Archives For JavaScript

Twenty Web Development Tips

January 27, 2009

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.

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Speeding Up Web Sites using Yahoo!'s YSlow

In two previous posts, I discussed analyzing my site using Yahoo!’s YSlow Firefox plug-in. I went through the initial test results and the steps I took to improve my score. At the end of part 2, I was left with a grade of 95 (whohoo!) but still two hurdles: ETags and sending compressed JavaScript and CSS. Continue Reading…

My Sabbatical

November 30, 2008

As I’ve previously mentioned in my newsletter, I’ve just wrapped the third edition of my “PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide” book and, at this moment, don’t even have another book lined up for the first time in literally several years. I expect I’ll do another book or two in 2009 but no contract has been signed yet, so I’ve got some well-earned downtime ahead of me. Of course, down time is a relative thing.

I do have two or three Web sites to do in 2009, but even a fairly complex site requires much less of me than a full-on book, so I don’t consider those to be major hurdles. Plus, I need to keep my skills up and use new sites as an opportunity to try and learn new things. So how will I be spending most of my so-called sabbatical? Continue Reading…