After you’ve been working with code for a while, source control is a godsend. It provides a way of tracking changes, prevents conflicts and generally saves your bacon. Here’s how to set it up on Windows 7.
Blog
Social Media Marketing: You’re Doing It Wrong
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently in small business startups, especially those started by young people. A lot of these entrepreneurs, when launching their businesses, are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and using a Facebook or MySpace page instead of a traditional website. It could be because it’s a natural extension from the tools they’re used to in their personal lives or because it’s self-service and can be live in minutes, but I’m here to say they’re doing it wrong. Here’s why.
Improving the User Experience with Browser Sniffing: UX Tips for a Better Website
We’re used to using browser sniffing to work around incompatibilities, to serve different stylesheets or scripts to different User-Agents with different capabilities. Of course, that approach has fallen by the wayside in recent times, with best practice now dictating that we test for capabilities rather than browser/OS combinations in our rich UIs.
When plagiarism doesn’t pay: the story of Matt Earnshaw, David Airey and Jon Hicks
A designer by the name of Matt Earnshaw thought he could get away with ripping off the work of David Airey. Here’s what happened…
Continue reading
Shameless plug – BlackLotus, alternative model
Ok, so this has nothing to do with web design. Well, maybe a bit. An old friend of mine has launched a new site for her modelling portfolio. Without getting into the whole Flash-is-not-search-engine-friendly issue, sometimes a Flash website can provide an engaging user experience for models, photographers and people for whom the textual content of the site takes second place to visual content such as images or video.
In these cases, it’s important to implement a solid linking strategy and get good inbound links with relevant link text. Of course, this isn’t purely for search engine purposes, any photographers reading this would enjoy working with Rachael; she’s a genuinely nice lass and very talented, so check her out.
Mistyped URL? Duplicate content? .htaccess and mod_rewrite to the rescue
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d jot down a couple of ways Apache and mod_rewrite can save your life. Not literally of course, unless your website’s been linked to your life-support system by a crazed psychopath – but it should make your readers’ lives easier. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing here?
TLA Confusion = Comprehension FUBAR
Does that title confuse you? You’re not alone.
Acronyms are everywhere, especially on the Web where technical terms ((X)HTML, CSS, PHP) rub shoulders with shorthand figures of speech (IMHO). In fact, the profusion of acronyms has given rise to a self-referencing acronym of its own – TLA.
On the Importance of a Coding Standard
mail() fail
I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could figure out what exactly was going wrong. The server was setup properly – I whipped up a quick test script, and it had no problems sending. Nothing was obviously wrong with the script itself… or so I thought.
Posted in PHP
Tagged code, coding standards, development, Magento, PHP, Zend Framework
Leave a comment
