OS X Terminal displays a blank window instead of a command prompt | MacFixIt – CNET Reviews. It is tough to get by without a reboot these days and I’m not savvy enough yet to know how to start mysql without terminal.
Hoping to Make iPhone Toys as a Full-Time Job – NYTimes.com. Spring blog cleaning here; the fact that I’m an an inconsistent blogger is highlighted by this saved draft from 4/5/2009 regarding making iPhone apps a full-time job. Back then the plan was to write an iphone app (puts me is a small pool of people…ha), throw it out there for free, learn, promote, then make money with round two.
Looking back over the goal I set last year has been interesting. While I’ve made little strides in the development of this plan I have devoted time on the thought of my applications; and in that time the app world has changed and that changes my plan. MonoTouch is a Godfather horse-head in the bed for developing iPhone apps. I wasn’t likely going to use MonoTouch but I had downloaded and played around with their tools. With Apple’s latest headlines I’m certainly not swimming without objective-c now. Additionally, changes to the commerce model allows greater app flexibility and then there’s always the iPad. It’ll be interesting to see how the next year shakes out…
How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell – The Oatmeal. One of The Oatmeal’s classics really hit home once again this week.
One of my clients business is audio sales via cd-burning and downloading through retail kiosks as well as remote fulfillment via web orders (phew – say that four times fast). It is an interesting business that I’ve been working with for 4.5 years. Besides the content role I’ve had that included CDN management, transcoding, SAN management, audio ingestion, database strategies and what not I’ve recently inherited an ASP.NET site. The site is receiving more business support and our team is working to add features, do a redesign and I’m also doing little tweaks that will help spruce up its performance.
The first item on my list was to implement compression on the site. The web server hasn’t been upgraded to IIS7 yet and I’ve long forgotten how to use compression with IIS6. The best resource I found was Scott Forsyth’s post on it (IIS Compression in IIS6.0 – Scott Forsyth’s Blog – thanks Scott). One item I didn’t do on the first implementation was add js and css files into the static file list so I’ll be doing that as well.
Up next is introducing URL rerouting to deal with dynamic content. I just have a hunch that using domain.com/artist/beyonce will be better than domain.com/artist.aspx?artistguid=dkfjdsfkjf. That obviously relates to SEO and after the URL rerouting is in place we’ll go through the results of a IIS SEO Toolkit examination as well as combing through the YSlow results.
A redesign is coming as well and I wish I there was a reason to convert it to a MVC app but it just doesn’t seem prudent.
Today Google published their new approach on China through their blog. In an effort to show my solidarity with Google I have decided that JD Laboratories shall also take a new approach with its business in China. I’m still working on the JD Laboratories tax preparation for 2009 but thus far 0% of its revenues have come from China. And although I have planned for a 100% improvement in 2010 between JD Laboratories and China (based on projected growth estimates from 2009) I must bring a new approach. Google and I have been partners for years through various technologies including: email, SEO, & web analytics; this partnership shall continue.
Sarcasticly,
Jake Hackl
Owner, JD Laboratories
