Null is Love

PHP 5.3 Released

Kevin Skoglund — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:38:59 +0000

PHP 5.3 has been released. Hooray for late static bindings! There is also a helpful migration guide that outlines the new features since 5.2.

Starting Good CSS Habits: Part 3

Kevin Skoglund — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:33:53 +0000

Now that we have work on improving our HTML in the previous articles, we are ready to start applying some CSS to the page. We will begin by discussing text and fonts.

Starting Good CSS Habits: Part 2

Kevin Skoglund — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:58:29 +0000

Christoph Wiese, a friend who already has good CSS habits, made some good points I forgot to put in the last post. Before we keep going, it is worth going over them.

HTML vs. XHTML and Self-Closing Tags
Lowercase Tags, Attributes and Entities
Attribute Values
Citations

Starting Good CSS Habits: Part 1

Kevin Skoglund — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:47:59 +0000

I am often surprised by how much bad HTML is out there. Especially HTML that does not use Cascading Style Sheets yet. CSS has been around for over 10 years now! It was added to HTML in 1997 and well-supported (at least reasonably) in web browsers by 2000. I think the reason many people never upgraded is that they either learned HTML before 2000, they learned it from sources (friends, coworkers, internet, legacy code) from before CSS, or they learned just enough to get a site online and never bothered learning the "right way".

Legacy sites are not always worth the trouble to update—I know I have plenty of old code still floating around out there—so their flaws are understandable. But some folks are carrying around their bad HTML habits still. If you ask them to code a page they probably know that frames should not be used, so they use a table to layout the page instead. They might use <center> when they want text to center. I see bad code and misused tags all the time. You can "view-source" on many major websites and see bad code by people who should know better.

If that sounds like you or someone you know, keep reading, I will try to help you break your bad habits and start good ones.

PHP with MySQL Beyond the Basics

Kevin Skoglund — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:43:23 +0000

I am proud to announce that PHP with MySQL Beyond the Basics has been released on the lynda.com Online Training Library. It is the sequel to my previous video title, PHP with MySQL Essential Training. It's almost 11 hours of video training; with the previous title, that makes a total of 21 hours of PHP training!

While the first training was an introduction to PHP and MySQL, in this title I focus on "intermediate PHP" and PHP's object-oriented features. Objects make it easier to organize and maintain your code, make code modular and reusable, and (most importantly) add clarity by reducing complex interactions to simple behaviors. Once you understand the fundamentals of PHP, you'll want to learn to harness the power Object-Oriented Programming provides.

PHP with MySQL Beyond the Basics is available online as streaming video to subscribers of the lynda.com Online Training Library ($25/month, $250/year, $375/year with exercise files included). It is will also be available as a CD-ROM soon both through lynda.com and Amazon.com.

Rails Hosting Survey 2009

Kevin Skoglund — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:30:32 +0000

The results of the Rails Hosting Survey for 2009 are out. Thanks to Planet Argon for putting it together! With about 1250 respondents, it has some pretty interesting results. Here are the things that stood out to me: 63% use Git vs. 36% use Subversion. I knew Git was growing fast, but I didn’t expect 2:1 over [...]

Worthwhile Links

Kevin Skoglund — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:58:23 +0000

I promised myself that I would pick up blogging again. I miss it and I think (hope) that my workload will allow me the time again. To kick things off, here are two articles that are definitely worth reading. The first is for advanced users who need to think about database design issues. [...]

Ruby on Rails version 2.2

Kevin Skoglund — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:44:16 +0000

I have been very delinquent in posting to this blog. Fatherhood plus several big projects have forced me to put it on the back burner. I’m hoping to resume regular blogging in January. But until then, I do want let everyone know that Rails 2.2.2 is out. Here’s the announcement. There are [...]

My Tools of the Trade

Kevin Skoglund — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:31:38 +0000

Whenever I learn a new set of skills—such as photography or cooking—I want to learn as much as I can about the tools that the pros use. Sure, to learn photography you need to understand exposure and depth of field, but that’s only part of what it takes to be a real photographer, to be a [...]

Attachment_fu Tip

Kevin Skoglund — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:18:17 +0000

I installed the latest version of attachment_fu for a project I’m working on. I ran into a problem that I wanted to document here in case anyone else runs into the same thing. The before_thumbnail_saved callback in attachment_fu is useful for tasks like giving thumbnail versions the same attributes that parent images have. So [...]