my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Presentation on i18n and Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails

Linguistic Potluck: Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer is a great presentation on the intricacies of web app internationalization, its linguistic implications and some awesome solutions to the most common i18n-related issues.

Backgrid.js – Tool Set For Creating Data Grids With Backbone.js

Backgrid.js is a toolset for creating data grids with Backbone.js. It simplifies creation and population of data grids as well as common data grid operations like sorting and pagination.

Sunday February 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Developing with Apache Wicket

I've been working with Apache Wicket on a rather complex client project for quite some time now and I'd like to share my experience. Apache Wicket is a component-based web app framework for Java. In contrast to MVC frameworks such as Rails (or Play and Grails in the Java world), which map requests to controller actions and views, Wicket is more similar to stateful GUI frameworks like Swing. Wicket applications are made up of trees of components. Each Wicket page is a root ...

Sunday January 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Live Tools For Building Website Elements

Ui Parade have released a series of design tools that allow you to have common website elements generated in HTML / CSS: http://livetools.uiparade.com These tools include: Button Builder Form Builder Icon Bulder Ribbon Builder Have a look at Ui Parade's actual website, too. It lists quite a bunch of useful and inspiring design elements.

Sunday January 20th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Regexper: Visualize Regular Expressions

Regexper is a new visualization tool that renders regular expressions as the equivalent finite-state machines. Very cool stuff, give it a try.

Sunday January 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

WordPress Child Themes

A few days ago I read a very useful tip regarding customizing WordPress themes and why you should use child themes for that. In short, child themes allow you to extend and customize existing WordPress themes without compromising the ability to update the original theme. If instead you directly customized a theme your changes would be lost once you install an update (or have that update installed automatically).

Sunday January 6th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Collaborating with GitHub and Dropbox

Git and GitHub are awesome tools for developers. Version control systems have been used for quite some time and for good reasons. Git, its distributed approach and GitHub's social coding features like pull requests for instance have introduced a whole new dimension to collaborative software development. However, when working with non-coders (e.g. graphic designers) on projects using Git for managing source files like CSS and JavaScript assets that have to be touched by both developers and web designers can prove to be ...

Sunday December 23rd, 2012 by Bjoern in Software

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations.

Thursday December 20th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Numbers: A Mathematics Toolkit For node.js / JavaScript

Numbers is an advanced mathematics toolkit for JavaScript and Node.js developed by Steve Kaliski, @sjkaliski: Numbers provides a comprehensive set of mathematical tools that currently are not offered in JavaScript. These tools include: Basic calculations Calculus Matrix Operations Prime Numbers Statistics Very interesting stuff.

Tuesday December 18th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ...

Sunday December 16th, 2012 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.