How to Center a Div in the Middle of the Screen
David Tang has written a simple and elegant plugin for jQuery that allows a div to be placed in the middle of a page.
MODx – Evolution – 1st Impressions
I haven’t been using MODx for very long, but I have worked with several other content management systems previously and experienced both the good and the bad with them. MODx appears to be a fairly simple MVC style content management system with a bit of a pluggable architecture. I haven’t written any plugins for MODx,…
Unobtrusive JavaScript And Why it Matters
Many more senior web developers can remember throwing tags all over the contents of websites and using tables for the presentation of content: these practices are said to be intrusive and a maintenance nightmare especially when the font colour should be pink instead of black on a header. Unobtrusive JavaScript is another best practice for…
PHP Object/Variable Life Time
Many junior PHP developers seem to feel that PHP objects and variables are retained between requests. In PHP4 and PHP5, no variables are retained outside of the contents of $_SESSION and other stores between requests.
Book Review: Code Craft
“Code Craft” (ISBN: 1-59327-119-0) was written by Pete Goodliffe. The book is relevant to all developers: code is very language agnostic. Code Craft doesn’t just cover the design of the program, but also includes quite a bit of content on the process the program goes through “in the trenches.” The book does include some minor…
How To Post Great Freelance Gigs
I have been trolling Craigslist and Kijiji lately in hopes of finding some additional freelance work to add to my portfolio before I become a full time freelancer/consultant. Read the advertisements has proven to be a terribly frustrating experience. Advertisers need to always remember that the more details they provide will lead to a much…
Learning Drupal
For the last couple of weeks, I have began playing around with Drupal because I’m so sick of fighting proprietary CMS. The proprietary CMS suffers from the vendor updating only updating the CMS when convenient for them and this ends up holding the purchaser hostage. Overall, I know that drupal has enough of the functionality that I need in modules and the core to significantly improve the efficiency of my programming and possibly offer a large learning opportunity on software architecture.
Drupal + TinyMCE
I’ve just really began to try and experiment with using Drupal, modules, and really starting to customize how things work. I have really been playing with open source Content Management Systems off and on over the years because I don’t feel that depending on proprietary CMS is the right approach and definitely rolling your own…
PHP Update Finally Depreciates PHP MSSQL driver
The biggest advantage of the change is being able to better take advantage of Microsoft SQL Server features that probably made you choose to use SQL Server in the first place.Making the change wasn’t overly difficult because I took time and wrote a simple Database Access Layer.
Installing PHPUnit on WAMPServer
Installing WampServer and PHPUnit doesn’t have to be difficult. Check out this post on how to install PHPUnit on WampServer.
Reducing Download Speed in Firefox (Throttling)
Conveniently, Firefox Throttle meets my needs exactly and allows exclusions for specific websites or specific IP Addresses.
Book Review:The Passionate Programmer
“The Passionate Programmer” is an excellent read and that I feel I have learned more about myself than I would have ever thought. I would never say that it is the next Code Complete or Code Craft, but it can definitely help you develop a meaningful career.
1and1.com – Web Hosting Review
Purchasing web hosting service is extremely easy; however, purchasing great web service is extremely difficult. Some of the web hosts pretty much register the domain and give you access almost immediately to some temporary space while the DNS wait period occurs. I can’t remember how long it took for me to get access to the…
Skype API Basics – Part 1
What is the Skype API? The Skype API is an easy way to create plugins that can dramatically change the way Skype functions. For example, we could make a program that reads messages out loud as we receive them instead of having to check for new messages. The Skype API is potentially very different for…
Kijiji Advertisement – Are You Kidding?
I was surfing the local Kijiji looking to see if maybe there might be some interesting contract work. Naturally, I wasted approximately forty-five seconds reading the three advertisements until I found this really pathetic offer: “I need a website built in the next 4 weeks. Website will have up to or may be more than…
Determine if Skype is Installed
The easiest method of checking whether Skype is installed is actually to check for a Registry Key. We, of course, can’t check C:Program Files for a Skype Directory because the user could have installed elsewhere (or maybe if 64 bit the operating system did?) Skype’s API Document provides us with the following information: To check…
Inline vs External JavaScript
In general, we never should have embed JavaScript inside the same file as the HTML markup and should instead place the JavaScript into an external file. The content, presentation, and interaction code should all be separate to make your life easier as a website developer. Cleaner Code. Cleaner code is much quicker to find errors…
JavaScript And Site Performance
JavaScript and the respective frameworks have really began to gain traction over the last couple of years. I would argue that most of the JavaScript frameworks are excellent, and truly are great for the user experience and for the programmer experience.
The Rise and Fall of Waterfall
Sadly, I still think there are a lot of companies that still just think,code, guess, code, guess some more and maybe eventually come up with something. We need a repeatable process that should be fairly iterative.
The Ten Commandments for C Programmers
by Henry Spencer 1. Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgement oft exceed thine. 2. Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end. 3. Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if they are…