Archives For blog

New Design Coming This Week

August 27, 2012

This version of the blog (i.e., this look) is about two years old now, which is plenty old enough in blog terms. After months of delay, this week I’ll finally put up the new look. Mostly this post is a heads-up (i.e., if you see anything amiss, please let me know), but I also wanted to explain my thought process in coming up with this new design. As many of you are trying to learn the behind-the-scenes steps and mentality in creating a Web site, I hope this will be of use to you. Continue Reading…

As part of my [intlink id=”2947″ type=”post”]January-February 2012 downtime[/intlink] (which really turned out to be February-March), I’ve been going through a stack of books, and a virtual stack of ebooks, that I’ve had lying around for way too long. One of the first books from that stack that I read was “Technical Blogging“, by Antonio Cangiano. I bought the ebook through Pragmatic Programmer‘s Black Friday sale back in November, and it’s available through Pragmatic Programmer, or Amazon, of course. Overall, I was quite impressed with the book, and I think it’s going to help me a lot. Before I discuss the book in detail, a quick bit of perspective… Continue Reading…

I’ve been reading the book Technical Blogging, by Antonio Cangiano, over the past couple of months and am glad that I am. I’m reading it in the hopes of improving the quality of (and, potentially, income from) this blog, and I think it will pan out. Continue Reading…

Peachpit Press has published on their Web site my “Five Critical E-Commerce Security Tips in Five Days” series of blog postings. The specific postings are:

The postings are in concert with my “Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL” book, although the information provided, from theory to actual code, should be useful whether you’ve read that book or not.

Time for a Big Change

October 30, 2010

For quite some time, at least a year or more, I’ve been meaning to redo my company’s Web site (www.larryullman.com). Sadly, even though I largely write about and do Web development, my own site is always the last one that I work on. Now that I’m between books, I actually have the time to get to my own neglected site. I’m happy to say that the new version of the site will go live this weekend, but there’s more. First, a little background…

Digital Media and Communications Insights, Inc., the company that I work for, and am a very minor owner of, was founded by my in-laws as a vehicle for my father-in-law’s telecommunications consultancy. In 1999, I started by own “branch” of the company, doing primarily Web development, training/teaching, and, of course, writing. In the past decade, my father-in-law retired and although I sometimes hire individuals for project work, yours truly is the company’s only true employee today. Thanks to the success of my books, and later the blog, the Web site gets a decent amount of traffic (north of one million hits per month), and I think it is safe to say that pretty much no one cares who or what DMC Insights is. Visitors want to download the code for a book, visit the support forum, email me, and maybe even hire me to work for them, but the existence of DMC Insights really doesn’t factor into the equation. In revamping my company’s Web site, I’ve often considered dropping the company facade and just putting my name front and center (my apologies if any of this sounds egotistical). Serendipitously, the domain name www.larryullman.com just became available this month, after being owned for the past ten years by a Canadian gentleman, named…Larry Ullman. I am now the proud owner of my namesake domain and have been busy creating a new look for it. The new version of the site is now ready to go (or ready enough!), so this weekend I’ll be instituting redirects on www.larryullman.com to direct all traffic there (unfortunately, half a million books are in print with my company’s URL on them). Hopefully this will be a smooth process, but there will inevitably be something that I missed.

I hope that everyone likes the new site once it’s up and, as always, I gratefully welcome all thoughts and feedback on what I’ve done.