Seven people, two years old, no funding, success. That's the elegant 37signals, creator of splendid web-based applications and the tradition-breaking Ruby on Rails framework.

And they wrote the book "Getting Real" about how great they are in managing small team. A genuinely interesting read for web developers, programmers, designers, and entrepreneurs; much more if you're small bits of (or aspiring to be) all those.

I feel that this is the right time to expand the wings of my web development skill beyond Drupal, and so I have been looking for a right framework to work on.

Python-based frameworks

Please note that I have very little experience with python, so my opinion here might differ with pythonic (or anti-pythonic) zealots. I gained most of the information here by browsing and reading the documentation of numerous projects, so my view is more-or-less a layman's or newcomer's.

The python language has garnered quite an interest for me: simple and intuitive, pseudocode-like feel, very high level, general-purpose, embraced by open source community. Much better than PHP, IMHO.

The state of web development in python, however, is somewhat disappointing. There are several major frameworks competing in different levels of service, confusing new users and fragmenting the community. Read more »

Let's see a few common problems of file management for commoners:

• They never care about backing up their data as it is usually too cumbersome.
• They work on multiple PCs and their head aches about synchronising all of their stuff between computers. Or they are working on a project and they keep passing around files by flash disk or e-mails and forget which person has which version and which files are the latest version.
• They keep the history of their documents neatly by appending phrases: "Letter to X.doc", "Letter to X (boss amend).doc", "Letter to X (final).doc", "Letter to X (final amended).doc", "Letter to X (final final).doc", "Letter to X (real final).doc" (which become less and less intuitive on each iteration!).

I was one of all those people once --- but not anymore because of a free service called Dropbox. It makes backup, sharing, and versioning a snap for everyone. Zero learning curve. Read more »

Aaaah... it has been a while. Yet I have not written much.

But hey, I still (want to) take blogging quite seriously even after going to university - see, I even updated the blog back-end! (Technically speaking, I upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 which is not as easy as upgrading Wordpress, for example. Nevertheless there were quite a few fundamentals that I changed -- most notably the input formats and image handling, as technical as they sound.)

The original appearance of the blog did not make it past the upgrade however, so I put up this quite nice theme made by somebody else. Personal touch is waiting for a free slot in my timetable. The former theme was my own creation so nobody would want to upgrade the theme for me. What a lazy dumbass I am... (by the way, I know about The Secret and suggestion but the world is not a perfect place.) Read more »

Yup, judul di atas tidak salah. Melalui Google App Engine, Google menawarkan bandwidth, database, dan penyimpanan file secara gratis. Layanan tersebut masih berupa preview, sehingga tidak semua orang dapat mencicipinya sekarang – saya juga masih menunggu dibuatkan account oleh Google.

Website Anda akan menggunakan server performa tinggi milik Google sehingga tidak perlu lagi susah-susah membayar hosting lagi jika website Anda tidak melebihi batas, yaitu disk space sebesar 500 MB dan “bandwidth yang cukup untuk 5 juta pageview (tampilan halaman) per bulan” (angka matinya 10GB). Kebutuhan bandwidth atau space tambahan dapat dibeli dari Google (walaupun dalam edisi preview, hal ini belum bisa dilakukan). Jumlah ini SANGAT BANYAK untuk web hosting gratis. Sebagai perbandingan, blog ini hanya menggunakan space sekitar 40 MB dan bandwidth tidak sampai 1 GB per bulan.

Website yang dibuat dengan layanan ini dapat menggunakan nama domain sendiri seperti leapon.net, atau dapat menggunakan subdomain gratis di bawah appspot.com (misalnya leon.appspot.com). Read more »

I don’t have a credit card and am unemployed, so web hosting has always become a problem for me. This condition forced me to look for free web hosting services since I ever considered learning web development. It was a rather unhappy odyssey – posting boringly in forums, whining for account approval, moving hosts here and there (probably more than five times)...

Journeys, however, always award us with invaluable experiences. Here I outline 7 characteristics of a successful free web hosting service, based purely on my knowledge (some of these may apply to paid hosting as well): Read more »

Today I noticed Qassia, a website so ambitious to be a knowledge repository – directly rivaling Wikipedia. What I really like about it is that it will credit the people who wrote in the knowledge, paying off your hard work instead of throwing it away to the society like Wikipedia (it’s not that charity is evil, but most people want to be known). The website says,

Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add – only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

In other words, you can quality backlinks (perfect for SEO) by adding up more intelligence to the website. Also, they offer a revenue sharing scheme, which may give a boost on Google Adsense earnings.

If the concept of Qassia really rocks, it can be the next best thing after Wikipedia. It can also really build up money and fame if done right. Currently it is in closed beta, but feel free to use my Quassia invitation/invite! Let’s try this one and see whether it will work wonders.