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How many times have you found yourself editing and tuning up CSS or JavaScript code right in the browser, then refreshing the page only to lose all of your changes? Improving development workflows can help web developers to be more efficient and deliver a higher quality final product.

Paid content and circulation have always been a mainstay of the magazine publishing business (with the exception of controlled circulation magazines). And prior to the advent of the Internet, it was, for the most part, the norm for readers to pay for magazine content, either by purchasing a newsstand copy, or by buying a subscription. The same has not been true for magazines online.

In a previous blog post we covered how to create custom tags in eZ Platform (with the legacy bridge or eZ Publish 5.x). The most difficult part of that process was building the XSL to output the custom tag HTML. But there's a simpler way to do it, which allows the developer to use Twig template code instead of XSL.

I first came across SendGrid while configuring a Google Cloud Compute Engine instance. Google blocks standard SMTP ports and suggests users route mail through third-party e-mail delivery services like SendGrid. These services offset the work of maintaining IP-based e-mail reputation and provide additional tools for contact management, e-mail marketing, and compliance with CAN-SPAM requirements. 

With a sleek, modern UI, well-documented web API, and helper libraries in seven languages, SendGrid stands out in this space. Though it does not bill itself as a marketing automation platform, SendGrid’s rule-based segmentation, white-label click-tracking, inbound parse webhooks, and transactional messaging -- all free -- are comparable to Bronto, Oracle’s enterprise marketing automation platform.

In the realm of digital publishing, there’s no shortage of creative ideas, but not every business idea is suitable for magazine publishers. Sometimes it’s prudent to stick with tried and true innovations, or to emulate those who have had proven success.

Like many magazine publishers, Habitat Magazine has a long history of creating quality content targeted to its specialized audience: property managers and condo board members in the New York area. But, with its potential audience maxing out at about 7,500 subscribers, Habitat has had to get creative with digital media opportunities that have enabled it to repurpose and leverage its content in order to grow. 

If you deliver print content such as a magazine or newsletter to a subscribed user base, you should be targeting a digital solution.

As a project manager on a web project, you have to be the hub for editors, marketers, developers, designers, IT staff, clients, and a plethora of other stakeholders as the team works together to plan, build, and launch the website or application. While managing the people, scope, timeline, and budget, you need to find the most efficient way for everybody to get things done. The best way to achieve this is to make unblocking others your primary responsibility.

For most content-based websites, success comes down to a trio of critical metrics: traffic, engagement, and revenue. These success metrics can also be expressed as a conversion path: you drive traffic to your site via content and marketing strategies that engage your audience, and this converts to revenue via ads, sponsored content, paid subscriptions, or otherwise.

Dealing with permissions and security systems such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is an issue that seems to challenge many developers. Some enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat and CentOS come with SELinux enabled by default, but not knowing how SELinux works can lead developers to disable it. This is a mistake.

I recently did a performance review for a server setup running more than 200 websites. The infrastructure is hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS). It contains multiple web servers behind multiple Varnish caching servers, uses Relational Database Service (RDS) for database storage, and uses Elastic File System (EFS) for storing assets like content images and documents. There were several areas of performance optimization to be done, which was a good development exercise and resulted in an improved user experience. Most importantly, though, the results also saved bandwidth; reduced the number of servers, number of CPUs, and amount of RAM required; and saved money! A faster site also improves SEO, which will drive more visitors / customers to your site, and will increase conversions.

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