occasionally useful ruby, ubuntu, etc

21Oct/120

Finding a Freelance UX Designer?

Question to any readers who've done this sort of thing before -- where do people normally go to get UX Design work done for them? Specifically, I have some ideas for a web app I want built, but I don't have the UX chops nor visual chops to design the interface. I want someone to take my written designs and talk to me to come up with some wireframes, which I can then iterate on with the designer before moving onto the visual design phase. Anyone have experience in this area?

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20Mar/115

ACID Cloud databases to keep an eye on

So far, "database in the cloud" options have been pretty limited. You have Amazon's SimpleDB, which is slow, eventually consistent, and not really a database except in the loosest sense of the word; there's Amazon RDS, which is a managed MySQL instance and scales up, but not out; and of course you can run database server yourself on any of the cloud servers out there (Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid, Linode, Slicehost, etc etc). But none of these offer one-click scale out ability, which is really the hardest part of database scaling. However, there are a few options cropping up, most of which are in beta.

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31Aug/100

How we got here: Web App Stores

The recent sudden popularity in web "app stores" is taking off with a rate normally associated with fads, but in some respects is actually to be expected. Still, it bears an interesting similarity with one of the oldest types of websites that the average consumer has seen: directories.

6Mar/1017

HTML5 Web SQL Database – Intro to Versioning and Migrations

I've been dabbling a bit with Chrome extensions, which have at their disposal HTML5 localStorage and Web SQL Database. And...the web sql database especially is pretty cool. But one thing was bothering me -- if I have a database on the client, how do I maintain the schema? The (simplest) answer is in changeVersion.

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