Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

• Putting the Mobile Web First Posted Friday, May 28, 2010 Jim Garretson 0 Comments

  It is unfortunate, but probably not very controversial, to say that mobile web sites tend to be second-rate afterthoughts compared to “real” desktop-browser-optimized sites. A lot of popular web sites either provide no mobile-optimized version at all, provide an overly-specific one built only for the iPhone, or provide a super-generic, watered-down WAP version that admittedly presents the content, but usually so that it looks like an unstyled bulleted list. What’s worse, none of these mobile strategies really scale well to handle new devices - say, a new class of device with a screen halfway between that of a smartphone and a desktop. The iPhone-specific version usually doesn’t display properly, the WAP version is way too basic, and the full desktop site often requires Flash, Silverlight, Java, or other heavyweight plugins that aren’t always available.

  It’s kind of a mess.

   
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  Interface Design • Mobile • Platforms • Web Development

• Sinatra for Rapid Prototyping Posted Friday, May 28, 2010 Jerry Gulla 0 Comments

  Recently, I’ve been working on a project that is mostly front-end work, but also communicates with some back-end web services.  I needed something to quickly respond to some basic GET requests at various endpoints and return either HTML fragments or JSON.  I’m not much of a big Ruby or Rails programer (although I do admire both), but I decided to try out a Ruby gem called Sinatra for my basic web server needs.

   
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  Blog • Libraries • Ruby • Software Development Process • Web Development

• Applying Data Mining Techniques to MapReduce Posted Thursday, May 27, 2010 Huan Lai 0 Comments

  

  Here at the Labs, we have been playing around with the MapReduce programming model (namely the open-source Hadoop implementation) for a while, but have been relatively conservative up till now. Most of the jobs that we have done thus far have been relatively simplistic, being more or less basic aggregation functions, with the most difficult part being the shear size of the data itself. This time around, we are planning on being a little more adventurous with the techniques we will be using to analyze the data, mining deeper than we had before. Before actually diving in, I did some reading of books and papers from both academia and industry to get an idea of the landscape and what we could try. Here’s a basic summary of some of the more interesting things that I’ve stumbled upon and possible ideas that we will tackle in the near future.

   
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  Data Management • Innovation • Open Source • Platforms

• NutshellMail - Social Networking in a “Nutshell” Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010 Reneldy Senat 0 Comments

  

  Recently I’ve started using NutshellMail. It probably wouldn’t have hit my radar if our company — Constant Contact — hadn’t acquired it, but after learning a little bit about it I decided to give it a whirl.

  NutshellMail is an email solution where a person can receive a daily email digest of all the relevant social media interactions going on in that persons social network. It doesn’t hurt that I fit the criteria of a NutshellMail user, someone that on average has too much on their plate to really engage in social media, but still wants to be part of the conversation. After a few days of testing NutshellMail I can already see that it’s going to change my social media experience — and make things a whole lot easier.

   
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  Facebook • Innovation • Social Networks • Twitter
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