Apologies for the Recent Blogspam Attack

So, many of you who checked your feed reader or visited Ajax Blog in the past 3-4 days may have seen a spammy looking post for ‘WORK AT HOME’ or some such nonsense.

This was one of our “writers” who signed up and tried posting those free ezine articles to our Niner Niner blogs and get paid for them. When we called him on it, he decided to post those spam posts to some of our blogs.

So, I’m sorry you had to see that.

Niner Niner Backstory

Gabriel and I started Niner Niner a few years ago to explore the possibility of collaborative blogging. The theory was simple - let (almost) anyone sign up to write for a new kind of network that pays writers for blogging & lets them share in the rewards through revenue sharing, etc.

The problem is, neither of us were really cut out for (or loved the act of) being editors of a Weblog Network. I developed most of the backend, Gabriel did the excellent designs for the blogs, for example that you see here on AjaxBlog.com.

It’s always been a part-time thing, but something that we’ve tried to keep going, even as our primary interests drifted elsewhere.

If you would like to come on board at Niner Niner as an Editor - we could sure use the help. It’s a part-time gig paying $500 - $1,000 per month for 5-10 hours a week of watching over the blogs and helping post some quality articles/blog posts.

If you’re interested, drop us a line at:
shantibraford @ gmail or gserafini @ gmail

Again - sorry for the blogpost spam. We’ll try not to let it happen again

Can an AJAX-powered user interface help you ship your software on time?

“Shipping great software on time is a difficult but not impossible task.”
– Jim McCarthy, Microsoft Corporation
(From 21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time)

This is a sponsored review.

If you are looking for a program that could possibly help you ship your software in a more timely manner, you might want to consider checking out OnTime by Axosoft. They offer a free 5-user 3-month trial of their software and have paid upgrade options for companies that prefer to work with a vendor instead of using other options like the open-source Bugzilla or Trac. Axosoft supplies a competition comparison chart that you can use to compare features of other commercial bug and incident tracking systems.

Their screencasts demonstrate a fairly well polished application that makes extensive use of Ajax techniques to provide a more desktop-like experience. The signup process for their free trial went super-fast. They provide a first-time wizard that is quick and easy and gives nice options (like pre-populating your dashboard with sample data so you can see how to use the application.)

There’s two reasons to check out OnTime:

1. You’re interested in improving your ability to ship software on time
2. You want to see how a commercially successful company is using Ajax to improve the web experience

Some issues that I noticed in my brief exploration of OnTime so far: All the Ajax-enabled windows take a little while to load whenever you click on a tab. This is pretty typical for Ajax-enabled apps, but you’re still left with a feeling of slightly more latency than would be totally optimal. There are a LOT of different tabs and features baked in to this product. If you’re a fan of Joel Spolsky you’ll notice that Axosoft has made some decisions regarding offering many super-customizable form options for bug tracking that run counter to what Joel would recommend (keeping in mind that Joel’s company Fog Creek Software is a competitor to Axosoft).

All in all, I’d say it’s worth a look (at the very least you can check out their screencasts to get an idea of how they solved building an Ajax-enabled user experience).

It looks like they’re using Atlas for their Ajax toolkit.

http://www.axosoft.com/products/HostedSignup.aspx

Leave a comment if you have used OnTime and have any feedback about if it really delivers on it’s promises or not.

FEATURED INFORMATION

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