Reactions have been mixed on the new ReTweet functionality that’s recently been rolled out by Twitter. Some think it’s an elegant solution, others think it’s going to suck the life out of ReTweeting altogether. But no matter how you slice it, ReTweeting is going to change drastically in the very near future.
We all know that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool. (A good indicator of this is seeing how much spam has cropped up in the Twittersphere lately. Yikes.) ReTweets have provided a way for Twitter users to quickly share interesting tweets and links quickly, and nearly all Twitter clients have accommodated this unofficial feature.
But more importantly, site owners like you and I have enjoyed great exposure in the way our articles have been spread throughout Twitter with ReTweets. (Some of the articles on Web Jackalope have seen more than 100 ReTweets.) But as Bob Dylan sang, the times they are a changin’.
Twitter’s new ReTweet functionality could be even more powerful than before, adding more authority to your tweets and brand.
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This post is part of the Blog Action Day 2009 over climate change.
Green web hosting is something that has started to become quite popular among many web hosting companies. Even some of the big players are starting to turn to alternative energy sources to power their servers, or to try show that they don’t have a negative impact on the environment.
Why does this matter? It matters because of a little study on server energy usage conducted by Stanford in 2007. Thanks to the explosion of video, VOIP and an increase of broadband Internet services, energy consumed by data centers from 2000 to 2005 doubled. And it’s only been getting worse over the past 4+ years since the study.
Every effort web hosts can make to consume less energy and become more environmentally friendly is a very important thing as we use more and more energy to power our websites.
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With the economy reeling and VC’s spending less and less on startups, developers have had to adapt how they create sites. Because of the world’s economic state, we’ve had to change how we develop.
Some may see this shift as a grim prospect. Change is hard, and change is essential to staying alive in these conditions. However, if you can cut expenses in your development process without cutting quality by using free methods and tools, then you may be able to develop without using any extra money.
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Drupal is an excellent choice for a content management system (CMS). However, many people only see it as a simple CMS, a site to build a landing page or two. But Drupal is much more than that. Not only is Drupal easy to theme, it’s got a wide range of built in functionality and a large community powering the popular CMS. Continue reading »
Signup forms have long irked the casual visitor. During the process of discovery, nobody wants to stop and fill out details before they can “unlock” the rest of the site’s potential. As web users become more and more fickle, signup forms are becoming an increasingly large barrier that repels many prospective visitors from great sites.
Fortunately there’s a new signup system in town that is making it much easier for the visitor to interact with the site and it increases signups. I give you: Lazy Registration.
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Google Web Toolkit is a monumental project for Java developers. Java is a language that isn’t usually associated with web development. PHP, Ruby, Python and others are typically seen as the languages of choice when building web applications. At least until recently. Google’s steady development and improvement of the GWT is a major step towards bridging the gap between ajax-driven web applications and Java. And it works well.
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Social media websites have made a huge splash on the Internet as we know it. No longer do editors dictate what is news, and what is important. The power belongs to the masses on social news sites, which is a huge reason for their traction and loyal users.
It’s no surprise that developing a niche social media site is a popular job request for web developers. When I first learned about brand new social site for financial news, ideas, and tips Tip’d, I was immediately impressed with the clean, sophisticated design and impressive functionality. Yet what was truly amazing about Tip’d was how fast the site was assembled by it’s rockstar development team.
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With Thanksgiving only a couple days away, it’s appropriate to look back on the things that we appreciate best about our jobs. Let’s face it: Web Developers have the best jobs around, right? We’re incredibly lucky to have the professions we do.
Here are 15 things that we all should be thankful for. These are the technologies that we couldn’t live without, or that have previously paved the way and allowed us to be web developers.
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Widgets are excellent for adding unique functionality to a web site. However, as the we becomes more “widgetized”, it’s starting to add strain on the web browsing experience for our users. The more widgets we add to our web pages, the worse it makes the web.
Widget Blindness
Banner blindness was discovered in the late nineties, and it shocked many people that users weren’t actually focusing on ads when a website was teeming with ad banners. Yet 10 years later, the problem isn’t so much with banners (that problem will always be around), but with web designers and site owners going out of control with adding widgets to their pages. Continue reading »
