Whatever's tugging at my brain handles
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 21st, 2008
This evening, I went to my "My Yahoo" page, a customizeable personal page you can populate with news wire feeds, RSS feeds, and other Yahoo content. And it had gone back in time.
Note how all all the stories are "one week ago". Normally this feed is somewhere between a few minutes to "one [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 20th, 2008
So, I was working on a project that generates a form based on a selection of items from a database, and the form could get pretty long. For performance testing I timed the execution of the script and found some very odd results. If the number of items on the list was 16 [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 14th, 2008
This evening I got a comment on my post about how to detect when cell phones access your web site. It was a question about the way I went about the PHP code for matching a bunch of small text snippets against the User Agent string.
Basically, I put all the text snippets in a [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 14th, 2007
Replacing a short bit of text in PHP is easy. You just use str_replace, as in $bobo = str_replace("foo","bar",$bobo). That will replace all instances of "foo" with "bar" in the string $bobo.
But, on a recent contract, I had a client's site where it only worked properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer and part of [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 6th, 2007
Validation is the art of checking and modifying input from users so that it's all of what your web site needs and none of what it doesn't want. Validation can be as complex as anti-hacking and anti-spam measures or as simple as making sure someone's not putting their phone number in the box meant [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Dec 5th, 2007
While a lot of people have written in with kudos on my PHP code for detecting mobile browsers, others have written in with questions on how to use it.
The code in question is a PHP function that returns a true or false value depending on whether the browser viewing the page has been identified as [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Oct 15th, 2007
UPDATE: The code has just been tested against the WURFL database of over 6,750 different mobile browser User Agent IDs, and proved 94.34% effective at catching the User Agent IDs in their database, yet providing NO false positives on the 63 most popular browser/OS combos on the desktop. And remember, that's just one of [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jul 19th, 2007
One of the great things marketers have been promising since the dawn of the commercial Internet is personalized advertising; ads targeted to what you really want. Really? Right now ads that could be targeted with trivial effort... aren't. Where's the great future of targeted advertising?
Highly targeted advertising is supposed to be the [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on May 2nd, 2007
What is "link cloaking", you ask? It's when you use an alternative URL to represent the actual URL you're linking to. For example, if you were linking to http://www.fakeurl.jib/blog/post.php?postname=why_the_heck_is_this_url_so_long, you might instead cloak it and link to http://www.mysite.jib/linkout.php?link=89.
The arguments for link cloaking include:
Easier link/click tracking
Making links short enough to fit in [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 30th, 2007
A question lots of web site owners ask themselves is "how do I stop people from stealing my images?" The short answer is: you can't. If you put it on the web, someone can steal it. But that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for them.
Skip The Discussion And Just [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 27th, 2007
It's a common frustration for people running WordPress. You set the number of posts displayed per page in the "Options|Reading" tab with the "Show At Most" option, and it uses that number both for your front page and for all the archive pages (category archive, monthly archive, etc.). So if you're showing four [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 26th, 2007
You've seen them as a feature of Web 2.0 web sites, big bunches of keywords called tags or a tag cloud. You've got a large database of items and you'd like to add this feature to your site. It's easier than you might think.
Step 1: Getting The Tags From Your Users
The first part [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 25th, 2007
Author's Note: Now the stuff below is not the code you'd use if you were building the next Digg. It's just a simple demonstration of the concepts. But if you're looking to start building your own rating script, it's an excellent start to get you familiar with how the most elemental functions [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 5th, 2007
So, I should have known I was missing something. Wordpress was letting me insert styles in my comment text because I was logged in as Admin and therefore had privileges. When I tried putting the CSS in comments while logged out (posting as Joe Blow user), it stripped the styles without needing my [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Apr 2nd, 2007
So, I got a friend request on my MySpace account today. It looked like it might be from a musician (she was holding a violin in her photo) and I tend to accept friend requests from bands and musicians if their music is interesting. Unfortunately, her profile was porn spam and she used [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 31st, 2007
While working on some projects, I wanted to develop a comment engine, so people could comment on posts. I know, I could just use a blog, but a blog wouldn't have fit these applications.
Additionally, I wanted comment threading and to be able to sort the hierarchy simply, using a minimum of RAM and CPU [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 29th, 2007
You've all seen the URL that looks like this... http://www.somesite.com/article.php?articleid=598&refloc=hp. You've also seen URLs that look like this... http://www.somesite.com/article/598/hp/. The interesting thing is that it only takes about 4 more lines of computer code for the shorter URL to do the exact same thing as the longer one.
Although it's not so much of [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 11th, 2007
I've been reading different articles about what elements of a page Google indexes with an eye toward whether they index content that's added to the page via the JavaScript document.write() method. Not getting a conclusive answer, I decided to do my own test.
Why was I interested? Well, with all the "Web 2.0" technologies [...]
Posted in Success, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 7th, 2007
On the heels of my post about trying to find a coder for a small project, I find that my friend Aaron Dragushan of WonderMill (the company that brings you such cool sites as FreedBack) started his own blog, and his first post of the month is on finding a designer.
What I find interesting is [...]
Posted in Success, Web Programming on Mar 6th, 2007
So I have been developing a very cool art site on my own, based around a Flash-based drawing application. But occasionally, I've needed to subcontract small bits of code and that can be a frustrating experience.
I won't go into the technical details of the latest code block I tried to subcontract out, just the [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Mar 2nd, 2007
I've been a Mac user for the past few months and haven't been particularly happy with the adjustments required when you "switch", but this isn't so much a gripe about switching as it is about stuff on Mac that just lacks functionality.
Over the last few years, I have run into situation after situation where some [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 28th, 2007
I host the site for an online entrepreneurs group I'm in, and one of the services the site offers to members is an AdSense alternative. Basically, we can create AdSense-like ads for our sites and put them in a pool. When Google AdSense has no ad to put in a space on one [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 21st, 2007
Just found out from a friend of mine, that his YouTube account got closed after three DMCA takedown notices. Thing is, none of them were valid, all were made by major media corporations, and Viacom isn't the only one.
According to Gary's blog entry at "Developer Dispatch", the three separate DMCA takedown notices came from [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life, Web Programming on Feb 15th, 2007
Following up on the Microsoft Soapbox vs. Google Video comparison, I thought I'd try YouTube, despite some prior problems putting my videos on YouTube.
Whaddaya know? YouTube took the video.
Now, I still prefer Microsoft's upload process to YouTube's, mainly because of that progress meter. Like Google, YouTube uses a simple animation to indicate [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Technology & Life, Web Programming on Feb 15th, 2007
When I read today that Microsoft had taken its YouTube killer out of limited beta and opened it up for public beta, I had to go try it out right away.
The first nice bit was that I could login with my Hotmail e-mail address and password. Basically, I already had an account.
To really test [...]
Posted in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Feb 10th, 2007
So, I'm considering using Google Checkout to accept payments for a web site I'm dreaming up.
Since I'd like to give customers immediate access to services they buy, I was considering the Level 2 API integration. That requires you have an SSL secured server.
So, I did a search to see if they accepted self-signed SSL [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 19th, 2007
People have been asking what software I use to make FunDraw.com's video tutorials.
I switched from PC to Mac in the midst of development, so there are two packages. On the PC, I was using CamStudio. This is an awesome little freeware program that will record your whole screen, a selected window, or [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 17th, 2007
As I noted in my blog entry about the premiere of FunDraw.com, finding help on getting up to speed with ImageMagick was pretty difficult. Most of their on-site documentation is not so much sparse as "minimalist" (i.e. great breadth, really poor depth) and assumes a certain familiarity with both programming and some pretty expert-level [...]
Posted in Just Personal, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Jan 9th, 2007
So, yesterday I sent out the notice to a few friends and family that my Flash drawing tool was ready for them to try. Wow has it been a long road getting there. And in a few more days, the first ad will appear in "This Is True" and the public will have officially [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Nov 27th, 2006
While prepping my cool drawing site for launch this month, I decided to do help videos. It's a quick series of 12 videos, running from 30 seconds to about a minute-and-a-half, for a total of under 13 minutes.
I used Cam Studio to do my screen captures, and captured them with the lossless [...]
Posted in Techno Thoughts, Web Programming on Nov 25th, 2006
In putting together my create your own art site (premiering on December 8th), I figured I needed a decent helpdesk system to handle the influx of user issues.
I've previously used and recommended Hesk (phpjunkyard.com), but the drawback to it is, while you get e-mail notifications of questions from users and they get e-mail notifications of [...]