For those of you that read this blog with any regularlity (and my hearty thanks to you), my apologies for the lack of posts this past week. I’ve had a bit of a personal emergency that’s put all other tasks on the far back burner. I hope to start posting again by the end of this forthcoming week, including some detailed posts on the Yii framework.
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Through an Amazon service, this blog is now available for reading on Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a subscription service, priced at $1.99/month (for what it’s worth Amazon sets the price and keeps most of the money). I don’t know what kind of interest there is in this, but I thought I’d make it an option. This does mean I’ll need to work harder to make the blog content meaningful, though, if people will be paying good money for it! If there’s anything you’d like to see in this blog, or see more or less of, please let me know.
Somewhat randomly I’ve recently come across two very useful articles, each of which contains ten Web development tips. The first is at hackification, and is called Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago. This seems to be a generally good blog, with lots of stuff worth reading. In this particular article, I also heartedly agree with the author’s suggestions that you should…
- Use a browser development plug-in, like Firebug and YSlow
- Learn JavaScript
This author also mentions using a reset stylesheet, something I wasn’t familiar with but is also mentioned in…
…the 10 Dirty Little Web Development Tricks article at Yongfook. That author also recommends using a versioning system like SVN (to control the different versions of files as you work with them), which I feel makes more sense if you’re working on something with a team. Along with recommendations to learn the jQuery JavaScript framework and the Zend PHP framework, the author also suggests you take a break, perhaps the best piece of debugging advice that I’ve ever also given (I always include that in my books). There’s also some best-practices there related to using frameworks and MVC approaches to sites.
When I was at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters back in May 2004 (an event I’ll write about retroactively in time), I saw one of the fellow attendees updating their blog. I remember thinking how silly it seemed: who really wants to read every little thing that a stranger writes? Coupled with my innate aversion to anything popular (I was already sick of hearing about podcasts in June 2005), I never thought I’d find myself writing a blog. In fact, when I began producing a newsletter in the Summer of 2007, I was asked why I wasn’t doing a blog instead. In part, I wanted to do a newsletter so that people would immediately receive whatever I wrote without having to repeatedly check my Web site. But I have found that a newsletter also has its downsides:
- I put so much pressure on myself for turning out a solid, well-written newsletter, that I’m lucky to get one out each month.
- Newsletters are not as conducive to feedback and interactions as I would like.
- Newsletters are not the best place to put code and tutorials.
So that’s what has brought me to creating this blog: it’s another way to communicate with readers and convey information. What are my hopes for this blog, then? Continue Reading…
