Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
The last year has lasted an eternity. COVID-19 has impacted, well, the entire world, and my family wasn't spared. I don't mean to complain - we are blessed and privileged and are able to react to the uncertainty - there is just no question that every event in the last twelve-to-thirteen months has…
A month ago my blog hit a big milestone: 500 posts. It's taken nine years to accumulate this many words, words about PHP and Arizona and work and more boring personal matters. There have been dry spells that have lasted months and some months that the posts flowed out much more frequently. Overall I…
As some frequent visitors may have noticed over the last week I've been dealing with a pretty bad spam problem on this blog. Since I don't use Wordpress or any other blogging framework there wasn't a quick fix for this issue, no plug-in to download and plop on or anything. I had to come up with…
Over the last month or so I've been spending a lot of time working with image manipulation. First I played with resizing with PHP GD, a basic library included in most builds. Then I jumped into the real meat, reading and overwriting the raw EXIF headers, to both clean up some pieces from GD and…
Comments are an important part of a blog. Too often blogs are used as a soapbox for one person to state their ideas and opinions out into the open air of the internet without any sort of inline interaction. Comments allow an audience to give feedback, debate the points, or provide their own views…
Huh. I guess we made it past another potential doomsday, the Mayan apocalypse. We're now two weeks into 2013 and well past the time to make resolutions about losing weight and writing novels. But that's not enough to stop me from laying out some goals, especially as the next six months are the last…
There's been a lot of changes to a few of my websites lately, including this blog. Inspired by the whole idea of responsive web design I've been going through and refactoring the front end logic. This involves more than just updating CSS. Removing jQuery, adding some HTML5, and cleaning up the…
When I first decided to create an online blog I wanted to avoid a common pitfall of many other blogs: lack updates. While there were a few empty months in 2009, it feels like a did a good job with regular posts every week or so... Until the New Year rolled around. This is the first blog post in over…
This blog was started in March of 2009 during a pivotal moment of my life. I had recently been fired from Michigan Tech, my first post-college job, and was using my free time to create a website to allow me to both market and develop myself professional. With the new site's blog I hoped to discuss…
This post assumes basic understanding of PHP, HTML, and CSS.
Creating my blog by hand gave me the opportunity to work with many features that come standard with online blogging software. I developed tag clouds, post filtering, and the search functions based on the visual functionality that other…