March 2012 Newsletter

Hello clients, partners and friends,

Welcome to another issue of the MWS Newsletter. This issue contains an update from the Niche Magazine Conference, a warning and a tip about malware, and an update on my book!

Chris
chris@minnick.com

Don’t Build an App

Chris and James were at the Niche Magazine Conference in Nashville, TN earlier this week. We were there as sponsors of the event, but Chris also gave a short presentation about Mobile Web Apps on Tuesday as part of the “Shotgun Mobile” session.

Here’s the gist of the presentation: Niche Magazine Publishers don’t need to develop mobile apps, they need to focus on fixing their mobile Web sites.

Thanks to full-featured WebKit browsers on smartphones, publishers’ existing Web sites are already being viewed on mobile devices, whether they’re ready or not–and most are not.

Fortunately, the fix doesn’t have to be that painful in most cases. Every modern content management system is designed with separation of content and presentation in mind. This makes it possible to create a mobile version that shares the content from the desktop site, but simply formats it differently in order to fit small screens.

HTML5 Mobile Web Apps are the only standards-based and cross platform mobile solution, which is why they’re rapidly being adopted by everyone from niche publishers to Google and Facebook.

To download the full presentation, click here.

WebKit For Dummies

After almost a year of writing, editing, and waiting, WebKit for Dummies is finally on the shelves! The book is selling well, and has a 5-star review on Amazon!

If you’d like to learn how to build a next-generation mobile Web app using HTML5, or if you just want to see what I’ve been up to for the last year, you can order it now at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Powells, or anywhere fine books are sold.

My next project, which is actually well on its way to being finished, is an online course called Creating Mobile Web Apps with HTML5. Once I finish the writing of the course and it’s gone through all of the various stages of editing, art design, marketing, and so forth, this 6-week course will be offered (and taught by yours truly) through your local continuing education provider. Look for it!

Have a WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla Site? Test for malware now.

At Minnick Web Services, we’re big proponents of Open Source software. We build many sites using Drupal and WordPress, in particular, and we provide ongoing support for many sites too.

In recent months, we’ve seen a blitz of automated attacks on WordPress sites especially in which malware is inserted into the code in a way that’s difficult to detect, but that will serve spam to search engines — and then make your site look like a spam site to potential visitors.

One of the best resources I’ve found for detecting and fixing malware attacks is Sucuri.net. I recommend that every site owner (no matter what CMS you use) take advantage of their free site scan to find out if they’re infected–even if you haven’t seen any suspicious activity or heard anything from your site visitors. Once you get blacklisted by Google or another search engine, it can have a very bad effect on your site traffic.

Do you like us? Tell your colleagues!

Minnick Web Services has been in the business of helping businesses and publishers be successful online for 14 years!

We rely on our happy customers to tell their friends and co-workers about us — and you do. Thank you for that!

We rely on your referrals and we appreciate them very much.