End Your If

2011: Year in Review

Jamie — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:01:11 +0000

The New Year has arrived, I wasn’t quite prepared to sum up my year on December 31st because I was busy spending time with the kids during my, well deserved, one week off for the holidays. This last year was …

MVC 3 Routing Example

Jamie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:20:43 +0000

Below is an excerpt of a chapter from my new book: 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3. In today’s heavily fought battles for search engine supremacy, it’s quite difficult to winthe race with a website address that looks like: http://www.example.com/books/details?id=4. …

20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3

Jamie — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:57:35 +0000

Yesterday marks the official launch of my second book: 20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3. The book is being published by O’Reilly and is available in both e-book or print edition. I’m quite proud of this book as I’ve feel like …

Highlights from Webistrate: HTML5, MVC 3, and CSS3

Jamie — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:38:06 +0000

Over the past few weeks some great articles have been released on Webistrate: HTML5: Creating an HTML5 Website and degrading for older browsers MVC3: Using Class Extensions to simplify your code with the UrlHelper CSS3: Attribute Selectors Exploring some of …

Making AJAX Content Loading Prettier

Jamie — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 12:48:49 +0000

In today’s article on Webistrate I explore Transitioning AJAX Content into view with $.animate() using some basic jQuery. Please note, it doesn’t look overly pretty because I’m not a designer, but the functionality is there and it can be prettied with …

Improving the speed of AJAX request and response times

Jamie — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:11:40 +0000

Today a new article was released on Webistrate that discusses how to use jQuery Templates to speed up your websites AJAX queries by return back JSON data and then doing the visual enhancements on the client-side with the use of …

Developers to the rescue of designers…again!

Jamie — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:57:55 +0000

I don’t know about you, but my designers love their custom fonts and I’m tired of slicing and reslicing images – especially when the website is multilingual. CSS3 to the rescue allowing us to import custom fonts and make them …

Webistrate.com – Draw Your Own Conclusions

Jamie — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:39:36 +0000

I’ve been working on a new web site recently. I’ve enjoyed doing my blog; however, I find that blogging is different from what I want this new web site to be. The goal of Webistrate is to provide full code …

ToLower-ToUpper and the CurrentCulture.CultureInfo

Jamie — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:15:30 +0000

I have recently being working on my largest multi-lingual site ever – over 30 languages – in ASP.NET. While implementing it, there have been a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. One of the most recent one was …

Officially published my CakePHP Book

Jamie — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:59:40 +0000

Finally! It has been a long time in the making, but my book is finally finished and published! About two years ago, I began the undertaking of writing a book. At the time it was merely a hobby while I …

CakePHP 1.2 VS 1.3 VS 2.0 Page Request Times

Jamie — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:44:32 +0000

When I first started using CakePHP a few years ago, we had a lot of complaints about speed. If you do some Google searches comparing CakePHP to other frameworks, it seems to be near the bottom of the pack. I …

AJAX Star Rating Plugin For CakePHP

Jamie — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:27:06 +0000

First off, I didn’t write this plugin, I was browsing CakePHP’s plugin bakery and it came from there: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/schneimi/2010/08/19/ajax-star-rating-plugin-1 This is an excellent plugin and very easy-to-use. The above article is extremely detailed and provides excellent step-by-step instructions to set …

CakePHP 2-0 Ajax Pagination WITHOUT The Pages

Jamie — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:01:06 +0000

As I promised in this article, I have created a full CakePHP example of performing AJAX pagination without the pages. The goal of this article is to display news articles to a user. As the user scrolls down, we will …

CakePHP CSS Enhancements From 1.2 To 1.3

Jamie — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:20:01 +0000

This article does seem a bit late since CakePHP 2.0 is on it’s way. However, I felt it prudent to point out a few things that I’m really happy to see in the new default CSS provided by CakePHP. On …

Creating AJAX Pagination WITHOUT The Pages

Jamie — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:18:31 +0000

You may have noticed some changes in the way a few websites work. For example, if you go to Google Images and do a search, there is no pagination (1, 2, 3, Next, Previous) anymore. Instead Google loads the images …

IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy, The Final Saga

Jamie — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:01:01 +0000

In yesterday’s article I focused mainly on Watson. So, in case you missed the episode last night, BIG SPOILER ALERT, Watson won. Ken was actually pretty close after Double Jeopardy; in fact he was leading after the Jeopardy round. If …

IBM’s Watson On Jeopardy!

Jamie — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:11:54 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Jeopardy! for quite some time now. Even more so over the past year. Now that I am the Father of twins, going out at night just isn’t as easy as it was! When I first …

Building A Scalable Queueing System With PHP

Jamie — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:58:07 +0000

In today’s article we are going to cover building a queueing system with PHP. Before we begin, let’s define what a queueing system is. The best place to start is the dictionary: “to line up or wait in a queue” …

Publishing an e-book on Smashwords

Jamie — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:44:16 +0000

I feel a little bit behind in the times on this one, but I’ll work to catch up quickly. Over the past year or so I’ve been compiling samples and I put together a book for developing CakePHP websites. I …

Interesting CakePHP Bakery Components

Jamie — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:17:20 +0000

I enjoy researching what other people are doing in the CakePHP world and I came across several interesting components at CakePHP’s bakery website: Wizard Component http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/jaredhoyt/2010/09/10/wizard-component-1-2-1 This component looks pretty neat and easy-to-use. You import the component and set a …

CakePHP 2.0 Rant Retraction

Jamie — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:15:01 +0000

In yesterday’s article, it appears I may have misunderstood something regarding lazy loading. I incorrectly read it as “loading the data” on-demand oppose to loading the object on-demand. This actually looks like a great feature, especially after reading this: http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/Frank/2010/08/10/optimizing-model-loading-with-lazymodel …

CakePHP 2.0 Rant

Jamie — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:46:11 +0000

I was recently visiting the CakePHP bakery and decided to read a little bit about CakePHP 2.0-dev. I’ve rather enjoyed CakePHP as a framework since version 1.1 all the way through to version 1.3. However, after reading some of the …

Random Funny Technology Videos

Jamie — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:44:02 +0000

I was surfing the Interweb recently and came across some cool/funny videos that I thought I would share: Amazing iPod Trick http://www.break.com/index/amazing-ipod-trick-1984104 This video turns a black iPod into a white iPod. I’m not sure if I would personally want …

Using the TextHelper with CakePHP

Jamie — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:20:18 +0000

Really, the TextHelper? Yes, this is probably one of the most overlooked helpers in CakePHP. Sure we all know about the HTML Helper, Form Helper, JS Helper, etc… but how many of us use the Text Helper? I’ve seen so …

Maintaining a session in a session-less environment

Jamie — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:05:18 +0000

Confused? I know I was at first, but let me explain. First, why would there be a session-less environment? I thought this was a HUGE plus to server-side development languages over basic HTML that is session-less? Well, you would be …

Speeding up client/server response times

Jamie — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 15:04:17 +0000

In the past 6 months I’ve switched jobs from being a web developer to being a server side game developer. So far it’s been an excellent career shift. I get to focus on my true passions, intelligent back-end code and …

Modifying the CakePHP Bakery Templates

Jamie — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:10:07 +0000

One of the keys to a successful website is a good user flow. What defines a good user flow? At the very core, it requires simple navigation, being able to find what you’re looking for, and being able to do …

Maintaining the back button with AJAX

Jamie — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 01:47:17 +0000

Last week I blogged about whether or not you can use too much AJAX on your website. The short answer was no; with one caveat being that you must not lose the user interaction experience. In this scenario I’m referring to …

AJAX, can there be too much?

Jamie — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 02:00:31 +0000

Like any problem, there is no one right solution. There are always many different solutions that work for different reasons. Some solutions require the best solution; some solutions require the more optimized solution; other solutions just need to “get done”. …

Making Money With Flash Games

Jamie — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 22:26:04 +0000

There are a few different ways to make money with Flash games. In today’s article I will discuss the simplest way. It requires no development and no Flash skills. It does require a bit of investment (not a lot though) …

Bored? Try N-Puzzles

Jamie — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:19:08 +0000

So it’s Friday, it’s been a long week. I don’t know about you, but I need a beer and need to relax. Check out this little Flash game that I created a little while back: http://www.endyourif.com/npuzzle/npuzzle.html It’s called N-Puzzles, also …

iPhone Apps Randomly Crashing?

Jamie — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:53:06 +0000

Today at work I was advancing one of our iPhone applications. It’s a pretty basic application, has a menu which displays some data from the web via XML; all of that fun stuff. On occasion, I would try to push a …

Optimizing CakePHP Websites

Jamie — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:37:43 +0000

CakePHP offers a lot of functionality to us as developers. The ability to develop websites rapidly provides a trade-off in how quickly the website will load. As we expand our skills, we will learn the techniques that will slow down/speed …

Adding SEO functionality

Jamie — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:24:19 +0000

Two of the biggest things that will improve your search engine rankings are keyword rich website titles and keyword rich links to your content. Today’s lessons will cover both of these topics. Objectives Improve our search engine rankings Set a …

Developer High Fives (in honor of Barney Stinson)

Jamie — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:15:28 +0000

Last night was the premiere of my current favorite TV show “How I Met Your Mother”. If you are not familiar with the show, former childhood star Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser), plays a character named Barney Stinson. Barney is …

margin: 0 auto; not centering in Internet Explorer?

Jamie — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:23:39 +0000

The other day, I had chopped up a design. Sliced and diced if you will. I proceeded to creating the HTML once all of the images were sliced up. Things were going great. As per usual I began designing in …

unbindModel and $this->paginate()

Jamie — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:06:28 +0000

Ugggh what a disaster today was! On a client’s site, we have an older version of CakePHP, pre containable functionality. Because of this, we have to use unbindModel and bindModel to accomplish the same functionality. Over the past while, it …

Someone at work tick you off?

Jamie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:50:25 +0000

I don’t know about you, but there are many times during a work week where someone ticks me off. It could be something small or something major. I’ve always wondered what I could do about this, so I finally did …

Twitter, are you taking advantage yet?

Jamie — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:18:18 +0000

I’m sure you are well aware of Twitter by now. If you are not, perhaps you should crawl out of the hole in the crowd and begin checking out the latest fad on the Internet! People are absolutely obsessed with …

How to write for people and rank high with your keywords

Jamie — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:16:32 +0000

Using the right keywords are important, but don’t let this drive your content. It’s important to remember what your first goal should be and not your second. Your first goal is write and provide useful content to people who do …

Follow me on Twitter

Jamie — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:39:24 +0000

I’m sure it’s been a long time coming, but I’ve set myself up a Twitter account and you can follow my latest blogs on there. Check it out here: http://twitter.com/endyourif Other useful articlesJune 29, 2009 -- Twitter, are you taking …

The Shocking Truth to Website Success…and it’s not top Google Rankings!

Jamie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:33:09 +0000

Do I believe in SEO? Absolutely I do. Do I believe in link popularity? Absolutely I do. Do I believe in targeted keywords? Absolutely I do. Do I think it’s the most important thing? No, I don’t. I am going …

Facebook Development – Quick and Easy Dialogs

Jamie — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:19:48 +0000

At my work, whenever we have a link to delete records, we always have a simple Javascript confirm dialog pop-up. The confirm dialog just does the standard, “Are you sure you wish to delete this record?” with an OK and …

Sharing your way to success

Jamie — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:02:03 +0000

In today’s article I am going to discuss something that *hopefully* was taught to you at a very young age. For me, this dates back to my earliest memories of being a child. In your life, how many times have …

Fastest Top Five FREE Ways to Gain New Traffic

Jamie — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:59:13 +0000

Today’s article is going to discuss my top 5 ways to gain new traffic, did I mention that they are all FREE! Because each are free, they all take a few minutes of work on a regular basis. After a …

Photobucket, Photos, and You

Jamie — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:44:22 +0000

It seems like photo sharing and social network applications are the in thing right now. Let’s take advantage of this. Today I will provide a simple class that will allow you to post photos to a user’s Photobucket account in …

Facebook, Photos, and You!

Jamie — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:11:50 +0000

The Facebook Application API is quite extensive and allows you to get and set many different aspects of a user’s Facebook information. Today, we are going to discuss using the Facebook API to create an album, if it doesn’t already …

Creating your first iGoogle Gadget

Jamie — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:38:42 +0000

Recently at work, we’ve started diving into Google Gadgets. They are quite fun and really extremely easy to build. In this article, I’m going to get you started creating your very own Google Gadget. Sit back and reserve a few minutes of …

Bebo Development Scares Me

Jamie — Thu, 07 May 2009 23:48:29 +0000

Today at work, we’ve begun looking into creating some Bebo applications. I know it’s a bit behind in the times, but we’ve been busy with Facebook, iPhone, and Google Gadgets. It’s now time to sink our teeth into Bebo. I …

setTimeout() vs setInterval() in Javascript

Jamie — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:56:32 +0000

It feels like it has been a lifetime since my last blog! I must apologize for the long delay, but between finding the time and finding a good topic to blog about, it’s being difficult. In today’s article, it’s been a …

Caching Queries in CakePHP

Jamie — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:32:02 +0000

If you haven’t noticed already, at times CakePHP can be a little slow loading! The reason for this is quite simple. Rapid Application Development. To allow for RAD, sometimes we must give up something, in this scenario it’s a bit …

Understanding group bys

Jamie — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:49:12 +0000

Yesterday, at work, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that something that comes so easily to me, does not to others. I had tasked someone with, what seemed a simple task, to retrieve a list of users …

ActivityIndicator with a UIWebView

Jamie — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:39:03 +0000

Because you can never be sure how long it will take to retrieve content from a web page and have it displayed on the iPod/iPhone, it’s quite nice to provide the user with an indication that the content is being …

Custom pagination query in CakePHP

Jamie — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:23:13 +0000

My pet peeve list seems to grow on a regular basis. One of them is poorly optimized code. Not only is the code I’m going to discuss poorly optimized, it’s from the documentation of CakePHP! If you search for creating …

3 Flaws to CakePHP’s AuthComponent

Jamie — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:37:18 +0000

Good Friday to all. Over the past several weeks I have been working a lot with the AuthComponent in CakePHP and have learned a couple of lessons that I wanted to share with you all. The title calls them “flaws”, …

The flaws of using isset()

Jamie — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:35:44 +0000

I am starting to really dislike the PHP function isset(). Today, I was working on a registration system in CakePHP and my password validation was not working. If I left the password field blank and clicked submit, it would come back with …

Reset UINavigationController

Jamie — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:20:42 +0000

The following is a neat little trick to reset your navigation controller when it is integrated with UITabBarController. The following code will pop the navigation controller up when the user clicks on your tab bar item. I’ll begin by showing …

Scroll a UIWebView

Jamie — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:19:10 +0000

I struggled with this one for quite a while. I kept searching and searching, all I could find was forums and no one seemed to have an answer! Well, if you’re here, don’t worry, I have the answer you have been …

Transparent UIWebView

Jamie — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:11:22 +0000

The other day I was working on my iPhone application. In the application I have a view. This view creates a UIWebView. I then proceed to load content from a webpage into the web view. This works great. I was then …

A friendly framework reminder

Jamie — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 23:30:15 +0000

Quite often at work, I find myself reminding my team members to be sure to ALWAYS utilize the framework to it’s fullest. Just because you are unsure how to do something or have never done it before in the framework, …

UINavigationController Background Color

Jamie — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:22:17 +0000

Boy today was a frustrating day. Over the past month or so, when I have some free time at work I’ve been learning Objective C to create iPhone applications. Today, I struggled and struggled to do the most simplistic thing …

Web Developers are Warriors

Jamie — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:29:29 +0000

Sick days? What’s a sick day? I know at my place of work, we don’t take them. Today is a great example of that. I couldn’t even get out of bed yesterday, Sunday, but today, with work knocking on the …

Unbind Model Validation in CakePHP

Jamie — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 11:30:14 +0000

Have you found yourself wanting to remove validation on a specific field in a specific form? Yes? Excellent, you found the right place. If you haven’t had the need for this, a great example of where you would want to …

Jquery vs Prototype/Scriptaculous

Jamie — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:50:20 +0000

About two years ago I started learning AJAX and drag and drop. The first project I applied it to was an existing project that was using Prototype and Scriptaculous. So, I didn’t really have a choice as to what library …

How attentive are you?

Jamie — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:11:27 +0000

During my first job interview as a web developer, I was asked, what I thought at the time, a weird question. “Jamie, on a scale of one to ten, what would you score yourself in regards to attention to detail?” …

5 Tips to Become a Better Web Developer

Jamie — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:05:28 +0000

So, you are looking to become a better web developer? Well, the fact that you are willing to read this article is a great start! It’s actual one of my five tips. I’ll begin by listing, what I believe, are …

Login system with CakePHP in under 10 minutes

Jamie — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:57:03 +0000

In today’s article, I am going to discuss how simple it is to setup a login system with CakePHP. As the title says, it should be less than 10 minutes. In theory if you copy and paste the code below, …

Optimize your CSS and JS with CakePHP in minutes

Jamie — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:28:50 +0000

One of my first articles discussed YSlow. An excellent Mozilla add-on to help you understand why your web page may be loading slowly. In that article, I describe the importance of gzip, minify, and grouping your Javascript and CSS code …

Importance of using the CakePHP Helpers

Jamie — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:41:49 +0000

Uggghh, I hate to even be writing about this! I have been spending the past two days cleaning up a project that has been running for over one year. It was our first ever CakePHP project at our company and …

Re-map key/value array data in PHP

Jamie — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:17:08 +0000

I was recently tasked with a situation where I needed to populate about 10 different “Settings” for every user in the current database. This example is specifically for CakePHP, however, it could easily be used elsewhere. My goal was the …

How to deal with stress at work

Jamie — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:51:59 +0000

I’m assuming I’m not alone with this one, but on a daily basis I seem to bring home a lot of stress from work. At one point I use to bring home so much stress that I was unable to …

When to use element() and when to requestAction()

Jamie — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:54:06 +0000

Several times a week it seems, someone at my office is asking, “Jamie, should I use $this->element() or $this->requestAction()?” Every time they ask, I ask them back, “What do you need to do?” There are a few simple ways to …

CakePHP Containable Statement Pitfalls

Jamie — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:26:16 +0000

On some of our more recent projects, we have been using the Containable behavior that CakePHP provides. It works quite nicely, a lot easier than the previous format of having to bind and unbind models on the fly. The pitfalls …

Keeping your CakePHP Controllers Clean

Jamie — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 22:03:08 +0000

As my office gains more and more experience with CakePHP, we are beginning to learn to build more organized web sites. Looking back at our first few projects, I’m astonished to see how messy our controllers are! I know the …

Underscores and Internet Explorer Fun

Jamie — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:01:32 +0000

I think my favorite thing about being a web developer is wasting hours and hours of my time, my co-workers time, pretty much every ones time because Internet Explorer is retarded. Earlier this week, we were developing a site and …

Drag and drop category management with CakePHP

Jamie — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:40:11 +0000

Today’s article is going to walk you through creating a slick drag and drop with AJAX category management system. CakePHP offers a really nice built-in tree management. In fact, at a bare minimum you simply need to create a table …

Drag and drop with animations in jquery

Jamie — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:46:46 +0000

Every year at Halloween, my company offers prizes to the best dressed employees. For the past two years I have one as well as my co-worker that partakes in our crazy costumes. You may be wondering what this has to …

How to add comments with AJAX in CakePHP

Jamie — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:20:17 +0000

In today’s article we are going to create a very basic blog that allows people to create a post and posts comments on that post via AJAX. We are going to keep it extremely basic and just focus on that …

How to advance our CMS in CakePHP

Jamie — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:06:52 +0000

At the end of part one, we had a working CMS. Well, at least it was saving files and they could be displayed to the public. In today’s article, we are going to further advance our CMS. We will cover …

How to create a CMS with CakePHP

Jamie — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:17:04 +0000

I really enjoying writing code and I find that snippets just don’t always cut it for me. So in today’s article, I am going to describe the process of creating a CMS (Content Management System) with CakePHP. This will be …

AJAX Select box in CakePHP

Jamie — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:00:03 +0000

When I created my first personal CakePHP web site, this was something that had me quite frustrated. I struggled and struggled to figure out and understand how to do a simple “if I change this select box, how can I …

How to setup a route in CakePHP

Jamie — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:04:23 +0000

If you are like me and are creating personal web sites, one of the best ways to gain traffic to your site is through SEO. I won’t go into detail here as I want to focus on how to setup …

A practical CASE Statement Example

Jamie — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:20:40 +0000

What is a SQL case statement? Well, it’s much like a switch statement in a development language. It allows you to test several different cases for a field and determine what you would like to do for each one. If …

How to create a socket server in PHP

Jamie — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:14:15 +0000

Ever want to build a chat application or perhaps even a game? If so, a socket server will help you get started. Once you understand the underlying functionality of creating the server, enhancing it is just as easy. The way …

StringExtractComponent for CakePHP

Jamie — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:02:03 +0000

Hi folks, I have just finished creating my first CakePHP component and I wanted to share it with the community. After I finish writing this article, I will be submitting it to CakePHP for inclusion. The component is called StringExtractComponent. …

Top 5 SEO Tips To Achieve Top 10 Rankings In Google

Jamie — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:47:25 +0000

I thought I would follow-up my “How to get indexed by Google in ONE hour” article with my top 5 SEO (search engine optimization) tips. The following 5 items are by no means in order of importance, it’s best to …

The Importance of Database Indexing

Jamie — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 04:20:51 +0000

If you are not familiar with database indexes or even if you are, but not sure when to use them, this article will be perfect for you. In this article, I will show you an example of a simple query …

Dynamic COUNT() Versus Static COUNT()

Jamie — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:36:24 +0000

I’ll continue today with another good database programming article. If you missed yesterdays, you may view it here. Today’s article will discuss when to use a static COUNT() versus a dynamic COUNT(). On a regular basis we are tasked with …

Why You Should Avoid ORDER BY RAND() OR NEWID()

Jamie — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:51:02 +0000

Quite often we get a complaint from a client that their homepage is too slow. The first thing we do is load the homepage up and see for ourselves. Yep, it looks slow, so the next step is too see …

Why You Should Always Backup

Jamie — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 16:42:18 +0000

Man, what a week it has been. As you may have noticed it’s been a few days too many since my last post. The reason for that is a hectic week at work has prevented me from having time. Now …

Fixing slow drag and drop with scriptaculous

Jamie — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:56:13 +0000

Recently on a project I was working on, I was tasked with fixing drag and drop that was terribly slow. The drag and drop was implemented with scriptaculous on a calendar system. When you clicked an event to drag it it …

Why Frameworks Are Better

Jamie — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:46:56 +0000

Are you a person who dislikes frameworks? Or are you a person who loves frameworks? Or are you even a person who isn’t quite sure what a framework is? The following article will discuss the pros and cons of frameworks …

A Simple SEO Trick To Boost Your Rankings

Jamie — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:16:29 +0000

The following article is going to be short and sweet, but applying this technique will help you move up those all important rankings. The technique involves updating your <title> tag. With a few simple changes, your ranking for your targetted …

CSS Tips – Margins in Internet Explorer

Jamie — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:05:13 +0000

This is the first article to follow-up on my why “Why Is Internet Explorer Better?“. Today’s article is going to discuss how Internet Explorer deals with margins. To explain this weird and frustrating issue, I am going to build a …

Why Is Internet Explorer Better?

Jamie — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:27:59 +0000

I’m guessing I probably got your attention with this one? I’m also guessing that you cannot scroll down fast enough to the comments box and start typing a bunch of nasty messages to me. WAIT! Before you do that, let …

Facebook Development and $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']

Jamie — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:06:26 +0000

If you are new to creating Facebook applications or even if you’re not. When you go to use $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] you might be in for a surprise when this _SERVER variable does not exist! Just recently I encountered this problem, when …

Drag and Drop with AJAX Example

Jamie — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:19:37 +0000

At my work it’s quite clear to me that a lot of people have difficulty with both AJAX and drag and drop functionality. In this article, I thought I would provide a realistic and simplistic example of how to accomplish …

SQL Tips – Why LEFT JOINS are bad

Jamie — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:05:16 +0000

When you do SQL queries do you find yourself always, or almost always, using left joins? If you’ve answered yes to this question, I would suggest to continue to read and understand some downfalls that you might be getting yourself …

How to get indexed by Google in ONE hour

Jamie — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:52:09 +0000

If you’re not familiar with how some people accomplish getting their web sites submitted to Google quickly, you are going to absolutely love this article. I’ve bet you’ve heard from many people that it can take days, weeks, even months to …

YSlow – Helping slow web pages load faster

Jamie — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:44:07 +0000

This article is a continuation to my article about Firebug. YSlow is an add-on to Firebug that helps developers determine why a site is loading slowly. After you install YSlow, if you open up Firebug in Mozilla a new tab …