jQuery wins

Cameron Moll mentions today that Javascripting is now a required skill for any front end web designer worth his salt. I’m inclined to agree, as Javascript has made its way from the rainbow-coloring of text in the mid-nineties to a mainstay of the most used websites in the world (I’m thinking of Yahoo and YUI, […]

Enabling mod_rewrite and .htaccess in the LAMP Virtual Appliance

Life is just one damned thing after another.
–Elbert Hubbard

In the past few weeks, there’s been a figurative landslide of tiny problems that have produced (ironically enough!) a pretty unproductive stretch of time here at OEIC Labs, which is how I’ll now be referring to myself. Fortunately, I’ve found that these times teach me how the […]

CSS Framework Roundup

A great design and web front-end weblog, Smashing Magazine, has put together an excellent article on CSS frameworks. Building a great web front end takes a lot of elements coming together successfully, such as having a good understanding of your user’s needs, building an effective information architecture around that understanding and creating an engaging and […]

Date validation in Zend Framework

The Zend Framework has a powerful set of validation features, ranging from predefined data type checking (like email addresses and DNS hostnames) to classes for chaining together validations and input filters to create custom validation stacks. Since Rule #1 of web application security is Don’t trust ANYTHING that comes from the browser, I use […]

It’s the little things

Wil Shipley says: “This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”
In this spirit, it’s always a joy for me to run into a tool that does exactly what you need perfectly, no more and no less. Especially when I’ve been searching for this utility for years! Recently I was lucky enough to […]

DCPHP presentation

I’ll be giving a presentation on Subversion for the monthly DCPHP Developers Meeting tomorrow at 7pm. If you’re in the DC area and are interested in meeting some of your peers, and possibly learning something, swing by. It’s in the Greenpeace office at:
702 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
Here’s the Powerpoint presentation, but it has been […]

Untimely RSS Roundup

Perhaps surprisingly for a web developer, I’m a rather slow adopter of technologies. While I certainly believe in the power of the right technology and application to speed things up, I’m not such a firm believer in the ability of technology to simplify. New technologies simply shift labor from old tasks to new ones; for […]

Fun with Subversion - Hooks

I use Subversion as an SCM tool for all my projects, and I use Basecamp as a simple project management tool. They’re both tremendously useful, pretty simple to start using, and they can work together using Subversion’s hooks. I’ve started using a script from Simon Gate that posts a Subversion commit log to a Basecamp […]

Object Relational Mappers

I’ve always been a bit skeptical about Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools in PHP. Why provide an object wrapper around a database if you have to know all the details of your database schema to start with? Isn’t the point of objects to hide complexity? To my eyes, using an ORM to save a 1:* […]

Flash/PHP graphing

Yesterday I stumbled across a great library for generating Flash graphs easily with PHP. PHP/SWF Charts can add a bit of interactivity to data visualization with its ability to display data values on mouseovers, and create linkable regions of your graphs. This functionality could be replicated with HTML image maps and Javascript of course, but […]