develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

Content Management Tools (Free and Low-cost)

Content management systems were all the rage about a decade ago.  However, that market has settled down a lot and has only a few top contenders.  That may not matter to you or your customers.  A CMS is going to be a tool that can provide a large amount of value if it works closely to how you do.  Therefore, it is worth your time to stay up to speed with the latest offerings.  There are significant differences in how they approach managing content. Content Management Usually Means WordPress To be honest, WordPress is the winner of popular and useful CMS tools.  It leads the market in a way that it makes little sense to develop extensions and integrations with... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – The Prototype Pattern

Our tour of the creational patterns takes us to one of the fastest ways to create a new instance.  The prototype pattern provides an option to clone an instance rather than create and then set values.  This approach has a variety of uses that can reduce coding and execution time. The Prototype Pattern Defined It helps to start with the “Gang of Four” definition and then we will dig into that. “Specify the kinds of objects to create using a prototypical instance, and create new objects by copying this prototype.” The benefit of this pattern is that we replace the constructor with a clone method.  This approach can include parameters for the clone to limit/specify the values to clone.  On the other hand, it... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

The AWS Networking and Content Delivery Services

The AWS networking and content delivery services provide you the means to put your infrastructure in the cloud.  These offerings are focused on the networking side of things (as the name tells us) rather than the actual servers.  This is where we go to direct users to our solutions or and protect our systems from outsiders. AWS Networking In general, the Amazon services are on the Internet and open to the world.  That is why most of them start out in a “locked down” mode.  Amazon assumes we do not want to let everyone in the world access our services.  In the legacy world, we would only have a few points of access to the Internet from our network.  The bulk of our... Read more

realistic cloud pricing
Posted on General

Virtual Systems On A Budget – Realistic Cloud Pricing

A pet peeve I have with cloud services is that the tutorials and “wizards” are not always practical.  The configurations these tools suggest or use by default may be functional, but they also tend to be a bit expensive.  There are the best solutions, and then there are the practical ones.  It is essential that you understand your requirements to estimate realistic cloud pricing for your solution. Peaks and Valleys One of the most common issues I have seen in estimating cloud resources is a focus on peak usage rather than average or typical.  You will end up with a worst case scenario and not realistic cloud pricing if you base it on peak needs.  The very power of a cloud solution... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

Web Tracking and Visitor Recording Tools

A few years ago I stumbled across the ideas of heatmaps and recording for websites.  This is one of the most potent user experience improvement tools available.  The ability for visitor recording alone brings the task of watching a room full of users to your fingertips. Visitor Recording If you have not experienced this sort of tool, it is a game-changer.  The way visitor recording works with these tools is that you place a javascript snippet on your web page.  That is it.  The code is typically only a line or two, and it sends information back to the tool for you to see what users do.  You can see where they come from, what browser they use, and even where... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Patterns – Factory Method

We continue our exploration of the creation patterns with a look at the Factory Method.  This is a pattern where we see that instantiation is sometimes better when deferred.  We do not always know all we need to at instantiation time.  Thus, we need a pattern to address holding off on that step until we have the required information. The Factory Method Defined It helps to start with the “Gang of Four” definition and then we will dig into that. Define an interface for creating an object, but let subclasses decide which class to instantiate. The Factory method lets a class defer instantiation it uses to subclasses. This pattern allows us to roughly replace the constructor for a class with retrieving an instance... Read more