Leveraging Google to build your business

I read a nice post this morning about building business with Google by Eric at 過労死 Death by Overcoding.

It covers many aspects that may be involved in administering your business needs, such as:

• Domain registration/host/email/office apps
• Phone Management
• Blog
• The Application
• Payments
• AdWords
• Analytics
• Integration/Optimization

I recommend reading it to anyone who is starting up a web business. Following the steps mentioned in that blog post can be a real timesaver. And you do not need to hire an admin to do it all.

Visual Event

This is a really neat tool by Allan Jardine, a UI developer! It makes it so easy and visual to see what even handlers are attached to the elements of a page. Great addition to my toolbox!

When working with events in Javascript, it is often easy to loose track of what events are subscribed where. This is particularly true if you are using a large number of events, which is typical in a modern interface employing progressive enhancement. Javascript libraries also add another degree of complexity to listeners from a technical point of view, while from a developers point of view they of course can make life much easier! But when things go wrong it can be difficult to trace down why this might be.

Read the whole article about Visual Event

Colors for the web

Do you need to find interesting photos that would enhance your website and would perfectly match its color scheme? I found a perfect tool for that job.

Multicolr Search Lab by Idée Inc.

And these are the images that match colors of my blog:

1. orange
   


2. orange & blue
   


3. blue
   

What The Font ?!

I am creating a website for my wife's coffee shop and I needed to find out the font type they used on the signs and the menus. I was really wondering how I could identify the font.

It turned out to be quite simple. Thanks to WhatTheFont?!

The process was following:

1. This morning I snapped a photo of the sign,
   
2. Slightly modified it in GIMP,
   
3. uploaded it to WhatTheFont?!,
4. and voilà, the font is Isonorm
   
   

Yeah, I know. It is not quite quite the same, the letter "r" looks a bit different, but other than that, it's a perfect match. I am quite happy with it. Much better than going through thousands of fonts manually.

Testing on IE6, IE7 and IE8

Have you ever needed to test your web app in multiple versions if Internet Explorer? It is not quite common to have IE6 and IE7 (or IE8) installed on the same computer side by side.

It is possible. But if you have already upgraded to IE7, there is no going back. Or is there?

Well, you can still test on both browsers. Microsoft quite conveniently produced a free Virtual PC image for IE6 compatibility testing. Go to Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image page, where you can download images for IE 6, 7 and 8 Beta 2.

• Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP3
• Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP SP2
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on Windows XP SP3
• Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista

All you need to run these images is Microsoft Virtual PC. It's all free.

hCard microformat validator

I was creating a contact page for a website and I wanted to use hCard microformat to encode the address, telephone, fax and the geo location. After I created it, I looked for a way to quickly validate it and I found

hCard microformat Validator 1.0

What a great service! I must tell you, this service is super easy to use. Just type in a URL of the page that contains hCard data and get the results instantly. I read the spec but... I still made few mistakes that were promptly brought to my attention.

I made a typo and instead of adr I used addr, which rendered couple of nested elements invalid. Ok, that was a quick fix.

The telephone number is shop's (this website is for a retail store) and I marked the telephone number as shop, which is invalid. The valid values are: home, work, pref, fax, cell, voice, video, pager, car, msg, modem, bbs, isdn, pcs. Another easy fix! The same went for the fax number.

Lastly, the email address that I entered was of a domain that did not register itself yet. The message I got was:

Lookup of e-mail's domain “notyetregistered.com.au” failedVerify that e-mail address is correct.

Wow, I did not expect such a thorough check!

Another good point for this validator is that it not only tells you what is wrong, but it also links to a FAQ page where the problem is explained.

Well done and thank you! Now this contact page validates 100%!

Wordle

This is my blog through Wordle

Free Code Coverage Tools

What is code coverage? When the query "define:code coverage" is run in Google, you will find the following definitions:

• An analysis method that determines which parts of the software have been executed (covered) by the test case suite and which parts have not been executed and therefore may require additional attention.
  www.testingstandards.co.uk/living_glossary.htm
  


• Code coverage is a measure used in software testing. It describes the degree to which the source code of a program has been tested. It is distinct from black box testing methods because it looks at the code directly, rather than other measures such as software functions or object interfaces.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage
  

There are some great tools that will help you to measure the coverage of your code. Some are commercial, some are free. I used to use Clover that was great. I used point beta versions (0.9x) prior Clover went commercial with the release 1.0. My company did not see much value purchasing anything like that as unit testing and XP was not well know at that time. So I was using the last "free" Clover and I was happy as I got all I needed to keep track the code coverage of my unit tests.

With the explosion of open source projects on the web I was hoping that there would be a good free alternative to Clover after all those years. And there is. As a matter of fact there are many. Lets have a look at the free ones.

Good starting point for hunting for free stuff is at java-source.net. For code coverage tools follow this link. That is the one that I used and will cover in more details.

EMMA

EMMA is an open-source toolkit for measuring and reporting Java code coverage. EMMA's main features are:

• either offline (before they are loaded) or on the fly (using an instrumenting application classloader) instrumentation,


• coverage types: class, method, line, basic block,


• stats are aggregated at method, class, package, and "all classes" levels,


• output report types: plain text, HTML, XML. All report types support drill-down, to a user-controlled detail depth. The HTML report supports source code linking,


• output reports can highlight items with coverage levels below user-provided thresholds,


• EMMA is 100% pure Java, has no external library dependencies, and works in any Java 2 JVM (even 1.2.x).

For few sample reports generated by Emma have a look at http://emma.sourceforge.net/samples.html.

Most of my past projects used Ant for builds. Emma offers several components that expose its functionality as an ANT task and a command line tool, which is very convenient. The documentation is very well written and covers all questions that you might have.

There is also a NetBeans plug-in for Emma. Read some doco about it here.

Unfortunately, if you are looking for an Emma plug-in for Eclipse, there isn't one. Well I could not find any easily. If you do find some, please let me know. If you need a plug-in for Eclipse that will give you a code coverage, use Coverclipse .

Happy testing and getting your code coverage reports!

On May 01, 2006 Jeroen van Wilgenburg said:

You should take a look at Cobertura: When Clover went commercial the project was forked into the commercial Clover and open source Cobertura. It works with Ant, Maven2 and commandline. I think the reports of Cobertura are a bit better than Emma's

There is also an into on Getting started with Cobertura written by him.

On September 26, 2006 Marc said:

You may check out this free EMMA integration for Eclipse: EclEmma