Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
As of a few weeks ago my website used PHP to route static assets. That is, every time a request hit my server for css, js, or the like, a PHP process would kick up to process and stream the response back. This was done to handle versioning and compiling of different assets, which was very helpful…
Many people avoid using regex in their application because of speed issues. When you're developing a site and are looking for sub-second response times a regex that takes a few hundred milliseconds is not very appealing. Especially when that slow pattern is being matched against several dozen…
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of learning about Sculpin, a sweet PHP tool, from Ben Benesh at the local PHP meetup. Sculpin is a static site generator that takes a bunch of Twigs and/or Markdowns and compiles them into a set of static HTML files for easy deployment. There are some rather cool…
Site analytics is an important tool for web developers and stakeholders alike. Knowing where visitors are coming from, how they're interacting with your content, and why they're leaving can provide valuable information on how to better serve your audience both on- and off-line. There are several…
Of all the memory-intensive processes that you can do with PHP image resizing is one of the most abused. It may be tempting to have the power of requesting any image in any size, passing the parameters in to a script and boom, having a custom fitted image, but it's not a great idea. There are…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
In my last post I explained what a web crawler was and some of the basic steps that someone could break up the logic into. I also dived into some of the difficulties I had when building out my own crawler. Granted, some of the difficulties were self-imposed: I was using PHP, had a limited timeframe,…
A web crawler is a script that goes out and crawls the web. Pretty surprising, eh? There are many crawlers out there, including the famous GoogleBot that attempts to index every site it bumps into and nefarious spambots that look for and exploit vulnerabilities. The logic behind them seems simple:…
Right around this time last year I set up a simple hit logger on my server. Nothing complex, just a dump of the server superglobal with some extra metadata. This is something that is partially captured by the server itself in access logs: what file was requested, who was requesting it (user agent…
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…