As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here.1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all the mysteries of implementation. You never interact with the computer directly, but upload your code to the plat...

WE who love the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that skeptics once worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online. There is, however, an outdated brand of digital orthodoxy that ought to be retired. In this worldview, the Internet is a never-ending battle of good guys who love freedom against bad guys like old-fashioned Hollywood media moguls. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, and make it impossible to post anonymously copied videos and stories. The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or...

Get the new year off to a positive start with these design resolutions Wake up. I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it’s a new year and it’s time to get back to work. We did pretty good last year. We started standing up for ourselves. We stopped working for free. We started getting our financial house in order. (Please don’t make me do the contract thing again this year.) We rediscovered typography (again). We learned to think about mobile first. We learned how to make responsive sites. And we stopped compin...

With the rise of all these APIs and the browser race to implement them, you’d think that currently we can do pretty much everything in JavaScript and even if we currently can’t due to browser support issues, we will once the specs are implemented. Unfortunately, that’s not true. There are still things we can’t do, and there’s no specification to address them at the time of this writing and no way to do them with the APIs we already have (or if there is a way, it’s unreasonably complicated).We can’t do templating across pagesI don’t mean h...

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process.Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a positive user experience and a valuable one for the business we’re working for. In this article, weâ€...

The Analogies Are WrongOriginally, web pages were static documents, and web browsers were static document viewers; there was text, some formatting, and images—if you could pay for the bandwidth to serve them. Hyperlinks were the really big thing, because they were the main point of user interaction—but what a powerful thing they were, and still are.Then along came CGI and Java, and the web was transformed: all of a sudden, a web browser became a way to serve interactive content to users. A web page was no longer just a document, but a portal to a living, breathing world. You your...

As the list of *-as-a-service’s continues to grow, I thought I’d throw one into the mix. What about the idea of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS)?The recent surge of client side Javascript frameworks along with the attractiveness of simple RESTful APIs has created an environment where server-side interaction can be reduced to simply database interaction (including validation and some computation). But why stop there?What if the server-side of the equation was simply a RESTful, schema-less API? It could utilize MongoDB or some other document-oriented storage to avoid a strict schema d...

Remember those childhood games where you are given two nearly identical images and your objective was to find some number of subtle differences? Well, I shouldn't have to play that game when I'm using your damn website.I show here two examples of a common practice that is plaguing the modern web. First, a clipping from a project page on github.com.  And now the second image:  See the difference? My question is this: why? That edit button is the only component of the entire page that has a hide-by-default-unless-your-mouse-is-in-a-certain-vertical-and-horizontal-range behavi...