Servage Magazine

Are you ever working according to a schedule? Or maybe in charge of creating such schedules? Then you know about all the problems arising from shift planning. Getting the schedule done in the first place can be very tiresome. But afterwards, challenges arise as well. Very commonly is the management of people staying home sick, shift swaps between employees, holiday planning etc. Scheduling quickly becomes a very complex task, and simply managing it with an Excel sheet can be very inefficient. Thankfully there are many tools available out there, to make the task easier. What you really want is help creating the schedule based on predetermined parameters, like employee availability, holidays ...

It's amazing what you can accomplish with Javascript. Frameworks like jQuery make it quite easy to get going with your own functionality. We have some articles about it here on the Magazine: Create a jQuery plugin and Element-specific data handling for jQuery plugins, and a presentation of Starter. You can pretty much do whatever you like, and quite fast as well, using jQuery, or similar Javascript technologies. The web also provides you with a whole lot of free/open-source scripts you can use, to add rich functionality to your web apps. Today I am going to show you how easy you can add a copy-to-clipboard function. "The Zero Clipboard library provides an easy way ...

Every business-owner knows how hard it is to get customers to buy something. It counts for retailers as well as online stores. Offline as well as online service providers. No matter the product, you are likely to find yourself in a highly competitive market, where other businesses are looming around like sharks, trying to get their share of the customers. Plenty of marketing methods evolve around spam, where businesses somehow send out information in bulk, to any recipient they believe could somehow remotely be interested. This is valid for email, flyer, posters, magazine or newspaper advertisement. Smart people have learned to optimize this process, using demographics and other user-derived information, so ...

You probably know the hazzles of project management. Always trying to maintain the big picture, understanding the milestones and goals for the project, collecting information aboutproblems, solutions and progress. Some people keep all this stuff in their head, and the edge of explosion, some people use notes, some use Excel, some use apps. Some use great apps that really make your project management easier. There quite a few project management apps out there. Some free, some commercial. I've choosen two that I would like to present, because I think they can help you with your project management in an efficient way. One paid, and one free alternative. Basecamp 37Signals's Basecamp is ...

Developing quickly and efficiently is important to create value for your users. Having an environment which endorses swift programming and designing really helps you satisfy your customers better. So, how do you develop your web apps? Are you always working on the live code on the webserver? Or are you using advanced version control systems to roll out tested changes? Are you testing on a local machine, uploading your changes every now and then? Obviously there are some serious considerations and risk assessments to make. Please consider version control and some of the tools mentioned here. However, this article wont judge your development practices. This one os about development ...