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…
There's been a lot of kicking around of QR codes since they first cropped up, complaints about their usability or a specific implementation (see WTF QR Codes for plenty of examples). I recently bumped into them in a discussion with some coworkers regarding 'short URLs' vs longer keyword-stuffed URLs…
After reading and practicing a slew of different methodologies in development projects I've noticed an interesting trend emerge, especially when working mid- to large-scale. In an effort to get an initial working example I'll write code very quickly, only slowing on occasion to optimize or clean up…
Finding the distance between different locations is a programming task that I've done a number of times. The idea seems simple - the user wants to know the closest branch, store, or distributor relative to them. Ignoring some possible use cases (commuting routes, varying convenient starting…
Sending plain emails with PHP can be pretty easy. On a basic level you can just call mail(), which triggers the server-side sendmail command. Pass in three parameters (a recipient email address, subject, and message) and you're done. When you start looking into file attachments and HTML messages,…
Over the last few months I've been having a lot of fun with the Twitters. It all started simply enough, just upgrading my lifestream to pull from an authenticated feed. Now I'm playing with a few Twitter bots, looking into the streaming API, and even working on a PHP library with David Kryzaniak.…
The most recent redesign of my website(s), which I started by rolling out a new home page late last year, is focused on some responsive ideals. There are some other changes as well, like removing unnecessary Javascript and sprucing up my framework, but the main goal is to implement responsive…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
In my last post I explained what a web crawler was and some of the basic steps that someone could break up the logic into. I also dived into some of the difficulties I had when building out my own crawler. Granted, some of the difficulties were self-imposed: I was using PHP, had a limited timeframe,…