Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
This week I finally made the leap and pushed my personal MVC to a public GitHub repo. I didn't do this because I'm particular proud of the code - a good chunk of it is six years old and isn't representative of current (or past) best practices. Nor did I do it because I think other programmers will…
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…
PHP was the first programming language that I understood fluently. Sure, I had dabbled in BASIC, Java, ActionScript (3.0 is pretty awesome), and a few others, but PHP was the first language that I felt truly comfortable with. It wasn't until I moved onto JavaScript that I started to understand a…
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…
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…
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…
An interesting possibility cropped up for my MVC a few weeks ago. I've been working with microformats on and off the last few months (you can read about one of my first adventures with them when I created a microformatted resume). I started to wonder where else my site could use this new feature. An…
Something that I've been working on a lot with both my work and personal web programming is data abstraction. The opportunity to work with several different handmade php frameworks has given me different ideas on what an effective data abstraction system should have. Without formal education,…
It may be no surprise to any of my long-term visitors, but I've decided to perform a deep overhaul of my website. Based partly on my recent introduction to model-view-control frameworks and partly on research into web caching and optimization, I've spent a good chunk of time analyzing my current and…
Ever since I started working on websites during the summer of 2006 I made sure to keep dynamic and static information separate on my projects. Certain things in the website's content should remain the same, or similar, on separate pages: header, footer, navigation, etc. (I'll refer to these similar…