The other company we collaborate with on short.ie has released a private beta of a new application a short while ago. The web application is basically a business collaboration tool that allows someone to keep a consistent tracking over projects and clients, management of tasks, management of documents (online document manager) and much more.

I would seriously recommend people (managers, developers, etc) to look at it and register for the BETA version because having been granted access to test and give feedback, we, as private beta testers, found it really nice, insightful and simple to use.

This web app has a huge potential (internationally) and is developed following a solid architecture. Being strong PEAR contributors we are of course happy to take a look at what helped the footprintapp.com team achieve such a great product. So I went ahead and asked a few questions to Iarfhlaith Kelly from webstrong.

Q: How long have you been using PEAR?
A: I dabbled with a few of the PEAR packages back in college (2001-2005). Mostly I used the database abstraction packages like DB and MDB2. It was great to use on object oriented approach to interact with a database. After college though, from 2005 onwards, I ventured much deeper into the PEAR packages because as a freelance developer I was getting a lot more requests from clients.

Q: How does PEAR help you in your daily development life?
A: Using PEAR has greatly reduced the amount of code I’ve needed to write on the ‘heavy lifting’ areas of web development. This lets me focus on the flow of the system and spend more time building features that make my app unique, rather then re-inventing the wheel on some of the more common features often needed in most modern web apps.

Also, because of PEAR’s command line interface for installing and updating packages (both locally and remotely) it has made maintaining the code packages a lot easier then if I had to download and upgrade each one manually. This saves a lot of time during system upgrades.

Q: What do you use it for (packages you use)
A: Well, like I mentioned before I started off by using DB and MDB2 in college, but once I started using PEAR on client projects I quickly learned about the XML parsing libraries, HTTP requests, MS Excel generation, encryption, authentication, and email. I used a number of key PEAR libraries without which I would still be building it today. These were:

* Auth_HTTP for HTTP based authentication
* MDB2 for database abstraction

The system also communicates with a number of other web services, such as Amazon’s S3 service and authentication services via the OpenID format. To communicate with these, I use:

* XML_Parser for processing the returned information
* HTTP_Request for sending commands and data to the web services

Because of the standard approach to documentation across all PEAR for these packages allowed me to hit the ground running on new packages.

This is yet another great experience by PEAR users and we are glad to be helping and best of luck to webstrong and footprintapp for the future!

Today the Irish Internet Association announced the setting up of a new working group for web development. The main aim of the group is to educate decision makers on the web development process. This will cover areas such as server-side technologies, front-end technologies, development processes, best practices and standards in web, security and data protection.

Anyone who has ever worked with a client to build a web site or web application will know that there are areas where the client could benefit from having a better understanding of what is involved in the development process. Ultimately, when a client is better advised in these areas, they can make more informed decisions. This also can be beneficial to the development company or freelancer, as it can ensure better communication from the beginning of a project. (more…)

Over the past number of days a few issues have arisen around Twitter’s security platform. Most of the security “problems” discovered were either minor or required a high level of social engineering. One thing that has been realized and that is becoming common knowledge, is that once you are logged in to twitter, as soon as you visit another web site, that other site can make an Ajax request and retrieve your user profile.

Personally, I believe that this will be one of the features of web3.0*. The ability to have a single login, not having to log in anywhere and your profile will be recognized, etc. (OAuth, OpenID, etc). We could almost say browser-identifiable-security where one browser window (with as many tabs as you want) could be associated with a single account and all websites you visit would know about you and your information. The idea itself is very neat, but brings with it issues around user privacy.

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I had lunch with Eoghan and Paul from Contrast earlier today. We had some nice burgers in Bóbó’s — I’m still full. As we were leaving myself and Paul weighed up the pros and cons of tech companies offering that little bit more in recessionary times, and we concluded that companies that do so are likely to fare better in the months ahead. In a recession people expect a bit more value for their money.

OK, so this isn’t rocket science — it’s just a little bit of common sense, and it doesn’t apply solely to the web or tech industry, nor tough economic times for that matter. I think any company that doesn’t try to go that extra mile for their customers are failing to sufficiently differentiate themselves from the competition, and sooner or later that will hurt.
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In the last year, I’ve been lucky to be able to discuss the topic of leadership in a small start-up company with friends and industry peers alike.

I found that most people tend to either describe what a leader is, or what a leader does, usually based on personal contact with someone they regarded as a “good” leader. However, most seem to find it difficult to actually define what a leader is. Indeed, I can understand this, as there are many types of leaders out there and I think that generally how you tell them apart is not their skills, but what or who it is they’re actually leading.
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About two weeks ago I was uploading something to skitch.com and saw an inline button. So being a security person myself, I decided to try some XSS on their fields. 1, 2, 3, 4 tries done, I was able to load some of my javascript from a remote host and the nice thing is that this was a public URL. So for fun I sent the URL to a few friends. What that script was really doing was taking their cookies, writing to a file on my server and sending them back to the main page of skitch. So basically what people told me was that the link didn’t work, they were sent to the main page. In the meantime I was finishing my PoC by editing my cookie with their cookies. After about 10 minutes I had changed their first name and last name. (more…)

What do Digg and short URLs have in common? They are URLs, they are shared and used by many people. Why not mixing the idea of short URLs (Which has mainly arised because of the Twitter hype) and the ability to get people to share and publish URLs to the public like Digg?

So a few months ago I was discussing with a few lads about all this, and we decided to start on our own social network idea, with URLs. Basically one thing we noticed is that many many of the url shortening services had cool features like stats, custom urls, and at the same time you saw the power of Digg’s public URL hype idea. We basically decided that if we could make an URL shortening service that had most of the features of the other services in one place, and that if we could also add some value to this by bringing a “social-networking” aspect to it, it would simply rock!. Instead of linking people by their type of types of people, activities, technology interests, groups of friends, etc. we saw that there was an opportunity to link people by the type of urls they shorten but most importantly the context of those URLs.

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Since opening a few months ago, we’ve been faced with the recession. One thing we noticed and found important so far (and something we have been telling and helping our customers with) is that in times of recession it is important to innovate and come up with new ideas.

For instance small companies are confronted and struggling to get users at this time of the year (Not only in the tech and IT industry) but in all industries, and what we have been doing for a few months when companies come to us is quite simple, take what’s working, take what’s not working, flip it in all sides, find a new way and easier way of accomplishing the tasks you want done and go with it. There’s a term I heard from one of the lead developers from a VoIP company that I thought was well worded for the current economic situation: “Grow a pair and do it“.

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