I was recently approached by a friend for advice on how to tackle the task of making a web site. As a career web developer, this is the type of inquiry I field every now and then, and I thought my answer might make a suitable blog post. I will offer the disclaimer that there are countless ways to accomplish this goal and I don’t consider these to be the right answers (or necessarily the answers I would provide today). They just happened to be things that popped into my mind when answering his questions.

Do you use any type of software to get started with web layouts or do you just code everything manually?

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We were recently working on a project at work that required we submit some data by appending a dynamic image tag with JavaScript. The data was transmitted in a GET request through a query string defined in the src attribute. We wanted to return a 1×1 image that could be tiled as a background image to indicate the status of the request. With such a simple image requirement, I wanted to find a more elegant solution than streaming an existing image from a file. My experience dealing with images in Java is extremely limited, and a quick Google search didn’t turn up a concise example, so this is mostly just here for reference (mine and others’).

BufferedImage buffer = new BufferedImage(IMG_SIZE, IMG_SIZE, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Graphics g = buffer.createGraphics();
g.setColor(new Color(Integer.parseInt(success ? SUCCESS_COLOR : FAILURE_COLOR, 16)));
g.fillRect(0,0,IMG_SIZE,IMG_SIZE);

resp.setContentType("image/png");

OutputStream os = resp.getOutputStream();
ImageIO.write(buffer, "png", os);
os.close();

IMG_SIZE in this case is 1 and assumes a square image. You’ll notice the parseInt method call specifies a radix of 16, so that allows SUCCESS_COLOR and FAILURE_COLOR to be defined as hex strings, which to a web developer are second nature.

After having recently audited a web application for proper character encoding support, I have one piece of advice for web developers in this area and that is: you should always support UTF-8 encoding across the board right from the start.

If you just take a few steps at the beginning of a project to enable Unicode encoding, you won’t ever have to worry about international character support, your application is “future-proofed.” When the time comes for your application to go global, it’s ready to go.

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For the past couple months, I’ve been working on a web site for my cousin, basketball coach and author Brian McCormick. The site centers around his latest book, 180 Shooter: 5 Steps to Shooting 90% from the Free Throw Line, 50% from the Floor and 40% from the 3-Point Line.

My favorite part of the job was creating the shot tracker program, which is an interactive shot chart, similar to the one shown at left. Coaches can input their players’ makes and misses with a rich user interface, tracking a wide variety of criteria such as opponent, quarter, shot type, etc. The coach can then report on the players’ shooting statistics, broken down by these criteria, and visualize that data in a heat map overlay. The result is knowing exactly where and under what conditions their players should take their shots.

There’s also a great individual practice program, which helps players follow along with the drills outlined in the 180 Shooter book. The program guides players towards practice in the necessary areas to improve their shooting. I would recommend for anyone wanting to become a better basketball shooter, you should check out this web site.

For almost 2 years, I’ve been working on a product called Email Center Pro – anyone who reads this blog probably already knows that. It’s an email management solution for small to medium sized businesses that makes it super easy for a group of people to manage hundreds, even thousands of emails a day.

This is a big week, because we just launched version 2.0 of the software to our user base. The new version has a completely rewritten JavaScript client and makes use of an entirely new RESTful web services API. It’s got a lot of powerful new search features and introduces the dashboard which will soon allow users to customize their home page with analytics tools. 2.0 is a big step forward but it also lays the groundwork for the exciting things Email Center Pro will do in the very near future.

For anyone who has a web site, manages more than one email address, or has at least one other person involved with their business, I would whole-heartedly recommend this product. Sure, I may be biased, but I have seen first-hand the real gains in efficiency that it provides for an organization.

I was thinking the other day about the amount of form spam that most web sites get (and again just now as I moderated a ton of blog comments), and I was reminded of a proof of concept I saw a while back. It required the user to utilize drag and drop functionality to submit a form, thus verifying human interaction. Then I thought of the iPhone’s unlock function and how it would make a cool CAPTCHA.

I’ve written a handy JavaScript class for including these types of sliders into a web site- stick around after the break for more details and cool configuration options.

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I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.

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Today at work, our marketing team rolled out the web site for our new product, Email Center Pro. The service is still in private beta mode, but the thought is the new site will start to pick up organic search traffic, and by the time we launch publicly in the next few weeks, the site will start off with decent search results.

To those small business owners out there, keep your eyes peeled as we go public with the new service. Palo Alto Software’s latest offering will help you manage your customer service, informational, and other generic public-facing email. It’s group email management done the right way- check it out.