Latest Blog Posts
University of Denver
Tue September 15, 2009
Yesterday was my first day of classes at the University of Denver. I’m entering into the Information and Communications Technology program. I’m excited to start learning, and it’s interesting (and validating my decision) that I’m already learning things that I never even knew I needed to know.
Next quarter will be more about specific [...]
Web Experiments #1: Ajax Convo
Fri September 4, 2009
1) I’m learning object-oriented design, design patterns, object-oriented PHP, and object-oriented JavaScript right now. I wanted to do some experimenting with building systems using these concepts, so I came up with the idea of doing a series of “Web Experiments” where I take an idea for some kind of web application and make a [...]
Book Review: PHP Solutions
Mon August 31, 2009
In my quest to expand my knowledge of the web industry, I knew I needed to understand more PHP. PHP is one of the (if not the) most popular languages used on the web today. I had been exposed to it a little, and I have experience with other C-ish syntax languages, but I needed [...]
WordPress: Sort Posts by Multiple Fields
Tue July 21, 2009
I was recently creating a star-rating system for a client, and we were sorting the reviews (or “posts”) by the number of stars. The problem that came up was that with a 5 star system, and increments of half-stars, you will necessarily end up with many of the ratings being equal. We wanted [...]
WordPress: Tabbed Sidebar Widgets with jQuery
Wed July 1, 2009
Tabs are a great way to show more information in less space, assuming the initially-hidden tabs are non-essential information. Recently a client asked me to put a few Wordpress widgets into a single tabbed container in the sidebar. Here’s how I did it.
Book Review: Javascript: The Missing Manual
Fri June 12, 2009
In my ongoing efforts to realize my dreams of becoming a true web ninja, I recently read Javascript: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer MacFarland. I had read his previous book in the Missing Manuals series on CSS, and had both enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.
I did find this book interesting and [...]
Site Upgrades: Wordpress 2.8!
WordPress 2.8 was released on Wednesday, and I’ve upgraded my site.
Javascript vs. jQuery vs. the DOM
Wed June 3, 2009
When I first started learning about Javascript, it took me a little while before I could wrap my head around the distinctions and relationships between Javascript, jQuery and the DOM. So I thought I would lay out what I’ve learned so that it might help someone where I was.
UPS saves the day
Fri May 22, 2009
No, not that UPS.
A while back I bought a way-more-wattage-than-I-need uninterruptible power supply. It’s a big box (almost the size of my desktop computer) with fancy lights and readouts that regulates the electricity coming out of it and into my computer, like a surge protector on steroids. More importantly, it stores the electricity [...]
Wordpress: Using a custom home page
Tue May 19, 2009
WordPress hs a simple checkbox in the Admin->Settings panel that lets you set a certain file to be the “static” home page instead of the default listing of the latest posts.
I’m going to show you how (and why) I did NOT use that feature to create my customized home page.
