I’ve been working on a side project since early last year and it’s finally ready for the big time, so I thought I’d share it with you.

It’s called TypeFront, and it’s a font distribution platform that leverages downloadable font support in browsers to serve fonts to the web sites that you choose.

Last year, the W3C and the browser makers finally got together to make something beautiful happen - downloadable font support in the CSS3 specification and an implementation of this in the latest versions of all the major browsers. Suddenly you could refer to a font file through your standards-compliant CSS code and it would be correctly downloaded and displayed in over 90% of the browsers out there.

Finally we could look back on our years of Arial-bondage and laugh.

However, there were still a few tricky issues to deal with, such as the fact that most fonts, especially the good ones, are not free. The companies that sell those fonts would not appreciate every second web designer uploading their font files on a web server somewhere that anyone could easily download without having to pay for it.

What I wanted was an access-controlled bucket where I could upload my font files and allow access to only my sites.

I also saw an opportunity for font sellers to use such a platform to control access to font files they had already sold. A platform such as this could also drive the use of different pricing models for fonts. For example, instead of taking a one-off payment for font files, a seller could take a monthly fee for access to the font on a particular domain.

And so TypeFront was born.

TypeFront allows you to upload any font file - we will automatically convert it into OpenType, Extended OpenType (EOT) and Web Open Font Format and give you the code you need to include it into your web site. Of course, you should make sure that the licence you bought your font under allows for web-based embedding before you do this.

Once you have uploaded your font, you can add the domains of web sites you would like to allow.

TypeFront also has an API that allows third-party applications to programmatically access all of its functionality.

I hope you enjoy TypeFront - I would love to hear what you think of it.

Since I launched Blavel in 2007, a small but enthusiastic community of travel bloggers has grown, posting travel stories and photos from all over the world.

Man have they been some places!

I thought that I would post up a selection of photos taken from posts by the Blavel community as a tribute to their worldliness. I hope you like it.

Thailand from Summer2009Part2

Syria from janash

Tokyo, Japan from Sharrie

Suzdal, Russia from janash

Hong Kong from carrco

Khao Sok National Park, Thailand from Summer2009Part2

Moscow, Russia from janash

San Francisco, United States from janash

Montepulciano, Italy from amanda_june

Brussels, Belgium from bandersnatch

Amsterdam, Netherlands from jenifer900

Cappadocia, Turkey from janash

South Africa from efish

Normandy, France from jenifer900

Petra, Jordan from janash

Highlands, Scotland from Sharrie

Bavaria, Germany from Twodals_Travels

Krka National Park, Croatia from janash

Greve in Chianti, Italy from bradwhit

Singapore from Summer2009

Cathedral Cove, New Zealand from bazza

Paris, France from Sharrie

Istanbul, Turkey from Sharrie

Huacachina, Peru from demdots

The Equator, Ecuador from JannaP

Brighton, United Kingdom from bandersnatch

Abu Simbel, Egypt from janash

Parkes, Australia from Kiwi_go_round

Quebec City, Canada from mmc314

For some people, social media is almost like a sport. How many followers can you get? How many subscribers can you get?

For other people, social media is their livelihood - it is how they put food on the table.

One thing that I think a lot of people struggle with is trying to single out the factors that make the biggest impact on their performance in social media.

For example, it might be your goal to get 1000 subscribers to your blog. Things have been pretty flat for the last month or so, but this week your blog has experienced a huge jump in the number of subscribers.

You have probably been employing any number of methods to promote the posts you have been putting on your blog - promoting them on Twitter, submitting them to services like Digg, making changes to your site to ensure it is SEO friendly, listing your blog on directories, making guest posts on other blogs, and so on.

The trouble is that often you have no real idea which of these activities has actually contributed to the sudden increase in your subscribers. You can often make an educated guess as to what the root cause might be - but you need to get as scientific as you can if you want to make the most of your future time spent on marketing activities.

What I think we all need is an analytics solution that gives us a summarised timeline of our activity across all of our social media and promotional channels and compares that with performance towards our goals.

It would be that much easier to track down the root cause if you could see that, for example, the day of the increase in subscribers coincided with one of your promotional tweets being retweeted by someone with a high number of followers.

If the spike in your subscriptions coincided with a number of possible contributing actions on the same day, you could zoom into that day and have a look at the hours at which each of those events occurred, available data permitting.

I think that the way such a service would work would be to aggregate data from Google Analytics and all of your social media presences, and arrange the data on a timeline similar to the mockups I have attached. This would give you a starting point from which you could then add in other actions that you wanted to track that wouldn’t have come through on any of your feeds, e.g. SEO changes to your site, or listing your blog on a directory.

This sort of system could be used for tracking the performance of your blog, website, Twitter account, Flickr account or any other internet presence with a feed of data that could be consumed by the tool.

So far I haven’t found any sort of social media analytics service that offers this type of view. If you find it (or make it), let me know, I would love to use it!

Here it is: countries.yml

You can put this file into a directory called db/seed_data and then set up a rake task to load it into your database. Put this into the file seed_data.rake in the lib/tasks directory:

namespace :seed_data do
  desc 'Load seed data into the database of the current environment'
  task :load => :environment do
    require 'active_record/fixtures'
    Dir.glob(RAILS_ROOT + '/db/seed_data/*.yml').each do |file|
      Fixtures.create_fixtures('db/seed_data', File.basename(file, '.*'))
    end
  end
end

You can then issue the following command to load the seed data into the database. It will load into the development database by default — use the RAILS_ENV=production parameter to get it into the production database.

rake seed_data:load

Before you do that, however, you are going to need a Country model to access your countries through.

Generate a new model with code and name attributes:

script/generate model Country code:string name:string

Then migrate your database to create the new table:

rake db:migrate

I am using this reference data to populate country select lists, so I forked the country_select plugin and modified it to read the countries from the database. My version of the country_select plugin on can be installed by typing the following command:

script/plugin install git://github.com/johngrimes/country_select.git

Now you can use the following code in your views to output a country select list:

< % form_for @whatever do |form| %>
  < %= form.country_select :country %>
< % end %>

Combine this with autotest and voila - you can be alerted the moment you change something in the view code that breaks your site’s valid markup.

Take this one step further and add your tests into your Capistrano deployment script - and you literally cannot deploy your site when it is in a state that is not standards-compliant.

Get started by installing the be_valid_asset gem (or plugin), and inserting the following line into your Rspec spec_helper.rb file:

config.include BeValidAsset

Then you can use be_valid assertions within your view tests in the following way:

describe "/index.html" do
  it "should be valid XHTML" do
    render 'home/index', :layout => true
    response.should be_valid_xhtml
  end
end

You can test your CSS the following way:

it "should be valid CSS" do
  css = File.read(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, %w(public stylesheets main.css)))
  css.should be_valid_css
end

I would like to find a way expand on this solution and be able to automatically run all CSS includes of a particular view through the checker, instead of having to manually specify each one.

I am also aware that there is another plugin that performs a similar function called assert_valid_asset - it might be more suited to those of you who use Test::Unit.

I think that narcissistic social media addicts would love the ability to track how popular their postings are on their favourite sites.

Now that Google have released an API for Google Analytics, it would be relatively easy to piggyback off website owners’ existing GA accounts, slice the data up and present the analytics relevant to a particular page or section of the site that your current user is interested in.

Clicking on a ’stats’ link beside any of their posted content could take the user to a page full of funky flash charts illustrating their recent rise to fame. Widgets such as top 10 content and user popularity rankings could be derived from the analytics data and posted on home and profile pages. Users could be alerted by email or IM when their content has just gone viral, then transported to a real-time updating page where they could watch the action unfold.

I think that the sell to website owners would be pretty easy - they stand to increase user engagement and frequency of visits to their site, and they are giving their most fanatical users exactly what they want - which is always a smart thing to do.

As the market for free gets more crowded, we’ll see more and more people promoting their free products, stuff that people used to have pay for. A complete shift from ‘you will pay’ to ‘it is free’ to ‘I will pay for ads to alert you it’s free’ to ultimately, ‘I will pay you to try it’.

So what comes next after the price the market will pay for any given service is driven down to (or past) free? What happens when all the freemium services are undercut by others offering all their premium services for free? Surely a market in which the price of quality online services is zero is not a sustainable one. Or is it?

How we got to this point:

• The costs of producing a web application are approaching zero.
• Nearly any web application that isn’t massively complex or dependent on expensive infrastructure can be easily and cheaply copied and undercut.
• Up until now, advertising revenue and general kudos have been enough to motivate large numbers of individuals and lightweight startups to offer their services for nothing.

There are so many conflicting trends that you can look at in this space - it is very difficult to make sense of it all. On the one hand there are products like Smugmug that have become successful by copying free services and turning them into premium paid services. On the other hand there are companies like Google who are building success by effectively undercutting everybody else who offers the same services in a paid capacity.

My prediction is that advertising (in its current form, at least) is slowly on the way out, set to have its share of marketing spend reduced as people catch on to new and more effective marketing methods. Many of those offering their services totally free-ad-supported (including Google) will have to work out alternative business models if they want to make any profit at all.

As this happens, market prices for online services will by necessity slow their descent to zero and hover just slightly above zero. It will still be wildly competitive, which will keep prices low, but there will have to be a bare minimum that your average web app producer is willing to work for. Those who relentlessly innovate to avoid commoditisation will be the ones that can ask more than the average.

The next question is: Will overall spending on online services increase in the future, as relative to other sectors? I think it will.

Is there a certain slice of people’s wallets that they are willing to spend on online services, as opposed to other (non-online) services? Will the online slice grow bigger as more and more services that people used to use offline are moved to the web, for example?

Meanwhile, the rise of the market of niches will march forward, and it will mean that people are going to have access to services that are much more personalised to their own needs. They are potentially going to get more value out of services, and be more engaged with them. Does this mean that they will be more likely to pay for services? Or does it just mean that a higher number of services are going to be servicing each person, reducing the slice of that person’s disposable income they can ask for?

So many questions. Feel free to post up your views on these issues. Meanwhile I think I should stop thinking about it so much and focus on being prolific in releasing innovative and remarkable new products.

This is great because it means that you can fiddle around with your code with a greater level of confidence, because you know that the moment you break existing functionality, you will be alerted.

You can install autotest simply by installing the ZenTest gem:

gem install ZenTest

And then type the following from your Rails project directory:

autotest -rails

I even found a way in which you can set up autotest to use your desktop notification system to alert you of when tests have passed or failed, making it even more visible to you as you code. I am running Ubuntu, so I set it up through the Gnome notification system, but according to this article on getting started with autotest you can also enable this on OSX and Windows.

Theoretically, you could trigger an event for almost any sort of event within the user interface of your web site. You could even do tricky stuff like record how far users get through a form before bailing out. Or even how long users are taking to get through a form on average, using the optional_value field.

Read the whole post: Event tracking in Google Analytics.

Capistrano is written in Ruby, so this is your main pre-requisite. Get Ruby and Rubygems installed, and then simply type the following command to install the Capistrano gem:

gem install capistrano

Getting your application ready for deployment starts with the following command, issued from inside your app’s top-level directory:

capify .

This two files: Capfile and config/deploy.rb. The latter is where we are going to tell Capistrano how we want it to deploy our application.

set :application, "myapp"
set :repository,  "git@github.com:johngrimes/myapp.git"
set :scm, "git"

The first part of our deploy.rb gives our app a name and tells Capistrano where to pull the latest copy of our app from. This example has us using Github as our source code repository.

task :to_dev do
  set :user, "webadmin"
  set :runner, "webadmin"
  role :web, "dev.myapp.com"
  set :deploy_to, "/var/www"
end

task :to_test do
  set :user, "webadmin"
  set :runner, "webadmin"
  role :web, "test.myapp.com"
  set :deploy_to, "/var/www"
end

task :to_prod do
  set :user, "webadmin"
  set :runner, "webadmin"
  role :web, "myapp.com"
  set :deploy_to, "/var/www"
end

The next part of our script sets up a task for each of the environments that we might want to deploy to. These tasks do not actually perform any actions: they simply set the server and location for deployment, along with the users that our script should use to connect to the server via SSH and run our tasks.

And that’s it! The script we have written so far will deploy your application in the default Capistrano manner. Before we do so, however, we need to set up our deployment area for the first time:

cap deploy:setup
cap deploy:check

The first command will set up the default Capistrano deployment directory structure on the server, then the second command will check for all the required dependencies for a successful deployment (write permissions, git is installed, etc.). Once this is all ok, use you can the following commands for deploying to development, test and production respectively:

cap to_dev deploy
cap to_test deploy
cap to_prod deploy

I like to add a few extra bits to customise the deployment process a bit.

after :deploy, 'create_symlinks'
after :deploy, 'set_permissions'
after :deploy, 'deploy:cleanup'

task :create_symlinks do
  # Create symbolic link to a common database.yml which
  # is not under source control

  run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/system/config/database.yml
    #{release_path}/config/database.yml"
end

task :set_permissions do
  # Change the owner and group of everything under the
  # deployment directory to webadmin and apache
  run "chown -R webadmin:apache #{deploy_to}"
end

task :after_setup, :roles => :web do
  set_permissions
end

This code instructs Capistrano to reset the owner and group of everything under our deployment directory after each deployment. This is useful for making sure that key directories are writable by our webserver.

It also ‘cleans up’ old deployments each time, by removing everything bar the last 5 deployments.

You also might want to create other tasks that are performed after each deployment, such as the one shown above for creating a symbolic link to a file that is located elsewhere on the server and not kept in source control.

Something to keep in mind is that for Capistrano deployment to work, you need to check the following things:

• the computer you are running the deployment from can access the server(s) via SSH
• the server(s) can access the source code repository

I find that the best (and most automated) way of doing this is by setting up SSH authentication keys so that your deployment scripts can achieve password-less login. This article will show you how to do it for the SSH from your machine to the server, and this article will show you how to set up keys for your Github account.

How many more would you need to add to be on the absolute bleeding-edge of thinking in your field? 50? 100?

How many more people do you need to follow on Twitter?

How long would it take you to read all that content each day?

I can see that the people who strike real success usually do it by a combination of doing their own thing and striking it lucky - not necessarily by following the trends.

I think that there are a lot of people that spend a lot of time staying on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and web business trends, potentially at the cost of creativity and time to commit to developing and improving their own original products.

I think there is value in learning lessons from others and knowing where the market is going - but I think that one of the things that the most successful products have in common is that they all stood up to lead their chosen market in a particular direction at some point.

And you can’t do that until you quit following the established leaders for a second or two.

Basically an American salvage company has discovered a shipwreck with an amount of gold, platinum and gems that they are saying could be worth up to 11 billion dollars(!).

It will be interesting to watch the legal nightmare that will no doubt follow this discovery. The salvage company has spent a lot of money on locating the wreck, but as it turns out the law isn’t exactly finders-keepers, losers-weepers.

I’ll go on the record as saying I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if the US government doesn’t end up getting a large chunk of the discovery. :)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/30/2478562.htm

I just created this in Up2Maps. It is a map of average salaries across the UK. Is it just me or are they really low in general?

I think that any gesture that makes our society feel more inclusive for indigenous Australians would be worth doing.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1006106/Moving-Australia-Day-’has-support’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Day

It doubles as a tool for creating quick sketches of how web sites are going to look, as well as a kind of project management tool that lets you track tasks and assign them to people, etc.

It has a very nice Flex interface, allowing you to quickly drag standard controls onto a page and build up a visual layout with a funky sketch look.

www.iplotz.com

I hope this is paranoia, because if it’s not then it is a pretty scary world we are heading towards.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24817536-15306,00.html

http://www.up2maps.net/report/TSoprano/World/world_account_balance.html

Not really any surprises, but interesting nonetheless!

I have to say that Mr. Rudd continues to impress me with the way he is going about things.

I really think that the best thing that could possibly happen to telecommunications in Australia would be for Telstra to get chopped up into little bits and fed to their competitors. :)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/15/2446644.htm

A new way to compare the relative cost of living between different geographical regions