I love programming and related activities – creating websites, making scripts to make my computer run better, and all that stuff. I also love learning new technologies. I have a list of technologies that are high priorities on my to-learn list – Pylons and the ASP.NET MVC framework are two of them.

Then there are others which I’m on the fence about; although I would like to learn them, they are few notches down on there interest scale. Here are some of these technologies:

Silverlight and Flash. These are two technologies do pretty much the same thing and I’d like to learn them both. Someday.

My excitement over these technologies ebbs and flows; sometime’s I’m really excited about Silverlight because my skill set with .NET would mean a smooth transition, but it’s another Microsoft technology – and despite being paid to develop .NET code, I don’t want to be pidgin-holed. Flash sometimes appeals very strongly to me and I’d probably pick up ActionScript incredibly fast. Still, I’m such a JavaScript enthusiast that I enjoy trying to match what flash can do with JavaScript alone.

Ruby. I get excited about Ruby every time I hear someone I know – in real life – talk about it. I’ve become immune to rants and raves it receives in the blogosphere.

Ruby seems like an interesting language and is probably fun to program with; but it goes down a few notches in my eagerness-to-learn scale because I my pet language – which I already know – is Python, which is super fast and easy to develop with. I’ve also grown to appreciate the Python community. Ruby is still on my want-to-learn list, but it’s not high because Python fits my needs perfectly.

Java. Java seems to have a reputation of being outdated by its flashy and speedy competitor, .NET, but Java is extremely versatile. Plus, it’s got an important leg-up on .NET – it’s cross platform.

Knowing VB.NET and C#, Java’s syntax is very understandable to me. I would probably pick it up very easily. I’ve played with open source projects and other software coded in Java and I’ve been in impressed with its quickness.

BSD. I love Linux, but I’ve never been able to get in too deep with BSD. Of all the technologies on this list, this would probably be the one I’d learn first. BSD is an extremely important technology to me, and being the cousin of my beloved Linux, it would be really neat to be a wizard at it. This almost didn’t make the list, it was almost added to my “definitely want to-learn” list.

It’s too bad that I have to work for a living; if I didn’t, I’d be guru in each of these technologies. I’d be a famous published author on each of them, and people would stop to ask me for my autograph.

Technology moves fast – but sometimes, not that fast. “Old”, outdated books on languages and technology often have valuable insight or content. These books may be a couple years old or a previous edition – or a book from an obscure publisher or author that never received the publicity it deserved. On Amazon.com, these books tend to be cheap and sometimes plentiful. And they are potential treasure chests of information and code.

I have found Amazon.com to be an invaluable resource for these types of books as I explore different programming languages and techniques. Here’s why: Amazon’s reseller program offers tons of books – often used, perhaps a version older – for super cheap. This may not be news for most people out there, but how valuable these books can be to your learning may be.

For example, I’ve found the out-of-print “Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 in C#” By Matthew MacDonald to be an excellent summary of programming ASP.NET in C#, and still widely available. It’s also good for brushing up on Mono’s ASP.NET implementation, too, which is somewhere between 1.1 and 2.0. ASP.NET (actually .NET) is one of those technologies that the basic, foundational skills learned in in “early” versions (Microsoft still supports early versions such as 1.1, “For as long as their clients demand”) are usually very relevent and compatible with later versions, too. And the enterprise installations of early versions of ASP.NET is still incredibly high.

Also, if you increase your skill set by reading code, there is no shame or nothing “inherently wrong” with the code in older versions of books. They can be as relevant as ever and can be good examples to learn from. Legacy code doesn’t update itself – so it pays (literally, sometimes) to know and understand how older code works, too. Speed of adoption can lag behind the latest releases of books, and its likely you will come across older code at some point as a programmer, if not daily or weekly.

I have “old” books I’ve picked up from Amazon.com on subjects as diverse as ASP.NET, C#, PHP, SQL, Python, Linux, Apache, and a handful of other subjects. And many of them have been invaluable references to the code or technology they explain.

In the last year I’ve seen an increasing number of websites using what I’ve dubbed as the “Content Footer.” These are exaggerated website text footers which serve the dual purpose of better search engine optimization and increased usability. To help frame the discussion, let’s look at what I think is the best example of a Content Footer, MarthaStewart.com.

Rather then trying to list everything in the main navigation the Content Footer helps organize additional content in similar buckets. This methodology also serves as a micro-sitemap of second tier navigation. From a search engine optimization perspective, Content Footers help re-enforce keyword rich terminology without spamming the search engines.

MarthaStewart.com

Apple uses the Content Footer in the same way as MarthaStewart.com however they’ve opted for a vertical arrangement and they are capping what items are listed in this area. If you look at the applications listed in the Content Footer you’ll see they’ve limited the selection to their top applications. Apple isn’t interested in showing you everything they sell, just what is most popular and relevant.

Apple.com

From a design perspective the argument could be made that Content Footers clutter up the layout, this could be the reason that Apple doesn’t show the Content Footer until the subpage level. Personally, I feel the Content Footer pros outweigh the cons and I think we’ll start seeing more sites designed with this feature in the future.

A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/

I just got done reviewing SnapPages and my initial impression is WOW! It appears that much thought was given to the user-interface and features that go into SnapPages. SnapPages users aggregate pictures, messages “gabs” and events all under one application. The developers were looking to design a web application for entry level web users, and I think they have succeeded.

SnapPages is one of the nicer Flash RIA websites I’ve seen and I think it will do well with the entry level web-user if the company can market to that audience effectively.

Personally, I don’t see myself using this application since I would rather use the combination of iCal, iPhoto / Gallery2 and straight email to accomplish my daily tasks. I’m also missing the revenue model for SnapPages.

Kudos to the developers for building such a nice app and offering it for free!