Servage Magazine

The problem isn't new, but it's still present. Standards and best practices have not just been invented for fun, or mere entertainment for nerds. They actually fulfill rather important purposes. Without standards and best practices, we wouldn't know how we should do things. Without compliance to the defined rules there would be chaos. Or actually, there is chaos... Because the standards and best practices for the web are not being followed completely at all. The World Wide Web Foundation is responsible for the definition of such rules, and continuously works to improve and strengthen the possibilities for web developers, by providing a flexible, yet standardized compendium of possibilities. However, even though ...

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 ...

It's a common problem amongh developers that insufficiently or no documentation of code causes problems, delays, misunderstandings. Even code you wrote yourself could look really strange after a while, when you no longer remember what's exactly going on. At this point a good documentation could help you save time and nerves. PhpDocumentor is a good script that generates documentation for your code based on inline comments in your script files. It can generate various output formats, has different themes, and is very customizable. It only requires that you actually commend your code. You can read how to comment your code easily in the PhpDocumentor manual. There are a ...

Many hobby and professional web developers use Wordpress, Joomal, Drupal or similar open-source content management systems for their own or clients' websites. They are great systems for various purposes. Quick to install, easy to understand and highly customizable. Unfortunately many are struggling with their own design. Some working with own custom design, some working with templates. Creating good quality design templates is quite a lot of work, especially if the template should support the vast amount of functionality found in most content management systems. Therefore many web developers are struggling to create a good looking website from scratch. Also many use free templates of poor quality, which is a shame. If ...

I realized that many of my friends are still not aware of, or using, the smart new synchronization and backup applications available out there. So to all of you who might be in the same boat, I just want to remind you: Backups are good, synchronization is clever. It's even available for free. Don't wanna be in an "I told you so..."-situation, when your loose some important files some day! So please check out this previous article. It's really easy, and it could save your day. Ever since I started using a notebook I have had the same annoying problem that everyone else seems to have: How to go about syncing data between multiple ...

Earth Hour 2011 seems to have been a great success. We introduced you to the event in this post. On March 27th 2011 at 20:30 local time many places went dark. Around the globe even entire cities participated, shutting down large amounts of energy consuming lights in streets and buildings. While possible negative effects on power grids, and the question of an overall positive effect on energy concumption from this event can be argued, the fact remains, that many people in a record 134 participating countries made a statement. We are aware of the problem. You can read how the Earth Hour progressed in an official press release, among ...

The World Wildlife Foundation is trying to get the world to shut of it's lights for the Earth Hour again this year. On their website they have released the following information about the event, which I find is a nice statement from the people, showing the will, not only to think, but also to act, greener. Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights off for one hour to take a stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. ...

The web has a plethora of content management systems (CMS) available. Many are similar: Require installation, complex functionality, difficult to use. Few are easy and straightforward. Even fewer are hosted. Almost none of them are for free. I am not going to present the regular candidates like Typo3, Drupal etc., but I would like to direct your attention towards a never, more innovative way of managing the content of your website. CushyCMS offers quite a cool way of managing your website. It requires nothing but FTP access to your hosting account, and a few attributes in your HTML code (templates). CushyCMS works in a way, that allows you ...

And here we go again... Valentines Day 2011 is coming up, and yet again many females set high expectations and wishes for this day, which males run around all confused with all this emotional, flowery stuff and try to fulfill. It's one of those typical situations where male and female in many cases are predetermined to end up in conflict, because their views on certain aspects of life are just so fundamentally different. Now please, don't be insulted that this article is taking a very conservative view of the whole Valentines Day concept and relations between men and women. Not to forget about same-sex couples etc. This is merely meant ...

The Servage Facebook page has been around for about two years now. Initially it got quite a lot of members, reaching the first 1,000 quite fast. Unfortunately the amount of fans has been somewhat boringly constant for a while now, moving up and down around 1,900 people. It's nice to get so much feedback here and on Facebook, and it would be nice to see Servage pass the 2,000 mark on the Facebook page soon! Servage on Facebook: Click here! Please join our efforts and share our page with people you know use Servage, or people you might think could benefit from using Servage. Don't forget to give them ...