Web Development

Tip 1: Use the word robust. And use it often. Every 5th time you use the word robust, be sure to combine it with the word "scalable". e.g. "Our vendors offer robust, and scalable solutions to the enterprise-level CMS markets."

Tip 2: Speaking of which, also use the words vendor, and end-user. Make it a point to distinguish the two as often as possible. e.g. "Well, the latest release of bloatus 5.6 offers a variety of features, and improvements that both vendors, and end-users will welcome."

By making such distinctions, you will prove to your audience that you understand the business-side of content management. Open source communists emphasize API's, collective intelligence, the ingenuity of people working under tight resources, and the human desire to create meaning out of being a part of something larger than themselves. Intelligent, business-minded people know that such fairy tales are hogwash. Quality, business driven, CMS solutions have proven robustness, and scalability that Drupal can't match. Let

For you short attention span, impatient types, here is the bottom line link that this best god damn link -- ever.

Now for that link with commentary: I'm asked directly, at least once a week, where someone should host a civicspace or drupal site. I always say site5.com. Its not that site5.com pays me, or I hope that they someday will. With my hand on the holy bible, I swear that now -- as I have in the past, and will in the future -- openly admit any conflicts of interest that involve the dollar sign when discussing anything.

Give me a break: nApple has annouced that it seeks to move into the web publishing market. Ha!

Apple's browser Safari can't even read Javascript correctly! Have you ever seen a javascript-compatible wysiwyg editor that works with Safari? The answer is no, because for whatever reason, the engineers decided that the key language that drove all web 2.0 applications was not important. No -- following the typically apple game plan, they decided to think different, and thus use a different standard that the rest of the world would never care about or support.

Stumbled across this eyebrow raising site, they rule. The site allows you to explore the connections between top corporate officers, government boards, and other "important" decision making bodies. The interface is somewhat "old news"; however, the association that the interface allowed are anything but old news. I'm guessing that the visualization engine is java-based -- though it seems a little too fast.

After reading what I wrote above, I wondered if I should have even bothered giving you my "insight". And no, I did not cast that comment into the great sea of codependency hoping to catch a compliment. Rather, I was just reflecting at my use of the words "interface", "visualizations", "engines", and felt a slight hint of self-loathing.

Today, I’m flying to Santa Fe. I have a new fondness for air-travel thanks to a magnificent tool I recently stumbled across. XAMPP is a free, open-source, simple, nearly idiot-proof LAMP emulator that lets me create fully functional drupal sites on my laptop, complete with full database, and php support. The thing even has freakin’ phpMyadmin* installed. You can even switch between PHP 5 and PHP 4, and I also believe you can switch between mysql versions 4x, and 5x with the proper extension. All in all, its increased my productivity astronomically. Its funny – I never bothered to think of how much time I wasted over months watching a status bar move during an FTP transfer. Or – actually, I take it back, that’s not very funny.

Today, while working on the redesign, and drupalfication of Cybertelecom, I was faced with a challenge: In addition to displaying the taxonomy terms that a node was filed under, I wanted to add a link to the term's RSS feed. The solution ended up being so bloody simple that I couldn't help but share it. Also, its worth pointing out that while this specific chunk of code is specialized, it reveals some damn useful tricks in dealing with the taxonomy from within single nodes.

In this tutorial's case, we will be calling the above function from within a node.tpl.php file. Within node.tpl.php file look for a line that reads:

As I read over the basics of integrating google maps into webpages I began to laugh to myself. My heart started pounding. I thought to myself, "this is too cool...".

It was at that point that I decided 12 hours of exploring ways of integrating content by location was enough... and that I might as well wear a Star Trek communicator pin around, because my level of geekiness has reached pathological proportions. That'll do for tonight.

Seriously though, every developer needs to check out that link I left up top.

At certain times, people whom I admire and respect share foolish and misguided opinions. Most of the time, I let it slide; for what is more human than folly? However, ever so often I feel a need to voice disagreement. As you may have guessed, O soothsaying reader, is one of them. The opinion is:

WYSIWYG text editors are for amatures. Real men hand code their web pages.

Paul Scriven's post brought this topic up. Paul, who is no less than the CEO of 9rules, Inc argues (correctly) that you will never be a competent builder of webpages if you depend on a WYSIWYG editor. This fact is undeniable.

Macromedia has just released Dreamweaver 8. A fully functional 30-day trial is available for download.

*I'm not getting paid to tell ya'll this. It just so happens I spend about 6-12 hours a day using dreamweaver, so a new version is significant... for me at least

I can't help but gloat. Today, I was quoted at publish.com. The article, Five Reasons Technorati is Broken (and How to Fix it), was written by Jason Boog.

Less bling, more speed

"I'd recommend they drop the flashy shading, icons and curves in the site's design in favor of a more efficient, faster and less bandwidth/processor-expensive design," Web designer Nick Lewis said in an e-mail interview.