Neglect

Lately, I’ve been neglecting my development blog. In the shadow of my everyday blog, it’s used primarily for longer posts that are more specific to my work in website development and stuff like that. I’ve been pretty busy working and have actually had a lot of progress with some websites and projects.

Since my last post, I started a brand new website project called SillyApp. This site came to me one night and I thought it would be fun to make. I feature the really dumb and hilarious applications found on the iTunes App Store. Still in its early days, it already has over 1,000 daily page views. I haven’t had much time to nurture it the past few weeks but after I finish up a few things in old personal life world, I’ll get back to contributing to it regularly. It’s also one of the first projects that I’m going to be farming out help with. Usually, I keep my websites close to the vest but I have a few people interested in writing for it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my brand itself. I re-designed my entire portfolio website to have a new look. Over the past year, I’ve really learned a lot in terms of website design and realized that my old look didn’t really reflect the way I design and work anymore. So, I started fresh and I’m really happy with the way the design came out.

I also spent some time and re-designed my social brand too. I went for a consistent look throughout all of the main websites I use (that actually allow customization). My Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Start.IO pages all now reflect the design that I created for my blog. You can read more about that here.

In other, slightly related news, I now own http://johnthedeveloper.com for another two years!

NCEMSForum

I’ve been pretty busy working on a few projects recently. The way the internet is today, keeping your information current and informative is the only way to keep a presence on the web.

The most recent project that I’ve been working on is one that strikes two of my interests – web development and EMS. The National Collegiate Emergency Services Foundation provides resources and membership to college students involved in emergency medical services.

Two members recently decided to extend this and start their own forum, NCEMSForum. When I came across this site (after being referred to it by one of my supervisor’s at my college ambulance company), it was in the early stages. I contacted them to see if I could lend a hand and they graciously agreed. After a short stint as an “intern”, I created a brand new theme for them incorporating a simple EMS colored theme that was edgy and had a “college feel” to it as well as a clean and modern look.

The reception has been great and I continue to make it better as the head of their Technical Support staff. Check out their website here.

Creating A Profile Page

Recently, I started doing some modifications and the next round of new features for one of my favorite project – The PART website. This project has been such a great learning experience and a serious “trial by fire”. I’ve been able to test out a lot of concepts that I don’t have an outlet for elsewhere and since it is constantly getting new members at an almost daily rate, I have been able to modify and learn how to work with larger groups of information.

One of the new features that I will be implementing soon is a “Profile” section. This page will take information that members submit on the registration page and display it on a page that will be much like a profile page on Facebook or MySpace – without all the unnecessary fanciness.

This “cool idea” is no easy task and comes with its fair share of challenges. The first implementation of the information collected on the registration page was relatively simple – a basic members table that shows First Name, Last Name, Email and Graduating Class. This profile page would not just be a dump of information – but an organized and specially formatted way to show more extensive information, such as birthday, union affiliations, user choices and selections, etc.

The way that I wanted to do this was in the most streamlined and organized way. Instead of creating a new page for each member (which would waste valuable bandwidth, server space and time) I would create one profile page that would pull information for the selected member.

For example:

http://thepart.org/profile.php?id=1

This would pull specific information for the member with the ID of 1.

Right now, I’m working to get all this information organized into a pretty table and then I need to integrate the code that will open the database and use the ID number entered in the URL to call up a specific user’s information.

I will post a more detailed explanation of how I accomplish this as I get it done, testing and implemented into the real world environment of the website.

Email Quota

With the advent of computers and email, the idea of email began to catch on and spread like wildfire. Now, with one simple sentence, there is no way to truly capture the history and technology associated with email, but for my sake – it’s enough said. I myself have a handful of email accounts ranging from MobileMe, GMail, Yahoo, School as well as emails that forward to emails associated with websites, companies and projects that I’m working on.

What I have begun to notice is the trends in the way in which people use email. There are two main philosophies. The first is the one that is not like me – those that treat email like a text message, deleting it after sending a message or reading it.

The second is the group that I fall into. I keep almost every email with some kind of information that is useful in it – which means almost everything except spam, messages from Facebook and codes to get free cookies with any order. I have a paper trail of emails from companies, banks, schools and much more. Not only do I save incoming messages, but more important, I save outgoing messages.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to go in and find a message from months ago to win a bet, prove a point or remind someone of something important. Lately, I’ve had to change my strategy a little with my school email account. The quota you are provided is 50MB. Yes, 50MB. My MobileMe account has 10GB and my Gmail account is virtually unlimited. Granted, I won’t ever need this (unless I start some business where people email me full length, uncompressed movies). Today, I had to go in a delete over 200 messages which made me feel really weird.

I think schools and businesses should recognize the importance of email communication and I think I should have more space!

Bringing It Back

So, I’ve decided that over time I seem to go through website phases. Not with websites that I browse, but moreso about my personal websites. I am constantly changing, updating, revising, deleting and moving around various websites that I am working on. Lately, I’ve spent less time working on my own website, my development blog and stuff like that in lieu of an actual project.

I was asked to design and maintain a website for the alumni association of my high school. Since this project is for something that is very near and dear to me (they help out theatre alumni and they gave me a nice scholarship when I graduated), I was more than happy to work on this.

The project has progressed nicely and after only a few weeks, the website has been discovered by hundreds of alumni, many of which have already registered to have their name, contact information, headshots and resumes added to the database.

The website can be found at http://thepart.org

I’m really happy with the way it came out and am glad to have an active project being so well received.

Nice Try Windows

Recently, there has been some news circulating about Windows and its plans to retaliate for the “Get A Mac” ads, featuring “Mac vs. PC”. Today, Windows unveiled “The Mojave Experiment”. Basically, the idea they were trying to get across is that people who haven’t switched to Vista and believe all the bad hype, haven’t actually tried it. 

The experiement was they would have an “informal discussion” with a Windows user while hidden camera recorded it, and would show them a new OS they called “Windows Mojave”. After the person used it and told them how much they loved it, they would tell them that it was just Vista. 

Overall, I think that the idea is clever, but the concept is still not going to be able to get the same attention that Apple gets. From simple things like how much reading you have to do on their website, or how complicated it is for them to get people to say Vista is not terible just proves what Mac users have always known. Mac is just better. 

Windows is spending millions of dollars on this add campaign, but I don’t think they’ll be able to see a huge shift in thinking. They make it seem like the people that gave Vista negative reviews were just making stuff up. It doesn’t matter if you get 20 people in a room to say that “Vista is cool” when there have been so many terrible reviews, horror stories, compatibility issues, security problems, etc. 

Go check out The Mojave Experiment for yourself and you’ll probably see what I mean.

MobileMe Status Updates

Recently, Apple made an interesting transition from a web-based service they’ve used for years, known as .Mac. The “dotmac” service was created as a way to keep your information organized and updated. It provided subscribers, who were required to pay $99/yr. for the service, an excellent email system, a way to organize and store bookmarks on the web, a internet-based hard drive known as an iDisk to store gigs of data on, a gallery to publish websites, photos, videos and more as well as a way to keep all your data, personal settings and other information in sync. 

At this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC08), Steve Jobs unveiled MobileMe during his keynote address. It claimed to be a brand new, and improved system that would replace .Mac. It claimed to offer “Push Email, Push Contacts and Push Calendars” and used a clever “Apple” way to explain this. MobileMe would store all your information in a “cloud” and then push information down to all of your devices and any changes made on your devices would be pushed up to the “cloud” and back down to the rest of the hardware on your network. 

On July 11th, in the shadow of the iPhone 3G release, Apple began the transition to MobileMe. The millions of users that already owned .Mac, plus the hundreds of thousands that has purchased it alongside their shiny new iPhones were shocked when they received errors when trying to use Mail, Calendars and Contacts. Over time, what Apple called a “rocky transition” continued to plague at least “1% of all MobileMe users”, according to Apple’s status checker on the MobileMe website. 

Personally, I only noticed the small bugs that I assume the other 99% of MobileMe users experienced. It took days for Apple to officially release an update that would change all references to .Mac on your Mac to MobileMe. I ended up finding this on a torrent, through a link from MacRumors and installing it myself. I also noticed that Mail was still using the Mac.com servers to send mail and that it seemed my data – which was supposed to update instantly, if I understood the cloud concept correctly – was taking around 15 minutes to show up as a change on my computer. 

Days later, Apple finally made some sort of announcement about the service. They offered everyone who was an existing customer a free 30-day extension to their plan while they fixed the issues. Later in the week, Apple finally updated their website and system to no longer say “Push” services. Apparently, while data could be pushed instantly from the MobileMe cloud to the iPhone and Me.com website, it would only be changed on your Mac or PC every 15 minutes, when an automatic Sync would take place in the background. 

Two days ago, after Apple began to receive terrible press and had thousands of angry customers plaguing their forums and support chats with messages like “HOW DO I GET A REFUND?” and “NO MAIL FOR 14 DAYS – NO WORD FROM APPLE!”, Apple finally talked. They created a MobileMe Status page, which in effect is a blog, where they are trying to keep customers in the know of what is going on. 

Overall, I think Apple is doing the best they can coping with an overwhelming use of their product. Not only were they not expecting such demand, but when the problems began, they had no way to slow down the activity, with more and more users signing up every day and flooding their servers. It looks like they’re slowly beginning to fix things and I’m sure there will be some future updates to address the Push issue as well.

My Thoughts on PayPal

The PayPal electronic payment system has been around for quite some time. I remember back when I would use my dad’s eBay account, PayPal was a rarely seen method. As the concept and security grew, PayPal became “an eBay company” and has become the only preferred and sometimes, only accepted method of payment for eBay auctions. 

I’ve recently had to use PayPal a lot, after I decided to sell my first-generation iPhone. I decided the only payment method I would use would be PayPal. In order to become a “verified” PayPal user, you need to add a credit card account and you need to link it to a bank account. That was kind of a scary concept, to literally throw my entire account information at some website. I even called customer service just to be sure it was ok. 

When the auction ended, the money was transfered almost instantly and is now on its way to my bank account. The concept of electronic money is a scary one. I know that personally, I find myself spending a lot more money online simply because I feel like it lasts longer, when in reality it doesn’t. Every once in a while I’ll open my account and realize I’ve done too much. 

PayPal makes it very easy to allow people to send money as well. I’m able to create a simple invoice that a person can literally just enter their credit card information in and send me a payment. I was a bit skeptical about this, especially because the invoice was for a private transaction of my phone, to a woman in a different country. Apparently though, PayPal told me I would be as safe as I would if I was getting money from someone next door! 

I originally planned on removing all account ties once this eBay stuff was over, but it looks like I might keep it. It really is convenient, and I’m hoping that some of my projects take off and people will begin to donate. Also, I’m planning to start doing some “Mac repairs” up at college, and charging people thru PayPal. After all, how long can I go giving out freebies?

I guess the moral of this is that PayPal is part of the new era of money handling, and it’s here to stay. While it might seem strange, for the most part, it protects everyone. It sometimes feels like your money could just disappear but as long as you’re smart, you’re protected.

New Domain & Hosting

Recently, I started to look around at hosting alternatives to my current host, 1and1. They have always been helpful and the service has been pretty reliable, except for a few issues when I started, and the pricing wasn’t terrible. Why am I switching then? I wanted a fresh start. As you can see, I have a lot of different projects going on. The reason for this is because each idea I have is totally different, and each idea has the potential to be a great one. Everytime I start a project, it’s also a new learning experience. 

Some people work on web projects as a “get rich quick scheme” and those are always the ones that fail, or litter their websites with ads. I’m all for making money, but I know that the real winners are websites that have stood the test of time. One such example is MacRumors. Started over ten years ago, MacRumors has become a hub for the Apple community, always providing reliable news and rumors and a thriving forum. The owner and creator, Arnold Kim, was recently featured in the New York Times because he decided to quit his job as a medical doctor to work on MacRumors full time. In fact, he also said he would make just as much money (at least six figures) from MacRumors as he would if he continued to practice medicine. 

Most, if not all, of my current projects and ideas will probably ever reach this level. Part of this is because of timing. Back when website development was at a slower pace, people had time to establish a following before the next bigger better idea came along. 

Anyway, I’ve decided to move to a new host, Eleven2. Their company has been around for a few years, and they were a great resource when I was thinking about starting my own Reseller Hosting website. They started like me, as teenagers, and worked their way up to thousands of users in many countries. They offer amazing hosting packages. 

The main domain name of the hosting plan will be www.johnthedeveloper.com. This blog will eventually be moved to the website as well. Then, I’ll begin migrating only my current projects over to the new host. While I’ll have plenty of space, in the years since I purchased my first hosting plan, I’ve learned so much and will be organizing everything much differently. I like when things are organized, and a quick look at my FTP server will show how UNorganized my server has become. 

I’ll let everyone know when the transition is complete, and you’ll likely see some of my projects die entirely, and others change shape.

Can’t Keep Track Of It All

Welcome to my new blog, website and project. If you know me, you know I’m no stranger to blogs. This one will features everything going on in my “developer world”. I created this blog as an outlet for all the information coming in and out about my projects. A lot of these projects are still in development and being worked on, but as they come up, I want to be able to talk about them, get them out there and give everyone a little overview of what they’re for. 

Since this isn’t the only blog I maintain, I should clarify what my others are for. 

Tumblr – My tumblr (or tumblelog) is my personal blog, where I post articles, stories, opinions, music, photos and videos that I come across. 

JohnTheDeveloper (Tumblr) – This blog was created as a placeholder for this project. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to use WordPress or Tumblr for it, but once I decided to buy the domain as well, WordPress was the only option. 

Learning to Fly – This blog is one that I created when my interest in aviation “came back”. As I go through the flight process, I’ll be posting information for other student pilots and flying hopefuls.

Party7 Entertainment – This blog was created as a part of my DJ Entertainment business, which is something I do on the side, mostly for fun. 

MacGenius – I’m not quite sure what I was thinking when I made this one. It’s purpose was to blog about Apple, but I do that enough on my own blog. I figured I would keep it in case I found a use for it. If you know me, you know I have enough Apple-related projects going on to last a while.