Hat tip to The Guardian for building an excellent web app in 5 days. Proof that rapid web development is possible in large organisations, not only small ones.

The app was written in Django and is hosted on Amazon EC2, the same cloud infrastructure that Mr Monkey employs.

The app is also testament to the power of crowdsourcing - enabling anyone and everyone to contribute to the project. Thousands of people have used the app to analyse the 457,153 PDF pages of MP's expense claims, one page at a time. In the past 48 hours, 136,438 pages have been reviewed. In contrast, The Telegraph has spent at least 7 weeks analysing the documents internally and we don't know what percentage they managed to get through.

If you've not tried it yet, check it out here.

Twitter lets you customise the background image on your Twitter pages. Use this opportunity to place your company logo and branding on your page.

We've just created a background image for the Magic Toolbox Twitter page and can share these 6 tips...

1. Follow the Twitter design - an easy way to create a good-looking background is to follow Twitters' lead. It uses columns of content with 5px rounded corners and a solid background colour. Space your column 72px from the top of the page and 10px from the left. Example:



2. Display your URL - this is an opportunity to promote your website. Display your URL prominently in your design.

3. Summarise what you do - some visitors won't know who you are or what you do. Tell them Twitter style - in as few words as possible.

4. Match the colours - change your five Twitter design colours (background, text, links, sidebar and border) to match/complement the colours of your background image.

5. Choose the right size - the largest resolution your viewers are likely to have is 1280x1024, so your image needs to be no larger than 1260x900.

6. Minimise file size - it's a big image, so don't go overboard with design or the image could take ages to download. Aim for under 15kb. After tweaking our image, we managed to reduce our image to a 32 colour PNG with a 7kb filesize. (The same image as a JPEG would have been more than 20kb.)

We just increased our book sales by 42% thanks to user feedback and about 60 minutes work. Getting rapid results with minimal effort like this is our main goal in practising rapid web development.

The improvement we made was obvious: we started selling our Web Developers' Checklist book, in PDF format. When we launched the books' website, we ruthlessly cut out all the nice-to-have's and launched the site just 2 days. The PDF format was one of the features we cut out, opting for paperback only.

Over the following months, quite a few users requested a digital version of the book. You can't beat user feedback to give you clues for improvement, so we investigated our options. It was a toss up between:

• Google Checkout - most profitable with costs of about 3% but we'd need to spend a day or two creating a simple fulfilment system.
• Lulu - most straightforward with set-up in minutes but they would take a cut of about 18% per PDF sold.
  

We didn't know how popular the PDF would be, so we saved ourselves the time and chose Lulu. We knew we could always switch to Google Checkout (or PayPal seeing as Google Checkout just hiked their prices) and increase our profit margin later.

Six weeks later and total sales have increased 42%. Of all the books sold, 53% were paperback and 47% were PDF, so not only has PDF increased total sales but it has stolen some of the share from paperback. That was a feature worth implementing.

Buy the book: Tick My Boxes - the web developers' checklist.

We've just spent a couple of weeks hacking in Taipei. It has lots of funky cafes with fast internet, good coffee and zesty lime juice. Nearby are excellent noodles, dumplings, fried chicken, pork buns and other and an endless supply of other delicious food.

Change your surroundings and freshen your mind. You can get more work done, have more ideas and recharge your batteries. Call it a working holiday.

When you're mocking-up a quick interface design, you usually need some images. Don't spend ages looking for the perfect image - it's only a mock-up. An image that feels about right is all you need.

The image could come from any source - don't worry about copyright at this stage - it's only a mock-up and won't be published to the world. But if you can find an image that is free to use, all the better.

That's why my new favourite is Compfight. It searches all the photos on Flickr with the handy addition of "license type". If you specifically need an image that you can use on a commercial site, choose Commercial like so:



Didn't find what you were looking for on Compfight? Try the big daddy of image search - Google Images. It's the fastest search of them all, though the results are of mixed quality. You should find roughly what you need within a couple of pages of search results. It's ideal for a site mock-up but if you want to use the image in your site, you'll need to track down the copyright owner, contact them and hope for an affordable outcome. Hassle.

That leaves the stock photo sites. Some offer free images, bonus, but the quality and choice is mixed:

• www.freedigitalphotos.net
• www.picfindr.com
• www.sxc.hu
• www.everystockphoto.com
  

So, if you want to cut to the chase, you should find a decent, affordable image at iStockphoto. It has the largest and best collection of stock images on the web.

Labels: free, images, rapid web development