About "Us"

Who's "Us", Precious?

I have been in the technology business for a long time and I have seen a lot of "businesses" come and go. The unique and wonderful thing about the early days of the Web, and to some extent it still applies, is that you could just "hang out a shingle" (that is, a Web site), and be as competitive as the next guy. In theory at least.

The idea that the Web "leveled the playing field" was sort of a valid one, though a guy selling computers from his garage was decidedly not on the same playing field as Dell, HP, or Gateway at the time. I say sort of because the playing field was not actually leveled, it's just that everyone had the perception of business equality on the Web. And what was this perception based upon?

Ignorance.

Someone could create a Web site with the appearance of a full-blown clothing store. Of course, a brick and mortar store is assumed to exist, but this is not necessarily so. To this day, Web site visitors have no way of knowing at a glance if a random site belongs to an establish company or is just one guy in a basement.

This ignorance has engendered a verbal fiction, especially with one-man development shops that I find really annoying. About "Us".

To "compete" and "level the playing field", small development shops (and other business types) try to look big, and in doing so, have created some sort of business schizophrenia.

I Yam what I Yam

I am a firm believer in being who you are. It is disingenuous to represent yourself as something that you're not, whether it's in business or in personal life. I recently updated my Web site and though my wife is a big part of "our" business, and I do work with a number of sub-contractors, I decided to continue with the "I" instead of the "web".

Additionally, there advantages to "being small". I have worked in companies much larger than mine and the ability to determine direction and in some cases make simple decisions is greatly hindered by the size of the company.

Anyone interested in more on the topic should great Chapter 3 of Getting Real, starting with "Less Mass". (Getting Real has been required reading for my staff for a couple of years now.)

Have a Blank PHP Page?

So you're coding a PHP page, you switch to your browser and hit refresh, and you get -- nothin'. No error message, blank page, and depending upon your error settings, you may not see anything in the logs. You have display_errors turned on, so what's going on?

If you're using PHP 5.x, it may be a combination of two  things:

1. You have white space somewhere.
2. Output buffering is set to 4096 by default.

What's happening is that some sort of error has occurred in your code (or you have whitespace in an include before a header call) but the error output is being buffered by the output_buffering setting new to php.ini in 5.x and the error is being hidden.

If you have logging turned on, you would still see there error there, but this can otherwise be misleading.