Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
Forbidden land stretched out in front of me. I was within a mile of the Huron Mountain Club property, standing on an unnamed outcropping southeast of Burnt Mountain, looking north along the eastern guardians of Mountain Lake. For years I had been trying to see this huge lake within the Club's…
There were plenty of friends who told me that the wedding would be a blur of activity, a sudden glorious rush gone in a blink. They were right.
Katie and her parents did most of the planning for wedding weekend. My involvement was minimal, kept to a small sounding board and infrequent errand…
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…
Running has never been a strong skill of mine. That didn't stop me from trying, though. A combination of lukewarm interest and parental pressure kept me in sports all through middle and high school, which included many years of track & field. I typically competed in the 400 and 100 meter,…
The morning air was crisp enough to draw a shiver from me as I searched for a path. I had parked on the end of a forest road east of Old M-64 on a spring morning and wondered if my double shirt and jean jacket would be enough to protect me from the cold. Finding the sign that marked the start of the…
It was late afternoon as I walked away from my parked car on the Northwestern Road. The air was cool and damp from the morning's rains, keeping the normally pervasive black flies and mosquitoes to a background detail. Several logging roads branch north from the Northwestern Road here before it…
There is a lot of buzz around performance optimization on web pages these days. Visitors want sub-second responses when they click on a link. They don't want to wait for a page to load or for redirects to resolve, nor do they want to wait for javascript libraries before they can interact with the…
A bent blue gate marked the beginning of my afternoon hike. I had just drove down the confusing Holyoke Trail, northwest of Marquette, and was itching to get started. Stepping around the game I set off north along the two-track, wondering what this hike would have in store for me. I knew there were…
In an effort to streamline and homogenize code a number of design patterns and best practices have sprung up in the programming field. One of the ideas that has moved across programming disciplines is the vilification of long strands of meandering logic, or called spaghetti code. For many in the…