Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Several months ago I wrote a blog post describing how to create a database class that would wrap the native php mysqli connection. You can read that post here. Since that post was written I've learned a lot about proper php classes and realized that I made several mistakes in that blog post that I'd…
For the last post in this short series on SQL I wanted to explain some more in-depth usage. A technique that I wish I would have started using in my early websites is a centralized script to handle all of my database calls. PHP does have some great functions built in to connect, read, and write…
While the last two posts focused heavily on theory and fundamentals of SQL it's time to start on the actual usage. There's a ton of good tutorials out there that skip right to the code, but as a young developer, I wasn't convinced that SQL was a worthwhile tool until I was forced to use it. I wanted…
In my last post, I introduced some of the basic ideas of data storage and how I came to realize that SQL would be a great solution to my content handling problems. Now I'd like to walk through some of the more advanced concepts and start going through some basic uses. There's plenty of great…
I like to think of myself as a practical web developer. With no true formal training, most of what I use to make my web sites is self-taught. Instead of trying to apply what I learned in a classroom into an online project, I went out and learned what I needed to get a project done. This allowed me…
Over the last six months or so, I've found myself spending a large amount of time working on personal websites. What is a personal site? Well, as a web developer I work on three broad categories of websites: fulltime-job websites that have to work within branding and technological constraints,…
While working on redoing my website using a custom model-view-controller framework I decided that it was a good time to do some extra cleanup. After all, cleaning up the backend only changes the content portion of the site. There's much more to websites - styles, behaviors, cache control - then the…
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…
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…
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…