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Channel: Ben Werdmuller » Software development
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Creating a British Silicon Valley

I wrote a piece on David Cameron’s proposed East London tech city for Imperica: There is a simple difference between the business cultures in London and San Francisco. The former provides the...

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Open data in the arts

I’m in New York this week for a whirlwind series of meetings with Team Latakoo, but I wanted to draw a little attention to the introduction to open data in the arts I wrote over on the festivalslab...

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2011: happy new year

I’m a little late to the party for end-of-year wrapup / start-of-year prediction posts. Instead, I thought I’d write about some of the things I’m looking forward to playing with this year. Vanquishing...

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Making money with open source

If you’re going to do something, do it well I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open source business models. The project I’m most often associated with, Elgg, developed a business some two years...

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Why HP’s take on WebOS could be a very big deal

Yesterday, HP finally delivered an iPad competitor I can get excited about, not just by creating an elegant piece of hardware, but by taking a step back and outthinking their competition. Unlike the...

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Onflood

Friday night was sleepless for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple idea I had, riffing off of Color and some of the technology I’d built for OutMap: What if you could hook messages, photos,...

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httpID: adding identity to standard HTTP requests

This is a more technical post than I’ve been writing lately. I’m considering splitting out into two blog channels; let me know if you’d prefer this. This is a request for comments and ideas. Please let...

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Bonita: a PHP template manager with lofty ambitions

I’m fed up of using the same PHP template pattern over and over in my web apps, so I decided to write it from scratch and iterate on some core ideas. And then open source it under an Apache 2.0...

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Does open source exclude high-context cultures?

Something to think about for anyone starting any online community: High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with...

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Identity is the operating system

I’ve got a phone number: +1 (312) 488-9373. Feel free to call or text it. If I’m walking around, you’ll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I’m in transit (but not driving), you’ll probably get me on...

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Grassroutes: how three students helped save the Internet

Like many of you, I blacked out my site for the protests against SOPA and PIPA. These are bad laws that describe themselves as being anti-piracy but will hinder business, destroy jobs, undermine the...

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Bootstrapping Elgg

In my twenties, as part of a two-person team, I co-founded and bootstrapped a social networking platform that would end up being used by organizations like Oxfam, the World Bank, the Australian...

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You can’t empower users by targeting ads

Scott Hanselman has a great take on platforms and ownership on the web: Why doesn’t someone make a free or cheap social network for the people? Why can’t I control my content? Why can’t I export...

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More secure password hashing in PHP 5.5

The most recent set of PHP releases suggest that the core development team are serious about keeping PHP at the forefront of web development technology, and addressing some of its legacy criticisms....

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Who to host with (domain names, web space, SSL, DNS)

I’m sometimes asked who I recommend buying web infrastructure from. Here’s my list based on my personal experience: Domains | SSL | DNS | Shared hosting | Dedicated hosting | Transactional email |...

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Facebook Graph Search is super-powerful – if all your friends obsessively...

Facebook’s new Graph Search is an exceptionally powerful idea. Here are some searches I’m looking forward to running: Bars my friends like in San Francisco My friends who like Doctor Who and live near...

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Using PHP closures with the observer pattern

PHP 5.3 introduced the concept of anonymous functions, often called closures. These have been present in languages like JavaScript for a long time, and have been incorporated into PHP as part of its...

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Silos, the open web, and selfdogfooding

Tantek Çelik has written an important post about silos vs an open, social web: The answer is not to not “only [be] relevant to geeks”, but rather, reframe it as a positive, and be relevant to yourself....

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Engine attribution

This site is (right now) powered by the WordPress open source blogging engine. If you hit “view source” in your browser, somewhere near the top, this is what you’ll see: <meta name="generator"...

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The Progressive (Profitable) Web

Ryan Holiday laments the loss of Google Reader and RSS in general in Our Regressive Web, arguing that if someone came up with them today, we’d think they were brilliant ideas: Nothing better has risen...

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