• September 30th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Web Development
  • Work

These are exciting times. Halloween is my favorite holiday, not because I like blood and guts or horror movies or scaring people. It’s when the companies I do work for make $$$$$$. Plus, it’s a fun holiday to just let loose, relax and have fun. Who doesn’t like a costume party? Although the days of throwing parties has passed, I still eagerly anticipate the holiday. I honed my skills as a web developer on a few big Halloween sites.

October pwns. The climate cools to the point where it’s actually enjoyable, leaves turn here in New England, baseball playoffs, and Halloween to name a bit of awesomeness. The lovely October holiday has kept a roof over my head since I graduated from WPI, minus a short stint distracting tweens.

On the eve of October, it’s worth mentioning that if you work with websites that spike ginormously in a short amount of time that up-time is critical. Each minute of downtime can have huge revenue ramifications.

At Fright Catalog I employed a free way of instantly being alerted via txt message if any of our sites were struggling.

Montastic

Montastic is a free service that will constantly ping your domain and alert you via email when there is a problem. It’s rock solid and it just works.

Send a text to my iPhone

It took a bit of research to figure out which email address on AT&T worked with my iPhone but after testing out a few:

• phone#@mmode.com
• phone#@txt.att.com
• phone#@mms.att.com
• phone#@cingularme.com – works, but on it’s way out

I finally found a winner: phone#@txt.att.net (Thanks to Ryan for the update)

It’s not sexy but it will work as an email address that when emailed will send an MMS message to your iPhone.

I’ve seen the recently popular downforeveryoneorjustme.com advertise uptimeparty.com. They’ll let you monitor 1 site for free, but otherwise you pay. Montastic does the same job and it’s free, so it makes a great alternative.

Montastic has helped me sleep easy many-a-night if we hit some up-time snags earlier that day. It could easily be used for your own personal blog as well.

• July 28th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Shameless Promotion
  • Web Development
  • jQuery

On August 7th I’ll be speaking at the Betahouse with John Resig about the jQuery Javascript Framework. My friend and colleague Patrick Haney put this talk together for Refresh Boston.

Check out the Upcoming Event. Sign up sooner than later, as of this writing there were only about 20 slots left!

I’ll be talking about how I’ve used jQuery in some of my development projects and some tricks and best practices I’ve picked up along the way. I’ll also be talking about degradation, progressive enhancement and (time permitting) discuss how jQuery’s Plugin architecture lets small teams do a lot with little.

Update

The talk was a great success and I had a great time. I’ve posted my slides: jQuery Best Practices. Much thanks goes to the Betahouse for hosting the Refresh Boston event.

As well as the accompanying demos on Progressive Enhancement:

• jQuery Rating
• Toggle-able Forms