Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for August, 2006
MasterPages hate logic. Throw Interfaces at Them.
ASP.NET 2.0’s MasterPages rock. But they are not a good place to put your page logic. Here is how to keep your logic in a page class while communicating with controls in a MasterPage in a clean & maintainable manner.
Aug 30, 2006 News Wire
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Widgetbox
Just launched into public beta, this site provides a directory of reusable widgets for use in web pages.
(tags: ajax javascript design) -
Leaving Search Engine Watch
Danny Sullivan, the face of Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conference series, announces he is departing both after failing to negotiate terms for his continued participation with their new owner, Incisive Media.
(tags: search) -
1.2 million Flickr Photos Geotagged in 24 Hours
Flickr, the popular (and AJAXy) photo sharing site, has added support for geotagging photos (adding a geographical location to the metadata) with Yahoo! Maps integration. In the first 24 hours after the feature’s release, over 1.2 million photos were tagg
(tags: ajax yahoo) -
WinSnap – makes screenshots better
Free for personal, educational and non-commercial use, WinSnap is a screen capturing software with a great many convenient and powerful features (e.g. transparency for non-rectangular windows). Windows only, obviously.
(tags: software design) -
Notes on Writing a 2-D Video Game in Javascript
If you’re interested in tackling JavaScript with a view to writing a 2D action game, this article provides an overview of the issues encountered by a developer who recently did …
Being a good little 404er
Using ActiveRecord’s RecordNotFound exception to cleanly and consistently handle 404s throughout your application
How’s your retirement looking?
My understanding is that there are lots of young people who visit Sitepoint, people in their teens and twenties.
I hope that you save 20-50% of every dollar you earn.
It may seem hard with rent and food — but it only gets harder later on.
If you start saving now and investing wisely, you may be able to retire long before your colleagues.
I won’t bore you with a lecture about how money compounds, and how $1 saved in your twenties can be worth lots more than $1 saved when you are 40 or 50. You know that.
Why do we work? Lots of reasons. But work is about how we use our life energy, and what we do with that energy. If you want to be able to choose whether you work or not someday, please start saving up now — in a big way. It takes discipline and commitment, but is worth doing.
Please read the classic book Your Money or Your Life if you want to learn a new way to think about money. Read also The Automatic Millionaire, so you can see the powerful effects of saving.
I’m lucky in that I saved enough money early on and made some smart …
Aug 29, 2006 News Wire
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Using Google as a Top 10 List – The Power of SEO
A cute demonstration proving that search engine optimization is not dead. Unfortunately, all the attention has broken the demo, but for awhile at least this SEO pro was able to grab the top 5 search terms on Google in the desired order.
(tags: google search) -
jQuery 1.0
This JavaScript library is something of an upstart compared to more established players like Dojo, Prototype and others. It has, however, developed a strong following and a reputation for fostering a simple and elegant coding style.
(tags: javascript) -
Web 2.0 Patterns
A brief account of the goings-on at a “Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop organized by Tim O’Reilly to expand on the conclusions of his “What is Web 2.0″ paper. The list of Web 2.0 “values” they produced is nice enough, but I look forward to more detail.
(tags: business design) -
17 MS Office Killers
An entertaining comparative review of the main web-based “Office killers”.
(tags: ajax business) -
Processing 1.0 (BETA)
An open source programming language and environment specialized for producing animation and sound. The current implementation produces Java applets, but it’s simple enough for …
Flickr mySQL DBA Blog
Quick note – Dathan Pattishall, one of Flickr’s db / software engineers has been dropping notes on his new blog mySQL DBA – some fascinating insight and technical tips.
Related to recent UTF-8 discussions…
- Rebuilding 4.0 data into 4.1 data
- What does mySQL 4.1 do with utf8 and collation
- Calculating utf8 sizes for varchars
- MySQL 4.1 and insert or Load data warnings
- Note about utf8_bin
- Quick php script to figure out bad utf8 characters. (Blogger.com really needs to sort out syntax formatting and highlighting!)
Will update the wiki in due course.
Higher Order Perl (and Javascript / Ruby)
Currently juggling about 15 bookmarks in a copy of Higher Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus. Just a mini-review – for a more detailed review try here.
From the inside cover…
As a programmer, your bookshelf is probably overflowing with books that did nothing to change the way you program… or think about programming.
You’re going to need a completely different shelf for this book.
Not sure if that’s understatement or overstatement. Anyway – it is an excellent book; most of all as a middle ground for stepping into functional programming but Mark’s (I assume) background in mathematics makes for a very refreshing break from web frameworks and CRUD, with some really interesting problem domains. Mark explained his “hidden agenda” here.
It’s not all mathematics though (in fact it mainly isn’t). For example the chapter on parsing is one of the most accessible and useful I’ve seen on the subject (excepting perhaps Game Scripting Mastery, oddly enough) – Chomsky grammars don’t even get a mention ;)
Otherwise there’s a bunch of techniques and ideas that are applicable pretty much anywhere and may turn your head if you’re used to thinking in terms of classes and objects, such as using …
Aug 28, 2006 News Wire
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A Gentle Introduction to SQL
For those who learn best by doing, this site teaches you Structured Query Language (SQL), the language for working with databases, by letting you type in and run snippets of code on the site to solve problems of increasing difficulty.
(tags: databases) -
GIMP vs. Photoshop – What still needs to be done?
An insightful analysis of the factors that are holding the free image editing software The GIMP from dethroning Photoshop as the industry standard.
(tags: design software) -
JQuery: (Mis)leading the Pack
Although the jQuery JavaScript library has some attractive features that set it apart, this rebuttal of a recent blog post throws some cold water on its creators’ enthusiastic bashing of competitors like Prototype.
(tags: javascript) -
An Interview with Dojo Creator Alex Russell
A two-part interview with Alex Russell, co-creator of the Dojo Toolkit, the most comprehensive open source JavaScript library. A man of deep thoughts and considered opinions, Alex shares his thoughts on the history and future of the massive library.
(tags: javascript) -
Why XHTML is a bad idea
A new look at an old chestnut. Although there is nothing new on the subject here, it does provide a nice, …
Personality Obsessions of Software Developers
Rob Walling managed to generate a lot of interest in writing Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers. While I vaguely agree with Rob’s points, at some level reading it produces a feeling which I can only compare to finding a fingernail in your sandwich.
Approaching 10…
On this “perfect developer” profile, strikes me there are a couple of missing points (for starters!). Based on my own flawed view of things…
- Is passionate about what they do. Let’s face it – staring at a monitor for 8+ hours a day ain’t Rock N’ Roll (well for most of us anyway) – at some fundamental level you have to enjoy doing this stuff. Put another way – I’d rather work with a passionate trainee than a bored veteran.
- Has some humility. Being “wrong” is inevitable – you will write code that has bugs, you will produce suboptimal designs and you’re not an expert on everything – how would Linus fare with CSS? If you can’t admit you’re in the wrong, there’s little space to fix problems, learn from mistakes plus you’re probably hard to work with. Inverting this – between binary 0 and 1, there’s no room for ego. The …
Okay, let’s see if anyone’s been reading this blog: Reader challenge
We’ve been interacting for about 2 years or more now. Some of you are newcomers to this blog and some of you have been here from the start.
So at this point, it is my expectation that if I ask you to answer a business challenge, you should be able to answer it for me. Here goes:
What advice would you give to a web developer/designer who is looking out at his business pipeline over the next six months and sees that business will likely dry up in about 3 months?
What are the top 1 to 5 marketing activities you think would help this person recharge his pipeline?
Looking forward to your answers….
