I think it was Adobe that forgot it was a company that makes tools. They did make it Flash versus HTML5, and are now realizing that they should have been agnostic as a toolmaker.

Flash existed long before HTML5, there was no platform for the tools. They revolutionized the web and HTML5 is catching up

I believe they use Amazon S3 for all storage.

In fact, they're supposedly the single largest user of S3 by data stored.

I use the paperclip gem and store files on S3 with my Heroku apps and it works great. I believe this approach is very common.

I too am implementing paperclip...but I am wondering about backing up the uploads. How do you backup those uploads? I was thinking that I would store the first copy on the host - then push them to s3 for backup (and maybe 1 other CDN, just to be ultra paranoid).

But, it seems to me, that if you are just passing through Heroku altogether - that removes one point of fault tolerance and redundancy - right?

Powell's books, and don't forget the separate technical books location: http://www.yelp.com/biz/powells-city-of-books-portland-3 http://www.powells.com/locations/powells-technical-books/

Great coffee: http://www.yelp.com/biz/coffeehouse-northwest-portland http://stumptowncoffee.com/

Fun bars: http://www.dougfirlounge.com/ http://www.rontoms.net/

Cool neighborhoods to explore: - SE Hawthorne - Pearl District - Northwest

so powells technical moved up 2 blocks (just across the main store on 10th and Couch) and is now called powells 2. as of last month.

Is this accurate that paypal express and google checkout are the only legitimate ways to accept payments while deployed on Heroku?

Can anyone suggest an alternative high-quality contact importer?

http://www.improsys.com http://www.cloudsponge.com http://openinviter.com

Free: http://openinviter.com/

Paid: http://www.octazen.com/ http://addressbookimport.com http://www.improsys.com/importer.htm

Most of these have the best support for PHP which may or may not work for your needs. Various free libraries have been released for other languages but 1) generally support only a few email providers and 2) may not be actively maintained. Octazen has a fee-based API which sounds great but I haven't used it.

thanks for the response. looks like octazen is the winner

I think the subtle point here is that users don't want bloated applications but 1) They will vocally advocate for additional features that meet their specific needs 2) They will buy upgrades (particularly of boxed software) based primarily on new/additional features

The nice thing is that this problem of desktop applications hasn't actually translated directly to the web. On the web, doing one thing well is much more valued on than on the desktop.

I suspect that this is because more users understand and feel comfortable with the web than feel comfortable with the non-browser desktop.

I think the key aspect is that adoption of web software is easy, and most web software (e.g. gmail, google maps, flickr, twitter) is free, or at least has a reasonably useful no-cost usage tier. This may contribute to users feeling they are less locked in to a single application, more able to switch to a competitor if need be, and more able to use additional software to provide additional functionality (e.g. twitpic + twitter).

I highly recommend O'Reilly's Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.

It's written for learning instead of reference, and focuses on modern best practices. It anticipates and answers most questions a beginner might have.

http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/