Vidali ConsultingInformation Technology solutions

With Spring almost upon us, millions of people will start to dust off bikes that have been idle all winter, and set out to get some air in the lungs. (Or if you are one of the hardened few who make it through the winter on a bicycle, you will merely rummage around for the mud guards.) But mapping out a route for a nice ride isn’t always easy, even though free web-based satellite-coordinated maps have been available for years. Programmed for maximum automotive efficiency, MapQuest and Google Maps will sooner give you directions to the highway than the bikeable scenic route. Thankfully, there are better ways to map a bike route.

Map My Ride is a great service which utilizes the Google Maps API to overlay custom bike mapping features that can automatically calculate elevation changes, start and stop points, loops, and caloric burn. (They also created Map My Run if jogging is more your forté.) What’s more is that you can save routes, maintain a training log, and they’ll even calculate your CO2 offset based on the mileage you’re not driving. Another indespensible feature is the ability to stray from roads and continue mapping coordinates, which is essential for mountain bike mapping, or loops through parks which don’t have mapped roads.

Today Google itself announced bike mapping is a new feature in Maps, allowing you to select “Bicycling” when you map directions, just as they now offer public transit (in limited areas) and walking directions. The features are more pronounced in major cities they chose to focus on (think California), where bike lanes and bike trails are specially color coded. One nice feature is the travel time estimation like driving directions have, though it doesn’t take long to figure out that they use 10 MPH as your rate of speed, which is on the low side for regular road riders.

All in all, picking out new bike routes just got a lot easier and more exciting, so get out there and get some fresh air!

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Developing a web app is no small task…unless you have a small web app to develop! Increasingly, Ruby is being used as the cloud platform of choice, and several micro platforms have been spun off as tools to develop fast, clean, tiny apps. Camping is a micro framework for Ruby, while Sinatra is essentially a library that incorporates everything you need to start working with GET/POST HTTP requests.

Once you’ve developed your micro app, deployment becomes an interesting quandary. Why overpay for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) so you can install all the necessary runtimes, when your web app is actually small enough to run on the most basic of shared hosting accounts? That’s where Heroku comes in. Heroku lets you deploy your apps right from GitHub with just two lines of code, and you can scale your piece of the server pie from a basic free slice to a big slice. It’s a great way to invest small for your small projects and get them running ASAP.

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Everyone knows that YouTube has a bazillion servers. CNN has an army of them. Amazon’s AWS cloud hosting pops up on tons of sites, and boasts an array of thousands of PCs linked together as database servers. What’s a small website operator to do when there’s no budget for fancy but there’s a need for speed? The answer is CacheFly, incredibly fast file hosting for the rest of us. Officially called a CDN, for Content Delivery Network, CacheFly gives you an FTP account and provides a static link that will deliver your content from one of their very fast servers around the globe. There’s a 30 day trial to get you started, and then the basic plan gives you 300MB of storage for $15 a month. That’s enough storage to host all the images and videos on most blogs and e-commerce sites, and they’re dynamically load balanced across the globe. If you have a lot of customers in Australia, they’ll get the Australian server for your media, and so forth. Other companies like Akamai, EdgeCast, and Limelight won’t even give you pricing on their pages, and are geared toward the large sites with big budgets.

But how do you test how fast your website actually was or is? That’s where Pingdom comes in. They have free tools that will create reports with your website load time down to a tenth of a second, and break it down into each individual element of your page. (There’s also paid services for monitoring your uptime if you’re a sysadmin.) Run a Pingdom load time test before you remap your images to CacheFly, and then run it after. I cut page load times by a third as soon as I switched the image links to CacheFly. In the e-commerce game, load times can make or break a customer’s experience. Even if your site isn’t mission critical, it’s worth a look to see how easy it is to make your site faster, for a small pile of cash.

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It’s been a busy few weeks so I haven’t had time to write up comprehensive evaluations of some of the tools I’ve been using, but here’s a quick rundown of some useful resources for independent contractors and work-from-home computer folks.

Button Generator – This flash-based button generator makes shiny buttons that you can export as PNGs in a jiffy. Great for prototyping quick projects, or sprucing up a graphic.

The Invoice Machine – This is a great web based invoice generator that allows you to create professional invoices quickly, and even generates PDFs and billing notifications for you. The basic level is free; heavy users pay nominal monthly fees.

Survey Monkey – Create free surveys instantly with this very intuitive tool. Design web forms that are radio buttons, checkboxes, comment forms…you name it. Get better feedback from clients with specific questions.

Google Chat Badge – Use Gmail for business? Set up a chat badge and put LiveSupport-type chat on your website whenever you’re online for free. There is a lag if you sign off (generally I’ve found 10-15 minutes) but the price can’t be beat, and there’s no server-side coding.

Noupe’s Handy Design Tools List – A great rundown on 40 different web tools to help design sites, graphics, and even some AJAX and Javascript code.

DigiVendor – Have digital content that you want to sell but can’t figure out a good, easy way how? DigiVendor is a low cost way to sell music, PDFs, graphics, software or anything that is downloadable. It uses the PayPal shopping cart (which has no monthly fee) and can be tied into any web hosting account that has PHP and MySQL installed.

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