August 12th, 2009
My favorite thing about web development is the wide variety of skills it uses. Being a good developer means staying on your toes and always learning, because there are so many important skills and these are constantly changing.
Here’s a checklist of 10 skills that are some of the most important for good web developers to have. These focus a bit on front-end skills, but they apply to all developers:
June 13th, 2008
Let it not be said that I never fall victim to a web fad: AJAX, jQuery, SEO‚ I was there with bells on. So when everyone started hating Flash and doing all web animation with HTML/Javascript, I jumped right on board. I thought it was just great! You didn’t have to lose any SEO, and most importantly you never had to open that awful Flash GUI.
But have you noticed? EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT! There’s just too much Javascript on the internet these days, and it is bringing many browsers to a halt. My MacBook is less than a year old (2.1GHz, 1GB mem) and Safari has been crashing frequently. In Firefox I can only have three or so tabs open before serious lag1. While I don’t have a super gaming computer, my computer is better than the average user’s, and I … Read more…
March 28th, 2008
There's a new search engine being showcased on Apple.com's widget download page, lumifi , which, unlike other search engines, does not run through a web browser. With web search being so integral to our computer lives, is it preferable to search through a website or an application?
Lumifi's marketing department provides one answer :
"lumifi is different than Google and other search engines in that it reads each search result for you to determine what is actually relevant to your research rather than what happens to be popular at the moment."
But obviously other search engines do relevance tests-determining relevance is their main purpose. Perhaps they mean that lumifi does some sort of post-processing of standard search results; basically a double-search. Their program hits Google, or some other search engine, then filters and returns the reordered results.
The problem is the results are pretty lousy. Google's algorithm is great … Read more…
March 15th, 2008
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 that is accessed with jQuery also needs to have hard links, anchor tags with the href to make the search engines happy. These anchor … Read more…
December 10th, 2007
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 spider.The solution is to make a hard link search engine that parallels the AJAX one. Since the search begins with selecting a state, I put … Read more…
August 8th, 2007
Over the past couple days I’ve been redesigning my website.First, I made a design for my website in Illustrator that I’m happy with. What’s better is that I was able to implement it fully in a matter of minutes because of the clean template structure I used previously. I had wanted for some time to add some flare to the site, but not to do too much, since I would never want to detract from the content. I hope this design is successful, I don’t think it’s too flashy. Please let me know what you think. Next, I made a lot of minor appearance changes and cleaned up a good amount of the code, fixing up a few sections that had had minor bugs for some time. This is mostly done, but I’m still not happy with the video playback JavaScript. It works fine in FireFox but InternetExplorer shows … Read more…
I've written four web development books, covering topics such as: