Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
As of a few weeks ago my website used PHP to route static assets. That is, every time a request hit my server for css, js, or the like, a PHP process would kick up to process and stream the response back. This was done to handle versioning and compiling of different assets, which was very helpful…
Over the years I've played a lot with Twitter and different bots and interactions. Shoot, there are write-ups on this blog about authenticating raw Twitter requests with OAuth, extending that to handling Twitter streams with Guzzle, and then doing it again with raw streaming requests. Using these…
There are few tasks that I cringe about more than putting together a presentation with a standard slideshow program. With my background in web development the drag-and-drop process, mixing of content with design, and maintaining consistency through an evolving forty-plus slideshow is clunky and…
Site analytics is an important tool for web developers and stakeholders alike. Knowing where visitors are coming from, how they're interacting with your content, and why they're leaving can provide valuable information on how to better serve your audience both on- and off-line. There are several…
Even though my waterfalls site turned out to be a great way to chronicle adventures through wilderness, it has several areas that are lacking. The biggest area is the Google Maps functionality, which is shaky at best. It can only show the end points and major points along the route, but I didn't…
This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript, stylesheets, and cookies. It will show you how to use cookies with a style switcher to remember a user's preference and load it with their (many) return visits.
In the previous post, I explained a method for allowing users to switch…
This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript and stylesheets. It will show you how to setup a Javascript-powered styleswitcher that works for individual pages.
One of the huge benefits that CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, brought to web design was the ability to easily change an…
Throughout the course of my web development learning, I've always had a central problem to deal with. On a typical website, multiple pages have some sort of general, non-changing bits that stay constant throughout the site: headers, footers, and navigational bars are great examples. The only piece…
This post assumes intermediate understanding of the Google Maps API.
While I was working on a personal project I bumped into the need to create a Google Map that included locations and driving directions of the different Keweenaw waterfalls. This gave me the opportunity to learn about the Google…
I started learning about web development during the summer of 2006 when I took an undergraduate course at Michigan Tech involving basic xHTML and CSS. My professor was very strict on certain coding points, such as using valid, clean xHTML and the separation of content and style, which I still…