Web Development Category | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Product Development and Intelligence

My career in web development started with delivering products, not necessarily expectations. Starting as a lone web developer I've previously made the mistake of trying to put the product specifications before the client needs, focusing on what I can do technically and not what I should be doing to fulfill their requirements. Working at DealerFire has helped me start with the client expectations and work backwards to what we can do to meet them (which is how it probably should be, although this can easily result in a mismatch of perceived value and actual value). Thanks to a recent promotion, I'll be moving up to the next tier of delivery and responsibility - product intelligence.

When you work in a web development environment there is always a limit on what is possible with finite resources. That's something that holds up a lot of beginning developers and companies - getting caught up on the limits of what they currently know. Without full knowledge of current technologies or industry movements, it's easy to fall back on known territory and ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• business intelligence,
• customer service,
• dealerfire,
• job

SEO Consultants are not Necessarily Experts

I've always been a bit confused by people who consider themselves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants. It's not that I don't think such a position should exists - on the contrary, SEO is an important part of the web development process that is often overlooked by web designers and programmers. What confuses me is how they consider themselves experts.

Most of these consultants devote their focus on Google. This makes a lot of sense, with Google being the elephant in the room when it comes to search engines. However, it seems that the majority of their focus is always on the algorithm and how it changes over time. When Google made the Panda update early in 2011, there was a big push for unique, organic content on sites. SEO consultants seem to be reactionary, watching to see what Google determines is important in determining good content and structure is. This is the wrong approach.

Well-rounded web developers take a simple stance when it comes to SEO. Just build out a web presence that make sense. Each page on a website has a ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• consulting,
• optimization,
• seo

Responsive Web Design and Duplicate URLs

Duplicate content is a well-known issue that members in the search engine optimization (SEO) and web development communities keep a close eye on. This issue can lower the relative value of a page in the eyes of search engines, due to their being multiple instances of the page's content. The address, or URL, of any page on the internet is meant to be a unique identifier for the page, and if there is an exact duplicate of that content located on a separate URLs than the pages are not as useful for end users. A great example of this is the www vs no-www duplication that many sites have... Both versions of the URL may render the same page. GET parameters, tailing slashes, and other types of dynamically generated pages can also generate duplicate content issues.

I wanted to address the opposite issue in this post. Duplicate content can be easily fixed using a variety of solutions, but there are other practices that are starting to pervade the web development community that could potentially confuse users and search engines alike. Let's call it ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• css,
• responsive web,
• seo

Best Practices in Development

Over the last few days I've been working on a relatively large change to my image linking logic. This change involved some reorganization on the server side, adding name-spacing, changing the url structure, and placing 301 redirects to all 1200+ of my photos. I made this update both in hopes of keeping some relative SEO content on the photos linked in my blog and because I wasn't happy with the original implementation (especially the data storage). This post isn't about the update, though. I wanted to talk a bit about some of the principles I used on this and other projects I work on.

Incremental Changes

This update was a rather large one to my engine. I needed to change more than just a few image links - I upgraded my entire image storage system to a relational setup. Eventually this will turn into a dedicated photography site (photos.jacobemerick.com, mayhaps). Trying to change everything and push it live at once would have been asking for disaster.

Instead I broke down this change into five steps. Each step could be tested ...

• Tags:
• agile development,
• best practice,
• mvc,
• my site,
• oop,
• seo

Levels of Impossibility

As a novice web developer I often thought that many site functionality ideas were impossible. Without experience or working knowledge of a variety of web languages even the most basic Javascript animations or ajax features throughout the internet lived in the realm of dark magic and mystery. Now, after years of developing web sites for clients, I understand much more of how things work, or at least how to duplicate it using more familiar technologies. When a client throws a unexpected feature request at me, I can normally figure out a way to add it into their project. However, I still believe that some things are 'impossible'... it's just a matter of how impossible they are.

Level 1: Truly, Undeniably Impossible

Even with all of the amazing things web developers can do these days we still have one solid restriction: the browser. A browser instance cannot affect other browser instance (unless they are linked). One domain cannot directly read another domain's cookies. Web sites cannot affect a user's computer unless the user allows it. ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• business intelligence,
• customer service

Popular Music Project

Over the last few months I've been working on a fun side project to display what music I've been listening to recently. I decided to break this information down by albums and number of songs played over a period of time. While the data itself is straightforward and could be displayed either as a list or table, I wanted to make something visually interesting that would show the most 'popular' albums in my library.

Note: you can view this project at Jake's popular music site.

Before I could get involved in the display I needed to find a way to grab the data. Luckily, last.fm has a solution for this. Using their 'scrobbler' media plug-in, I am able to upload my music plays from all of the different computers I use (desktop, laptop, work computer) to my profile. They also have an API that returns this information as an XML feed. I query this API with a daily cron to pull the most recent information to my database.

In order to make the display dynamic I needed to do some ...

• Tags:
• ajax,
• dynamic,
• jquery,
• music,
• my site

Will (and should) Google Plus be The new Social Network?

With the advent of Google Plus a few weeks ago, I've found it interesting to compare the differences of the major 'social networks' out there in today's internet. There's been a lot of discussion out there on Facebook versus Google, but I don't think it's fair to compare only these two applications. After all, Twitter is a major player who's simplicity and wide range of possibilities that, in some regards, is something that Google Plus is also targeting.

To start out I'd like to share what my idea how today's internet is changing. For the longest time publishing content on the web and sharing it with the world was a fairly difficult process. Even with the advent of Yahoo! GeoCities, MySpace, and blogging networks, it was difficult to show your friends, families, or 'followers' (people who are interested in your content but may not be an acquaintance) without sending links with every update. There are a few things that helped with that (search engines to find, rss/notifications to update), but it was still a clunky process. Then there was ...

• Tags:
• facebook,
• google plus,
• twitter

Why You Should Build Your Own Darn Framework (Usually)

I've always been a big fan of writing my own website frameworks. It's how I learned to code, writing and re-writing a specialized PHP framework in an iterative, agile-like development process. There have been times when I've worked within standard systems (Zend, Code Ignitor, Wordpress, etc) but I try to avoid them on personal projects. PHP has a lot of flexibility in terms of allowing a developer set their own standards and I have a very unique style and approach to custom projects that I bring to my code. Also, I have some issues with using a pre-built framework.

Too Much Functionality

Some frameworks are very abstracted out with functionality for multiple data source drivers and DOM helpers (cough cough Zend). While it is impressive how much thought went into these large, comprehensive frameworks, there is often far too much logic there for a standard web project. As an example, one of the previous systems I worked with (heavy-traffic, front-facing site) was based off of the Zend Framework. Each page load included over 300 scripts ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• mvc,
• php,
• security

Abstract Form Handling

I've already gone over some basic form handling and form best practices with my last few posts, but building with an object-orientated MVC starts to throw forms into a different light. It's very easy to abstract out forms with their repetitive logic patterns, something that I've recently done on one of my side projects. While I don't want to explain the code line-by-line, this post will go over some of the basic thought processes and steps I took to make my abstracted form handler.

Form Wrapper

The first logic I worked out was the definition of a form. To create each new form, I create a new class that is abstracting off a base pattern. Each form class defines form elements within a standard 'get' method. This way I can call on individual form elements easily or call the entire class to pull the whole form. Example...

• Tags:
• abstraction,
• form,
• mvc,
• oop,
• php

Best Practices with Forms

The last post about PHP form handling (forms with php) focused on the basics - the HTML syntax and simple PHP necessary for an operating form. There were several pieces that I glossed over in the explanation for the setup of that form that I want to go over in more detail now. You can create a form using many different techniques... but some practices are better than others.

Use Standard Elements

By using Javascript or tweaking HTML elements you can create a working form without the standard form elements (input, textarea, checkbox, etc). Normal HTML form elements often have annoying default styles added to them by different browsers that may conflict with your design. While it may seem like a good idea to hack their behavior, there are two reasons why you shouldn't.

First, if you don't provide graceful degradation, there's a good chance that your tweaks may make your form unusable by more basic browsers and systems (like screen readers!). Second, users are used to certain ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• form,
• php