Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
There's been a lot of changes to a few of my websites lately, including this blog. Inspired by the whole idea of responsive web design I've been going through and refactoring the front end logic. This involves more than just updating CSS. Removing jQuery, adding some HTML5, and cleaning up the…
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…
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…
Over the last few months I've been working on a fun side project to display what music I've been listening to recently. I decided to break this information down by albums and number of songs played over a period of time. While the data itself is straightforward and could be displayed either as a…
It's that time of year again... When people realize that they've eaten too much food, spent too much money, or just haven't been overly productive over the holidays and decided to make firm New Year's Resolutions. I'm no exception to this annual tradition and have made a few commitments of my own…
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…
When a computer script crawls across the web looking for information (like Google's search robot) they need to do a lot of thinking to figure out what information is located on a web page. After all, web pages are written by humans for humans, with the data and information contained in our complex,…
Recoding all of my subdomains to follow a model-view-controller framework has been a really interesting process. I've had the opportunity to experiment with different design patterns and techniques, especially in the realm of data handling and content delivery. Abstracting out my resume is a great…
As a web developer interested in creating a web presence I'm constantly looking for new projects to add to and inhance my websites. Some of these (like this blog) require a fair degree of committment to create new content, while others (like my about page) is a simple static page. I've always kept…