Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Five years ago I played around with a PHP class to contain my resume content and abstract out optional pieces. This work ended up being unwieldy and largely unused - I had to create custom exporters to get the data out and rarely needed alternate versions of my resume. Shortly after building a few…
I've always been a bit wary about ORMs. While I understand the appeal of modeling a data structure in the application and how much fine-grained control that gives you, it just feels like a heavy-handed solution. It's a lot of extra code to write and maintain and to build it out 'properly', with…
Over the last few years I've found myself writing and implementing a number of client libraries for different APIs. PHP to scrape dailymile and twitter, PHP to post updates to twitter, and even more PHP to interact with customer.io. Okay, so maybe most of my API building and consuming experience has…
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…
Outside of fetching elevation information for each point on the upcoming waterfall refactor I decided to add a new feature. Listing the county and exact latitude/longitude is helpful for explaining where a waterfall is located (as well as showing it on a map, of course), but listing the 'closest…
A related piece to the new waterfall site (that I'm still actively working on) is geodata - that is, the coordinates of each waterfall and nearby features, paths, etc. The existing waterfall site had each coordinate saved inline with the fall record, a very sloppy and elementary implementation.…
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:…
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,…
There are a few things that frustrate me more as a web developer than finding cross-layer coupling in frameworks. I'm not just refering to 'view' or 'model' layers here… Front-facing parameters, module logic, and data storage structure are all unique layers of an application and should be…