The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘css’

Weebly, the startup that allows users to build rich websites using a straightforward drag and drag interface, is about to get a lot more colorful. The site has opened a new Theme Community, allowing any of its 3.5 million users to submit their own themes for use by other Weebly members. To help launch the new feature, Weebly is holding a contest where it’s giving $10,000 to the top submitted design, as determined by a panel of professional designers.

This is a pretty big deal for Weebly. Up until now, users have had around 80 themes to choose from, which pales in comparison to the number of themes available for some other site building platforms, like WordPress. You’ve always been free to use your own custom CSS styling, but many of the site’s users are using Weebly specifically because they don’t want to have to deal with that sort of thing. Now they’ll have a lot more variety to choose from, with no mucking around in CSS required.

At launch, Weebly’s theme gallery is still only going to consist of the 80 themes that already exist, since it’s just opening to submissions for the first time today. But CEO David Rusenko expects that to change quickly, in part spurred by the design competition the site is holding. He also believes that designers will be compelled to create themes for the site because of the large audience it reaches — Weebly now has 3.5 million site building users, who see 80 million page views per month from 17 million unique visitors. And he says that traffic is growing 20% month over month. It’s a bit surprising that it took this long for the site to roll out the feature (Weebly launched back in 2007), but Rusenko says that they “wanted to get it right”. Fair enough.

Users will be able to access the themes both through the site’s editor (which has been revamped a bit to accommodate the new gallery) and from this page, which you can view even if you aren’t a Weebly member. Themes won’t include attribution in their footers, but the gallery itself will allow designers to build up their own profiles, allowing users to see all of the themes they’ve submitted. At launch, all themes will be free, but Rusenko says that the site plans to begin allowing designers to sell premium themes in the future.

The design competition has a submission deadline of April 30, is open in any country where such contests are valid, and is being judged by Michael Cronan, Scott Thomas, Jason Putorti, Andrew Wilkinson, Dustin Curtis, and Rob Martin.

Two years ago customer support startup Get Satisfaction turned its ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands. Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Tapping into the conversations taking place Twitter and other social media sites is now integral to brands and customer support, as we’ve recently seen with Southwest Airlines. Get Satisfaction is extending its social media coverage today by rolling out the ability to add a support tab to Facebook Fan pages.

As companies turn to Facebook Fan Pages to connect with customers, consumers are increasingly voicing their issues with a particular product or brand on the brand’s Facebook page. But often these complaints or opinions can get lost in the stream. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes in. The startup now allows brands to create a tab on their fan pages, which can be a portal for consumers to express their opinions, complaints or issues with the brand or product.

With the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, Get Satisfaction creates a tab (that can be labeled with any brand-specific name) on the brand’s Fan Page. Here customers can begin wall discussions in the form of four topic types: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem, or Give Praise. When customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction searches for and suggests similar threads to give consumers instant answers to commonly asked questions. All questions, comments, and answers are discoverable via Google and other search engine. People can respond to any thread — i.e. voice a similar problem, suggest a remedy, emerge as an advocate in response to another’s complaint, or offer a new twist to a product suggestion. Community members can also make their experience heard by simply clicking ‘me too’.

In turn, any question, idea or problem posted on a brand’s hub on Facebook will be automatically imported into the brand’s Get Satisfaction web interface, allowing marketers and customer support reps to access the conversation from their Get Satisfaction site.

Get Satisfaction’s co-founder Lane Becker says that the new offering is a part of helping brands distribute the conversations where the conversations are actually happening. And with 400 million users worldwide, Facebook is definitely a place where the conversations are taking place. Becker says that the startup is particularly focused on the idea of the “social CRM” and helping clients connect the conversations taking place regarding customers support on social media sites with CRM applications like Salesforce and Zendesk. Get Satisfaction currently has free app on Salesforce’s app exchange.

The Facebook offering is a paid feature and Get Satisfaction will have a number of pricing options. Today’s rollout is more targeted towards bigger brands, but a more scaled down offering will be introduced soon and will cost SMBs $99 per month.

Get Satisfaction recently raised $2.3 million in funding, which Becker says is being used to scale out its team. With only 20 employees, Get Satisfaction currently has 20,000 customers (10,000 of which are paid customers). Zappos, Mint.com, Procter & Gamble, and Nike have all created customer support communities on the site. Currently there are over 25,000 communities that have been created on the platform.

Example:

Mighty Leaf Tea uses the Get Satisfaction Social Engagement Hub to engage with its loyal customers, driving both word of mouth marketing and peer advocacy.

Link: http://bit.ly/buxE6B

Get Satisfaction’s Web 2.0 customer service and support platform launched in 2007 and has grown exponentially. More than 35,000 company communities have been created on Get Satisfaction, and upwards of 20,000 organizations are actively engaging with 1.4 million community members. Organizations of all stripes — from Nike to Four Square — engage in conversations with their customers, increasing loyalty, retention, collaboration, and customer-driven innovation, while reducing repetitive support costs.

You might want to take a different approach when shopping for a 3D TV than a standard HDTV. Instead of just looking at the picture quality, you should also take a serious look at the brand’s 3D glasses. Some show some clear advantages to purchase that brand’s 3D TV and until there’s a standard format for 3D glasses, each brand requires its own unique glasses, thereby locking you into that manufacturer’s products. Yeah, it’s a bit messy right now. Click through for details on all of them.

San Francisco based Posterous, a fast growing publishing platform, has taken a $4.4 million investment from Redpoint Ventures. Partner Satish Dharmaraj, who is also an individual investor in Posterous, led the round and joins the company’s board of directors (and he maintains his personal blog at Posterous here).

Posterous, founded in 2008 by Sachin Agarwal, Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, is a Y Combinator company that began as a way for users to very easily post pictures online. Its appeal lies in its simplicity – users can just email a photo to post@posterous.com and an account is immediately created for them. But today people are using Posterous for videos and text blogs as well. Users can change the CSS and even use their own domain names – see Guy Kawasaki’s HolKaw blog, for example, which is run by Posterous.

The company does have revenue, such as this early deal with Coca Cola for a branded site, but has stood firm in keeping the “nickel and dime” consumer fees out of the product. There are no restrictions on usage, storage, CSS customization or using your own domain, says the company.

Later this year Posterous will launch a pro version of the service for bigger brands, and allow things like Javascript and site monetization for a fee, they say.

All that simplicity and freeness has resulted in a lot of growth for the company. They have 12 million unique monthly visitors, they say, and 25 million page views. And they grew 30% per month in 2009, all with just 4 employees (they are up to 6 now).

Posterous regularly releases new products, such as Post.ly a month ago. Post.ly lets users easily share media on their Twitter account.

CEO Sachin Agarwal says that they want to continue to add new products that make it dead simple to post and share content online: “Our goal is to become synonymous with “posting” just like Google is synonymous with “search”. Doesn’t matter if it’s for twitter or a blog, private or public, group or individual. if you need it online, you go to Posterous.”

If you’ve read about random video chat site Chatroulette lately, you’ll know that it is filled with naked people and journalists. And that’s exactly what The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart found in his exposé of the Web service. In between the random pervs, he actually found more journalists looking for pervs, or something.

The clip has cameos from Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, and NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who insisted he wasn’t cruising or anything. The parody is great linkbait (at least for tech blogs) and pretty funny to boot. But you will only find it on the Daily Show’s own site (where it can be grabbed and embedded).

It’s clips like these that make Hulu wish Comedy Central didn’t pull its videos and go it alone.

Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company.

The round was led by Montreal Startup, with participation by eonBusiness, Norseman Capital and Klein Venture Partners. Vanilla Forums, a Montreal-based startup, will use the funds to expand its marketing, development, and sales efforts.

Vanilla has also released its forum hosting platform and additional premium features. According to Vanilla Forums, their hosting platform enables customers to quickly and easily deploy a community forum solution without having to write a single line of code.

Vanilla also released two new premium features, custom domains and ad-removal, with plans to release additional premium features including custom CSS, single sign-on, and forum analytics in the future.

The company already has over 300,000 users, including companies like O’Reilly Media, Rackspace, Mozilla, and more.

Tonight at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA, Google is holding a Campfire One event to announce some of its new developer-focused releases. Google holds these campfire events a couple times a year — the last one was in April — to announce new product launches that cater to the development community. I’ll be live blogging tonight’s event below.
Update: You can see an overview of the evening’s announcements here.

David Glazer, Google Director of Engineering has taken the stage. He’s outlining some of the Google applications that have been built using Google Web Toolkit. Since the last campfire event, Google has released Wave, a revamp of AdWords, and a redo of the Orkut UI. They’ve also built a number of new internal Google apps. Tonight we’re talking about building faster apps, and running apps faster.

Andrew Bowers has taken the stage. We’re seeing performance increases and capabilities increase. 100x JavaScript performance increases since 2001. At a high level, Google Web Toolkit lets you write an app in Java, cross compile to JavaScript so it runs across all these browsers.

Declarative UI – UiBinder. Lets you separate an app’s logic from its presentation. Can have your Java file separate from the template. Can bundle, GWT widgets, CSS into templates. One codebase, multiple browsers. Anywhere you have JavaScript running, you can run GWT app.

Dotspots founder Matt Mastracci has taken the stage. Lets you create miniature dots related to media. Have been using GWT for a couple years. He’s showing off how you can add a ‘dot’ to an article (he used a TechCrunch post as his example — good choice). One advantage of GWT 2.0 is new development plugin they’ve just launched. Allows devs to make changes without having to go through the whole GWT compile process. Our website is based on GWT. Say you wanted to make a change to your website. Jump into Eclipse, grab the GWT URL, and enter development mode in the browser. Save the code change in Eclipse, refresh the browser, and you see the change live. Mastracci’s summary:

• Developing for multiple targets with one code base is easier with GWT
• Easier to debut in multiple browsers
• Recompiling existing single code base with GWT 2.0 saves time too (Dotspots saw 20% savings just by recompile using GWT 2.0)

Bruce Johnson, the tech lead, for GWT has taken the stage. The big picture: I’m going to be talking about what happens when it’s time to actually deploy your app. It’s often the case that people call GWT a compiler. But the compiler only a small tool within the whole toolkit. Whole point is to not have to run it as often. Optimization Loop, dead code removal. Can ignore code in JavaScript that you don’t use. You can go through the pipeline below, a typical project goes through the pipeline 7-10 times, at which there’s nothing to improve. Then it generates Javascript. Minified JS. Get rid of extraneous spaces, comments. Users don’t download a single byte they don’t have to. “The compiler smushes the heck out of your code”.

Below is a JS app in size 2 font. On the left is the original codebase, on the right is the optimized code.

There’s a size reduction from GWT 1.7 to 2.0.

GWT 2.0 offeres incremental app downloads using developer guided code splitting. Like watching a movie online. Don’t want to have to watch the entire thing, before you can start downloading it. Real-world example for Google: Google WaveWave spiraled up to nearly 1,500 kb in size as they built it. Someone joked about having to ship on a CD ROM. Code splitting was the answer (or at least part of it). In several weeks they reduced startup size by a factor of 7. 1400kb to 200k uncompressed.

Jason Bright, President and Founder of Media Beacon has taken the stage. Showing off of Media Beacon uses GWT. Codebase kept getting bigger and bigger, the problem was we got to 1.5 meg before the login screen. Took 15 seconds to load at 100kb/s. Put in code splitting, jumped to 109kb compressed. Smaller than the logo.

Johnson has retaken the stage. What happens if you’ve had all these issues and resolved them, but the app is still slow? Things you can’t really see. Kelly Norton, the Tech Lead of Speed Tracer has taken the stage. A few of us on GWT got good at pinpointing problem for a web team. Problem is that it involves debugging browser itself, building rom source. Then once in place, have to sift through reams of data to figure out where the problem lies.

Norton has fired up Google Calendar, and is now watching what’s going on inside the browser using Speed Tracer. Can monitor to see if actions of snappy, even after the initial load time. It’s an HTML5 app deployed as a Chrome extension, not a desktop app. “We did this by using Speed Tracer, on Speed Tracer.”

To conclude the event, Johnson has taken the stage to give a special thanks to the WebKit team, which made Speed Tracer possible.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

jQuery is a Javascript library that is used in a large number of web applications and is popular amongst web application developers. It was launched in 2006 by John Resig, and immediately gained a large following due to its lightweight nature and design philosophy. jQuery allows developers to build Javascript web applications easily by abstracting many of the complexities and difficulties. A developer with knowledge of CSS selectors and HTML would easily find their way around jQuery and be able to implement Ajax queries, effects and other tasks with a few lines of code.

A new commercial company called appendTo has launched recently with the goal of providing commercial support, training and development solutions exclusively around jQuery. The company was founded by members of the jQuery development team, and is lead by co-founder and CEO Mike Hostetler, who is both a jQuery core team member and previously a freelance developer/consultant. John Resig is not involved or affiliated with the company, and is employed by Mozilla as a developer.

The website for the new company does not reveal much other than the announcement press release and a contact form. What is more interesting is that the fast-paced rise in popularity of Javascript and frameworks such as jQuery has now lead to companies being setup to support them. It wasn’t too long ago, before Ajax and before the tidal wave of rich internet applications, that Javascript was considered nothing more than a hackish scripting environment for web pages. Frameworks such as jQuery solve many of the traditional pain-points with Javascript development – issues such as cross-browser support and separating code from markup and style. The growing popularity of web based applications and the rising number of web application developers owe a lot to Javascript frameworks and to jQuery. They provide an abstract layer and drastically lower the barrier of entry for developers to build rich web applications.

jQuery is well known because of its simple yet elegant approach to Javascript development. The library is small and modular, and has a very active developer community providing support, plugins and other resources online. JQuery is MIT licensed, meaning that it can be applied in commercial environments and within commercial applications with no intellectual property implications. It was for these reasons that Microsoft decided to support jQuery within the .NET MVC framework – a huge vote of confidence in both the framework and its community (Scott Guthrie, VP of the Microsoft Dev division, was full of praise for jQuery in his blog post announcing the support).

appendTo has sensed the opportunity with jQuery, and with the rising number of rich web applications being built are looking to capitalize on supporting and implementing one of the best and most popular Javascript libraries. It is the first company, that we know of, specifically setup around supporting and commercializing a single Javascript library.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. The social network’s search engine was re-launched last year and has done over one billion queries in this year alone.

Over the past year, LinkedIn has made select business development partnerships with technology companies for integrations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Twitter. While these partnerships created additional channels for LinkedIn’s platform, the opening up of the social network’s API is no doubt going to expand its presence across the web, perhaps representing a new level of growth for the social network.

LinkedIn has already tested the API with several developers and applications are already going to be launching in the near future. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. Posterous, Box.net, and Ribbit will all launch LinkedIn integrations in the near future as well.

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Nash says that this is the first step for LinkedIn to become an open ecosystem and there are future plans for additional APIs to be released down the line.

50 million users strong, LinkedIn could expand its already powerful growth with development of third-party applications. It’s a no-brainer for LinkedIn to open up its API. As Twitter’s platform has shown, an open ecosystem produces innovative and sometimes, extremely popular, products around a product. And it doesn’t hurt to have a loyal developer community as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Back in July we took a look at ZooLoo, a service that looks to help users build their own websites (complete with vanity URLs) where they can manage their entire social network experience from one place — when it launched we described as an iGoogle meets Facebook, in that it’s a single hub that lets you interact with your Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts. Since then the site has seen some significant improvements, including an overhauled UI that makes the site both nicer on the eyes and easier to use.

The biggest changes to the service is its revamped, streamlined navigation system. The old icons, which you can see in this screenshot have been replaced by a series of dropdown menus that are cleaner and easier to use. Another big addition is a home page, which aggregates your feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and brings them together in a single feed. At the top of the feed is a box where you can enter a status message, which then you can then syndicate to each of the services you’ve connected to ZooLoo.

The service has also updated its website creator, which allows you to tweak your page as you’d like. The new version includes added support for CSS and HTML tweaking. Other additions since the July launch include support for Facebook Connect, and widgets that you can add to your ZooLoo dashboard (including PayPal, Google Voice, and LinkedIn).

Looking forward, the service has an iPhone app in the works that it expects to release in the next few weeks. The company describes it as “ZooLoo Home Page Plus” for the iPhone — basically a feed of your social network activity (which you can use to update across multiple services), as well as links to your photos, friends, and messages.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.