Davin's blog

Tag: web development

  • I got to help UXmatters with print styling

    A few months ago I contacted UXmatters online magazine to let them know of a problem I had printing out articles with Firefox. The first page would print, but that was all. I could switch to Safari and print fine, but that just didn’t seem right. I found out that they were a little shorthanded…

  • Nephtali web framework creator talks FP

    Adam Richardson of Envision Internet Consulting has been a long-time collaborator and good friend of mine, and over the last few years I’ve seen him pursue knowledge in web programming with persistence that I’ve never seen from anyone else. One of Adam’s projects is Nephtali: a web framework that focuses on security and considers the…

  • How WordPress falters as a CMS: Multiple content fields

    WordPress is amazing and keeps getting better, but I want to be clear about an inherent limitation that WordPress has as a content management system (CMS). That limitation is that WordPress doesn’t handle multiple content regions on web pages. Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill…

  • Let’s stop playing Frankenstein

    Consider the monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The creature is described as being about eight feet (244 centimeters) in height, with translucent yellowish skin that “barely disguised the workings of the vessels and muscles underneath”, watery, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, black lips, and white teeth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Appearance) I read that phrase describing the skin of…

  • Marking up breadcrumb navigation

    Breadcrumb navigation is a secondary navigation system that usually represents a site visitor’s current position in the site, showing other pages above the current one in the site’s hierarchy. In some sites, like those built with Dokuwiki, breadcrumbs actually show the history of the user’s session instead of the hierarchy of the user’s current position…

  • Trouble with PHP5 and SQLite 3

    After fiddling for a while with SQLite 3 and PHP 5.0.4 on the Mac PowerBook (OS 10.4.2) I’ve been using, I just saw that the current version of PHP does not include support for SQLite 3. Only for version 2. Dangit. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing SQLite 2 just so it can…

  • LAMP or WIMP?

    I was walking on campus last week thinking about the acronym LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and realized that if it was on a Windows server running IIS, it would be WIMP.

  • Prognosticating on LAMP vs .NET, J2EE

    Dvorak wrote an article on PCMAG.com, “Windows Vista: Where’s the Buzz?,” in which he made some predictions on the future of web technology. It all started with his observation on the lack of excitement about Microsoft naming their coming OS as “Vista.” Linux/Apache will own the server space and with the emergence of MySQL and…

  • Dreamweaver MX 2004: Less than great for dynamic web applications

    So, I’m supposed to teach a course in Dreamweaver Dynamic Web Applications and one in Dreamweaver/PHP Web Development. In preparation, I’m working on a little project that should help with some internal LCTTP record keeping as well as give me practice using DW to build web apps. Here’s the trouble: Web applications generally require some…

  • Change is afoot in the web…More foundational than when the first graphic showed up in a web browser…

    What an exciting time to be in the Web industry. I just read an essay by Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path that really got me thinking. Major change, like questions of what happens to our bookmarks when we lose our current definition of a web page? In 2002, Luke Wroblewski of the NCSA published a…