Best Practices

Apr 12th, 2009

Window’s Host File Gives You Your Own Personal DNS Settings

So here’s a useful trick I was reminded of this past week. Sometimes as a developer I write code that appears on multiple web sites. I just write a few lines that check what domain name the current site is using and execute the relevant code appropriately. Confusing? Think about when you sign up for [...]

Mar 25th, 2009

Broken Apostrophes When Querying WordPress Tables

I’m a big fan of the WordPress blogging platform, and it’s the one I use when I’m setting my clients up with a blog. In most cases they want WordPress to be a small part of their site instead of the whole thing. (You can certainly make a case for WordPress as a full CMS, [...]

Mar 19th, 2009

Making Your CSS Files Dynamic With a Little PHP

I’ve grown so accustomed to writing in languages like PHP where I can use variables, loops, and arrays to cut down on the amount of duplicate code I need to create. I love the flexibility I had to make things as efficient and modular as possible. So I used to dread working with a CSS [...]

Sep 17th, 2008

Communicate Hosting Requirements at the Outset

photo credit: fill3r With most of my clients, I develop their site on my web server. We’ll go back and forth through all the iterations of changes there. When it’s complete, then I move it over to their production server. 95% of the time, this works fine. I recently came across a situation, though, where [...]

Sep 3rd, 2008

Lightbox and Other Modal Overlay Effects

Hot on the heels of (and sometimes built upon) incredibly useful Javascript libraries like Scriptaculous, there’s been a wave of modal overlay effects. (Some of the most popular are listed here.) They all seem to have their own unique quirks, but the overlying theme is the same. A small layer is given attention by bringing [...]

Mar 19th, 2008

Microsoft Spell-Check Tells Me Eyestrain Is One Word

I went to bed last night with a killer headache centered right behind my eyes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised since I had spent almost every waking hour of the past 4 days staring into my monitor as though it displayed the secret of eternal happiness and life everlasting. (It doesn’t.) The reason I’ve [...]

Mar 12th, 2008

Offer Email Templates as an Ancillary Service

As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling [...]

Feb 6th, 2008

Adventures in Debugging CakePHP

The purpose of this blog is to share whatever wisdom I accumulate in my business with other freelance web developers. Normally that means looking back at my previous week and trying to identify what I wish someone had told me at the beginning of the week. I generalize that information so that it will be [...]

Jan 17th, 2008

Leveraging Fresh, Original Content

One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start [...]

Jan 10th, 2008

Giving an Uploaded File a Unique Name in PHP

It’s been a while since I’ve done a technical post with code snippets, so I thought I’d share a function that I use at least every week. The majority of my work is with custom CMS or the occasional intranet. In both cases I’m regularly dealing with code where the visitor can upload files to [...]

Web Development