All about building a website but the administrative/business stuff: that goes in “business and economics.”
Chris Shiflett has written a nice recap of OSCON in which he mentions one of my talks. Thanks! Chris, when I post my talk, I’ll have to use your quote:
“…one of the most entertaining talks of the conference!”
—Chris Shiflett, author of Essential PHP Security
In any case, someone needs to write a review of Chris’s OSCON talks. I nominate myself for this difficult task.
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“Any site that has got a longer entry on Truthiness than Lutherans has its priorities straight.”
—Steven Colbert, The Colbert Report, The Word: Wikiality
I received a question today:
I have some quick caching questions. What is the quickest way to get data into a PHP script? I have some data, I could store it in a database, but I want to avoid that dependency and slow down. I want PHP to compile the file into some data that it can access easily in the script’s name space. Periodically (every 1-2 mins) the system will check the modified time on the file, if it is different, it will reload the data.
The data is not large.
Speaking of caching, what is the best script system for caching these days APC?
Mike sent me this book review of Pro PHP Security.
His joke: “528 pages? Didn’t these guys read your blog?”
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In CSS, sub attributes within a master attribute have a “-” as a word separator. For instance, it is background-color and background-image which can be shorted into background.
Today I was trying to recall the white-space attribute for CSS. Why the hell is this white-space and not whitespace? It makes me think there is a shortcut attribute white.Continue reading
Chris just sent to the list The interact 10 ways website from Getty Images.. The one he mentioned was sumona’s “information” page which generates an infinite photomosaic.
Getty is using it to promote some new media ideas for their stock photography. (I shudder to think how much some of the infinite photomosaic would cost if you actually had to purchase the rights from Getty of those images.)
If you like photography and want to pass the time, take a look at some of these.
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PoisonedMinds has a breakdown of time spent on modern web design.
I get e-mails often of companies looking to hire me or find a hot-shot front-end Ajax-style PHP coder. It’s very difficult to help and I don’t know who to recommend.
My policy is to cast a wide net and then grill the people in interviews until they break in order to see where their real knowledge is. Others can’t be so luxurious because they’re not me. Anyone who can string a web page together with MySQL can (and often does) call themselves a “front-end PHP coder.” The variance in quality is very high, so high that I often recommend a good solid C programmer over a PHP one, because the former can learn PHP if need be.
The problem here is this doesn’t work well for a front-end UI developer because the web is a tricky business.
Ben mentions a different problem. What should the going rate of such a person be?Continue reading
J was working on analyzing some of our website data warehouse statistics today on Excel.
M (sarcastically): What are you doing using Excel? You should totally be using Google Spreadsheet for that!
Caitlin started a blog about content creation in sight, sound, and motion called mediamux.
It’s just a start, but if you ever do video content creation, or just like to discuss it, you should subscribe to it.
One of her early entries covers the RedOne digital cinecamera, which I wanted to blog about but was too lazy. She promised me she’d also do a quick write-up of Sony’s 60fps dSLR sensor and digital image processor.
She’s into cinema and video so she has a lot of insights that escape poor little old still-photography me. Her running catalog of various camera and non-linear editing tricks alone are worth reading.
Plus, she’s a whole lot hotter than me…
