I put a bit of jQuery on my site, animating the links in my art portfolio section. Check it out. I really like jQuery actually, it looks nice, and its a great way to liven up a site's visuals without using Flash and losing all that SEO. The problem is that jQuery, which is essentially JavaScript, is also not very SEO friendly. You can use it pretty much the same way as Flash, in limited quantities where you don't care about searchability. However, when you want to make it SEO friendly, it operates pretty similarly to AJAX. Basically, you don't want jQuery to be the only way you access any content. Any content ... (more...)

While doing some WordPress customization recently, I ran into a problem forcing lower case output for the month headers in my blog archives. It seems like a simple task but it turns out the WordPress templating engine prevents you from returning any strings from functions while within a template. You can use all the PHP you want, and call any function you want, but the functions in the end work by echo'ing out a result, rather than returning it. This seems like a pretty good security move, but it turns out to be pretty annoying when you're used to object oriented code and you want to do something simple like make an outputted date string into lower ... (more...)

Everyone knows the value of improving your workflow. Well it turns out I work a whole lot faster on a Mac, both in web development and web design. I think the OSX developers must have thought a great deal about workflow, because Mac has a lot of great features: from much more drag-and-drop integration between programs than windows, to little things like the mouse command to fly out all windows or show the desktop (this saves me so much time). But workflow on a Mac goes much deeper than these features. Web development is great on a Mac, since the programs you need for coding run very quickly and the terminal is really handy for doing lots ... (more...)

Here’s some free advice: don’t forget the cache-control tags on any server-side AJAX page. I was doing some Geodesic Solutions customization today. Anyone who has dealt with Geo will tell you it’s the biggest pain to customize, and that anyone who mentions Geo and best-practices in the same breath must be joking. Basically, the only way to customize it is through a series of patches, or by reworking the Geo class files (which will be overwritten in any upgrade). Geo doesn’t allow any mysql calls within the templates (I suppose it’s a good security measure), and since I didn’t need to do too much database work, I decided to do all the database stuff with AJAX. ... (more...)

I've been working on integrating an online shopping cart with in-house Quickbooks. I'm using SOAP (nuSOAP) and cURL / SSL to pass QBXML (Quickbooks XML) data through a port. Muchas gracias to Ryan Szrama of the open source project Ubercart for his extensive notes on Quickbooks / SOAP integration.I developed a pretty nice php class to pass data to the Quickbooks RDS server but the cURL requests kept failing, even though I opened the ports through the router and I had the computer they were passing data to on an FQDN DNS IP. It turns out I had to pass the IP through the server as well (SSH tunnel to: etc/hosts). It's all good though, ... (more...)

It's a new year, and what better way to start off than with a lengthy rant. Strap yourself in. People often ask me why I am so concerned with writing standards compliant HTML, and they have good points, mainly that it takes longer to develop something that is compliant, and the only people who really know if it is are other developers. I've always been in favor of standards compliant code, but to be honest, for a long time I didn't even know why I did it, it was really just nerd lore to me, the big nerds wanted it, and I agreed blindly. You might think that a production environment with constantly encroaching deadlines would make me throw ... (more...)

AJAX isn't typically thought of as being very search engine friendly. This is because search engines don't process any JavaScript, which AJAX is built upon. I'm using a ton of AJAX on this one search engine site. In fact, the search engine itself is done in AJAX since it makes for quick page loads and overall a great user experience. This is a big problem because we also, of course, want all the pages that our search engine indexes to be spidered by Google and the other search engines. Besides the AJAX search, the only other way users reach the bottom level pages is through an advanced search form, which of course Google can't ... (more...)

I'm customizing this dating software for three different sites. Basically each site will have a different stylesheet and limited differences in functionality. It's somewhat difficult to develop since a lot of the core functions are hashed, so we've had to make some compromises on what we can and cannot modify. Overall I'm actually happy that we went down the software modification route, since developing this from the ground up would take much longer, especially the streaming flash video chat.

I've been doing tons of auction software customizations. The software is Geodesic Solutions® and the code is really bandaged and thick with tables nested within tables. The work isn't too bad though, since I'm doing pretty different things with each site, and I'm also getting pretty nice at it now. Before I could only really attack the HTML side of it, but now I'm in the PHP like crazy.I've also been doing a lot of customization of ZenCart® shopping cart software. This is mainly reskinning it, which is just replacing the header/footer and then doing a lot of CSS work on the content portion.

For a while, I've been doing odd design jobs and tutoring high school students to stabilize my income while I do the freelance web development. Recently, this has seemed a bit silly to me so I started applying to full time development positions. I think going full time would be good because I think that a team environment would be really helpful to me. I want to have my code critiqued, so I can become a lot better. I had an interview yesterday for a design/development position, but I'm not sure it went so well, since I didn't know a lot of the lingo. He seemed interested in my 3D and design portfolios though, which is nice because although ... (more...)