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It’s been my observation that we web developers are a fairly nocturnal bunch. We beaver away long into the night, building the next big web app, trying to meet client deadlines, or fiddling with some new technique or technology that has us all excited.

Makes me wonder how much of the sum output of our industry happens in the middle of the night, and what is it that sustains us through those wee small hours? Is it fueled by the pure nervous energy of obsessive compulsion, or are there concrete things you can do to boost your performance beyond the physical …

Last week there were lots of announcements and the odd bit of controversy in the ‘ol CFML blogosphere… this week, not so much. However, I do have some tasty code posts for you and some even tastier open source news – bon appetit!

Code

Interested in learning object-oriented programming? Join Ben Nadel as he builds a photo gallery application using OO techniques – and knowing Ben’s hands-on learn-as-you-go blogging style, this will be comprehensive!
Nick Tong shares a code snippet to export the contents of a table into a CSV file, using the Java StringBuffer
Rupesh Kumar from Adobe’s engineering team in …

Today we published the first in our series of SitePoint Community Interviews with renowned designers, entitled Mark Boulton’s Freelance Design Secrets.

In the interview, Andy Kowalik, one of our mentors on the SitePoint Forums talks to UK-based designer Mark Boulton about how he got started in design, how he made the leap from salaried employee to business owner, and picks Mark’s brains on grid theory, typography, and other peculiarities of design on the Web.

Go read it now!

Is there a web designer you’d like to see us interview? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll track …

You often hear people extolling the virtues of multitasking: you get more done, It’s the way of the future.

Balls.

Multitasking is great if you want to fill your time doing a lots of things not very well, over a long period of time. Sure you can: flicking between checking your email, Twittering, writing a report, trying a new web app and chatting on Facebook. Are you busy? Probably. Are you productive? Probably not.

As I see it, there are two key problems here:

Doing non essential tasks
Due to procrastination and self-distraction you are putting off certain tasks, by doing everything else …

We conclude our first ever CSS-themed week with a classic article that collates the most important CSS positioning properties.

Nigel Peck’s article CSS Positioning Properties At-A-Glance Guide was first published back in 2003, but five years later still stands strong as a compact summary of the basics of CSS positioning (although we updated a few points before republishing). In fact, the concept of this article formed the basis for the SitePoint CSS Reference, which was then expanded to include the HTML Reference, and we have a JavaScript Reference under development, so the article was quite seminal from our …

Why should Olympic athletes have all the fun?

If you’re a regular in our marketplace then you’ll want to keep an eye on this competition — the World Championships of Web Site Flipping are happening (a first for the site flipping industry, I believe), proudly sponsored by SitePoint.

Check out all of the contenders that have been spotlighted on the site — nothing really in there to suggest the talents of these flipping warriors, but fun if only to put some real faces to names in the site flipping industry.

There are a stack of prizes on offer — up …

Usability is an inexact science, but I’m pretty sure there is at least one golden rule that is non-negotiable, and that’s this:

Never, ever, insult your users.

Unless your web site revolves around insults, and every error message consists of a purposefully engineered insult for humorous reasons, treating your users with disdain or disrespect is a huge no-no.

Earlier today I decided to sign up for reddit, the popular social bookmarking service. My experience has turned me right off the service. Here’s my rant:

1. The CAPTCHA

First, I clicked Submit Link, and was presented with an option to register.

I’m personally not …

It seems that testing has been on the flavour of the week, which is apt really as I myself have been playing with RSpec a lot lately (Blog post forthcoming, once I finish up one of the projects that has been using said testing framework).

Simon Harris from My hovercraft is full of eels describes a simple way to break up you tests into DRY, manageable chunks: http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/blogs/simon/archives/000429.html

Ben Mabey shows you how to use Macros in RSpec, using Shouda. Macros are as old as the hills, but can be really handy to organise many tasks simply:

When it comes to web programming languages, PHP probably holds the record for copping criticism from the community at large. Comparisons with alternatives such as Ruby on Rails and Python/Django are common; defenders of PHP are quick to criticise the comparison of a language and a framework. But at the end of the day, developers work with Ruby on Rails, and with Python/Django, and with PHP. Just PHP. For most of the PHP applications out there, the language is just perfect, because PHP, to an extent, is the framework.

PHP is designed for the web. You could plug vanilla Ruby or …