Summersault Blog

Mark hasn’t had time to create a weblog entry about this yet, so I thought I would note that he recently had an article published on Perl.com entitled Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application, which is all about the popular and mature Perl CGI::Application framework for web applications. It’s definitely for geeky web developers like us, but shows how we’re keeping track of the latest trends and tools for efficiently creating robust web applications for our clients (and designing the logo for some of those tools too). Nice job, Mark!

When people use the CC field for a long list of e-mail recipients of which I’m one, I usually send them back something like this note:

Hi. This is a boilerplate message that I send to people who send e-mail messages to me as a part of a CC to a large group of people. I would like to discourage you from using this particular approach to send a message to a large group of e-mail addresses. Here’s why:
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A subset of the Summersault staff are here in Chicago together, about to attend the 2006 “Yet Another Perl Conference North America” conference (yapcna2006). We spent the day getting here, having Thai food for dinner and walking around Michigan avenue a bit (the Apple store had already closed). We thought when we got home we’d just hop right on the newly established DSL connection waiting for us - but it turned out to be a nightmarish slogging through poorly designed setup processes, router peculiarities, pilot error and impatience, etc. We’re online now and excited that the conference will inspire/instill a little more technical savvy than we experienced tonight. We’re hoping to post some photos and notes here as the week progresses, stay tuned.

When we started in 1997 and then opened our first real office in 1998, the first phone Summersault ever owned was a small, gray two-line office model with, I believe, five separate voice-mailboxes. It cost us around $200, after we spent a long time researching and discussing just the right one to get. It sat quietly on my desk, and when the occasional call did come in (it could even do a conference call!), everything worked just fine - we never had to open it up, reprogram it, reboot it, back it up, or monitor it. It’s not hard to long for those days, as Summersault’s growth has meant some costly and time consuming expansion in our phone infrastructure over the years. But our recent experience installing and configuring the Asterisk open source PBX phone system has given me some hope that we’re returning to an era where the phone is once again a useful tool that saves people time and makes communication more efficient, instead of less so. This article touts some of the benefits of this kind of phone system, and has some notes and tips on how it might help your business or organization - large or small - have enterprise-level phone system features on the cheap.
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I did an interview this morning with Chris Nolte on 1490 WKBV AM about the “dangers of unsecured home wireless networks.” I thought I would post a few follow up notes about that issue here:

The general problem is that a lot of vendors that make home networking products want their items to be as easy to use “out of the box” as possible, and so they make the default mode of a wireless access point to be one where anyone can join the wireless network created by that device. For the average home user, this means that as soon as they plug in their wireless router to get their own laptop connected wirelessly, they’re also providing a free ride to anyone within a radius of that signal.
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When Summersault first started out, one of our goals was to try to help not-for-profit organizations take advantage of the technologies of the Internet when they might not otherwise be able to do so. Of course, we were thinking about all of the cool things we could do for them on their sites to help level the playing field and get their image and message out to the wider world…we weren’t always thinking about the fact that this goal doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a good business model for a tech startup. Many of the groups we wanted to help didn’t have the budget for even the simplest web presence, and on the other hand, there were a good number of non-profits out there with plenty of funds but with technical problems we had no interest in working on solving.
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Reuters has an article out today, Internet users judge Web sites in less than a blink, noting the publication of a study in the journal Behavior and Information Technology finding that “people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site” in one twentieth of a second, less than half of the time it takes to blink your eye. The implications for us as web developers are important, and its clear that being able to create quality graphical layouts built around extensive experience with web design still matters a lot. Of course, everyone responds to different designs in different ways so there’s no formula (as the article mentions) for how to get it right every time. But we feel like we’re doing an okay job so far.

It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else - a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended - sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs - and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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If you’re going to be a true Mac fanatic, you have to spend at least a few hours a week reading the Mac rumor sites that churn with gossip about forthcoming products and business decisions from everyone’s favorite technology underdog. The current rumors a-flurry are all about Apple’s forthcoming September 7th press conference, and the possibility that they’ll announce an iPod / Mobile phone combo. Drool.
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At this very moment, hundreds of people around the country seem to be flocking to the Summersault-hosted website belonging to Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage located in Missouri. Why? Their intentional community was featured in tonight’s episode of the FX show “30 Days“, hosted by Morgan Spurlock (of “Supersize Me” fame). We at Summersault have had professional and personal ties to Dancing Rabbit since 1999, and we’re happy to be hosting their site (even with the onslaught of traffic!), especially given our own mission of working to build and sustain communities. We hope the national spotlight is favorable to them, and is an educational opportunity for those wanting to learn more about community building and living off the grid.