So What Is The Difference Between Web Developers and Web Designers? February 24, 2010
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentI get asked this question one way or another all the time. Either its someone actually trying to understand the difference (and there is a huge difference) or by people I am introducing myself to when they ask me what I do for a living. In the later sense they usually respond with “Oh so you know how to build web pages.” This doesn’t bother me, but I’m still a little dumbfounded with the prevalence of obvious web applications like facebook, myspace, and twitter in peoples lives.
We’re all guilty of this though, right? I have a friend who is a plumber and he had to explain the difference between commercial and residential plumbing to me, and even within those branches of plumbing there are specialties but we won’t go into those today.
I was explaining the difference to my girlfriend the other night. I was a bit intoxicated so I came up with an over the top analogy of the Sistine Chapel. The way I broke it down was you can liken the architect and the builders to web developers and Michelangelo and the painters as the web designer. So the web developer gives a website functionality. Its the web developer that enables you to submit your latest tweet, update your facebook status, and add all those images to myspace. Its the web designer who makes it look good. Now I over simplified the web designers job, they need to know a lot about how users view a page, how to catch a users eye, and web designers are usually damn good in PhotoShop (which has gotten pretty complex).
Another example is the engine and drivetrain in an automobile (web developers) versus the body, interior, and paint job (web designer). These two analogies are fairly accurate. Thoughts?
Twittrash – Twitter Trash and Other Scum on the Internet February 17, 2010
Posted by chris in : rant, seo , add a commentSo I recently started using twitter and you can follow me by going to http://www.twitter.com/cnizzdotcom. I had long been opposed to twitter because I thought it was useless. Of course I was initially opposed to myspace and facebook as well which I am currently using on or have used at one point. I guess I am sometimes a bit reactionary when it comes to knew things. Not just technology, but even certain technologies and methodologies in programming. This is a dangerous thing in my field, but I’m getting more progressive by the day. I laugh thinking about how years ago I stated to a co-worker “extending classes is a horrible idea.” Hey, if we were never wrong, then we’d never improve, right? So I take comfort in my opinions evolving as I become more knowledgeable.
So about a month ago I began using twitter. My use of twitter is really just an exercise in marketing my most important product across the internet, which is me! What I’ve learned in my month with twitter is that twitter is not much different than SEO blackhat, whitehat, and greyhat that you see with ranking in Google. In the SEO world you have scum that write bots (actually they are quite easy to write) which like graffiti in parks (the trashy kind) spam blogs and forums in an effort to win backlinks.
In the twitterverse its the same. You have twitbots, employed by twittrash that will follow someone for a few hours, maybe a few days (its hard to tell) and then unfollow them. All this is done automatically so the twittrash doesn’t have to do it manually. You’ve probably noticed this before. I noticed it right away and assumed it was some bot, but it was confirmed while reading a forum post over at DP. The poster advised another poster to “use a twitter automation program to auto follow then unfollow after time has passed and they don’t follow back.” The term twittrash immediately popped into my head.
There are legitimate ways of winning followers in twitter. It’s hard starting from ground zero and doing things legit (trust me I’m doing it now) but it can be done.
- Find people you know and start following them
- Use hashtags to reach a broader audience
- Write good twits and links to quality content
- Include links to your twitter page everywhere
If you already know the person and they know you are now following them its likely they will reciprocate.
When you use a hash tag such as #php or #embarassing it reaches everyone else listening for that hashtag. Of course spammers use these as well, but you glance over the spam and find the good stuff just like with anything else on the web.
This is a no brainer and its the exact same thing you do when optimizing for google.
Add a link to your twitter page on your facebook, myspace, blog, and to forum signatures
On the web and in life, when ever something good comes a long there will be [insert prefix here]-trash to try and ruin it. Twittrash is no different than snake oil salesman, politicians, and blog spammers. Thanks for reading.
well my word press theme got hosed February 3, 2010
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentI upgraded word press, thinking to myself “wow, this wordpress updater is really awesome.” Next thing I know the costume theme I created for my site was just gone. This really sucks and I don’t have time to fix it. So this blog will look like crap for a while. I don’t like how it doesn’t match the rest of the site now. Anyways one of my goals is to redesign this site anyways so this is just more motivation to do so. Now on to the blog post I was working on….arggh.
Multiple Monitor Software January 4, 2010
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentCheck out http://www.mediachance.com/free/multimon.htm
Goals for the year December 31, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentWhat are your goals for the year. We all like to make resolutions, I’ll just make goals, that way I don’t feel bad if I don’t make them. In no particular order I’ll list some goals I want to accomplish this year:
Become Zend Certified
I read over the certification guide and I am confident I could pass 80% of the test, it will look good on a resume (and for this site), and will just be kinda cool to say “yeah, I’m Zend Certified.”
Redesign Cnizz.com
Yup it could use a more modern personalized look. Same with this blog, but I won’t worry about that for a while.
Spend less
I went over my expenses and I have way too much frivolous spending. I’d like to cut this rampant expenditures by $100.00 per month and put that money in my savings account.
Get my side projects up
I have two of them. One is a lead generation site and the other is helping my friends with their online retail site.
Pay Off Debt
Luckily I don’t have a lot, just student loans and a car loan, but I would really like to pay off (or at least make a huge dent) in my car loan.
Take Guitar Lessons
I have an old acoustic, but don’t know many songs or chords. Would love to be able to play it more often.
How about you?
MooTools Table Sorter added to MooTools Plugin Repo December 23, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentI’ve added my mootools table sorter to the newly created plugin repo created by mootools called, mootools forge. I’ll be enhancing the documentation over the holidays and adding much needed updates to the code. If you’re a mootools user or have been thinking about using mootools this is a huge step forward for the team over at mootools. The plugin site is much better than JQuery’s.
I’m also on twitter now.
The Four Core PHP Development Principles November 13, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentWe’ve all written bad code. Look at the code you wrote 2 years ago, 6 months ago, or heck even yesterday. When I do this I find that I failed to follow my 4 core development principles. That’s okay we are not perfect, but we should always be striving to accomplish something more than just getting the job done when we program. Just getting the job done in a quick manner will almost always produce poor quality code that at best doesn’t scale and at worst isn’t secure.
1. Scalable
Big apps get more lovin’. If your code isn’t scalable, it probably sucks.
What do I mean by scalability? One way to look at scalability is how easy is it to add in new features to your application. The best way to create scalable code is through planning, understanding what you want the application to be when its complete, where you want the application to be in 3 years, and what other markets/tasks you might want the application to handle down the road.
google wave, next generation collaboration platform, google exchange killer July 24, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentReading Slashdot I came across this article on Googles latest yet-to-be-released product called, Google Wave.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/22/220226/Google-Wave-Reviewed
I was interested enough to sit through the 1 hour video demo on the product and it was worth every minute. I am thoroughly ecstatic about this product and the Google Wave API makes the possibilities endless. Think about all those iphone style apps or all those great FireFox Addons rolled into an enterprise (or something great for you and some friends) collaboration suite.
In thinking about Wave, Google thought about what they would include in email if they could completely rewrite it today. What they ended up doing is making email interactive like an instant messenger client, to the point where you can see what recipients (yes thats plural you can add multiple people to an email) is typing character by character as it happens real time. Now say you add a new person to a “thread” that has hundreds of responses, enter the playback feature. You can playback the life cycle of the thread, message-by-message and edit-by-edit from beginning to the most recent response. This thing is jam packed with other neat features like a slick drag and drop photo gallery (gears only right now but they are pushing to get it adopted into HTML 5), spell checker, setting pieces of a thread private etc.
The whole thing is open source so you’re not locked into Google as your Wave vendor. You can install it at home or work and modify the code to tailor the Wave to your organizations needs. If modifying the application is a bit much you can tie into the Wave API and create your own extensions. If you have an hour and twenty minutes to kill I would watch the demo, it really is awesome!
firefox 3.5 fails – bug with ajax callback onreadystatechange July 17, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , add a commentI first noticed this bug a few days after upgrading to FireFox 3.5. When you fire an XHR request, the callback function is not being executed when the request completes itself. Instead you see an onreadystatechange error in Firebug.
There have been several bugs reports on this:
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2009/07/09/firefox-35firebug-xmlhttprequest-and-readystatechange-bug/
http://www.ghastlyfop.com/blog/2007/01/onreadystate-changes-in-firefox.html
My advice is don’t upgrade too FireFox 3.5 until they have released a patch for this bug. Its incredibly annoying to keep retrying your XHR request until it finally succeeds knowing your code is just fine. I have downgraded both my systems to FireFox 3.0.11. My bigger concern is how this ever got passed of by QA?
zend studio 6 fails – going back to zend 5.5 June 6, 2009
Posted by chris in : rant , 3commentsZend, the PHP Company, took a major step back with their PHP IDE when they moved it too the eclipse platform. I’m not a fan of eclipse, I don’t even like using it for Java development – which its built for. Zend Studio 6 is slow, clunky, the user interface is confusing, the FTP component is horrible.
If you can name it, Zend 5.5 beats Zend 6 at it, except for javascript support. However, I only need a JavaScript IDE for when I am doing heavy JavaScript coding or debugging. The worst part about Zend Studio 6 is the FTP component. Every time you save a file – it refreshes the folders and closes them all. So you can to open the folder again and wait everytime you make a save! Finally I decided to update the program hoping they had fixed this bug. When I updated to the latest version I was no longer able to connect to most of the FTP servers I had (roughly 10), one of which was to this domain.
At the point I uninstalled and went back to Zend 5.5 and wrote this article. Flat out, Zend Studio 6 sucks.