Building a Better Website

Web Development Article on Read/Write Web

For those who don’t know, in addition to writing for this blog, I also blog professionally elsewhere. One of my most recent articles on the 10 Most Marketable Web Development Skills actually appeared on Read/Write Web, a popular web technology blog with over 150,000 subscribers. Of course, with so many eyes, criticisms were to be […]

Simple PHP Math Captcha

I can’t profess much expertise with cryptography, but I hate form spammers as much as the next guy. That’s why I designed this simple math captcha in PHP. Just include the input code in your form and the output code in your form processor. A new form field will appear asking submitters […]

Online Photo Editing with Picnik

I’ll admit it; I still use the old installation of PhotoShop that I got from my webmaster job in college. To be honest, it’s hard not to. Unless you’re stuck in the dark ages of text- or graphic-only websites, good web design requires photo editing from time to time.

Of course, there’s no way […]

How to Pre-Parse a PHP Include

I’ve been coding in PHP for more than five years now and I’m still learning new tricks. A novel problem the other day led me to learn how to pre-parse a PHP file prior to inclusion.

Here was my problem. My friend Adam asked me to write some code to include recent post lists […]

Most Web Professionals Blog

If you work on the web, chances are good that you have a blog or personal website, that it’s been around for awhile, and that it hasn’t done much for your career. A recent survey of nearly 33,000 web professionals over at A List Apart (via Daniel) yielded these interesting statistics:

Overall, almost three out […]

Improve Your Resume in One Simple Step

We’ve been in hiring mode at work, lately, looking for CSS developers, content managers, and so forth. Interestingly enough, the same problem keeps cropping up with almost every resume, one that makes the difference between the call list and the circular filing bin next to my desk.

No matter what profession you’re in, a resume […]

Ride the Wave

Very few bloggers have a perfectly consistent writing schedule. For most, writing may be easy one day and difficult the next. Considering the importance of posting frequency, however, good bloggers don’t just write enough when they’re in the zone; they ride the wave.

It’s not difficult to tell when you’re “on a wave.” […]

My Review of Google AdSense, Pros and Cons

I’ve been running Google AdSense on my site for a few years now. In that time, I’ve managed to earn almost $800. I wouldn’t describe the system as ideal, but I’d say I’m happy with the results so far. Here is my review of AdSense as a whole for those who are […]