This blog is back

After a (too) long hiatus I finally decided to get rid of the cobwebs and write here again. I didn't have lots of cool ideas to discuss so I decided to start a new pet project to give me some inspiration. After few weekends this is what I came up with:

1. Eventfy (http://www.eventfy.com), a simple web tool to setup events. You can use Eventfy instead of group emails to organize and track events. You can even setup conditional events like those poker (or RPG) games you can't confirm yet because you're not sure enough people will show up. In this case, once enough people confirm their presence Eventfy automatically notifies everybody that the game is on. If not enough people confirmed by the deadline you set Eventfy sends an event cancellation note to all invited. Thanks to responsive design techniques all functions work great from computers and from small devices like smartphones and tables.
2. Pingr (http://pingr.eventfy.com), a basic web-based availability monitoring tool. Just enter a URL from your site and Pingr will monitor it for you. If the site goes down or performance (ping or download speed) drops below normal thresholds it will quickly send you a notification.
3. Eventfy Blog (http://blog.eventfy.com), where I will post updates about anything hosted in the Eventfy.com domain.

These are quite simple projects but they are mobile-friendly (the screens won't look crappy on smaller screens and as such users won't have to zoom in / out in iPhone and iPad) and  it can transparently scale to meet the demand (hosted on Google App Engine's PaaS solution).

Check out after the break all the different topics I am planning to discuss here soon, all inspired from my experiences with Google cloud platform, public internet domains, responsive websites, HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and more.

I spent just few weekends on these small projects but I end up getting inspired (and thankfully a bit more knowledgeable too) to write about and share code / details on the following topics:

• Blogging platforms: Wordpress vs Blogger
• Custom domains
• How to find a good name for cheap
• Setup DNS zones: A, CNAME, MX etc
• Centralize multiple services in Google Apps for free
• Use it to manage your custom domain and get
• email addresses like yourname@yourdomain.com backed by Gmail
• many Google services like Blogger, Calendar, Gmail, Docs mapped to URLs like blog.yourdomain.com, calendar.yourdomain.com, mail.yourdomain.com etc
• Integrate with your Google App Engine projects
• Cloud computing on the cheap
• PaaS vs IaaS
• Google App Engine vs Amazon
• Google AdSense in websites and mobile sites
• Set up ads (and get $$$) on responsive websites
• Build responsive modern-looking websites with HTML5 + Twitter Bootstrap + jQuery
• A single site for both computers, smartphones and all in-between
• Kickstart your project with H5BP
• Start from a boilerplate project with Initializr
• Bootstrap themes
• Functional web tests with Selenium
• A simple way to escape user input and prevent code and sql injection attacks
• Cool graphs with jqPlot
• User authentication with OAuth, Google Accounts

• Don't spend time writing your own auth mechanism
• Let users securely sign in with their Google or Facebook accounts

• Resource optimization in Google App Engine
• Reduce datastore I/O with caching
• Improve performance with batch operations
• Date and time hell - yes, this is more complicated than you think
• Timezone conversions
• Internal vs Human friendly formats (e.g. server uses UTC)
• Device-specific date / time formats
• Datetime picker mechanism that works with both PC and iOS devices
• Google App Engine cron tasks
• iCalendar attachments in emails
• Website performance optimization
• LESS vs CSS in the real world
• Build responsive UIs with AJAX and JSON
• Message templates in Java

I am happy with all the different ideas and fun these projects gave me so far. If you ever find yourself looking for ideas to write about try starting up / build something new and I am sure you too will find lots of cool things to discuss.

If you are interested in any of this just keep an eye here or subscribe and you will find updates on these topics - in no particular order - pretty soon. Until then feel free to give Eventfy and Pingr a try and leave me a comment to let me know what you think.