Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, September 22, 2007:

PHP to Rails and Back Again

Interesting post by the cdbaby dude about how he tried to convert the entire site to Rails then scrapped the entire effort after 2 years and went back to PHP.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

I have to say one of the top 2-3 decisions I made regarding HelpSpot was using PHP. It’s flexible, fast, ultra reliable, runs everywhere, is already running most places and just great software. And that’s with HelpSpots dependencies on some less that common extensions like IMAP (mail handling) and mbstring for character conversions (technically this is optional in HelpSpot, but useful).

Antair Update

Andrey pulls back the curtain a bit and fills us in on what Antair has been up to.

http://www.antair.com/blog/2007/09/13/whats-antair-been-up-to-lately/

As a side note, what frickin genius it was of them to release a call screening app. Genius!!

Update: Gavin throws in his 2 cents on what him and Andrey are up to, http://webhelperbrowser.com/blog/2007/09/whats-happening-here.html

HelpSpot In the Wild: LexBlog

It’s been a while since I did a HelpSpot in the Wild post. Here’s one I saw recently that was really classy. It’s by LexBlog, a company that specializes in creating blogs for lawyers. They’ve done a fantastic job of creating a very sophisticated looking layout for the HelpSpot portal. I especially like the top red banner which makes it very clear where you need to go if you’re looking to submit a request, which is what most visitors are looking for.

Here’s the support homepage:

One of the knowledge book pages: