I am a web application programmer, Search Engine Optimization Developer and all-around Geek.
Mental Ramblings of a Self-acknowledged Geek.
Posted: May 22, 2010
MySQL isn’t dead, despite some concerns people have had lately. But if you’re at all concerned about its future, you may find yourself suddenly poking your head up and looking around at alternatives, like me. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: May 15, 2010
PHP has really been growing up lately. There are some really nice new things in the SPL (Standard PHP Library), including some nice new collection structures familiar to programmers from other languages. We’ve got heaps, stacks, and queues. There are also some interfaces you can implement to create your own collections with standard array-like behavior.
Let’s take a look at building out our own basic collection class. We can extend and subclass this thing later to make it even more useful. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: May 6, 2010
So I’ve certainly made my opinion of JQuery clear. As far as I’m concerned it’s really an integral part of the JavaScript language. The main thing it brings to the table is its drop-dead simple css-style selection and manipulation of the DOM.
However, another thing that many JQuery programmers really appreciate is the command chaining lets you pipe the object from one statement to another, futher shrinking the number of lines of code and in the process making it easy to just do a lot of different things in a row to one object.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: October 3, 2009
I have recently signed up for the National Novel Writing Month Challenge! (NaNoWriMo). NaNoWriMo is an annual, month-long challenge that takes place during the month of November. The idea is to write a 50,000 word long novel in exactly one month.
Posted: October 2, 2009
I used to be one of those ‘He-Man’ coders. Why do I need to use libraries or frameworks? I’l just code it all by hand and it’ll be leaner and more efficient. Why would you bother to have an extra 15k download? That’s an extra server call! You get the idea.
While there certainly are some libraries or frameworks that are too big or that run slower, that’s more a sign of a poorly made library than anything else. JQuery is no poorly made library.
Posted: September 11, 2009
So just to clean up and simplify things, I’m merging my old wordpress.com blog with this one. I’ve imported some older posts over here and am making my wordpress-hosted abandonment official. There weren’t a lot of posts imported, but if you were browsing the archives and found some older ones from waaayyy back, that’s why. Just FYI.
Posted: September 11, 2009
I haven’t gotten a chance to mention this yet, (see last post) but I got to see Bill Nye in person a couple months ago. Bill was giving a talk at nearby St. Louis University on environmental sustainability that was free and open to the public. Given such a bargain-basement price, of course we went and got there plenty early.
The coolest part about all this is that I wasn’t the only one who was excited about this (nor probably the most excited). My 7 year old stepson Johnny just about imploded with excitement when he found out.
Johnny’s a huge Bill Nye fan. He watches the Bill Nye videos and reads Bill’s books from the local library like a lot of kids his age play video games (he really likes video games, too). So Isa and I decided that it would be a good surprise to take him to this talk…of Science!
Posted: September 10, 2009
Well it has been a while since I’ve posted anything here, as you well know by the ear-shattering sound of nothingness coming from over here the last couple months. Not an excuse but it has been pretty busy here lately.
To catch you up on the goings-on, here is the official Cliff’s notes version of the last few months of my life, with full version to follow shortly.
First up, I got married. After a year up planning the Big Day finally arrived. The ceremony was great, the church was beautiful and everything went off without a problem. The reception afterward was very elegant, everyone said so. And–very importantly for us–the photos came out great.
Well getting married was a lot to plan, but a few weeks before the wedding I found out I got an excellent new job at GoDaddy. In Arizona. So in the last couple weeks before the wedding we also had a move to plan. Fortunately Isa’s the plan ahead type and everything went smoothly.
When we got down here of course we needed to find a place to live, and then here was settling into the new job. Then, just about a month ago, my Dad found out he was going to need bypass surgery. I flew back and my brother drove home from school to be there. Fortunately the doctors found his blockages before he had a heart attack, and they’re getting really handy with heart surgery nowadays. It’s almost become a routine thing. Still it is a pretty big event and can really make you worry.
Finally, just this week, Isa and I made the switch and got iPhones, on which I am composing this post.
Anyway, that catches up most of the major events that have been occuring lately. Hopefully things have settled enough that I’ll be able to keep connected more, and maybe be able to get back to working on my movie reviews site.
Posted: March 2, 2009
Conditionals basically allow you to tell PHP what to do, depending on certain conditions. This is where you really start getting into PHP programming. This is where you’ll find the ‘If…Then’ you may have seen before in programming.
Conditionals aren’t too hard. The most basic form of a conditional is the ‘If’ statement.
If something is true…
Then do something else
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 28, 2009
PHP has built-in math functionality for most of your mathematical desires. Here are a few of the common math operators and what they do:
+ adds numbers
- subtracts
* multiplies
/ divides
% modulus (the remainder of a division)
Read the rest of this entry »