Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
A web crawler is a script that goes out and crawls the web. Pretty surprising, eh? There are many crawlers out there, including the famous GoogleBot that attempts to index every site it bumps into and nefarious spambots that look for and exploit vulnerabilities. The logic behind them seems simple:…
The most difficult part of pulling information from Twitter's 1.1 API is the actual request. I've covered how to create the OAuth request in some previous posts: making a basic OAuth request and passing in extra parameters. Once you get the information back, though, what do you do with it?
Twitter…
A while ago I wrote a post explaining how to pull data from Twitter's API. I focused on pulling the default authenticated user timeline (which, if you set up the application under your account, you are the authenticated user). Wouldn't it be great if you could customize the request a bit?
The…
Right around this time last year I set up a simple hit logger on my server. Nothing complex, just a dump of the server superglobal with some extra metadata. This is something that is partially captured by the server itself in access logs: what file was requested, who was requesting it (user agent…
Content Management Systems (aka CMS) is being grossly misused in its contemporary usage. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, ModX… All of these are open-source web publishing applications that have a robust backend (depending on your needs) that are frequently described as being CMSes. They aren't,…
Recently I had the pleasure of reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule. This book goes over the basics of a user-focused design process, explaining some methods and practices to ensure user experience (UX) stays paramount throughout the discovery, concept, and delivery phase of a project. It really…
The word 'brogrammer' has gotten a fairly bad rap over the last year or so. It was never a particularly popular word but lately it has come to symbolize a genuine and ever-growing concern over sexism in technology. Whether you're talking about booth babes or male-focused conferences, women are not…
There are a few things that frustrate me more as a web developer than finding cross-layer coupling in frameworks. I'm not just refering to 'view' or 'model' layers here… Front-facing parameters, module logic, and data storage structure are all unique layers of an application and should be…
There's been a lot of changes to a few of my websites lately, including this blog. Inspired by the whole idea of responsive web design I've been going through and refactoring the front end logic. This involves more than just updating CSS. Removing jQuery, adding some HTML5, and cleaning up the…
One of my least favorite phrases to hear while working on a website is 'do it for the SEO'. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a valid factor in website development. If Google and other search engines are having a difficult time crawling and understanding your content than it will be more…