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Web Development

Evolution of my WordPress theme development workflow

I’ve been using WordPress to create client websites for over five years now. In that time, everything has changed. Multiple times. Everything’s amazing, but web development has gotten more complex, not less. The depth of knowledge required to use the HTML/CSS/JavaScript stack is staggering, and the abundance of tools created to make it easier has […]

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Web Development

Sublime Text 2

Being a nerd is an odd thing. We’re really particular about things that never even occur to The Normals. Take, for example, text editors. For a web developer or a writer well-verses in Markdown, selecting the right text editor for the task is a Very Important Thing. IDEs and GUI applications often get in the […]

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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 […]

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Web Development

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, […]

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Web Development

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 […]

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Web Development

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, […]

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Web Development

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 […]

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Web Development

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, […]

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Web Development

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 […]

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Web Development

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 […]