How about a little love for the guys and girls behind the scenes, eh? After celebrating some great web design posts last month, we’re turning the focus to Web Development for this edition of the MetaSpring Blog Carnival. So let’s get right to it!

The Trouble with Soft Delete

“Soft delete is a commonly used pattern amongst data-driven business applications”, but as Richard Dingwall points out in this post, “[soft delete] usually ends up causing more harm than good.” Richard outlines the various pros and cons of soft delete and offers a few solutions for those struggling with implementations of the pattern.

Scaling Rails – On The Edge – Part 1

This is the first of three screencasts by Greg Pollack in which he explores nine new Ruby and Rails libraries which can help you to scale your rails application. This first post deals with three tools: Bullet, Rails Indexes, & Scrooge. The content covered in these posts is easy to discern for all levels of Ruby development.

behavior: a Rails gem/plugin for storing application configuration in the database

Paul Campbell from Pabcas.com put together this post highlighting the advantages of a new Rails gem/plugin that he’s pushed out called “behavior”. Paul worked on the Rails Development Directory and developed behavior as a solution to storing issues that came up. As Paul writes, “It is useful to store site title, description, email address, passwords, etc. outside the source code.” Behavior does this with a Yaml configuration file. Installation instructions can be found at the end of Paul’s post on his website.

We Can Have Hack Free CSS With the @unsupported Directive

This forward-thinking post by Chris Eppstein discusses a feature for CSS that does not yet exist. Chris makes his plea to CSS3, requesting an @unsupported directive, which would provide benefits like “Feature Queries” and legacy browser targeting.

Top 15+ Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code

The developers here at MetaSpring take great pride in well written, succinct code. (MetaSpring programming Architect, John Ku took this concept to the extreme a few months back in a post about Ruby Quines.) Now, Burak Guzel’s post urging developers to write highly readable code will continue that theme, because as Burak says, “readable and maintainable code is something to be proud of in a finished product.”

Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

Burak Guzel is so good that we had to feature another of his posts! This time Burak covers a few MySQL optimization techniques. Burak walks through a step-by-step process for structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and assembling better code. This 21 point plan for making optimized web applications is a great read for any programmer.

Next Month’s Issue: Usability

Thanks to all those that submitted blog posts this month. Hopefully you learned as much as we did. Next month’s theme is one that gets discussed a lot in both the world of development and design: Usability. Usability issues are at the forefront of many projects these days, so we’re sure to have a great batch of links. The deadline for submissions on BlogCarnival.com or through our email is January 17th. If you have a usability-related post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.

Happy Holidays!

Hello and Welcome! to the second issue of the MetaSpring Blog Carnival! This month’s topic focuses on Web Design, for which we received many great submissions, so a special thanks to everyone who participated!!

Here at MetaSpring, we pride ourselves on being well versed in all things internet, but web design is our bread and butter. While web designers are often comprised of many quirky traits and characteristics, one thing is for sure: they know how to communicate extremely well. Whether it be through their designs, a Twitter dialogue, or an email, valuable information is constantly being passed from designer-to-designer. In that spirit, may we present to you the wisdom of our peers.

What Makes Your Website Stand Out?

Fellow SEO experts, Jacob Brown Designs of Novi, Michigan brought us this great guide on the basic principles of web design: design, SEO and marketing. Whatever your business be on the internet, it’s likely that you’d like your website to stand out in terms of creativity and originality and these helpful tips can help you design just that with characteristics that actively work for you. Read the post…

Realizations of Rounded Rectangles

This post comes from Keith Lang and UI&us and focuses on the rounded corners that are woven into our everyday life. Where did they come from? Why are they here? What can we learn from their permanence? Keith and his team write about User Interface Design, User Experience design, and the cognitive psychology behind design in general - so their answers to the questions above have ramifications for web design and beyond. Read the post…

Choosing the Right Colors for Your Website

In many design attempts, color selection is often overlooked for the sake of a certain style or design concept which often to colors that might not be entirely representative of the concept of the site. Robert Bravery of Integral Web Solutions in South Africa helps you discover the right colors to set the mood in your next project. Read the post…

Build: Single Handedly the Best Web Design Conference of 2009

To add to our international flair, we welcome Paddy Donnelly all the way from Belgium (originally hails from Ireland).

Paddy made the trip to Northern Ireland for Buildconf on November 5th, which he called, “one of the most prestigious and kick ass conferences of the year”. In this fantastically creative and originally styled blog post, Paddy recounts the talks of the six conference speakers Tim Van Damme, Andy Budd, Mark Boulton, Ryan Sims, Wilson Miner, and Eric Meyer. Topics covered include font embedding, seductive design, freelancing, pixel perfection and developing a hybrid between design and development. With the savvy inclusion of Twitter reactions, this post gives a thorough analysis of the conference for those who weren’t lucky enough to see it in person (us!). Thanks Paddy. Read the post…

5 Essential Document Templates for Freelance Designers

This post comes from our friend, Lee Munroe. He, and the aforementioned Paddy Donnelly, won the W3 Award last year for their work together on Big Word Project - many belated congratulations gentlemen.

Its not uncommon for designers to develop a keen sense of communication through many rounds of correspondence with their clients. Lee Munroe is a well-known freelance designer who, in order to facilitate better client discussions at an efficient pace, compiled these five, ready to use document templates. Read the post…

Profitable Website Ideas – In Just One Click?

Brian Terry sends this post to us to help those seeking profitable websites. If you have an idea for a revenue generating site, make sure you cross reference it with this seven point checklist. Read the post…

How to Create the Best Landing Pages for Google Adwords

Our friends at Digital Products Review offer their assistance in using Google Adwords. As we have experienced with a number of clients, Adwords is a powerful tool when implemented intelligently. Creating properly titled ads marketed to proper keywords can generate real results for your business. This post looks past the initial ad telling us, “The success and failure of your Google Adwords campaign depends completely on the success and failure of your landing pages”. Make sure your landing pages are properly formatted and designed for click-through success. Read the post…

10 Key Tasks For Your Next Web Site

Wondering where to start your next design project? This post from Smiley Cat Web Design establishes 10 goals any designer can set forth before them at the starting line. As you navigate through the checklist, personalize each point to your project at the fundamental level. Read the post…

Next Month’s Issue: Web Development

This wraps up the second edition of our MetaSpring Blog Carnival - be sure to check out next month’s issue Web Development. If you’ve written or know of a great development-related post, please send it our way! Submissions will be accepted through December 20th.

If there is a specific theme that you’d like to see covered, email us with your request at media@metaspring.com.

Welcome to the first ever MetaSpring Blog Carnival! Over the last few weeks, we asked our readers to submit their favorite blog posts for inclusion in our new monthly Blog Carnival and we received a ton of great submissions - much thanks to everyone who participated!

For our first Carnival, we thought we’d keep it varied, so the following batch of posts span across the topics of link building, web design and development, social media and search engine optimization. We’ve already started to receive submissions for next month’s carnival (which will focus on web design) - so make sure to submit your post soon!

Design and Development

All the way from Northern Ireland, freelance web designer, Lee Munroe, shares some neat CSS 3 tricks and explains why he thinks Internet Explorer Users Don’t Care About Rounded Corners. It’s a bold statement, but somebody had to say it!

Steve Hamilton of Ann Arbor’s own, Nology Design, sent in a bit of advice for those seeking to build a website in his post, I Need a Website, What Do I Do Now?. Steve stresses the need for in-depth planning and scope definition and provides some noteworthy advice on ROI expectations.

Next up, John Laugherton presents his Top 50 Web Design Resource Blogs. I know - a list of recommended blogs within a list of recommended blogs - how very meta of us!

Another great post from Lee Munroe highlights 21 iPhone integrated websites to get your creative momentum flowing - Web Design Trends: iPhones.

Social Media

Our friend Jason Spector sends in this post entitled, The Twitter Elevator Pitch: Rethinking Your Social Bio. Jason explains how elevator pitches falls short in this world of social media and how your social bio can represent your elevator pitch, personal brand, and more.

Our friends over at Simply Zesty, a social media marketing company in Ireland, discuss the concept of Virtually Dressing for Success. Could avatar dress codes be in our near future?

Jody Fransch broke down the statistics from the September “Did You Know?” video in her post, The Media World Is Changing Fast! The “Did You Know?” series reveals eye-opening internet and tech-related factoids in a short, quirky format.

Writing Effectively

Evan Gould’s cleverly titled post, Five Ways to Write Blog Posts without Writing, offers a few tools and techniques to get you started on that next blog post. That old writer’s block excuse isn’t going to work after reading this.

In the last few years, we’ve heard it over and over - “content is king,” but Larry Brooks, guest author for CopyBlogger thinks that king is dead and a new one has taken the thrown. Why Content is No Longer King (And Who’s Taking His Place) offers insight as to how context usurped the crown.

Patricia F. Anderson, another Ann Arborite, was kind enough to share this post urging you to Consider Your Content. She runs down the why, where, when, who, and how of generating content for social media profiles and other forums around the web.

Link Building

Here’s a vlog from Welly Mulia titled, “Backlink Analysis Using Free Tools“. Welly has documented a few practices to save you time and money when it comes to analyzing your domain’s backlinks. The video is a tad long, but I’ve got some bookmarks for you - he covers the Yahoo! backlink tool from 5:00-13:00, and the SEO Quake Firefox plugin is covered from 13:00-24:00.

Posting guides on eHow is a great way to build links back to your site in a natural, and helpful way - and you can even make a little money in the process. Brian shares his tricks in his guide: Increase SERP Rank on eHow.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Design

Thanks for checking out MetaSpring’s first ever Blog Carnival - be sure to check out next month’s issue on Web Design. If you have a design post you’d like to share, submissions will be accepted through November 15.

If there is a specific theme that you’d like to see covered, email us with your request at media@metaspring.com.

MetaSpring is excited to announce a new feature coming soon to our blog - on the fourth Friday of every month, we’ll be posting the MetaSpring Web Marketing & Development Blog Carnival!

What’s a Blog Carnival?

A blog carnival is a type of blog event (thanks, Wikipedia!) that can be easily compared to print magazines - they’re published on a regularly scheduled basis, they revolve around a central topic, and they usually contain content from multiple sources.

Blog carnivals allow authors to provide regular collections of recently published, high quality resources. This helps to raise the standard of information being generated on a topic and encourages thought leaders in niche web communities.

In addition to MetaSpring’s carnival, you can find a wide range of carnivals, or even start your own, at BlogCarnival.

The MetaSpring Carnival

The MetaSpring Carnival will be posted every fourth Friday of the month.

If you’d like to submit your post for inclusion, entries will be due by the third Sunday of each month.  That means that submissions for this month are due by Sunday, October 17, with the first carnival going up on Friday, October 23.

Submissions can made in one of two ways:

1. Complete the form on our BlogCarnival page
2. Email us directly at media@metaspring.com with the URL, title and a brief description of your post

Please only submit posts that fall within the following topics:

• Online Marketing
• Social Media
• Digital Design
• Web Development
• Web Innovation
• Small Business
• Meta/Philosophy

The articles we accept will be rewarded with a do-follow link from our blog and will have the honor of being included with some of the best content on the net.

Please limit your submissions to two posts per month.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to your posts! Let’s have some fun, it’s a carnival after all!