BigBlueHat

Last month, BigBlueHat had it’s 7th anniversary! It’s hard to believe that we’ve been building web sites and applications for so long. Two years ago, we threw a little shindig for our 5th anniversary. This year, we’re celebrating a bit differently: we’re expanding!

First, the Past

Seven years a go, Benjamin Young (President of BigBlueHat), started out to build a web design and development company that would make life easier for his clients and friends. The early years were focused on building simple sites for small companies on Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS’s) such as Mambo and Joomla!. As our client’s needs changed, so did we. The Open Source CMS’s of the day didn’t provide the flexibility that we all wanted and needed–and they all lacked the usability Benjamin cares so much about. So, we built BlueInk–our very own “over the top” CMS that lets editors view their sites while editing. You may have seen it, used it, or heard of it. If not, we’d love for you to check it out http://blueinkcms.com/ To date, we have now built over 100 sites on BlueInk! We’re pretty proud of the little guy…

Second, the Present

Open Source has played a huge roll in everything we’ve done for the past 7 years, but our contributions to Open Source were mostly small lines of code, the occasional documentation paragraph, and general promotion and support in various forums and mailing lists. A few months ago (does that count as present?), we made a decision we’d put off too long. We decided to jump into the Open Source world full tilt by building a rewrite of BlueInk as an Open Source project on a relatively new database called CouchDB. If you’re into this sort of thing (as we obviously are!), you can checkout the code at http://github.com/BigBlueHat/BlueInk

This was a huge decision for us! Building something as broad as a CMS is rewarding and challenging. Doing it with a world-wide community of like minded developers extends the reward (and the challenge) to an even greater level. Open Source is a strange and exciting world and we’re excited to now be more completely a part of it.

Third, the Future

These past seven years have shown us that “going it alone” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Open Sourcing BlueInk has introduced us to the power of community and the powerful other people can play in our business, products, and ideas.

Today, we’re announcing that BigBlueHat will be transforming into a new, stronger company! We are forming a partnership with a long term, local affiliate, Exact Solutions. This new partnership will be known as Exactly, Inc. and will combine the BigBlueHat ideas, products, and services with Exact Solutions’ fabulous and experienced support and management team.

In the short term, hosting and technical support will be improving (due to the additional hands on deck). We’ll also be releasing some long awaited BlueInk documentation. Beyond that we’ll be making new product announcements, upgrade opportunities, and hosting package improvements.

We’ll be making more detailed announcements over the coming weeks as we form the partnership and role out the new products and improved support.

Last, the Thanks

Each of you have played an important role in BigBlueHat’s growth over the years. Thank you for being a part of this business, choosing our products, and helping us grow through your feedback, ideas, and purchases. We look forward to many more years of service to you, our clients and friends.

On a related note, Benjamin Young, BigBlueHat’s founder, has recently accepted a full time position with CouchOne–the company started by the creator of CouchDB. The Open Sourcing of BlueInk created more opportunities than we’d first imagined! Benjamin will still be an active part of Exaclty, Inc. working primiarily in a consulting and planning role–think Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He’ll still be very much around, but will primarily be in the background cooking up crazy new inventions and charting BlueInk’s continued growth.

If you’ve made it this far, you have our thanks. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to write us. We’ll be sending out several more e-mails over the coming weeks to introduce you to the new team, services, and products.

Thank you again for all you’ve done with and for us over the years.

Your’s very truly,
BigBlueHat

Friday, September 17, 2010 at 8:00 AM - Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 6:00 PM (ET) Greenville, SC

Co-Chairs: Mike Amundsen & Benjamin Young

REST Fest 2010 (Sep 17th & 18th)

REST Fest is a community unconference event focused on the REST architectural style and implementations. This year, REST Fest will encourage developers who have direct experience building RESTful applications for the World Wide Web to share their successes and their frustrations in an informal atmosphere. REST Fest will also maintain a “Hack Room” open throughout the two-day event where attendees can get together and work on any project they like. http://restfest.org

Call for Presenters

In the spirit of the “Unconference” model, all talks are automatically accepted as a “Lightning Talk” (Five Slides in Five Minutes). Presenters are encouraged to submit a title, short abstract (250 or less), and an indication of the “level” of the talk (beginner, intermediate, advanced). “How To…” talks are encouraged as well as “How Do I?” talks. A small number of talks will be chosen as “Selected Talks” with a format of 30+ minutes. Break out sessions will be added as desired by the attendees. http://restfest2010.eventbrite.com/

Workshop: Hypermedia Hacking with Mike Amundsen (Sep 17th)

In this one-day pre-event workshop, attendees will learn how to implement an alternative to one-off Web APIs using Hypermedia Engines. The all-day session includes a mix of presentation, discussion, and hands-on implementation. Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops and “code-along” with supplied examples throughout the day. http://www.restfest.org/schedule/workshop

While working with some older PHP projects we’re migrating to our servers for some clients, I’ve run into a number of “unwanted whitespace” errors in PHP code. Unwanted whitespace can cause header output errors when they proceed a header call, or causing binary files loaded with readfile to break.

Typically, the cause of these errors has been the use of ?> followed by one or more whitespace characters. The extra whitespace was either added by the original author (and overlooked thanks to a low error_reporting level) or by a none-too-helpful FTP client.

After spending too long hunting down the whitespace (made necessary by the use of unnecessary code), I Twittered about the problem and a deluge of discussion followed.

Tradition and Convention vs. Need

According to the PHP manual on the topic of instruction separation, the use of ?> at the end of a file is completely optional. That said, the use of ?> has been standard fare for decades. At this point in history, most of us are so used to seing it dangling uselessly at the bottom of our code, that removing it feels painful or even dangerous.

Personally, I’d never thought to question it’s existence until I read the Doctrine ORM for PHP coding standards. Coding standards typically consist of a four spaces vs. tab debate, where one should put one’s curly braces, and class naming conventions. When I read Doctrine’s, I was surprised to find them start out with the requiring that ?> not be used at the end of files.

Since then, I’ve found other projects that require it be left off and, most recently, spent hours frustrated by the fact that someone before me didn’t leave it off.

Necessity, the Mother of Invention Convention

There seems to be growing movement among projects to drop the use of ?>. Most PHP coders, however, aren’t a part of those project. Many of us stumble across these things by accident, and overlook them as an oddity of a particular project (as I originally did with Doctrine) rather than a best practice for all PHP code. My hope is that my Twittering about it, this blog post, and subsequent debate/promotion/usage of the practice will save us all time down the road.

Discontinuing the use of ?> where it’s not needed is one way we can make the world a better place. No longer using PHP 3 and 4 and moving to PHP 5 would also help, but that’s another blog post.

My vision for the future of the web (which I’ve been quite on for too long now) matches up with Google’s in many ways. That said, I’d be saddened if the only way to a better future went through the doors of a single company.

What’s needed is an ever increasing use and creation of open standards so we can all move up the innovation ladder or at least make that forward momentum generally available.

Perhaps the Cloud computing “movement” presents this opportunity in some ways. Tim Bray’s thought that PHP’s ubiquity may help this hope may point to a broader way forward–especially when it plays well with other languages via extensions and remote data stores like CouchDB and other web services.

BigBlueHat’s role in this will hopefully continue to increase. We’re doing things “here and there” at the moment as we continue to bootstrap our way to a successful CMS market share. In the future, though, we hope to give more, participate in more, and promote more of what we believe the web should be.

Sure we’re small, rural, etc, but here’s a shot at helping put our little company and/or product on the map. If you’ve used BlueInk, and believe it’s worthy of the Best App Award, we’d love to have you cast your vote.

If you’ve not yet tried BlueInk, we’d at least like to have you check it out at the BlueInk Demo Site.

Thanks in advance for whichever you have time to do.