Happy Friday, MetaFans! We’re starting up a new segment on the MetaBlog that we’re calling “The Friday MetaBits.” We’re planning on keeping this as a quick, weekly post where we’ll share a few of the great links that we’ve been collecting over the course of the week. So let’s round em up!

1. Do You Want To Succeed At Social Media Or Social Media Marketing?

   It’s not such a simple question if you don’t understand the difference. Thanks to Chris Poterala for this one!

2. New Digg: Tips for Marketers

   If you haven’t heard yet, significant updates were recently pushed to Digg that digital marketers will definitely want to take note of.

3. 5 Web Design and Development Tools I Simply Can’t Live Without (and Why)

   My old MSU web professor put this post together! Great picks, Ethan! :)

4. Eye Tracking Study Shows Importance Of Search Snippets

   So it turns out that search result snippets are fixated over more than the result title and URL combined. So don’t forget to write your meta descriptions!!

5. The 4 Hardest Things About Conversion Optimization For Local Search

   Conversion Optimization is becoming the “industry benchmark” but there are still a lot of problems with tracking and optimizing conversions. This post gets the discussion going by reviewing some of the more difficult issues that arise.

6. How to Bluff Your Way Through Every Conversation About Which Programming Language is Best [Comic]

   And here’s a fun one for all you programming junkies! This comic involves dinosaurs AND Ruby On Rails – what more could you ask for?!?

7. The MetaSpring Blog Carnival: Issue 8 – Web Marketing

   And now it’s time for a little shameless self-promotion, if you didn’t check it out already – please head over to our most recent Blog Carnival for the a run down on some of the biggest news in Web Marketing for the month of August.

Well that’s all we have for you this week. Keep checking our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more daily news and updates!

Have a great weekend!

A well designed site can never really get off the ground without a little development love behind the scenes. We have some top-notch developers here at MetaSpring and they like to keep us up to date on the latest news in the industry. It seems like there’s always something to talk about with new apps and methodologies sprouting up all the time – so let’s get to it, before these stories are old news!

Google Bringing Accelerometer Support to Chromium

UberGizmo reports that Google is bringing accelerometer support to Chromium, an important move of note for developers. An accelerometer gives a device, such as a video game controller or iPad, orientation awareness which can be used for information input. With more and more devices built featuring accelerometers, developers will be able to craft new applications and programs for interacting with the user. Google, recognizing the significance of accelerometers into he future, has launched support for Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome.

Do Web Designers and Web Developers Need to Be Enemies?

Having trouble keeping your Design and Development teams on good terms? Rarely is there a project in which designers and developers see eye to eye immediately. And sometimes that’s okay, but other times…watch out. We’re fortunate enough to have a very tight knit group here at MetaSpring, with designers and developers getting through projects relatively hassle free. But we’ve heard the horror stories and so has Peter from Agriya. In this well-written post, he identifies 4 ways to keep your designers and developers on the same page.

Increase Productivity by Creating PHP Helper Functions

Whether its a new trash compactor or iPhone, time-saving tools are always important. This is even more true for development teams, as we’re often trying to create clean and efficient code in very short periods of time. This post by Michael Watson of Nettuts+, outlines several PHP helpers that cut down on repetitive tasks and help to streamline the development process.

Web Designer as The Artist, Scientist And Philosopher

As a web evolutionary, you must wear many hats. On any particular day, you are called to inspire others with colors and shapes, while also balancing the pragmatics of functionality and answering to the almighty dollar. The unique position of a web professional is profiled in this wonderful post from Smashing Magazine’s Alexander Dawson. It’s so good, you may have seen it on Twitter a couple times already, but if not, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s also a great post for inspiration when dealing with troublesome clients.

Mobile Developer Economics 2010: The Migration of Developer Mindshare

According to a survey by Vision Mobile’s Andreas Constantinou, developers are moving towards the Android platform with great ambition and focus. The survey reveals some telling tendencies as well. As the article points out,

A mindshare migration has taken place for mobile developers away from the incumbent platforms Symbian, Java ME and Windows Phone, while a substantial number of PC software developers have flocked to iPhone and Android

The reason for this migration might be attributable to the large market penetration, speed of development, potential to make money, and low cost dev tools as reasons for initially choosing Android.

Bootstrapping a Prototype-based Object-oriented Language in 44 Lines of Code

Ever dreamed of creating your own programming language? As Aaron Gough tells us, it’s slightly easier than you think. In a 44 lines of Ruby code, Aaron walks you through the implementation of a prototype-based object-oriented model without using any of Ruby’s object-oriented features. The project starts with storing a Hash and ends up with a micro-language that, while not pretty, definitely works.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to all of you who submitted posts this month! We appreciate hearing from you and hope you’ll tune in next time as well. Our next carnival will focus on Web Marketing, a topic we’re very familiar with. As you’ll see in this blog over the coming weeks, we’re growing our Web Marketing services, building on past successes with clients like Amish Tables, FindItLocal411.com and Ashcom Technologies. Let us know if you’re interested in learning more about our SEO, SEM, Social Media and Marketing ideas. At MetaSpring, we connect all the dots!

What good is a website if it isn’t user-friendly? At MetaSpring, we make website usability one of our biggest priorities, and as you can see by the contents of this post, many other designers are doing the same. It’s one of those elements of web design that can always be improved on. This MetaSpring Blog Carnival features six usability perspectives from some of the industry’s best.

Five Simple but Essential Web Usability Tips

This post from Brujo Owoh, one of the many great bloggers at Six Revisions, covers a few points that would be especially important to a web designer taking on big projects for the first time. Brujo covers some key usability points like search features, page organization, consistency, web forms, and help features. He also includes some great real world examples and detailed descriptions for how they might improve usability.

Life, Below 600 Pixels

We took a page from Paddy Donnelly‘s book (and blog) and placed this post below the sacred website page fold. You’re still reading this aren’t you? Paddy makes this poignantly sharp point right off the bat in this post about life below the fold. So if you’re worried about users not learning how to scroll, this post will give you something to think about.

How Browsable is Your Blog?

As Heidi Cool points out in this recent post, “sometimes navigating a blog can feel like wandering through a maze.” How often have you tried to find a related post, or get more information from a blog only to give up after a few frustratingly-failed clicks? The fact of the matter is many blogs suffer from extreme un-browsability, leaving users on a goose chase for content. Use the 6 tips discussed in this post to make sure your readers get what they’re looking for.

The Myth of Usability Testing

We’re thrilled to feature this post from Robert Hoekman Jr. of A List Apart. Robert helps us understand why development teams often run into problems when they run usability evaluations. These tests, while good for many things, are a tad unreliable when it comes to addressing the right problems on websites. Robert points out several reasons why this happens, as well as some areas that usability testing must be implemented.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

Ever wondered anything about Agile Software Development? Anthony Colfelt provides all the answers in this post on bringing Agile and User Centered Design (UCD) together. In the Agile development process, requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. I’ll let Anthony take it from there.

Is Your Website Accessible?

User-friendliness consists of many factors. Sometimes the usability buzz dominates designs to a point where you forget other important factors of a user-friendly site, like accessibility. Occasionally you’ll find a website design that uses too many flashy gadgets, which can marginalize parts of the population due to one obstacle or another.

Nathan Olmstead, a freelance web designer right here in Ann Arbor, urges fellow designers to fulfill their moral responsibility to make sites user-friendly to all. He illustrates a few specific details designs must adhere to if they are to appeal to all demographics. For example, color contrast ratio for text to background should be around 4.5:1. Check it out for other tips to keeping your site viewable by everyone.

Next Month’s Issue: Web Marketing

Thanks to everyone who submitted posts and feedback for this month’s carnival. We had a blast connecting with each of you and look forward to continuing the conversation in our upcoming carnivals. Next month’s theme is Web Marketing, something we encounter daily here at MetaSpring. Marketing your product or service on the web is becoming a crucial factor to business success no matter how big your business is.

With such an important topic, we can’t wait to see what you all have for us. The deadline for submissions on BlogCarnival.com or through our email is March 21st. If you have a Web Marketing post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.

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!