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

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

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

Sauce Labs – Cross Browser Testing

Cross browser testing is a notoriously cumbersome problem. When developing web applications or websites any decent web developer or designer will try to test her work not only on her local machine, browser and operating system combination but will strive to cover as many reasonable environments that hold a certain market share as possible. Provisioning all those configurations with every possible combination of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer and OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS can cause quite some headaches, not ...

Wednesday December 12th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Publishing for tablets – A market ripe for disruption

This week there were two quite intriguing posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog: Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type Publishers shouldn't be app developers Both posts deal with the shortcomings of magazine and newspaper publishing for tablets like the iPad. Currently, publishing for the iPad and other tablets mostly amounts to magazine publishers writing native apps that wrap their content. Given that magazine publishers usually don't specialize in software development more often than not this entails slow, unstable apps and a generally ...

Sunday December 2nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

New publishing tools

Recently, I came across a few interesting publishing tools: ShareLaTeX allows you to collaboratively edit LaTeX documents: https://www.sharelatex.com Anthologize is aWordPress plugin with which you can export the content of a WordPress blog as an eBook: http://anthologize.org Docverter is an open source server software that allows you to convert markup formats such as HTML, Markdown or LaTeX into print publishing formats like PDF or EPUB: http://www.docverter.com, source code: https://github.com/docverter/docverter These tools should be very interesting to those who produce online content and would like to ...

Saturday November 24th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.