Categories
Site Reviews

Software Engineering for SaaS course Review

Just finished the Software Engineering for SaaS course on Coursera . Very good, learned a lot about Ruby, Rails, Cucumber and RSpec. Took me about 30 hours, including the book, videos, and course assignments.

One thing to note and that is mentioned everywhere is that the Ruby and Rails segments have what they call an “accelerated pace”. This is important because they really mean it! While I understood enough to keep up with the assignments, they took a lot of web searches to be completed.

Ruby is quite interesting, specially given my main language, Delphi, which is quite formal. I did a lot of web apps with it in late 90s, but Rails is very far away from it. I realized it before learning more about it, but it is incredibly easy to make some very complex stuff up in it.

I really like Cucumber – a BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) tool. It servers as documentation and automated tests at once, and it is really readable:

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Section of a Cucumber test for a site:

Feature: search for movies by director

Background: movies in database

Given the following movies exist:
| title | rating | director | release_date |
| Star Wars | PG | George Lucas | 1977-05-25 |
| Blade Runner | PG | Ridley Scott | 1982-06-25 |
| Alien | R | | 1979-05-25 |
| THX-1138 | R | George Lucas | 1971-03-11 |

Scenario: add director to existing movie
When I go to the edit page for “Alien”
And I fill in “Director” with “Ridley Scott”
And I press “Update Movie Info”
Then the director of “Alien” should be “Ridley Scott”

[/box]

There is some support code for that, but surprisingly little.

RSpec – the TDD (Test Driven Development) tool –  uses regular Ruby code, but the nature of Ruby (plus the RSpec helper functions) makes mocks and several other details incredibly easy. You can just replace method calls with mock functions, and at the same time easily control the results and check how they are called. Awesome.

The course wasn't perfect (in particular, a lot of the videos were hard to read, although they are fixing that for the next edition), but I think it was pretty good, specially for free. Recommended.

Categories
Articles

How to choose your product prices?

Interesting article by ExtendsLogic about choosing plan features and prices .

In the end he got double the average revenue per customer.

I do wonder if the simple feature test (every plan has all features but the pricing grid tells you they don't) wouldn't be considered deceptive advertising, at least locally…

Categories
Articles

Using Open Graph to Get Video Thumbnails on Search Results

Interesting article on how to get video thumbnails on search results – and apparently ranking well in them, just by using Open Graph.

Categories
Articles

Secure WordPress

Nice post on Problogger about Securing your WordPress installs . Cover the basics – such as keeping your install update – as well as a few useful security plugins.

Worth checking out.

Categories
Software Release

STGThumb 3.32 and CSS3 Gradients

I have released STGThumb 3.32 today. The new feature is CSS3 Background gradients.

It looks great, and I posted a new demo to show it off.

Categories
Software Release

STG FolderPrint Plus 3.93 Released


I have just released version 3.93 of STG FolderPrint Plus.

The only major change is that I have added an Explorer Menu item to the right-click menu of files and folders. This shows the equivalent Explorer Menu that you would get on Windows Explorer.

Categories
Articles

How to Write an App Store Description

I just read an excellent article by Joanna Weibe (of Copy Hackers fame) on   How to Write an App Store Description .

Clearly it is very different from a regular web page, because of all the constraints on the Apple Store as well as the other app stores.

While this is theoretical for me right now (no phone apps so far) it is an interesting read, and recommend if you publish to app stores or plan to.

Categories
Book Review

Think outside the cubicle – Book Review

Think outside the cubicle – by Scott Young – is a short e-book dealing on ways to be more productive while working from home.

Here are a few suggestions covered:

  • Work for your peak everyday length instead of wasting hours of low productivity. You can also let low creativity tasks that require less of you for later, after your peak.
  • A system of Day/Weekly to-do lists. The goal being having an achievable to-do list every day (instead of mine which currently have several hundred items!). You don't add items if you are done before the end of the day – that would only punish your productivity.
  • Take breaks when you need them. But real breaks – not just checking your e-mail or Facebook, or anything related to work.
  • Exercise and eat well.
  • Write your goals and leave them where you can see them for motivation.
  • Increment your output level slowly
  • To stop wasting time with the internet, only check e-mail/sites/facebook once per day (this is a tough one to follow!)
  • Always empty your e-mail inbox every day (also a bit though).

Overall, it was an interesting little (I think it took me less than an hour to read it) e-book. You can get it Scott's site. I wouldn't have bought it at his price, however – I got it on an Appsumo bundle.

 

Categories
Book Review

The Dark Art of Writing Long-Form Sales Pages – Book Review

The Dark Art of Writing Long-Form Sales Pages is a book on writing long-form sales pages – you know, the usually really annoying ones, full of bullet points, bonus products and testimonials that just keep scrolling down forever.

The thing is – while they seem annoying, for certain markets, they convert very well. So you might want to learn how to write them, and test them on YOUR market.

The book covers a lot of material:

  • The genres of the long-form pages.
  • How to research your product and customers
  • The right way to do headlines, crossheads and hooks
  • Writing the body
  • Using testimonials
  • How to show incentives, discounts and bonuses
  • Suggestions o nhow to design and format your page

There are also a few bonus videos and extra PDFs. These are somewhat useful. The videos had really low audio in the screencast parts, but not too bad.

The main e-book also had some weird formatting, such as beige backgrounds with white text. Fortunately this was only on a few text boxes in the beginning. Other than that, it was very readable on my iPad using Kindle and the MOBI version.

Overall, the book was very good, and I have a ridiculous amount of pages bookmarked and sections highlighted. Joanna says on the book and on the videos that you should read the book twice (not an uncommon claim), and I agree that this is probably a good idea in this case. It really is a lot of material to absorb, specially if (like me) you are not a full-time copywriter and just want to learn how to promote your own products.

Categories
Articles

Browser size analysis

There is a new tool on Google Analytics that shows what the average users see on your landing page above the fold.

Unfortunately it fails in different ways on all my sites, but you can read the Analytics Blog post and maybe try it yourself.