I’m thrilled to let everyone know about our new support center, featuring mainly: comprehensive, searchable documentation!
This is a tool we’ve wanted to have for a long time and I’m relieved that its finally available and online for everyone to test out and hopefully start using.
If you can’t wait until the end of this post to try it out: go to http://support.nitobi.com
This tool has the following cool features:
- All of our documentation (ALL of it) is now in a single, easy-to-access location.
- All our documentation is now versioned by build number so it’s always up to date and always accurate for YOUR version of the product.
- Everything is instantly searchable and browsable from a single point of access.
- Perform wildcard searching of all documentation including knowledgebase. Eg:
“grid” might turn up the nitobi.grid class or the ntb:grid column or All about Nitobi Grid article.
“nitobi http” would perform a double-ended wildcard search and likely turn up nitobi.ajax.httprequest as well as other articles where ‘nitobi’ is mentioned before ‘http’ (but not necessarily exactly as typed).
- Whittle the documentation down by specific product if desired.
One thing we have lost from the docs temporarily is comments but we’ll be coming out with a comments feature in a month or so once we know the tool is succeeding and people are using it.
Posted in components, documentation, nitobi.com, resources, web development | 4 Comments » | Add to Delicious | Digg It
I’ve been an on-again, off-again fan of PHP over the years. On the balance I AM a fan, but some things about it really grind my gears.
- Upgrading. Upgrading is always a nightmare. Things never really work out right away. Always budget like 2 hours to upgrade PHP, especially if you are using IIS or MySQL. Expect to trawl the forums if you are a new or intermediate user.
- Bugs. I’m tired of the shoddy Q/A that seems to go into production PHP releases. Its issues like this that waste time and make me wonder why I bother (Check out the recommended solution: downgrade to 5.x.x).
- Reinventing the wheel. I have to use a lot of scripting frameworks in my line of work (Ruby, .NET, JavaScript, ActionScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, etc etc). What strikes me is that a lot of the frameworks do a lot of things the same way, like the order of arguments for common functions like strlen, strpos, etc. Except php! Its always different with PHP.. it always seems to be some different convention that nobody else uses – go figure.
- Inconsistent API. I know PHP has been a work in progress, but there have been plenty of opportunities to standardize naming conventions. Eg: String replace versus string position (str_ireplace, stripos).
- Colloquial documentation. I sincerely hope you are a native north american english speaker when reading PHP docs. Actually, stripos is a great example of what I’m talking about – check out the argument names:
int stripos ( string $haystack, string $needle [, int $offset] )
Really cute, not very helpful.
I’ve been doing a lot of Ruby coding lately and I REALLY like a lot about that language.. especially how everything in Ruby is an object. I really wish PHP would adopt some of the lexicon of Ruby, or at least head in that direction. Also.. a console for testing out code would help development substantially (a la ‘ruby script/console’).
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http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2007/07/chinese-iphone-.html
This speaks for itself.. my reaction: holy cow that was fast.
Posted in iphone, media | No Comments » | Add to Delicious | Digg It
It’s pronounced TWiTTER, not TWEETER.. which you said twice in a row.. like an idiot.
Wait.. IS there a tweeter? I wouldn’t be surprised. If so, disregard.
Posted in Rich Internet Apps, media, web2.0 | No Comments » | Add to Delicious | Digg It