Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
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…
Thanks to the prevalence of microblogging, and before that the infamous 80 column screen, friendly (or keyword-stuffed) URLs have run into character limit issues. Long URLs are great for both SEO and usability. They give both users and search bots an insight on the page's content before actually…
I've always been a bit confused by people who consider themselves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants. It's not that I don't think such a position should exists - on the contrary, SEO is an important part of the web development process that is often overlooked by web designers and…
One of my main goals while redoing my website is to optimize my content, both on the frontend and backend. The frontend is something that I've always considered to be the most important in terms of a fast user experience - I'm not crunching enough data on the backend to worry about long processing…
On several of my previous blog posts I ran into the need to show something on a map. While Google Maps was the initial idea to implement, all I wanted was a single image with a few lines or markers. Embedding a map seemed a bit much for this simple task. My second idea was taking screen shots of a…