Tony Abou-Assaleh

After a recent report by Mobile Crunch that the mobile location-based game Booyah has outgrown Foursquares and Gowalla reaching 1 million mobile users, combined with recent reports on the future of the Web at top conferences on the subject, and affirmed by recent trends in VC’s investing strategies in the IT sector, I have become convinced that the future of the Web is in mobile apps and not Web-based applications, sometimes referred to as “software as a service”.

In the last decade, we have witnessed a revolution in Web app design both in terms of the user experience and the richness of functionality. Arguable, the most successful and revolutionary Web app for consumers has been Gmail, and more recently Google Apps. Facebook is another great example of a Web app, with more social focus. All is good, and more Web apps are coming, but then what?

While the laptop is becoming a replacement to the desktop for many, smart phones such as iPhone and Blackberry are becoming a replacement for laptops. The new trend in mobile consumer usage, set by Apple’s iPhone and followed by RIM’s Blackberry and Google’s Android, is to access services and information through apps instead of mobile-friendly websites. Is your website optimized for mobile access? Big deal – new mobile browser can render most websites in a usable fashion. But who cares? If you don’t have an app to access your site then it’s simply boring. I believe boring is not the main reason though. It all boils down to the look and feel. Mobile apps provide a consistent look and feel with the rest of the mobile interface, a lot more so that a Web page does.

Based on these trends, I believe that the value of “software as a service” as being the future of desktop apps for consumers will slowly (or quickly?) diminish; while mobile apps will increase in sophistication and become the norm for accessing your email, social networks, documents, spreadsheets, organizer, etc.

Some may argue that the desktop, or the laptop, will still be ahead in software due to the limited screen size that mobile devices affords. Apple has negated that claim last month with the release of its iPad. QED.

As of today, the following plugins are active on this site:

1. Akismet: A popular anti-spam plugin the screens and blocks spammy comments
2. All in One SEO Pack: it gives a great flexibility in editing meta tags for individual posts and pages, but I use it most of it’s out-of-the-box good templates for default meta-tag values.
3. bib2html: With some in-house mods, this plugin powers the the publications page from a BibTeX file. Very convenient.
4. Exec-PHP: I use this plugin to execute PHP code on the popular posts page.
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: provides RSS feed serving through FeedBurner.
6. File Icons: the idea behind this plugin is neat, it automatically ads meaningful icons to links based on the extension of the destination file. I’m not too happy with it though. I feel it’s a bit clumsy at times. See it in action on the publications page.
7. Google Analyticator: simple Google Analytics integration
8. Google XML Sitemaps: very useful plugin that automatically generates a site map every time a new post is added. Highly configurable too.
9. WordPress Popular Posts: a new addition to the site. It power the popular posts widget in the right column as well as the popular posts page. The popularity can be based on page views or comments.
10. WP-ContactForm: I use a modified version of this plugin to power the contact page.
11. WP-SpamFree: Another plugin to reduce comment spam. It shows the comment form through JavaScript, reducing automated comments.

By now, it should be clear to everyone that the future of the Web is mobile devices, social networking, and linked data. Although this realization did not come to me until I attended the World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009) in Madrid, Spain, at the end of April. Several keynote speakers, tutorials/workshops, and dedicated tracks and sessions emphasized this fact. I’ll say a few word on each of the three pillars:

Mobile Web

As Sir Tim Burners-Lee said in his keynote presentation: “more people will have their first encounter with the Web through a mobile device than a laptop.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has task forces and standards to promote and standardize the mobile Web. They’ve been doing it for years, but only now that people are listening seriously because it is already happening.

What this means to the Web community is that Web sites should have a mobile version that conforms to standards and guidelines and works well on mobile devices.

Social Networking

It is a given that social networks are taking over the Web. But that’s not what “the future of the Web is social networking” means. Social networking on the Web refers to enabling the end users to interact with each other on your Web site. Without this interaction, your site will fail to deliver the expected value by the growing savvy Web population.

Linked Data

The Semantic Web is dubbed as Web 3.0. Many believe that a widespread of the Semantic Web is at least a decade away. Linked Data, on the hand, is already a reality. Linked data consists of the now-feasible subset of the Semantic Web. At the very basic level, it is RDF + URI: a common data representation format and standard for addressing and linking data items. The academic community emphasizes the important of Linked Open Data – making your proprietary databases accessible on the Web in the Linked Data format. This movement is new but strong. Many tools are being developed to facilitate the transition to Linked Data for the masses.

Summary

In short, as a Web site owner, if you want to survive on the Web for the years to come, you better ensure that your site is accessible from mobile devices, that you facilitate social interaction among your users, and that your data is open and linked, and linkable.

Thanks to Christopher Gutteridge for this wonderful tool to search and browse the WWW2009 proceedings.

I’ve been trying to upgrade to the latest WordPress (version 2.7.1) for a while without success. Every time I initiate the upgrade, whether through WordPress’ built-in automatic upgrade feature or using the automatic upgrade plugin, the process stalls when it reaches the step of downloading the latest zip file. After checking the the compatibility matrix I discovered that my hosting provider, 1and1, runs PHP4 by default, which incompatible with the upgrade script. This problem can be easily fixed by forcing PHP5. This can be achieved by adding the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

The django official tutorial consists of 4 parts, unnecessarily long, mixes commands with text, and omit some important details. Here is an attempt at providing a more complete and more condensed version of the tutorial.
Continue reading ‘Stripped-down Django Tutorial’

This article is in-progress.

I am compiling a list of notable sites (i.e., sites with consistent traffic, traffic growth, or sites that people talk about elsewhere) that are focused on aggregating content from other sites, primarily through RSS feeds.
Continue reading ‘Online RSS Aggregation Sites’

Today I became a happier WordPress user because I managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 with a surprisingly easy process, as well as migrating to the latest K2 release. The short story: install the WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin, run it, correct failed actions, upgrade the K2, migrate footer from the previous K2, et voilà! I am very impressed with the new admin interface of WordPress. It took a few minutes to understand where is what, but WOW! Neat, organized, and pleasant.
Continue reading ‘Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1 and K2 RC6′

I was previously using a set of home-brewed PHP scripts to manage my site that I wrote a few years ago. Back then, WordPress was still buggy, hard to use and configure, and the styles weren’t as flexible.

My primitive scripts did the job well initially, when all I wanted was a few static pages. But now that I want to update my site more frequently, I looked for some simple content management system. I really considered only 2 alternatives: Drupal and WordPress. I know my way around Drupal pretty well so it was the first candidate CMS. However I had heard about the wide spread of WordPress, it’s popularity among bloggers, and the awards it had won. Needless to say, WordPress was my choice in the end. Here is why.

• Theming K2 to a simplistic and functional look was easier than theming Drupal.
• This is a single-user blog, I don’t need all the complexity of permissions in Drupal.
• I had a really bad experience with Drupal’s WYSIWYG editors, but WordPress’ editor seems to work more reliably.
• I wanted simple categories and none of the taxonomy headaches
• WordPress didn’t require configuration to work, only customization. Drupal would’ve required both.

I’ve been fairly happy with my WordPess setup that I plan to convert some of my primitive Drupal sites into WordPress.

The site has been redesigned in WordPress and the content is currently transitioning into this new look.

Feedback is welcome through the contact page or view comments.