Posts Tagged ‘web development’
Site Redesign
February 8th, 2009
I set aside some time this weekend to redesign my personal blog. I was happy with the old design, but I just figured it was time for a change. I also wanted to polish up my portfolio since times are tough right now. I wanted to open up the design a little bit and make it easier to read. I was able to accomplish this by expanding the layout to take up the entire browser window and let the content define borders in the middle of the page. The fonts are slightly bigger and should be easier to read on the white background. I added the links to the social networks I belong to at the top of the page so it’s easy to find.
I cut out a lot of the garbage on the site which I thought was unnecessary. I’m the kind of person that surfs the internet, sees something cool and figures I should add it to my site. I think a lot of people are like that. I mean look at how many Facebook apps or widgets people have in their MySpace profiles. It was time to clean things up and scale it back. Limiting the number of plug-ins helped speed up the site dramatically.
I was able to limit the site to 6 plug-ins and I’m really happy with the result. I would like to give a special thanks to a few authors. All in One SEO Pack makes things a lot easier and I implement in all my Wordpress sites. Cforms for making a solid contact form product. I would also like to thank the author of Lifestream for making an awesome product for viewing social network information. It’s a big integration of my daily routine and the plug-in is integrated to allow status showing of Brightkite, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know. Thanks.
Website Hosting Change
June 28th, 2008
I recently switched my sites to Media Temple and I think for the most part it’s been a pretty successful experience. All four of my main sites (brandonquintana.com, brandonquintanaconsulting.com, lightenment.com, and webdevtwopointzero.com) have all been transfered and after some tweaking and fine tuning I think they are running pretty well.
Media Temple offers a great hosting package which allows you to host up to 100 sites on one account. My sites are relatively small so I think the allocated bandwidth of 1TB a month will be more than enough for me. On top of the typical PHP/MySQL setup, other nice features include SFTP connectivity and the ability to run Subversion. Their hosting control panel is laid out well and easy to use. Tech support issues are resolved in a timely manner. As of right now, I’m a happy customer.
If you are looking for a hosting provider, Media Temple is worth a shot and if you are interested in having me host your site, I would be more than happy to work some arrangements with you.
Safari For Web Development
July 9th, 2007
Since Apple has decided to release Safari for Windows, it got me thinking, what’s preventing me from using Safari as my default browser for web development. Up until now, I had been using Firefox with a few extensions for web development: Venkman, Firebug, and Web Developer. It got me thinking, Apple is releasing Safari so Windows users can develop for the iPhone. I’m thinking that’s the main reason, and it might be nice to pull some of the marketshare as well. Since I primarily use Macs for my web development, I wanted to see if others were using Safari for web development and what their feedback has been.
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Building a Successful Web Application: Search Engine Optimization
November 6th, 2006
Search engine optimization is an important step in creating a web application. High ranking organic or natural listings in Google, Yahoo, MSN will drive traffic to a website. By researching keywords and implementing them into your site a little effort can go a long way. If you have the time do the research. The two biggest points of search engine optimization are content and links. If you search for search engine optimization in your favorite search engine, I can bet that the majority of the articles will say that content is the most important part of search engine optimization followed by good linking development.
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Building a Successful Web Application: Clean Code and Documentation
October 30th, 2006
I can’t stress enough the importance of clean code. It may take more time initially to carefully plan a web architecture, document, and comment code, but it’s always worth the initial planning in order to save a huge headache later. I don’t know how many projects that I have acquired that were so poorly coded that I had to start the project from scratch to work on it. Now I’m definitely not the best coder in the world, but I like to use best practices if I or someone else needs to come back to the project later for updates or changes.
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Building a Successful Web Application: Design
October 25th, 2006
Cheat Sheet: Web 2.0
August 25th, 2006
Silicon.com has a Web 2.0 cheat sheet for those interested in learning the basic concept of Web 2.0. Many people have heard of it and it’s hard to pinpoint an exact definition for the term. It is a broad generalization of a number of things.
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Google Web Services With PHP
August 23rd, 2006
PHP Hacks has a tutorial using the PEAR SOAP module of PHP to pull data for use on your site. There are many other ways of doing similar things a lot of which deal with RSS feeds since they have become so popular, but this tutorial does a pretty good job of explaining how to use SOAP with Google’s web services.
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Software Product Documentation
August 16th, 2006
Out of all the projects I’ve worked on both individual and group, the last and final step seems to be documentation. A lot of times it gets overlooked. When the deadlines approach the product manager wants to get a working product. What a lot of people don’t realize is software documentation takes a substantial amount of time to write. It is very important to keep track of the software. Marketing individuals won’t actually see changes in the product in the time it takes to write documentation and that seems to make it less important in the overall product.
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Mouse Wheel Programming In JavaScript
July 26th, 2006
There was a post on Adomas Paltanavicius website giving a tutorial about mouse wheel programming in JavaScript. It is a pretty clever idea and doing more and more AJAX-like applications I can see this tutorial becoming more and more useful. At this time I never really thought about implementing code for the mouse wheel but in upcoming projects I think I will find this tutorial very helpful.
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