Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Around this time last year I was playing around with fuzzy dates - that is, formatting a machine date (like the UNIX timestamp) as a human-friendly string (like, 'last week'). At the time I was working on my lifestream site and wanted to display elapsed time in a convenient manner. Now that I'm…
There's been a lot of kicking around of QR codes since they first cropped up, complaints about their usability or a specific implementation (see WTF QR Codes for plenty of examples). I recently bumped into them in a discussion with some coworkers regarding 'short URLs' vs longer keyword-stuffed URLs…
One of my least favorite phrases to hear while working on a website is 'do it for the SEO'. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a valid factor in website development. If Google and other search engines are having a difficult time crawling and understanding your content than it will be more…
There is a big difference between human-readable dates and computer-parseable date information. People are much better interpreters of variable inputs while most programs pass around a standardized machine format. Since I'm a PHP guy the two formats I'm used to are MySQL DATETIME and the UNIX…