Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
This post assumes basic understanding of PHP, HTML, and CSS.
Creating my blog by hand gave me the opportunity to work with many features that come standard with online blogging software. I developed tag clouds, post filtering, and the search functions based on the visual functionality that other…
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…
This post assumes some intermediate understanding of using .htaccess files, mod rewrite, and website structure.
After several months of launching my main website, I took a good hard look at my traffic and Google ranking. I soon noticed some major problems with the way the site was structured and…
This post assumes advanced understanding of PHP and some object orientated knowledge.
In my last post, I outlined a basic class that compares addresses by distance. The class returns a sorted, filtered, or single best match from an array of addresses based on a single comparison address. However,…
This post assumes advanced understanding of PHP scripting and some object-orientated knowledge.
One area of PHP that I haven't had much experience with yet is classes. I have a rough idea of what they do, but after working with a few inefficient classes, figured that they are more trouble then…
Even though my waterfalls site turned out to be a great way to chronicle adventures through wilderness, it has several areas that are lacking. The biggest area is the Google Maps functionality, which is shaky at best. It can only show the end points and major points along the route, but I didn't…
This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript, stylesheets, and cookies. It will show you how to use cookies with a style switcher to remember a user's preference and load it with their (many) return visits.
In the previous post, I explained a method for allowing users to switch…
This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript and stylesheets. It will show you how to setup a Javascript-powered styleswitcher that works for individual pages.
One of the huge benefits that CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, brought to web design was the ability to easily change an…