My Blog has been quiet, OK… very quiet. I have tried my darndest to find time (and energy) to write BUT I have failed. I have happy reasons for that. I have been amazingly busy trying to juggle work and all round general company growth. So much so that I am now recruiting permanent staff and looking for offices.

Its time to move on from my home office, I need to feel like I am progressing. Getting ever nearer to whatever it is we all work towards… which to this day I still don’t know what that is.

If you have any of the following skills and are based in Leicester then get in touch.

• Print / Web Design
• Marketing / Strategic planning / Sales
• SEO
• Web Development (esp. ASP.Net/C# and PHP)

Looking for freelancers, local companies and job hunters. (no agencies)

Was sent this today from a friend, thought it looked amazing enough to share with you all.

For a while now, I have been using Microsoft’s Fiddler to help capture http traffic between the browser and the server. This helps in debugging requests made from flash and Ajax applications. I upgraded to the latest version of Fiddler and have found it to randomly not capture certain requests, which until I realised that was the case, was focusing on areas which I thought weren’t working.

Whilst searching for an alternative, I stumbled across ServiceCapture by Kevin Langdon (http://www.kevinlangdon.com/serviceCapture/) and so far I am mightily impressed.

Its ease of use and simple interface makes debugging a much less painful experience.

It can capture the following types of requests:

One feature I feel is missing is the ability to reissue requests. When developing flash applications, it can take several clicks and submissions before you get to the screen which makes the request that you are debugging. If the code still doesn’t work, the only way to re-test is to hit refresh in the browser and work you way through the flash movie again. What would be much easier is if you could right click on a request and select “Re-issue”.

Initially, I struggled to get it working with Firefox. To get it working requires the use of a javascript file. There is a guide here explaining what you need to do. If you do encounter issues or have questions, the forum is a great place to start.

Despite that, and for the price, it has already saved me many hours of debugging.

Whilst working hard I stumbled across a site which mentioned yet another Mozilla project.

Prism (formerly Webrunner) is desktop based browser that doesn’t have all the baggage that a normal browser has, such as plugins and extensions. So much so that it is becoming known as a “distraction free browser”. It allows you to run one web application per one instance of Prism.

It works by creating shortcuts to Prism passing in parameters which you set in the shortcut creation panel, parameters such as application URL and various window settings. Then simply clicking on the shortcut opens up Prism and takes you directly to the application.

This means you could end up with shortcuts to your favourite sites and applications within your programs menu. Good eh?… I think.

At the moment, each window is the same. Which makes this a simple, cut down browser. Which you’d expect as it sits on top of Firefox anyway. I just can’t see why you would want this? It is being regarded as an application that sits alongside Adobe AIR and Silverlight (kind of..) yet it all it appears to do is load the web application as it does in a browser (admittedly, a hell of a lot quicker).

What would be great is if it could manage the toolbar by creating buttons based on the bundle. For example, the Gmail bundle would create buttons such as “Check for new mail” or “Compose”. Or a Facebook bundle for the many Facebook actions.

At the moment, I can’t see why anyone would want to use Prism over a normal browser. Development is still in its early stages so hopefully future releases will shed more light on the direction Mozilla are planning to take it.

More information:

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/10/24/prism/
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

As good as Gmail is at filtering spam. It would be nice if it would stop putting all emails sent from my web form into the spam folder. As you have probably guessed, enquiries are not actioned until I, by chance, browse my spam folder.

Setting filters and classifying emails as “not spam” makes no difference.

The only solution is to set the from address to be something like “contactform@mysite.com” and adding the email address as a contact. Gmail recognises it as a friend and doesn’t place it in your spam folder. (Remember to include the senders proper email in the body. :) )