Coding
I am a big fan of podcasts, here is a handful of really good podcasts that I’ve been listening to over the last month on my commute to work. If you use Google Reader (With Google Listen), you can quickly subscribe to this via the bundle I created.
1. Founders Talk
Founders talk is a really good because it interviews really interesting and influential people from the world of the web. Some of the notable people interveiwed include Drew Wilson (the guy who made Pictos & Screeny) & Vitalty Friedman (The editor-in-cheif of smashing magazine).
Average Duration: ~ 60 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly
2. The Javascript Show
The Javascript show is a great round up of all the newest Javascript goings on in the Javascript world. It’s a great source to find out about new libraries & Javascript news. The key reason I love this show is because they cover a wide variety of useful tools & I always start using the libraries and tools they mention.
Average Duration: ~45 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly
3. The ExpressionEngine Podcast
I’m not a massive fan of ExpressionEngine (I am a much bigger fan of CMS’s such as Perch or WordPress), however their podcast is really well put together & really high quality. While it does have a big focus on creating websites in EE, most the stuff they talk about can be applied to working with any website.
Average Duration: ~35 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly
4. The Changelog
The Changelog podcast is great , it covers web and desktop development & the hosts appears to be quite well connected (So they interview some pretty interesting folk).
Average Duration: ~30 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly
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Posted October 30th, 2011
MySQL always surprises me in the sheer amount of stuff you can do in it. For example I recently found it has a bunch of String Functions. The main one I found to be useful was the REPLACE function, which works like this:
REPLACE(Original String, Find This, Replace with this)
So it can be used like:
SELECT REPLACE('My Original String', 'Original', 'Modified');
# This will output: My Modified String
So if you wanted to go through a full table and replace a bunch of strings, you could use it like this:
UPDATE `table_name` SET `field_name` = REPLACE(`field_name`, 'Find Me', 'Replace with Me');
Useful no?
Posted September 10th, 2011
I was recently shown (via Reddit) possibly one of the biggest crime against UX, a lightbox which asks you to share the website or wait 600 seconds.
At first I thought it was fake, but if you visit the offending website, it’s unfortunately real. So yeah, after a short time of giggling and raging I worked on a way to bypass this.
How to bypass it
The easiest way, is to vote with your feet and not use the website. But in some cases, that isn’t always an option.
A working method I found (if you are using Google Chrome or Safari) is to hide the element. With your mouse right click on the element and click “Inspect Element”, this will open the developer tools. Then under the “style” side menu just add the rule “display:none;” and it should disappear. In most cases, it might look a bit like the screenshot below.
You can also right click on the element in the developer tools and click “delete node” on the html causing the ragebox.
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Posted September 6th, 2011
Fast loading times are a really important factor when it comes to website ranking, so it’s important to remove as much unnecessary data as possible. A good method to do this is via cookieless domains.
Cookieless domains are (as the name suggests) are domains, in which the user will not send cookies (Which can add quite a few kilobytes to a request). For example, say I want a user to load a static image it would be silly of them to also send me the cookie data. Luckily they are super easy to set up.
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Posted July 1st, 2011
It may surprise you to hear, that using the mysql_connect() function in PHP has recently be marked as “old hat” coding because it’s slow in comparison with newer methods. A better alternative is PDO (PHP Data Objects), a lightweight method for accessing databases. Here is a quick overview to help you get started with PDO.
Reasons to use PDO
- It’s Fast - it talks to the database via a database specific PDO-driver.
- It’s Object Oriented – The methods within the class are the same for each database driver, so you can easily change your database driver without lots of extra coding.
- It’s Flexible- You can easily change between such database drivers as PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite by pretty much just changing your construct statement.
- It’s Safer – PDO encourages you to bind parameters to your SQL query’s, meaning that it’s significantly less likely your website will suffer from a SQL injection based attack.
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Posted July 1st, 2011
