Define The Problem
In the past, I’ve done some freelance Web Development and Web Design for different clients. One question I’ve always had to ask myself is:
How will the user be updating this website?
That question is usually preempted by a question to the client:
Do you have any HTML experience?
I can count (on one hand) the number of times that I’ve heard a yes to this question. To be quite honest, I don’t even know why I ask it anymore. Hardly any of my clients ever had HTML experience and even if they did, I doubt they’d want to go through the hassle. So this poses the very interesting question How do you pick a CMS (content management system) for a web project?
What Not To Do - Pure HTML is wrong for many reasons
Over the years, I’ve had much experience in this area (what not to do). Gone are the days when people simply wanted a web presence. Those days, things were simple. You fire up your copy of Frontpage (oh how we’ve learned from then) and designed a website for a client and stick it onto an FTP server, and viola; you’re done. Worst case scenario, they call you up seven (7) months later and say they’ve changed their phone number and need you to make an update.
Posted in Blog, CakePHP, PHP, Reader Input.
Tagged with CakePHP, cms.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 20, 2009
What Does IE 8 Mean To Developers?
Personally, I’m ecstatic that Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8. The great part is that they’ve stuck it in the Windows Automatic Updates and they’ve already started rolling it out Windows users. I damn near threw a party to celebrate.
Of course, we won’t be seeing the real benefits for a while (maybe for a few years, even), but the point is, the process has begun. Does this mean we can say goodbye to IE 6, CSS hacks, and IE conditional tags? Well, of course not! It’s never that easy when it comes to Windows or Microsoft. But again, the process has begun.
Am I saying that there are no problems with the other browsers? No I’m not. Try to find an old copy of Firefox 1.5 and load up a current website. It’s going to look very ugly. The point is, Firefox (I’m not sure about the other browsers) has long ago implemented automatic updates to their products. Old versions, simply disappear.
You Just Can’t Make People Happy
For years, Microsoft has been getting flack about old versions of Internet Explorer. The irony is that, now they’ve finally done something about it, but not everyone is happy.
Posted in General.
Tagged with ie, internet explorer.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 11, 2009
I’m sure you guys have heard about Git. It’s been making a lot of waves lately. It seems that I’m always the last to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to things like that, but I’m finally here.
Introduction
There are tons of Version Control Systems (VCS) out there: Source Safe (Microsoft’s Baby, which sucks by the way), CVS, and SVN. Git is different from those in one major way: It’s a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one. That means, there is no central repository that users check out revisions from. There can be a central one, but it’s not a requirement. Every use has a complete copy of the entire repository on his system at any one time.
I’m only (intimately) familiar with SVN. So you can read more on the differences between Git and SVN. They range from faster processing, due to the fact that everything is local; to reduced disk space usage by Git.
Posted in General, Linux, Work.
Tagged with git, tutorial.
By Kevin Lloyd
– May 9, 2009
Welcome to the December 26, 2008 edition of Web Development 2.0. (Yeah, I know I’m a bit late, but it was Christmas 
)
Fiona King presents 10 Best Ruby/RoR Web Hosts Compared ? 2009 posted at WHDb.
general
Marcus Hochstadt presents Using A CMS For A Content-Rich Website posted at Marcus Hochstadt, saying, “Marcus describes how he migrated one of his static HTML sites into a Content Management System. Which platform did he choose and why?”
javascript
Jason Maletsky presents Show Partial Content, Slide Animate with jQuery posted at Website Builders Resource, saying, “This plugin will show a partial amount of content from a and allow the user to click a link from the title or a link at the bottom to view the rest of the content with a sliding action.”
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Web Development 2.0 using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Technorati tags: web development 2.0, blog carnival.
Posted in Carnival, General.
By Kevin Lloyd
– January 10, 2009
Rounded Intro
So you’re all grown up and want Rounded Corners on your site. There’s just one small problem: the normal rounded corners implementation comes with tons of divs used for styles and you’ve got your fellow web developers screaming down your neck about web semantics.
So what’s this funky semantics thing? Basically, we’re looking for a separation of styles and data. We want to keep all the styles in the CSS style sheets and all the data in the XHTML files. Now, I’ve been known to be flexible on this a bit, however it is a great idea with a purpose and in this case, it actually helps us out a ton.
Ignore Me - Take The Easy Way Out
There are two jQuery plugins that can do this instantly, aptly named jQuery Corners and jQuery Corner. Yeah, I know totally different, right? They vary slightly in terms of their capabilities (anti-aliasing, background images, etc.). So if you’re not up to the heavy lifting or your requirements are very light (just basic rounding) these plugins more than fit the bill.
Posted in JavaScript.
Tagged with CSS, ie, internet explorer, JavaScript, jquery corners, tutorial.
By Kevin Lloyd
– December 22, 2008
Now, it’s no secret that I can be a moron sometimes, but I’d like to put it on record that it was all me and not Wordpress 2.7 that had the issue.
So I’m sitting here last night minding my own business and Chris Coyier sends out a tweet talking about how it took him 10 minutes to upgrade. So I figure, why not? I already had the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin ready to go, so I figured it would be a breeze. I guess I was wrong.
What Went Wrong
So I follow all the steps in the automatic upgrade. Everything seems to be going fine, however after the database upgrade I was bumped back into the admin screen. Everything was looking totally screwed up. Icons were scattered all over, colors were wrong, things were positioned incorrectly. It basically looked like the CSS style sheet was screwed up for some reason.
So I figured that my CSS and possibly JS files are still cached on my browser and that’s what causing the problem. So I did a screen refresh; nothing. I did a forced refresh; nothing. I cleared the cache; nothing. I cleared all the cookies; nothing. I started up Internet Explorer; nothing.
Posted in General.
Tagged with database, JavaScript, wordpress.
By Kevin Lloyd
– December 11, 2008
Welcome to the November 21, 2008 edition of Web Development 2.
Dereck presents My Google Penalty and My Response posted at I Will Not Die.
Sly presents 5 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Wordpress Blogs posted at Slyvisions dot Com.
Although I’m more or less devoted to CakePHP as my PHP Frameowrk, it’s also good to diversify sometimes. Greg Allard presents Quick Thumbnails in Django posted at Code Spatter.
Margaret Garcia presents Top 20 iPhone Apps for Entrepreneurs posted at Web Design Schools Guide.
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Web Development 2 using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Technorati tags: web development 2, blog carnival.
Posted in General.
Tagged with Carnival, wordpress.
By Kevin Lloyd
– November 21, 2008
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Comment Relish Plugin + High CPU Usage - Fixed The Right Way
How The Problem Started
Christmas Eve have just started at about 12:03 AM, when I logged on and saw that dreaded message:
So I did what all normal people do at first: I ignored it. Actually, I had a very good reason to at the time. Since it was 12:03 AM, I assumed that my nightly backup job (backup and compress files and databases) was causing the issue.
So after it happened the next day (a few times) I decided to do some investigation.
The Culprit - Comment Relish
HostMonster does a good job of providing some helpful information that you can use to figure out these issues. I went to the directory: cpu_exceeded_logs and sure enough there was a file with today’s (and yesterday’s) date in there. I opened it up and so a ton of referrences to comments on a Wordpress Blog:
That narrowed things down a little bit. The other helpful directory was mysql_slow_queries. Here I found the following query over and over again:
Posted in MySQL, PHP.
Tagged with Blog, comment, database, MySQL, PHP, wordpress.
6 comments
By Kevin Lloyd – December 29, 2008