suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder).

Pivot. Visualizing Complexity

Data processing requires logical efforts we’re not used to sustain anymore. Unless it’s visual. Take Pivot, from Microsoft Labs. It’s a breakthrough in data analysis.

Why reading tables and numbers when you can visualize them and interact with them? As they say, you may end up finding things you were not even looking for.

Using our GPU

We’re doing what nVidia did with the CUDA capable GPUs: we’re transferring the workload from our Central Processing Unit (the logic part of our brain, associated with language and arithmetic) to the Visual part (associated with Creativity).

Are we becoming all creatives? Is it because we’ve been bombarded with sounds and animations since we were born? Did our brain develop itself around cartoons, movies and music videos?

I don’t have the answers. But when I tweeted

There’s something wrong with the current webdesign trends.
Think about it.

I was referring exactly to this whole lack of visual communication. And I did not have any solution (and I don’t have any even right now). I’ll keep on writing words instead of creating videos (at least for the next couple of months). Probably I’ll throw some picture in. But we need to better blend it all. That’s why articles like the one I pointed out at the beginning of this post are more than welcome. The post art direction idea, mentioned in that article, is a nice idea. Single post (or sections/categories) styling is a great option for bloggers as well as other kind of websites.

So what?

So we need to go visual. We need to draw. To animate. To colorize. To communicate without coding our thoughts into words and verbs and phrases. We need to directly represent them spatially. In sequence or even with a web-like structure. We need tools to do so in an effective way.

We need to take a look at our brain neurons, then take a look at the stars, and apply these universal principles to communication.

Image found on the Visual Complexity blog.

Packets. Chunks. Connections made by yourself.
Draw your conclusions.

Comments?

As usual I remain open to any comment or thought you may be willing to share. Especially if you disagree with something I said because I firmly believe in constructive criticism as the basis for growth and wisdom (and because I write so badly that sometimes I just can’t express myself correctly).

Oh by the way, if you have any infographic resource, post it in the comments. I may as well start doing some experiment in that field (moving or static).

You may need to enable the cURL extension in your XAMPP setup, just like I had to do to install Magento locally.

curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, IMAP, SMTP, POP3 and RTSP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

Get cURL working with XAMPP

Just 3 easy steps.

• Locate and open your php.ini file (if not sure open the url http://localhost/xampp/phpinfo.php, and search for the line Loaded Configuration File). Mine was in C:\xampp\php\php.ini.
• Near line 952, uncomment extension=php_curl.dll (remove the semicolon).
• Restart the Apache web server.

Now you should be able to use cURL PHP extension with XAMPP on Windows.

We’ll set up shell colors, aliases and install useful packages that you may need. This is not something you need to do (you could skip this blog post altogether) but it may simplify you life while operating via the SSH shell.

Shell colors and aliases

To add some colors to your sheel promt just do the following

nano ~/.bashrc

Go to the end of the file and add the following lines.


# Set prompt: " username@hostname/directory/tree $ " (with colors)
export PS1="\[\e[32;1m\]\u\[\e[0m\]\[\e[32m\]@\h\[\e[36m\]\w \[\e[33m\]\$ \[\e[0m\]"
alias ll="ls -la"
alias ver="cat /etc/lsb-release"
alias free="free -m"
alias update="sudo aptitude update"
alias install="sudo aptitude install"
alias upgrade="sudo aptitude safe-upgrade"
alias remove="sudo aptitude remove"
alias ca="sudo cherokee-admin -b"

Then save and quit.
With command source ~/.bashrc you’ll reload the profile and you should start seeing nice colors. They’re helpful to quickly get info with a glance.

As you can see I’ve set some aliases too. Now I simply run update instead of sudo aptitude update. There’s also a cherokee admin alias because I’m going to install Cherokee Web Server.

Build Essential and other packages

Another package you may need is the build-essential package along with wget so

sudo aptitude install build-essential wget

I keep this post as a code snippets reference so feel free to change bits of it to suit your need.

Google Notebook
You can copy the above snippets and save them in your Google Notebook account for future reference.

Cloud Computing lets you scale and pay only for computing resources you actually use like storage, bandwidth, server uptime and so on. You get no upfront costs (unlike VPS services) and a great level of service (unlike shared hosting) because you’re in control of the box. This is a nice new paradigm for developers.

I know of two big providers for cloud services: Amazon (AWS) and Rackspace (cloud servers/cloud files).

Why Rackspace Cloud Servers?

Well, you may have heard about their fanatical support: basically they’ll help you with pretty much anything. They’re helpful with noobs and ready to help on pretty much any hosting related topic.

If getting quality support’s not your primary goal, then consider their aggressive pricing strategy: they let you start a cloud server for just $0.015 hourly. That’s $10.95 per month to have your own 256 MB RAM Cloud VPS. That’s great to test and develop software. You start a cloud server, do your dirty stuff and then shut it down. Done.

I see Rackspace this way: cheaper for fast and small scale stuff, with an outstanding support service. In fact if you want to start small, there you’ve got a nice playground for your cloud computing experiments.

Ready to scale then? Simply upgrade your machine or add other instances. Easy.

Also, they’re fast. Faster than Amazon AWS. How fast? Chad tells us how fast! And just in case, Chris Meller shows us the CDN power of Rackspace. And remember that fanatical support‘s included.

Why Amazon AWS?

Amazon AWS offers a wider range of services. They’re more business oriented. Less hardcore blogger or freelance designer oriented: their offer starts at roughly $0.085 per hour for a single EC2 instance. But you really get what you pay for: 1.7 GB of RAM and a nice processing power (WordPress mu will run on such machine).

Also you’re being offered a wide variety of other services like Elastic Block Storage, Notifications, Autoscaling and Load Balancing, Relational Database Service and more (given you’re ready to pay extra bucks).

It’s not a cheap way to start experimenting. In fact it’s not for the typical weekend developer. It’s for professionals who don’t need fanatical support or for people who wants to take advantage of other AWS services (tightly integrated).

So what about WordPress mu?

WordPress mu requires lots of RAM. On the mu support forums you can see Andrea pointing out that 2 to 4 GB of RAM should be a safe start.

So no entry level 256 MB RAM server. Unless you just want to use the script to power a couple of unread and unvisited websites. Let’s say you want to start with something around 1-2 GB of RAM.
On Rackspace you can get

• 1 GB RAM / 40 GB Storage, 6¢ hourly, $43.80 monthly
• 2 GB RAM / 80 GB Storage, 12¢ hourly, $87.60 monthly

Bandwidth excluded. Top notch support included.
On the other hand, on Amazon EC2, you get

• 1.7 GB RAM / 160 GB Storage, 8.5¢ hourly, $62 (more or less) monthly

Which is something in between the Rackspace offering. But you get some free bandwidth and more storage, while getting no support. Hard choice, but I’d go with the EC2.

The Database Layer

Now let’s say you need to use different database servers because you want to separate the web from the database.

Amazon RDS is just an EC2 instance running MySQL with some added extra (like backups), with no need to configure anything: start an instance, get your db server running!

On the other hand you end up paying 80$ per month to keep the RDS running because just like with the other Amazon Web Services, there’s no entry level offer.

Given that the RDS option is pricey, the other option would be a smaller instance on Rackspace, on which you can put MySQL: we’re getting the web server on EC2 and the database on Rackspace. But what about the network latency and the inbound/outbound traffic? Using different cloud providers’ still not the best option.

So what now? Maybe I’ve got another idea.
You may consider starting a 1 GB RAM Cloud Server (Rackspace) for the web server while using a 512 MB RAM instance for the database. Let’s see:

• 512 MB RAM/ 20 GB Storage, 3¢ hourly, $21.90 monthly
• 1 GB RAM / 40 GB Storage, 6¢ hourly, $43.80 monthly

So it’s $65.7 monthly, with fanatical support and low latencies.
But no bandwidth included.

This seems to me like the most viable starting solution: you’ve split the load and the WordPress script should be able to run with 1 GB of RAM with the database server having its own 512 MB of RAM, on another machine.

But take a closer look: the EC2 instance was 1.7 GB with 160 GB storage. It could have handled the database and the web server on the same machine with a lower cost and more RAM. So what? We’ve gone back to the start.

Whatever setup you might take, there are ways you can save on RAM.
In fact, to save something more on RAM and processing power, you could get a smart web server software. Since the good ol’ Apache’s pretty slow nowadays, I personally recommend Cherokee. It’s just as fast as Lighttpd or nginx, but with a smooth gui to configure whatever you want to (redirects, php handlers, load balancers, virtual servers, advanced stuff I don’t even know the meaning of…).

Speaking of databases

WordPress mu needs plugins like HyperDB or SharDB: it’s the only way you can scale with thousands of blogs, without actually killing your database server (like reaching a number limit or like clogging it with read/write operations). Sharding’s an interesting option indeed: every newly created blog get its tables created inside a specific shard (which is a pool of tables that does not share anything with other shards/pools). This way you can partition your WordPress mu installation among different DB servers (like a separate server for every 32 shards or so, based on your load).

This way you can keep on scaling WordPress mu indefinitely and quite in a linear way: you just move the shards on new machines.

Conclusion

You can start small (while saving and learning some system administration stuff) with Rackspace but don’t even think about a 256 MB RAM server for your WordPress mu network. You need at least 1 GB to run a small blog network setup. Then you may want to move to Amazon depending on your infrastructure needs (or stick with Rackspace and live Happily Ever After™). The final note is that you need at least a couple of well equipped machines to get serious: there’s no cheap way of working with WordPress mu.

Discussion

Since I’m always experimenting with such setups, I’d like to know your thoughts and your experiences. Then feel free to discuss better options or wrong/incorrect stuff I may have written (I do that a lot!). Also throw in your personal opinion like “I’ll stick with Rackspace because Chad is cool” or “I’ll stick with AWS because I buy books from Amazon” (yeah, such levels of personal opinions are accepted too).

The rackspace cloud server is an alternative for VPS products. It comes with a low pay per use cost ($0.015 hourly) instead of a monthly fee, and it’s ideal for development as well. I’m working on a personal project so I don’t need huge amount of resources in terms of data traffic. Instead of using Amazon EC2 ($0.085 per hour) I figured that I could save something with rackspace cloud server.

Note that this blog is still hosted at MediaTemple (gs) as it has nothing to do with the project I’m working on right now.

Starting the virtual server

This is pretty straightforward: just go to your control panel at https://manage.rackspacecloud.com/ and click on the Hosting button.

Once you’ve selected Cloud Servers, click on Add Server and then choose your OS.

After filling in some basic information like the name of the server and choosing the ram/disk/price option, click on create server.

Connecting via SSH

After the server’s started you receive an email with the root password and the ip address. You’re going to use these data to connect to your newly created server with an SSH client.

I use PuTTY both on Windows and Linux.

Open the main PuTTY window and insert your ip. Then you can either save your connection for later usage or just connect to your server right away.

The first time you log in, you’re using the root user. Since it’s generally a bad idea to err around your linux system with the root user account, let’s create another user and give him sudo permissions.

adduser <username> && visudo

Those are actually two commands chained by && (which means: wait for the first command to finish successfully, then execute the following one). What the second command does, is to call a text editor and let you edit the sudoers file. You want your newly created user to be able to execute stuff just like a superuser so simply add the following line at the end of the file:

<username> ALL=(ALL)   ALL

Save the file by pressing CTRL-X on your keyboard, followed by Y and Enter. Now you can make some tests: open up another SSH session and log in as the new user, then try to get to a root shell prompt by typing sudo su and pressing Enter. You will be prompted for the new user’s password.

Securing the SSH

Still logged in as root, type the following command

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Now change the port to something else (default is 22).
Make sure you have the following lines (edit them or add them).

PermitRootLogin no
UsePAM no
UseDNS no
AllowUsers <username>

Now save and exit (CTRL-X followed by Y and Enter).
Reload the SSH configuration.

/etc/init.d/ssh reload

Now you can connect to your ssh on the new port, with the new user, with his new password. Remember: you disabled root login, so to do superuser stuff, use the sudo command.

Forthcoming parts

• Customizing the shell and using aliases to work faster
• Using public/private keys to login via SSH without passwords
• Installing Cherokee web server with PHP5, MySQL and APC
• Installing WordPress mu on Cherokee web server

If you have suggestions or questions, please let me know.