Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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:…
The most difficult part of pulling information from Twitter's 1.1 API is the actual request. I've covered how to create the OAuth request in some previous posts: making a basic OAuth request and passing in extra parameters. Once you get the information back, though, what do you do with it?
Twitter…
A while ago I wrote a post explaining how to pull data from Twitter's API. I focused on pulling the default authenticated user timeline (which, if you set up the application under your account, you are the authenticated user). Wouldn't it be great if you could customize the request a bit?
The…
Presque Isle is one of those delightful city parks with some neat and unique spots that I usually avoid on my adventures. While it is a bit removed from the hustle of Marquette, perched on the north shoulder far from the main byways, the sounds and smells of city still float through the park like an…
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…
Ghostly fog crept over the dark road, repeatedly slowing me on my early morning drive. It was an uneasy reminder of a trip only a few months ago when my hike was cut short by a solid wall of mist on a bluff out by Irish Hollow Cemetery. Today's first adventure depended heavily on good visibility and…
Content Management Systems (aka CMS) is being grossly misused in its contemporary usage. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, ModX… All of these are open-source web publishing applications that have a robust backend (depending on your needs) that are frequently described as being CMSes. They aren't,…
Recently I had the pleasure of reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule. This book goes over the basics of a user-focused design process, explaining some methods and practices to ensure user experience (UX) stays paramount throughout the discovery, concept, and delivery phase of a project. It really…
Mining ruins are not my normal hiking destinations. It's not that I don't find the old sites interesting or that I'm not drawn to the Copper Country's rich mining history, it's just that I find the natural beauty of the Upper Peninsula more appealing. Well, that and ruins are more difficult to…