Carl Hage

Let’s face it being a good system administrator is no simple task, you firstly need the correct mindset, skills and knowledge to provide the best support you can to your customers within rapid time frames. The calls will not stop coming, that is guaranteed. However the way which you deal with them and the speed with which you can figure out the problem and give some insight and resolution matters. I have compiled a short list of what I deem to be essential Firefox Add-ons for the System Administrator.

Firebug

This tools is mostly used for one thing by a System Administrator who is not concerned with any design elements of a website, to see how fast the website loads on the client. Some times clients will call and say that somethign is wrong with the server because their website is taking 25 seconds to load, well this little tool will show you each element being called from the webpage and how long it is taking to load. To use it, click on the icon that looks like a bug in the lower-right hand of your browser and click on All then click on Net.

So if some images are loading in 8ms and others are missing and holding up for a few seconds, or if there is some horrible JS doing something nasty, you’ll pretty much nail it down and point out to them that the server is not slow but it is infact their poorly designed website which just has way too much client-side elements loading. I’ve used this in the past and my clients simply loved me, they saw the screenshots I sent them and passed them on to their designers!

A couple of years ago I discovered Pandora.com, an excellent internet radio site that let’s you choose what kind of music you want to listen to, and better still, it lets you vote on the songs it choses for you, it takes this information and tries to find songs that are closer to your taste so that you can discover new music you’ve never heard before, that you will enjoy. A remarkable idea brought on by the Music Genome Project.

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We all have Microsoft to thank for bringing the PC to the mainstream world and putting one in just about every home, however we also have Microsoft to blame for a blunder of a browser they continue to make the internet suffer with, Internet Explorer.

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I’ll admit when I first started doing freelance web development and design professionally, about 3 years ago, it was really hard to find contract work, I made sites for really cheap, really broke my back for people. I would take any bone that was tossed in my plate. These days it’s a completely different story for me, projects come my way frequently, I’ve learned a lot in the three years I’ve been in this profession and thought I’d share some of these things you usually cannot learn in a text-book, most of these things you can only learn one day, by making the mistakes and paying the price.

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The question on many minds is simply, what is Web 2.0? Some will immediately scream AJAX! Others will tell you that it’s a trend in online business models, and cynics will tell you that it’s nothing more than a marketing hype. So what is it? And why does everyone seem to have their own theory about it? The aim of this article is to sum up what constitutes web 2.0, compare it with what is Web 1.0.

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