Month: September 2013

Categories
Book Review

Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Book Review

Working Effectively with Legacy Code – by Michael Feathers – covers how to refactor and add features to legacy code without breaking it. Legacy code, in the book, is just code without proper tests.

Of course, refactoring code without tests is always dangerous because it might be much harder to find any new bugs you have introduced.

The book covers many techniques with steps you can follow to make it easier and safer to apply these changes. The steps are well explained, with many good examples. There is also plenty of coverage on how to introduce tests on code that wasn't made with unit testing in mind.

Use of techniques in practical problems is also covered in the chapters before these sections, with titles such as I Can't get this Class into a Test Harness or This Class is too big and I don't want it to get any bigger.

There is some cross over with the Refactoring classic, but even in those cases the different context makes this worth your time.

Strongly recommended to anyone that needs to work on codes without tests.

Categories
Product Review

Udemy iPad App – Review

Udemy has plenty of cool video courses.  I have reviewed a few of them before on this blog, too.

They have been talking for a while about their iPad app, so I decided to try it out.

I am glad I did – it is very, very good. You can just get it for free at iTunes, and enter your Udemy login. Very quickly you will get a list of all your courses (presuming you have any, of course).

That was pretty much what anyone would expect. However, there were a few nice extras:

– It knew exactly where I had last stopped, in the middle of a video.

– It can quickly download all the video of the course so that you can watch off-line.

– My favorite – it can play videos at any speed from 0.5x to 2x (1.25x and 1.5x seems to be the sweet spot for me on the iPad – more than that distorts the audio too much). I used to do this by downloading the videos myself and playing on GOM Player, but most courses don't allow video downloads lately (seems silly to me, as they are not hard to download anyway – but it is much more time consuming).

Overall, a very good way to watch your courses, specially to make the best of time waiting on the bus, subway, doctor's office, etc.

Categories
Product Review

Pluralis Conversion Optimization – Review

Pluralis is a service that requires a more complex description than most, because as far as I know it is unique. The best way I can think to describe it is a cross from design contest sites with conversion optimization.

The basic idea looks like pure genius. Essentially, you pick up anything you want to optimize on your site, create a contest and allow conversion specialists to improve it however they want. At this point you choose what versions you want to test, and their A/B Testing system (presumably you have to add a javascript snippet on your page) shows who won. You can then award the prize or restart.

Looks great in theory – you don't have to find your own expert (and figure out if he is an expert in practice). And unlike general design contests, you can have hard data on which option is better.

(I apologize if I got anything wrong – their current pages are not clear at all and for reasons I will mention below, I just saw the basics)

If you subscribe, you can also use their A/B Testing system yourself, for US$19 per month.

I did start up the “Try out for free” part, but all you get is to enter minimal information about a contest, and on your first login they already ask for your credit card (without any mention of any free time period). That is not what I'd expect as “Try out for free”. This is effectively less informative than their video.

It is probably worth mentioning that I was invited to check the site out, based on my Optimizely review. I also got what seems to be a generic invite to try them on an e-mail that is only used on the Whois of my domain.

Overall, all I can say that Pluralis seems like a great idea.

I'll update this if I ever do get a full trial with them.

Update (18/Sep/2013): I got an e-mail from them asking the number of hits per month of my page (from the Try out for Free thing). The plan they suggested would be US$19 per month, plus US$387 for 3 expert revisions (this is the minimum). Obviously at these prices, if you have any sort of reasonable sales numbers, you'd get your money back very soon.

However, I'll probably not try them out myself, given how new the service is and the lack of reviews.

Categories
Product Review

Pair Networks Review

Recently I have moved all of my WordPress based domains to Pair.com – mostly because of the recent downtime and occasional low speeds at Dewahost. This includes this blog and my micro-sites –  Print Folders, Disk Usage and Directory Printer .

The reason I chose Pair is that I've been hearing about their reliability for years from colleagues in the ASP (Association of Software Professionals). I also asked a question before joining and while the answer wasn't particularly fast, it was very complete and friendly. They have a very nice 100 day money back guarantee , too.

I ended up going with the Webmaster plan. Basic is a bit too basic, and if you need SSL the Advanced plan has an extra charge. If you get their 1 year 25% promotion, Webmaster (US$22.50) ends up being cheaper than Advanced with SSL. It is not cheap by anyone's measure, but I'd rather get reliable service than get annoyed by constant outages and low speeds.

Moving

Moving was fairly easy. I used BackWPUp on the old site – which allows me to include databases for all sites (it is a WordPress multi-site install), and almost all site files (more on this later) in a ZIP file. Then you can just FTP this file to Pair, login using SSH and unzip it. This is obviously ridiculously fast.

Of course, I also needed to create the sites and the database (and change wp-config). Pair has their own interface, which isn't bad but is fairly different from CPanel. It is very simple to use, but lacks a bunch of CPanel options (thankfully, mostly the ones I never used). You also need to pay a monthly fee of US$2.95 for the Software Installation Manager (for WordPress, Joomla!, and other – see the full list). However, unless you really plan on installing a bunch of these programs, it seems like a silly expense – most of them are easy to install manually and Pair even has articles on how to manually install them.

I did have a couple of problems with the move – one of Pair's DNS servers took a LONG time to start responding to query about my domains (like 6-8 hours!), which made me worried about moving the sites.

After I moved the sites, I realized that none of the plugins worked. Turns out that for whatever reason, BackWPUp does not include the plugin files in the backup! I imagine that if you only have plugins from the repository (and a few), the list of plugin names is enough – but I have not only quite a few plugins installed, several were paid plugins. So I ended up having to upload all of those by hand. After doing that, everything just worked.

Speed

I am fairly pleased about the speed of my sites on Pair. I was getting 6 second average page loads with this site on the other host, but after minor tuning (gzip and expire changes) I am getting about 2 seconds here.

File speeds are also very good. On both my sites, I was getting sub 10 K/s speeds on both Crystaltech and Dewahost at peak times. No doubt that is partly because of my connection (20Mbit/s cable in Brazil), but even at those times I am getting 100K/s or more for downloads on my Pair site. Usually it hovers around 500-700K/s.

You can test the speed by downloading one of my programs, STG FolderPrint Plus . It is only about 8MB, so speed might still be climbing when you finish.

Another nice surprise was FTP speed. I usually get around 20K/s for Crystaltech, but I am getting my upload speed limit for Pair – about 120K/s. This really speeds up my software releases! I still have to upload to the other site for now, though 🙁 .

Support

I have contacted support a few times, to set up my SSL (it requires manual setup by them, but that is free) and for FTP problems. My problem was that extra FTP logins can't use secure FTP connections – that is quite weird and unexpected.

I have never made an urgent request yet (there is a category for that on their interface), so I have no idea how fast they are. For my regular questions, support speed was usually a few hours. I'll update this post if I ever need urgent support.

Conclusion

Overall, I am fairly satisfied with my sites at Pair Networks. They are pretty fast, the interface is OK,  and support is good. They are also eco-friendly. Recommended.

I'll update this post over time if needed.

Found the review useful? Please use this link to sign up, so I get hosting credit. Thanks.

Categories
Product Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint – Course Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint, by Joel Widmer, is a course that covers pretty much all you'd need to know to start guest blogging.

It goes from why, through searching for adequate blogs, to writing and promoting your guest blog posts.

Why?

The reason most people have to want to guest blog is simple: links. Most blogs you'd want to post in are going to give you a link or two in your post, which can really improve your ranking on search engines and give you traffic.

The course also mentions some other reasons:

  • Increase your credibility, or that of your brand
  • Get targeted traffic from those blog readers – for sales, awareness or to build and e-mail list
  • Promoting a product
  • Getting job offers

There are many more on the course, but these are probably enough to get anyone interested in being a guest blogger.

Content

The course covers:

  • Goals
  • How to find Search keywords – that influences the blogs you will find
  • How to find blogs – some nice advice, and plenty of search engine tricks to help you find useful blogs
  • How to qualify the blogs you found – no point in getting a blog post on worthless blogs!
  • Choosing your topic – covers idea generation, how to see and match the tone of the blog, etc
  • How to Pitch your post to the blog – ideas on how to get the blog to accept your blog post, includes e-mail templates
  • Promoting your post – after you get your post in, it is useful to make it as visible as possible, and this include some techniques.

Conclusion

The course took me about 2.5 hours to conclude (I didn't actually do the exercises – but you probably should!), and it covers pretty much everything you'd want to know to start guest blogging.

There are also PDFs with e-mail templates, and the videos are downloadable – great if you want to watch on a tablet or cell phone.

Guest blogging Blueprint is money and time well spent if you are interested in the subject (which you probably should be, given the free traffic you can get!). Recommended.

I was able to get my readers a 50% discount coupon. At this price point (US$14!) the course is really a great deal.

Get Guest Blogging Blueprint – 50% off

Note: I got a free review copy of the course from the author. This didn't change this review in any way, however.

 

Categories
Product Review

Sleep Hacking: Course Review

Sleep Hacking 101: Have more Energy spend less time in bed is a course on Udemy on how to optimize your sleep.

The idea of the course is that there are practices you can take that can enable you to sleep less and still have more energy.

The course consists mostly of videos (with a few PDFs with mostly the same content and a Excel file for you to work on your habits), and took me about 2 hours to watch, while writing notes.

What it covers is the nature of sleep, and what you can do to improve yours, such as:

  • Get more light in the day, specially right after you wake up, and avoid it before sleep and if you wake up during sleep
  • Avoid too much coffee, and also food and drinks near your bed time
  • Minor advice on sleep monitors and smart wake alarm such as the Zeo (which I understand is no longer available); I would really like to have seen more on this area, specially reviews of products that are still available
  • Some suggestions on what to do before sleep
  • Suggestions on naps, which mostly is that they are useful and that they should be short enough that you don't enter deep sleep and wake up groggy

Overall, I'd say that the course does have some useful advice, although I already heard almost everything on the course before. I feel I wasn't taking enough natural light during the day, though, and following the course advice already helped a bit. It was good to be reminded of some of the other stuff, which I hadn't forgotten but started ignoring.

What remained was enough for the price I paid, but if I had paid full price (US$49 right now) I might have asked for a refund. If you get a nice discount, it is worth it.

Update (19/Nov/2013): I asked the course's author (Scott Britton) for a discount for my blog readers. And he offered a 100% discount! So you can get the course for free! Considering this I have changed my rating from 3 to 5 stars.

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