It gets me in such a great mood, here at ML Studio were just a couple of guys with the dream of giving the best web product we can offer to our market, in our industry. Sometimes we are chin deep in work and yet everyone that knows us still remembers us as the bright-eyed 20 year-old entrepreneurs. There is no web development in this blog post, besides talking about our industry we also want you guys to get to know us; so just sit back and enjoy these three awesome songs I’ve chosen for y’all by some of my favorite girls.

Gal Costa – Baby

Dionne Warwick – Walk on By

Nina Simone – I put a spell on you

First thing’s first

Twitter’s a micro-blogging site. Which means that instead of maintaining a full blog as I’m doing at the moment, with full articles, posts with detailed content or unedited ramblings, you’re limited to a scant 140 characters to express yourself. If the stuff you tweet (which is what we call these 140 char posts) is interesting or fun, people will follow you to keep on reading what it is you have to say. Similarly you may follow other people who interest you and read whatever it is they have to say. Pretty simple concept, and not too impressive when described so plainly, but it’s become a veritable force of nature.

Why it’s cool

The recent hype has revolved around celebrities twittering their every move basically skipping over the paparazzi and letting the public scrutinize their lives straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re into celebrity gossip well that’s pretty much where twitter begins and ends for you. For those of us looking for something more, the involvement needs to go a bit deeper. See, the one thing newbies don’t get about twitter is that if you don’t tweet and don’t follow anyone, you have a site full of nothing. So if following celebs isn’t your thing it might be a bit harder to find good people to follow, but once you do you will have opened a door into the collective hive mind: Developers with new techniques, advertisers sharing research, industry experts talking about their “secrets”, and in general excellent people putting up amazing content that most of us would have probably not found otherwise.
It’s also the absolute best place to get breaking news. Michael Jackson’s death might be the most recent example, wherein those of us on twitter had gotten the news about 2 hours earlier than everywhere else, but it can be much more practical.
Since I’m followed by a lot of locals, and most people with a smart phone and a twitter account use a mobile app to tweet from the road, I’ve found myself asking my followers for traffic reports, for the state of a line at the movies, for reviews on all sorts of things, and many times I’ve gotten an answer, sometimes with pictures, seldom with live video.
Further it’s a fantastic place to meet like minded individuals. I follow clients, suppliers, competition, friends, and people I don’t know and will probably never meet. It’s been a particularly useful tool for organizing the local web industry. What started as a bunch of tweets amongst a group of pros very impressed with each other, is now coalescing into the Web Professionals Group of Puerto Rico, including various development, design, and e-marketing firms in the island.

Who should I follow?

First forget about hoarding followers. Too many businesses and individuals come to twitter with a half-baked idea involving a million followers and some harebrained advertising scheme. The best way to get eyes is by generating good content. This is truer on twitter than it is anywhere on the internet as most of the time you’ll be expected to converse casually with both your followers and those you follow. Also a lot people will follow you for following them as a common courtesy.  If you or your company (or your client) is looking to become a productive member of the twitter community instead of looking for followers (they’ll come in time) focus on following good interesting people. A good place to start might be twitter’s own search. Write in a word or phrase and you’ll instantly find hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals tackling that particular topic. Find a couple of twitterers who say something interesting about said topic and follow them, odds are they’ll keep saying interesting stuff. You can also follow people you actually know, just ask around and you’ll find out a couple of your friends or contacts tweet as well. Once you have a decent base you can look at the people they’re following and cherry-pick those you like best. Finally, every Friday is Follow Friday. This fun little trend started a long while back and has become a staple of the Twitter community. Every friday people send out recommendations on who to follow from the list of people they themselves follow. Just look for the #followfriday  tag and you’ll find a lot of good ones as well as some bad ones but you can always unfollow if someone gets too annoying.

Final tips

Congrats! You should now be a productive twitterer. If you’ve no idea what to write about just take a sec to think about what you’re doing and write about that, odds are someone somewhere will find it interesting. Also there’s some lingo you’ll need to know to fit in here’s a decent primer straight from twitter. You’ll probably also want to use a good url shortener. Since you only have 140 characters to write your thoughts you don’t want to waste most of them on a long dynamically generated URL. So if for example you wanted to link to a beautiful 3 bedroom home on ClasificadosMejores.com, the best classifieds site on the web, you’d be better off using this URL:http://bit.ly/2m6R3A than this URL: http://www.clasificadosmejores.com/bienes-raices-clasificados-470.html.
My favorite shortener is http://bit.ly as it’s the least amount of characters allowed for a domain and it’s really easy to type and remember.
Also there’s ways to tweet without going to twitter.com, tweetdeck is my favorite solution for the desktop with tiny twitter on my phone for keeping everyone up to date from the road.
Finally here’s a list of great twitterers to follow so you can get started:
@pabloiv, @torlanco, @alantaveras, @robetoell, @albizu, @gcollazo, @jpadilla_, @fritzo, @redod, @mercedesnegron, @kolapse, @dhowell, @garyvee, @jasoncalacanis, @wiltonv, @lbenitez

If you already twitter and would like to leave some suggestions put them right there in the comments.

The Switch

The practical switch was much easier than the psychological switch. I set the home page and default search engine to Bing and with a couple of clicks I was set. Nevertheless Google has been my unthinking default since the late 90s. Opening a browser window and seeing something other than the multicolored logo and search box, over a white background felt weird for the first week. The Bing homepage is a testament to good content presentation. Most of the screen is dominated by a large, high-res image of some usually random, interesting thing. Today it was a hanging monastery in China and it changes daily. Directly below it is a footer with links related to the main image followed by breaking news and trending topics. To the left are links to the now traditional image, video, shopping, news, maps and travel searches, directly under the Bing logo and search box. There’s a bunch of other navigation pieces but they’re all well tucked-away in their respective areas.

The Search

First thing I noticed after the switch is that I seldom use search engines. I’ve been on the internet so long that I usually know exactly where to go for most pieces of information, leaving the search box as a last resort when my usual sources fail me (they usually don’t). The times I did have to rely on Bing for finding information it shone very brightly. The search results screen innovates very little but in case you need it there’s tons more meta-data about your search than a Google result usually brings. Searching the Beatles for example produced the same basic set of results: beatles.com, the Beatles Wikipedia entry, lyrics, fan pages, etc. Bing’s results were organized with subsections such as Beatles Songs, Beatles Lyrics, Beatles Albums, etc. Each sub-category was represented on a new navigation in the left side column over related searches and my recent search history. Each result entry had additional hover-over functionality with content preview and some links from the site’s internal navigation. Images were displayed on top of the main results and video results at the bottom of the page.

The Experience

Microsoft is evidently putting a lot of importance into making this the best search solution. Every results page comes with a feedback button locked to the bottom right of the window where you can rate and comment the results of your search as well as the general Bing experience. The entire experience is very dynamic, ajaxy and generally Web 2.0. Everything that can be done asynchronously is done asynchronously. Hover over an image and a larger preview image comes up as a tooltip with some of the image’s metadata, it’s source, a feedback link and a similar images link (this feature works particularly well). Hover over a video thumb and a preview starts playing right there with sound and all. All searches can be refined. Images can be refined by size, proportions, color, style, and people. This last refinement is particularly cool as it lets you search for faces, upper body or images with no people at all. These tools are very powerful letting a user find some very specific results with just a few clicks, like this page that includes only Wallpaper sized images of red Ferraris on plain backgrounds. Sure, the further you go down the more blue and black Ferraris slip in as well as other backdrops, but the first couple dozen images fit my search perfectly and most of the times you just need one good red Ferrari.

The Conclusion

My relationship with Google as my homepage has been long and fruitful, but I think I’ve finally found a real contender for this space. I’m going to stick with Bing for the foreseeable future and I’m glad that I decided to give it a chance. It’s about time Microsoft put some real effort into it’s search division. True, it copies all the best that Google has to offer, but copying the competition is nothing new for Microsoft, and at least this time they’ve managed to provide a better product with considerable differences that really put it a good couple of feet ahead of the pack.

This past week they’ve added another award to the trophy case, the SME’s WebAd Award for Best Website. From what we’ve read winning Best Website at the WebAds is akin to winning Best Picture at the Oscars. We at ML Studio are honored to hold their bits and bytes in our server and will continue to do se as long as they keep making great stuff.

If you’ve never heard of EyeTour, shame on you. Here it is in their own words:

“EyeTour.com has become a unique online experience in the Caribbean, where visitors
can explore Puerto Rico’s best attractions, including historical sites, beaches, nature
reserves, museums, restaurants, and much more, through high‐quality videos, articles,
and photographs. Visitors can download videos to their iPods, iPhone or personal video
player of choice and realize our company’s vision: Be your own guide,”

José Martí, President of production

Here a direct link to eyetour.com, where you can find their videos and blog. Congrats guys!

I recently met some of them in a casual meeting a couple of web designers and developers had this last Saturday. They were all in their MUB t shirts presumably for the Modernica opening in Plaza or MrTechs radio show in Red96 FM. This is something I’ve learned to appreciate from mac users, they seem to stick together and I’ve noticed from their blog they do so online as well.

The posts you’ll find in the site are not the typical regurgitation of Lord-Jobs’ keynote addresses, at least not always. What you’ll get is quality content and stuff to complement your mac lifestyle. The site is focused towards a local audience in a way that caters to Puerto Rico without alienating others. I was particularly impressed with a recent post about different configurations in jailbroken iPhones for in-network internet connectivity …that’s a mouthful.

So if you want to pimp your iPhone, just got a mac or are looking to find a great community with whom to learn or look at shiny things with, this is the place for you.

PS: visit Sugar Toys for community downloads including candy coated wallpapers.

Microsoft has taken giant steps in the right direction since the days of IE6, adding tabs, better standards compliance, better security measures, and support for things designers now take for granted such as transparent PNGs, and predictable handling of CSS rules.
The new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is leaps ahead from the cold dark days when it’s grandfather dominated the internet, and if you’re one of those still hanging on to IE6 I besiege you to upgrade with THIS LINK as quickly as possible. Go do it now, this post will still be here when you get back.

First thing I noticed is a markedly smaller memory footprint than the competition. To be fair I opened new instances of IE8, Firefox, Chrome and compared their memory footprint on my system, with the same 3 tabs open on each. Firefox was by far the largest using up about 200 megs of ram, IE8 was next with somewhere around 80 and the very lightweight Chrome was last with a little over 60 megs. This isn’t much of an issue for most powerful machines of today but tweakers and netbook users will appreciate the performance boost. I also haven’t noticed any memory leakage over time which has always been a huge problem with Firefox. On that note IE8 is notably faster than its predecessors delivering page load speeds within milliseconds of the fastest browsers available.

Two of the new big things launching with IE8 are Web Slices and Accelerators.
Web slices let you subscribe to particular sections of a site and have them one click away at any moment, without having to run to the original site. This can be particularly practical with news sites, e-mail services, and social content allowing you can stay updated of everything while moving through the Internet.
Accelerators bring new functionality to your regular browsing experience such as translation and dictionary tools, ebay search and Facebook posting; all straight from whichever page you happen to be in.

It’s great to see Microsoft championing content aggregation as part of what they feel should be integral to a standard web experience. On the other hand both these initiatives are IE8 specific and will require strong developer support to become part of most users’ day-to-day. Many online big guns such as the NY Times, Digg, and StumbleUpon are already part of these initiatives, it will take some time for these efforts take hold with web developers as part of our usual content delivery methods and client offerings.

Much of the other changes have to do with security and stability. Tab sandboxing allows faulty sites to crash their tab while leaving the rest of the browser unaffected. While this doesn’t allow you to just rip a tab out and open a new window, it does create a much more pleasant user experience while navigating through the darker waters of the web. On the security side it molds user behavior towards safer browsing with subtle and not so subtle notices. Domain highlighting for example, helps users distinguish between legit and phishing sites by slightly graying out most of a web address and leaving just the domain black. Although subtle, this tiny change makes users much more aware of their browsing practices and reinforces safer web habits . Microsoft has also upped the security in general fixing the old wholes and vulnerabilities of previous editions.

The browser is also better integrated with other Microsoft products which is a great plus for a more natural workflow. Without adding any Accelerators you can blog with Live Writer, send a page through Live Mail, or add it to your mobile favorites. This is part of Microsoft’s concerted, Live branded, Internet efforts which I really have to applaud them for. Although independently each tool is nice and well put together as a whole it is a very time saving solution which delivers time and again.

The last, and to me, biggest change is a large move towards better standards compliance. Although Acid3 test results aren’t what Microsoft would like, practical real world results speak for themselves. Page rendering is fast and consistent showing exactly what developers intended, usually on the first try. The change has been so significant that it even comes with a compatibility setting which will use IE7’s rendering engine so older sites developed around older versions of the browser will still work consistently.

IE8 has come full force into the current browser competition integrating the best of other browsers, cleaning up the old mistakes and even innovating in various areas. It is also a huge improvement over its predecessors as it includes all the features now commonplace in the market and integrates them seamlessly into a  well put together application that benefits greatly from being part of the larger Microsoft family. If you’ve been looking to upgrade browsers now is definitely the time.

The one beacon of hope for enthusiastic teens was Geocities. They offered 1 free megabyte of hosting space to do anything you wanted. At that point anything I wanted was a sad little site with: animated gif horizontal dividers of flames, pictures of superheroes, and a contact form that never worked, but it was mine and it was published, and working on it laid the groundwork of interest and knowledge that eventually led me into this line of work.

Like me tens of thousands of homesteaders took up Geocities on their offer and it became a sort of tent city in the wilderness of the internet, full of starry eyed settlers looking to find a place in this shiny new tract of space that had been recently open to the public. The hosting was even divided into neighborhoods and each one was themed to a particular interest, and you could search through everyone’s sites, which often were as silly and useless as mine, but sometimes they were rife with information on all sorts of things. These were the first blogs, the first mySpaces, the first formative steps of an online community that would eventually become what we know now.

Being limited by that 1 megabyte was hard at first, but it taught us about file sizes and the importance of frugal code. It taught us about the varying efficiencies of image formats, and how to reuse assets, it taught us to do more with a whole lot less. We have since outgrown that first meg of space, and it’s been more than a decade since I’ve used my Geocities account, relegating it to the toy bin of younger years, but if it hadn’t been for that first tiny piece of the internet a lot of us wouldn’t be here.

Thanks.

It really speaks of an ubiquitous integration of systems, all networked together, embedded even in places we wouldn’t even think of today. As computers keep growing smaller and cheaper, and internet connections become faster and more omnipresent, this future will come closer and closer. I’m really excited about the future that we’re looking forward to, and I’m even more excited that I’ll still be fairly young and able to participate in it.

This is our kitchen. Yes, our kitchen runs on Ubuntu.

We called a roofer to look at the roof because that’s what roofers do. He told us that although roofing problems where common they could be avoided with close to no maintenance to the roof. He was hired, and now pictures of the kitchen look like the one above.

Your office/business is where all your cookin’ gets done. In this economic downturn it’s easy to blame the “leaks” on the general state of things, but maybe, now that things have slowed down a bit it’s the best time to take a long hard look at what the underlying problems are and do something about it.

We, as web developers, have noticed that businesses in Puerto Rico think of their website in much the same way as I think of my roof: as long as it’s there, it’s doing its job. The reality though is much different, both need a little maintenance. Not a lot, not even frequently, but in many cases a website can do a lot more, with simple yearly revisions.

One of the best ways to expand outside the standard market and look for additional revenues is through the web. As web developers our favorite type of projects are the ones where we’re able to sit down with the client and create solutions that generate revenue in clear and measurable ways.

It may be that while checking the air on your company’s tires you find that your web efforts are good and sufficient, but in case you want a second opinion feel free to give us a call.

The top 5 sites for pixel fixing are:

1. WikiHow.com How to fix a dead pixel on an LCD screen
2. MakeUseOf.com 5 ways to fix a stuck pixel on your screen
3. Shivaranjan.com How to fix dead or stuck pixels
4. Instructables.com Fix a stuck pixel with instructions!
5. JScreenFix An application that does this for you

So there, you won’t have to see them uglies again!

PS Always remember to check your return policy before tinkering with electronics!

You can get real cheap monitors at Compusa or BestBuy.