ReadWriteHack

You've probably heard of Markdown. Maybe you've heard the name for years. Perhaps you just encountered it, since it's enjoyed a renaissance lately.

But do you know what it is? Are you using it? You should be. Here are three good reasons to use Markdown. There are no good reasons not to.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) were still functional during the weekend. There were reported claims to bring down this collection of important servers in the hopes of more cyberterrorism. However, while there are only 13 root servers, they are replicated into hundreds of machines around the globe using a variety of protocol tricks, and recently efforts were accelerated to further protect the roots, too.

But I learned a valuable DNS lesson of my own last week, unrelated to the supposed plans of this hacker group. And that is: Treat DNS with the respect that it deserves. I lost several hours of productivity to debugging some beta software on my Mac when I was on the road. Hopefully, after you read this, you will be more careful than I was in what you place on your own equipment. If we are going to bring more of our own devices into work, we have to be better at what changes we make to them, too.

The short answer might be no, as a number of website developers are beginning to think in terms of extending the core web apps to better handle mobile devices, such as iPads and other tablets. This flies in the face of current trends, so let's consider the pros and cons.

"We deal with all sorts of customers," says Amir Shah, the CEO of St. Louis-based Web developer AgilitySpeaks.com. "I find that when we introduce them to 'mobile' the first thing they think about, and usually the only thing they think about, is an app." But developing an app dedicated to tablets means forking into two or more different processes, and that can be complex and costly.

A blog post from the coders at BrightTag this week is instructive in how they responded to a "shark week." No, it wasn't giving all the developers time off to watch the popular Discovery Channel series (that doesn't mean I can't borrow their icon), but an opportunity to improve the performance of their code. The results were impressive: they cut page load times at least in half, and built internal test tools to make it easier to do more performance tuning in the future. The post describes who did what and how.

According to this report from HP, more than half of the Web apps they tested contained SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting flaws. Now, neither of these exploits is new. What is news is how both of these chestnuts still keep hackers plenty busy.

Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff's excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.

You probably have never heard of Dieter Rams (pictured at left) but certainly know of his work. For many years he was a product designer for Braun and other German companies. Back before Frog and Apple put the "i" in many of its products Braun was selling very elegant items that were well designed, such as calculators, shavers and household appliances. Many of these items can be found in museum collections all over the world today. Rams has had several design shows over the years and is known for his ten principles of "good design," and I thought if we substitute the word "code" for "design" that there is a lot software developers could learn from his principles too. Here they are, with some of my comments.

Once upon a time, before the word Internet (or cloud) put dollar signs in VC eyes, sites were built with static tools. All a good Webmaster needed was a text editor and a Web server – maybe a few images and blink tags if they were feeling fancy.

These days, most of the Web is powered by dynamic content management systems like WordPress or Drupal. But what if there was another way, a better way, leveraging cloud services like Amazon S3 or GitHub? Werner Vogels has done just that by using S3 and Jekyll.

There's no better way to learn than by making mistakes. Just ask Kevin Montrose from Stack Exchange. Montrose is going a post-mortem on the first generation Stack Exchange API, with coverage of its history and mistakes made in its design.

Tim Greene, writing this week in Network World, brings up the latest developments in improving SSL certificates. As many of you recall, earlier this year we had two big security breaches involving these certs, including a situation where Comodo issued and then revoked a series of nine fake certificates. While the fakes weren't actually used, it was a close enough call.

The problem is that your browser has a hard-coded list of certificate authorities (CAs).