berbs.us

a blog by jason berberich

Category: Web Development

Getting Stuck on Tools

I have a confession to make. When I start a new work or freelance project, I often become obsessed with the search to find the perfect tool to help me get the job done. For some reason, I love the process of researching, testing, and comparing software and web applications and I jump at the […]

Best Practices Through Frameworks

The increasing number of web frameworks means that design and development best practices are accessible to more people than ever before and are a sign of a maturing industry.

The primary goal of most web development frameworks is to save development time. Since most programming projects share a good deal of redundant code (database connectivity, error […]

Bad Web Design #1: Symantec MySupport

Update on 1/17/2007: There’s a follow-up to this post about a call I had with a Symantec employee and this issue.

Having created web sites and applications for a number of years now, I’ve developed a pretty good nose for bad design. Sometimes I find little things that bug me, and other times they’re blatant and […]

Making Web Forms Easier to Use

I’m always excited to read or hear information that challenges conventional wisdom, so I really liked this article that arrived in my RSS reader this morning: Label Placement in Forms. In it, results and recommendations of a web form eyetracking study are given.

Eyetracking records the movements of users’ eyes as they use a website, giving designers […]

Media Temple — New Web Host of Choice

Casey and I are in the middle of getting a new blogging project off the ground for her. I’m her web/blogging guy by default, so I’ve been slowly getting things setup for her on the technical end. One of tasks was finding a good website hosting company, something that seems easy, but is actually pretty […]

MODx: A Different Kind of PHP CMS

Right now I’m in the middle of designing a website for one of the new businesses. It’s work that I enjoy very much, giving me the chance to stretch the creative side of my brain and apply my knowledge of branding, marketing, accessibility, usability, and most recently, search engine optimization.

During the initial design round, I […]

How to Generate a Yahoo Sitemap with Movable Type

Recently, I discovered that Yahoo offers a way of submitting a simple sitemap to their Site Explorer service to let them know about all of the pages on your site. This is very similar in concept to Google’s sitemap protocol that was released last summer, but is just a simple text listing of URLs instead […]

Kick’in the Tires on Drupal

As most of our family and friends know, Casey and I attend Grace Baptist Church in Grand Forks. We’ve been regular attendees for over three years now, and can’t say enough good things about it.

I inherited the church website from a friend in late 2004, and managed to do a complete overhaul of it in the […]

Google Web Authoring Statistics

On the heels of their year-end Zeitgeist, Google has released the results of an interesting web authoring analysis. By sampling over one billion web pages, a feat few others could accomplish, the company gives us a pretty good idea of how people are using HTML on their sites. While I’m sure most people could care […]

Web Frameworks or: How I learned to stop worrying about PHP and love Ruby

Right now I’m in the early stages of my first big project after launching the redesigned EduTech website. It’s an overhaul/redesign of a web-based application I wrote about a year ago to manage all of the workshops our trainers offer to North Dakota teachers. While my first stab at it was, by all accounts, a […]