I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'web'

November 4, 2009

Mocking^2 Bird

Mockingbird, a new wireframe webapp, boasts:

Powered by Cappuccino: no Flash needed.

John Gruber writes:

It’s a true web app (no Flash), written in Cappuccino

Gentlemen, your excitement over skipping Flash is hugely misplaced.

If you load the app, you can see custom scrollbars and navigation, a complete lack of accessibility, non-native controls, and all those other things that cause geeks to hate Flash. What, to the end user, is the benefit of this being done with JavaScript instead of Flash? You can get the patronage of the 0.000001% of web users who don’t have Flash installed? (Sadly, I don’t think Richard Stallman needs many wireframes drawn)

Gruber’s definition of “true web app” and mine greatly differ. Clue: If it’s completely unusable on the iPhone Safari browser, it doesn’t matter if it’s built in JavaScript, Flash or Microsoft Visual Fortran 2012. It’s not a “true web app”

November 7, 2008

Lessons Learned while Building an iPhone Site

Some great thoughts on mobile website development from Flickr, whose iPhone-friendly site is a thing of beauty.

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April 21, 2008

NGINX requests - by day

NGINX requests - by day

A blog post I wrote last night ended up on the front page of Reddit this morning. As of 2pm, I have had more unique visitors today than I had in January-March of this year combined!

My stack of nginx, Apache, Django and memcache all kicked in exactly as designed, and handled the flood of visitors without breaking (much) of a sweat, on a $25-a-month virtual server.

(Hat tip to Simon Willison for blogging about using this architecture. and inspiring me to preemptively deploy it on my own blog)

August 21, 2007

Selenium Remote Control: About

Saw a presentation on this at BarCampBlock, and I absolutely have to delve into it further. “Selenium Remote Control is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser.”

September 4, 2006

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

Track where users are clicking on your webpages so you can slap in advertising/tune your site’s usability (delete as appropriate)

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May 6, 2006

Drunk Men Work Here - On Bots

Visualizations on how Yahoo, Google and MSN (and comment spam bots) spider through content.

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November 7, 2005

Greatest Internet Moments

A nostalgic selection of memes and history from the last ten years.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.