Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Dealing with normal events in a Google Calendar feed is not too tough. Looping through each event and pulling the basic chunks of information (title, description, times) is easy once you hook up the correct namespacing to the nodes. Once you get into recurring events, though, things get more…
Pulling and parsing a Google Calendar feed sounds like a fairly straightforward project. After all, you are provided with both an XML and iCal Address (even for private calendars) for each calendar on their settings page. It didn't take me long to realize that there are unique pieces of these feeds…
I've always been a bit of a goal- and task- orientated person. The only thing I enjoy more than making a long to do list at the beginning of a week is crossing the items off of the list one at a time. Now that I'm a 'real adult' with a full time job and puppy, I decided to create a list of goals to…
One issue I've always had with the typical templating methods over the years is the waste of bandwidth. Even with smart functionality on the backend combining the dynamic and static information on each page, you're still sending an entire new html page for each URL requested by the client, with a…
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…
This post assumes basic understand of website structures and XML documents.
After finishing my adventure map (map.jacobemerick.com) a few weeks ago, I wanted to share the KML information online for people using Google Earth or Google Maps. A KML document is merely an XML document with special tags…
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 semi-advanced understanding of PHP scripting as well as basic understanding of Twitter and Facebook.
When I started working on launching my personal website, an interesting problem came up. I wanted to have a feature that showed a current status on my site, similar to a Facebook…
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…