Why SaaS is Cheaper Than Installable Software

Published on March 13, 2012

Overview

As a software as a service (SaaS) provider, the question comes up all the time: “Is there an installable version of your software that I can put on my own server?”

In all honesty, I cringe every time I hear this.  It’s not that I have a personal vendetta against installable software, it’s because I know what the asker is usually thinking:

  1. I can save money if I only have to pay for it once
  2. It’s safer because it’s on my own server
  3. I can tweak it to do what I need it to do

The truth is, in almost every case, SaaS is a better solution that will save them more time and money than an installable system—they just don’t realize it yet.

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Posted in Surreal CMS, Web Design, WordPress | Leave a comment

jQuery Bootstrap-style Dropdowns

Published on March 8, 2012

A really awesome framework called Bootstrap was recently released by a couple of guys at Twitter. You probably already heard of it by now. And you probably already fell in love with it.  Today I made a plugin that replicates the features of Bootstrap’s dropdown to better suit my needs.

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Posted in JavaScript, jQuery | 2 Comments

Access Pages Without the PHP Extension Using .htaccess

Published on February 2, 2012

There are a number of ways to make “clean URLs” work on your site, but this one is pretty straight forward.  It allows you to access /any-page.php by simply going to /any-page.  Just place the following into your .htaccess file (and make sure that mod_rewrite is enabled):

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Surreal CMS No Longer on UserVoice

Published on December 13, 2011

We would like to inform the Surreal CMS community that as of today, December 13th 2011, we will no longer be accepting feedback through our UserVoice account.  This isn’t to say that we don’t want or value your opinions, it just means that we want to hear them from you directly.  Continue reading →

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TinyMCE Table Dropdown Plugin

Published on December 12, 2011

If you’ve ever used TinyMCE for table editing, you’ll know that the experience isn’t usually a good one.  To prevent clutter, most developers configure the toolbar to have just the Insert/Edit Table button, which isn’t nearly enough to do anything useful with tabular data.  In fact, TinyMCE’s table plugin has 12 tools (i.e. buttons) available for working with tables.  The problem is they take up a lot of real estate.  They make an otherwise simple toolbar very intimidating and unintuitive for novice users.  The fact of the matter is, most people who use TinyMCE may not even need to work with tables, so those extra 12 buttons will just be in their way. Continue reading →

Posted in News & Updates | 2 Comments

Detecting Mobile Devices with JavaScript

Published on November 23, 2011

While I understand and value the concept of feature detection over browser detection, sometimes the need for knowing whether or not we’re dealing with a mobile device arises.  For in-depth device checking, you can rely on a complex library such as The MobileESP Project.  But for simpler applications, the following snippet can be useful. Continue reading →

Posted in JavaScript | 2 Comments

Redirecting to and from the WWW Subdomain with HTACCESS

Published on November 16, 2011

Here are a few snippets that will come in handy if you ever need to redirect www.example.com to example.com or vice versa.  There are a number of similar methods out there, but I prefer these as you don’t need to modify anything between development and production. Continue reading →

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The Simple Image Class for PHP

Published on November 15, 2011

If you love working with PHP but hate the GD library, you’ll love the Simple Image PHP class we’re releasing today. This class takes the headache out of dealing with images and features over 20 useful methods.

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The jQuery Notification Plugin

Published on November 15, 2011

Today we’re releasing another jQuery plugin that was born of necessity.  It’s a small, but incredibly useful notification system inspired by both Growl and the volume/mute notifications that can be seen in iOS. Continue reading →

Posted in News & Updates | 1 Comment

How to Delete a Tag on GitHub

Published on November 15, 2011

In the world of Git, tags are very useful for keeping track of your project’s version history. A lot of folks will argue that you shouldn’t delete tags, but there are real-world examples in which tags need to be deleted.  That said, it’s both a good and a bad thing that GitHub hasn’t built the ability to delete tags into it’s web app. Continue reading →

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