We know that this blog hasn't received so much attention lately so we think it's time to tell you what happened since our last message.

Our food community Béchamel keeps getting better and better for each day. Since the launch in February we have fixed and tweaked many things here and there. The biggest change since the launch is though that we are slowly, but steady, getting more and more recipes (56 when I write this). Of course, a recipe community without many recipes is not an attractive one so this keeps to be our main priority within the coming months along with the iPhone app we will build.

Stay tuned for more news!

Ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to announce to you, the launch of the first of Smiling Plants' products, Béchamel.

After having been in development for several years, Béchamel is finally mature enough for us to open the doors for a limited number of beta testers.

But let's take a step back. I'm sure some of you are wondering what in the world Béchamel is. Some of you may be wondering why we're launching a sauce. Don't worry though, the answer is provided.

What Béchamel is

In short, Béchamel is about food. Béchamel is a brand new internet community centered on food. Here users can post recipes, discuss food, plan their meals and make shopping lists. Many food related web sites either focus a lot on editorial content, or product placements. Béchamel focuses on it's users.

We believe that it's time for users to have their recipes center stage, not just lurking around the edges.

How to get access to Béchamel

Initially Béchamel will only be open to a limited number of beta testers. However, we haven't filled all the beta tester spots, so we'll be giving away invites. Send us an e-mail at info@smillingplants.com. First come, first serve applies. Also, we'll be responding manually, so don't expect an immediate answer.

When starting to use a new application, we all know that it sometimes can be a little bit strenuous to get started. Although we believe that functions in programs should be self explanatory, that can sometimes be hard to achieve - specially if your app deals with a domain that’s new to the user. The user might also understand a certain function but wonder what it can be used for.

Things, one of the best "getting things done" applications out there, both takes care about explaining its model and also inspires you to get started. Until the user adds data to the different modules, each one shows a tip what it is and what it can be used for.

What makes a product special? We believe it's all about the details. Why Mac OS X, and not Ubuntu? All those tiny but alas important details.

Details don't revolutionize. Still, they are important because they make your life easier and more fun.

Below are two lovely details we have discovered recently.

First up is the image editor Acorn. Have you ever wondered how big your pencil will be when drawing that new artistic masterpiece? Acorn shows it right away.

Our second pick is Google Analytics. When skimming through the number of visitors on your site, you don't have to follow the graph up and down with your mouse pointer to see the detailed statistics. Just hover your pointer somewhere in the graph area and the number of visitors will show up.

No matter what you're doing, it's the details that separate great from mediocre.

Honestly, aren't we living in an advertisement bubble? Millions of dollars are spent every day on online advertisement despite a generally low click-through rate and, as we see it, an increasing banner rage among the users. One of the most popular plugins for Firefox is Adblock Plus. The Norwegian browser Opera has built in ad blocking, the same goes for OmniWeb.

But why this resistance towards ads? Here's our top five list of why banners are unpopular:

1. They are annoying: When was the last time you really enjoyed an ad on the Internet? Never have? Welcome to the club. Would you accept a newspaper or magazine where the ads are moving around, playing videos and making sounds and even sometimes pops up in front of your face? Probably not.
2. Users don't see them: One of the biggest usability guys around, Jakob Nielsen, stated in one of his alertboxes that users rarely look at ads on websites. Why show something people don't see? It doesn't make sense to us. And the ads users actually see often claim to be something else, e.g. a dialog from your computer. This pisses people off.
3. They are irrelevant: We did a simple empirical test to see how relevant ads are to us. By surfing around 5 minutes on mainstream websites we were presented with only irrelevant banners. Some examples: one wanted to us to start using Viagra (neither of us has reached the age of 25), another recommended Vista (we both run Mac OS X, what's the chance we would switch?), a third proposed a deal with Verizon Wireless (not available in Europe) and a fourth wanted to us to read more about apartments reserved for 55+ citizens outside Stockholm (again, not close in age and neither of us live in Stockholm). What's the conclusion of all these banners and probably 99% of all the others out there? They are totally irrelevant.
4. They consume bandwidth: Despite fast Internet connections, we don't want to use more bandwidth than we really have to. Ad intensive websites can often be well over 100 KB in size and sometimes the ad servers are painfully slow. Speed will always matter.
5. They are processor intensive: Many banners are interactive and therefore built with Flash. The technology can sometimes be good, but you don't want to run it every time you visit a website because of the processing power they generate. Just think about the environmental impact Flash ads have each day.

Will this kill the Internet industry? Not really. First of all, big and evil media corporations did not invent Internet as another channel for advertisement mania. Secondly, quality has a value and you can charge people for using it. Some crappy websites will probably disappear, but who will miss them?

So, can online ads never be ok? Well, we don't find text ads à la Google that irritating, and they are often more related to the subject of the page you're browsing. The same goes for text search ads.

Two other good examples of how websites can have ads but still be user friendly are the advertising networks The Deck and Ad Mates. Although they differ in business model, both provide website owners with a small static ad. Not annoying, small in size and often relevant for the visitors.

Internet advertising needs to mature otherwise the users will kill it.

As you may well know, we are currently working on a project called Béchamel, an online food community. If you haven't already, we recommend that you read our page on Béchamel before reading the rest of this preview, to learn a little bit more about it.

This tour will consist of a lot of screenshots, and I think it's about time we get going.

First up, when you first arrive at Béchamel, you will be greeted by a screen much like this one. Here you can see what's happening in the community, and of course, log in.

Once you've logged in, this page looks slightly different. The way we see it, if you're logged in, you probably have some idea about what Béchamel is, and therefore we also show you things that are more relevant to you, your upcoming meals, new recipes posted by your friends, responses on the forum and comments on your recipes.

Let's take a look at one of the recipes. As you see, you can add beautiful images of the recipe, something that we very much encourage. You probably noticed the image immediately, because of how it differs from the rest of the site's design. This is a conscious design decision, we want to put a lot of focus on the beautiful images.

Let's look at another recipe as well. We support several kinds of metadata to the recipe, difficulty, how much time it takes to cook it, tags and user ratings. These ratings are one of the factors used to calculate the popularity of recipes.

If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the comments for the recipe, and if you're logged in you can add new comments.

Next, we move on to another feature, planned meals. Here you can plan your week, food wise. As you see, today I plan to have Spaghetti alla Bolognese di Magnus, and tomorrow I'll have Baked Macaroni and cheese, and kladdkaka for dessert. This planning is also used in the shopping list, so that you can easily add all items needed for your upcoming meals.

As with any community, your profile is important. It's how other people get to know you. First off, we have some quick facts, all of these are of course optional and then a description. We certainly hope that you'll write a lengthy description of yourself. Of course, your description doesn't need to be a cheap rip-off of the introduction to John Hodgman's excellent book The areas of my expertise, but if it is, I won't blame you.

And now, the last stop of the tour. Searching. While this may seem a bit uninteresting, it is hands down the best way to find recipes, or users for that matter. We use an advanced engine for indexing our recipes (if anyone is interested, it's Lucene), which makes finding what you're looking for easy. Also, note the save search link. If you are a Connoisseur member, you can save searches and get a feed or emails for new recipes matching the search.

Finally, while we do not have a screenshot for this yet, we are making an announcement. If you are a Connoisseur, Béchamel will be available in a special optimized version for the iPhone. If you're in the store, wondering what to eat, take out your iPhone, and find recipes easily. Your shopping list will be easily available on the iPhone, making the need for notes or even printed lists from Béchamel unnecessary. Easier for you, and good for the environment.

Since Magnus sprouted the first entry of this blog by telling us about some of the technical stuff that's behind our new website, I guess it's time to talk about the more fluffy side: design and user experience.

When we talked about how we wanted the design of smilingplants.com to be like, we both agreed that we wanted something clean and quite minimalist (hey, we're from Sweden). It may not be the most inspiring or compelling design on the web, but we are pleased with the result and we think that it will suit our purpose for some time.

The theme of minimalism is also visible on this blog, which we as you may have noticed named Where things grow. We have some small details that we really like, for example that a user who has made a comment sees a thank you message directly with a link to the comment feed for that particular post. We believe that it's more convenient for the user to track possible coming comments by a feed than by e-mail because we believe the mental impact of an e-mail is higher than an entry in a feed. That way, you don't have to overly concern your self with comments that may well be uninteresting to you.

Don't dare to write a comment but still want to see how it looks like? Well, see below:

Of course we follow best practices when it comes to URLs. We have made them both user friendly and optimized for search engines. For example, a URL to a blog post contains a maximum of five words (we don't like long URLs) and if they don't give a lot of meaning, like 'and', 'of' and 'the', they're not visible in the address.

Sometimes we get questions (not really, but we'd like to pretend we do), questions like this one:

"Hey, Mister! If I want to create awesome web sites like you do, what tools shoud I get?"

This is a very good question, and of course an answer will be provided.

Well, little one, you see, for us to create awesome web sites, we need awesome tools. I will explain what tools I use, and why they are so awesome.

The first tool, and by far the most important one, is my Mac. While technically you don't need a Mac, in reality you really want to use one. I feel that Mac OS X makes me much more productive and creative than other operating systems, and I just plain enjoy it. And that matters. It actually matters a lot. If you don't like your computer (and chances are pretty high that you don't if you're using Windows), you won't like coding on it. Honest. Also, some software here is Mac only.

The second tool that I will talk about is your Web browser. You need this if you want to do web development. Now, on the Mac, a WebKit based browser, like Safari or OmniWeb is an excellent choice. Safari also has some nice debugging features, and if you download WebKit nightlies you also get this nifty JavaScript debugger called Drosera. You also want to use Mozilla Firefox, and especially the Firebug extension. This is great for debugging JavaScripts, and especially AJAX. It will save you from a lot of grief.

The third tool I wanted to bring to your attention is Symfony. Symfony is an open-source PHP web framework. You may have heard lots of talk about Ruby on Rails. We don't use that, we use Symfony, which is conceptually similar, but uses PHP, not Ruby. Symfony allows us to work much faster, and makes it easier to write good code. By using this design pattern called Model-View-Controller, we separate the code and make our classes better. And speaking of the Model. We don't use Propel, which is the default object-relational mapping framework in Symfony. We use Doctrine instead. As for web servers and databases and such, for developement we use the built in web server in Mac OS X, and SQLite.

The fourth tool you'll need is a good text editor. I use TextMate, I hear there are some other editors that are good too, but I prefer TextMate. There's also a set of snippets for TextMate that is made especially for Symfony. Cool, huh? TextMate is also awesome, but not required, when coding in Cocoa. An area which is very important to me, is the color scheme for TextMate. I do realize that some people might not agree with me regarding the high priority of this, but I don't care. It's important. The most important aspect is that it's a dark background, and light text colors. Right now I use SpaceCadet, but I also consider Sunburst and Twilight to be acceptable. Johan does not agree with me on this. He uses Mac Classic. To this I have only one thing to say. A dagger! A dagger through my heart!

The fifth tool that we use is Subversion. Partly because versioning is awesome, partly because it is a great way to share code between developers. Believe me, lock-edit-unlock sucks for editing code. Especially when the locking model is that you tell the other guy "I'm gonna edit this file now". And it really is a good thing to be able to go back to earlier revisions, just in case you screw something up royally. Do yourself a favor and use a versioning system. If you're more than a single person, do yourselves an even bigger favor and use a versioning system to share code. It might be a bit complicated to learn how to use it (especially if you, like us use the command line clients), but it's worth it.

So, with these five tools, can anyone create awesome web sites? Not really, no. The tools isn't what does the job, you do. Just because you might have the same bike as Lance Armstrong doesn't mean that you'll win the Tour de France. Sure the tools matter, and the better you get, the better tools you will want to use, but what you really need is experience, and the only way to get that is by doing stuff. You'll also need to be interested, otherwise you will probably give up at the first road block. And do yourself a favor, learn how to ask people for help. There's an excellent guide to this, although this is written for Cocoa, and getting answers in an IRC channel, the principles apply everywhere. If you learn how to ask questions this way, you have a much better chance of getting answers. Oh, and learn that you should only ask after having studied the documentation.

Well, this is it for this time. Perhaps you'll see more of this, where I talk about tools for developing in Cocoa (a big hint there is Xcode :) ) or Johan talking about the tools he uses. Who knows.

Finally, after a lot of hard work, we are ready to present unto you the official Smiling Plants web site. As you can see, we have this awesome and beautifully designed blog and we have a web publishing system for the rest of the site.

Actually at the time of writing, everything isn't exactly finished, but we want some text on the site before we launch it :)

We also have some awesome features on the site that you might like if you, like me, are a programmer. Like syntax coloring for code in a wide variety of languages. So if I need to set some young whippersnapper right here on the blog, you can be sure that it'll be done in syntax colored goodness :) How do we get all these fancy features? I'll let you in on a little secret. We use a framework called Symfony and an ORM called Doctrine. They allow for rapid development, and there are already plenty of fancy plugins it. The syntax coloration for example comes from sfGeshi, and the publishing system is an as of yet unreleased Doctrine port of sfSimpleCMSPlugin, made by yours truly.

Of course, you might still have questions to ask, like "Hey, mister, then why did the site take so long to complete?"

If you were to ask that question, you could be certain that the answer would be something like "Well, young lad, it's because I've mostly been working with our first big project, Béchamel, which you'll be seeing a lot more of soon, and we figured that there's not really any point in having a web page with pretty much no relevant content on it."