Archive: Dev

You have all your important data backed up, right? I mean, come on folks, it’s 2010. We may not have flying cars yet like we’re supposed to, but “having backups” is a problem that’s solved. And I’m sure you’ve solved it. I’m sure you sleep well at night knowing that if a comet hit the data center where your website lives, and everything was completely destroyed, you could get back up and running somewhere else quickly enough.

Except that the chance this is actually true for you, statistically, is very small. If we look at the statistics, then what we see is that people are storing increasing amounts of things, important things even, online because disks keep getting bigger and cheaper (though sadly not much faster, but that’s a different article).

But despite this availability of cheap storage, people for the most part still don’t back things up. This isn’t universally true of course, there are some folks who have implemented really brilliant backup systems at their companies.

Of course, it helps when you have an amazing systems guy on your team who is made out of lighting bolts and awesomeness, taking care of the nitty gritty details for you. If, however, you are one of the many many people who doesn’t have a good backup strategy in place, this article is here to help you out.

I’ve written a shell script (Ed: please remove .txt extension before use) that will serve as a good starting point, and we’ll talk through it in a little bit. For now though, let’s discuss backups in a more general sense so we can decide what our end goals are. (more…)

Editors note: Interested in web apps? Join us at the Future of Web Apps Miami on February 24th to learn more about HTML5 and hear from companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Mint, Reddit and more. Buy your tickets now and get $50 off.

In this weeks 10 minute episode of Doctype Nick shows you how to create gradients without images in CSS3, and Jim takes an in depth look at local databases in HTML5.

This is the last episode we of Doctype we will be syndicating on Think Vitamin. We hope you have enjoyed them and found them valuable.

Editors note: Interested in web apps? Join us at the Future of Web Apps Miami on February 24th to learn from companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Mint, Reddit and more. Buy your tickets now and get $50 off.

Friendly URLs are plenty popular these days, and are much more user-friendly than the cryptic URLs from five years ago. What’s the nerdiest URL you’ve ever written into a site? I can remember a few. Friendly URLs now save us from the numerical hell we were so fond of and got us used to a more human-friendly version. Instead of post=30 we now have “posts/i-love-ice-cream”.

Getting started

A recent project of mine got me thinking a step further than these friendly links. I wanted the URL to be conversational. Not just English, something more like an English sentence.

True, friendly and conversational URLs move us away from the hierarchical file structure that our old URLs once promoted. But with sophisticated servers and frameworks, and with the new social ways we’re sharing links, file structures are virtually irrelevant, and a conversational URL is more valuable.

With Hulabalub.com , my new design and tech event listing website, I decided to structure the URLs to tell my readers what exactly they’re looking at. My site centers around events, so that was the natural start to the sentence. Events. Events what?

Friendly and conversational

Since tech events all share a number of key characteristics (such as location, type, category, tag, speaker, etc), and since I knew my users would frequently search these exact terms to find events they’re interested in, I structured the URLs with these variables.

Instead of the formerly friendly “events/cities/chicago” or “events/categories/design”, I chose prepositions to describe the attributes of the query:

"events/in/chicago" or "events/on/design"

So with any number of filters added to my list of events, you can arrive at hundreds of these “sentences” that describe the page you’re looking at (and they can also be interchanged):

events/on/design/in/chicago
conferences/on/programming/in/new_york/about/ruby
meetups/on/entrepreneurship/in/san_francisco/with/fred_wilson (more...)