Sam’s random musings

Feature Richness and User Engagement:

Summary: The more engaged users are, the more features an application can sustain. But most users have low commitment — especially to websites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features.

Face is right, it is worth reading to the end. I got more out of it the second read…

(Via Mind-NOX.)

InputDraw: Allow Drawing in Forms:

Ever wanted to let your users draw in a form field?

InputDraw lets you do just that, saving the results as SVG for you to include in a form field. It’s based on Flash and is easy to use

Pretty cool, look out Lance and Rush, JS is on the hunt….

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Put on your Newbie hat:

[This is a 47hats Tip.]
How many times have you seen your microISV web site? More times than you can - or care - to count, I’d bet. But you need to do it one more time, this time, put your Newbie hat on.

You know what a Newbie is, right?

Good read nice things to remember and do, and a worthwhile site to keep an eye on.

(Via 47 Hats.)

Amazon.com: Amazon FPS, Amazon Flexible Payment Service: Amazon Web Services:

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.

this is going to get a good looking over, I am looking for a new payment system for some clients (currently using paypal or authorize.net)

Web 2.0 Badges - Useful collection of stylish web 2.0 badges and badge generator.:

Ok I know this is really silly and so very yesterday, but I like it so PFFFFT, you can make your own at this place. I’m going to start tossing them at random on everything, apps, web pages, meals I cook

Implementing efficient counters with MySQL:

On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object - blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view.

The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way - they convert read load to write load. When you would simply fetch given object information now you do not only fetch the data but also update the view counter.

Some good tips for a big performance and scaling tweek for your tables

(Via Planet MySQL.)

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language:

fullduplex.org » How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who [...]

Oh man so true so true

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.5.1.1 bug fix release:

Prototype 1.5.1.1 is now available for download. This is a bug fix release that prevents crashes with versions 1.3 and 2.0.x of the Safari browser. We urge everyone using Prototype 1.5.1 to upgrade to this latest release. Previous versions of Prototype could trigger bugs in Safari’s regular expression engine when updating elements with HTML containing script tags or when using JSON functionality with built-in security checks. These regular expression engine bugs affect Safari versions 1.3 through 2.0.4, but not Safari 3 beta or the WebKit nightlies. We’ve managed to code around them to prevent either browser crashing while maintaining the full API, keeping the performance top-notch and assuring backwards-compatibility. Prototype 1.5.1.1

there was a fix for a safari prototype.js issue just released 1.5.1.1 if you want to test it you need to use the current beta of script.aculo.us 1.7.1 b 3