I redesigned this site recently. You might have noticed. Maybe not if it’s your first time here, that’s ok too. Those full page splash images with everything fading into view look pretty snazzy but there’s one small problem: the Lighthouse test’s Largest Contentful Paint test fails to pick up on any element that starts at…
The advantages of loading scripts from Google’s CDN are fairly obvious – for a common script such as jQuery, we’re on to a better-than-even chance that the user will already have the script in their browser’s cache from other sites, reducing the total download weight of your site. Even if they don’t, the file will…
In Part 1 of this guide, we covered how to set up a portable development environment with the basic set of software tools (a web stack, an IDE and a good text editor). Continuing on, we’ll create a project and make it portable. The instructions given are specific to Netbeans because that’s what we set…
Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ recent posts on his iMac plus Air setup, I thought I’d document how to set up a seamless development environment between desktop and laptop. If you intend to set up a similar environment, you’ll need to perform these steps identically on both machines. Part 2 of this series will deal…
With the release of WordPress 3.0, the multisite functionality of WPMU was rolled into the main Wordpress codebase. Before this, I hadn’t done any work with WPMU, so I was utterly dumbfounded to discover that when adding a new site to a WordPress network, WordPress adds another set of tables for each blog. That’s right.…
If you’ve never read The Daily WTF, it’s a fantastic site run by Alex Papadimoulis highlighting the horrors that readers have found and submitted in real production code. Reading it is a heady blend of “oops, I used to do that” mixed with some absolutely abysmal stuff that you’d swear couldn’t possibly be real. Just…
After you’ve been working with code for a while, source control is a godsend. It provides a way of tracking changes, prevents conflicts and generally saves your bacon. Here’s how to set it up on Windows 7. Installation First grab the latest SlikSVN and TortoiseSVN packages for your platform – x86 and x64 versions are…
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d jot down a couple of ways Apache and mod_rewrite can save your life. Not literally of course, unless your website’s been linked to your life-support system by a crazed psychopath – but it should make your readers’ lives easier. Isn’t that what we’re supposed…
mail() fail I was recently called upon to troubleshoot the mail script powering a website’s contact form, which for some reason unbeknownst to anyone was failing silently. It should’ve been an easy fix, but the more I dug into it, the more confused I became, and resorted to dumping variables to see if I could…