Archive for the 'Building a Better Website' Category

Web Development Article on Read/Write Web

Monday, December 17th, 2007

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

Friday, December 7th, 2007

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 to solve an [...]

Online Photo Editing with Picnik

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

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 for [...]

How to Pre-Parse a PHP Include

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

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 outside [...]

Most Web Professionals Blog

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

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

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

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

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

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.” Writing one [...]

My Review of Google AdSense, Pros and Cons

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

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 considering it for [...]

Affiliates Are Leeches

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

With the help of my friend Adam, my company has been starting a lot of new marketing initiatives. I won’t go into details, but a lot of it involves affiliate marketing. The whole ordeal has given me a grim understanding of how the affiliate mind works and why the field has such a bad reputation. [...]

Domain Name Research Tool

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Building a website involves a lot of preliminary work. Before you begin, you need a goal, a strategy for how the website will achieve that goal, and an understanding of the hurtles it will need to jump to get there. Choosing the right domain name is important to each of these steps. Will the site [...]