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 […]
Tag: Web Development
1. Swift (and everything else from WWDC 2014) I’m not going to lie — I haven’t been more excited about an Apple keynote in years. It’s as if Apple has spent years quietly laying the groundwork for massive changes, enduring endless criticism from its biggest fans, only to unleash all of the improvements in one, […]
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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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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 […]
Google made a big announcement Monday night that has the web development community talking. They announced and released a preview version of App Engine, a set of tools that lets you quickly build web applications and deploy them to Google’s infrastructure for instant scalability. I want to talk a bit about why it is important […]
I don’t think I’ve officially mentioned this on my blog before, but one of the two businesses I helped startup is a company called Greeneye e-Manifest. What we do, in a nutshell, is make very easy for Canadian trucking companies to submit an electronic manifest of what’s in their trailers, and where it’s coming from, […]
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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Movable Type 4 vs WordPress 2.2
Just the other day I was considering moving this blog into WordPress instead of the various versions of Movable Type I’ve been using to run this thing for almost four years now. There were a few reasons I was thinking about doing this: I’m a tweaker, and like to try new things I’ve used WordPress […]
My Facebook lovefest continues. Late yesterday they announced the latest version of the Facebook Platform, which opens up the site (and its millions and millions of users) for 3rd parties to build on. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know this: It’s a very big deal. TechCrunch calls Facebook the “Anti-MySpace”, and for […]
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Thrift: Facebook Open Source Tool
Facebook released some of its home-grown software architecture as open source a few days ago. They’ve called it Thrift, and can be downloaded from their developer site for free. Browsing through Thrift’s whitepaper (PDF), I’m still trying to completely understand it. It appears to provide a consistent way for different programming languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, […]