16 articles and links tagged with “webdev”

1. JSLint needs some Bad Parts
   May 16, 2010

   One of the few tools that I consider truly indispensable when developing websites is JSLint. Too bad it’s almost impossible to contribute back to the project, and that the project’s run by someone who “will hurt your feelings.”

2. A JavaScript Detection Pattern
   March 06, 2010

   Progressive enhancement of our sites and applications has become a relatively well accepted best practice for web development. This article outlines a technique I've used successfully to ensure that core functionality is available without JavaScript, while maintaining a quality experience for the majority of users with JavaScript enabled.

3. CSS Rules of Thumb
   February 22, 2010

   Apropos of nothing, a few CSS tips that have nothing to do with browser incompatibilities, and everything to do with your own sanity when dealing with code you've written.

4. My Jekyll Fork
   November 12, 2009

   Jekyll is a well-architected throwback to a time before Wordpress, when men were men, and HTML was static. I like the ideas it espouses, and have made a few improvements to it’s core. Here, I’ll point out some highlights of my fork in the hopes that they see usage beyond this site.

5. Fallow fields, revisited
   October 04, 2009

   I'm currently in the process of gutting my website, and rebuilding it piece by piece. I suspect I'm doing this to distract myself from the fact that I don’t seem to have anything interesting floating around my head to write about. Rather that catalog the failings of the system I'm replacing (for they are legion), in this article I'd like to touch on the carefully considered bits I'm keeping around.

6. Mnot's Redbot
   May 23, 2009

   Mark Nottingham has put together a really useful tool that aids in the analysis of the behavior of HTTP resources. I've started putting together a command line version based on the web version he’s released on GitHub.

7. Running `python-spidermonkey` on JeOS
   May 16, 2009

   Paul Davis' python-spidermonkey project looks brilliant.

8. The Value of Measurement
   May 10, 2009

   While I agree fully with many of the conclusions Lukas Mathis draws in an excellent essay on the recent Google/Douglas Bowman split, a few bits deserve further study. In general, engineers understand and can relate well to automated A/B testing, and designers understand and can relate well to more personal usability testing. The two are, however, not the same, don’t provide the same data, and ought not be conflated.

9. Compiling Varnish on a minimal JeOS System
   May 09, 2009

   Varnish is an excellent-looking ‘HTTP accelerator’, designed specifically as a high-performance caching reverse-proxy to sit in front of your hard-working application servers, and relieve them of load. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass to install from source on JeOS, though.

10. Asynchronous Execution, JavaScript, and You
    May 05, 2009

    I spent more time than I care to admit this afternoon tracking down a bug in some relatively straightforward jQuery code. As it turned out, I was overlooking my error because I was thinking about my code in absolutely the wrong way.

11. Installing the W3C HTML Validator on JeOS
    May 03, 2009

    So. W3C has quite decent installation instructions for the HTML validator, but it makes a few assumptions about a typical linux environment that don’t actually hold true if you’re running a stripped down JeOS distro in a virtual machine.

12. The Inspiration of Ownership
    November 10, 2008

    On the bus home from work, I was listening to this week’s On the Media. In particular, I was struck by a great interview with the man who designed the field-organizer and volunteer training programs for Barack Obama’s campaign: Marshall Ganz. If you’re at all interested in the political angle, I'd suggest you listen. If you’re at all interested in how I'm planning to apply this seemingly unrelated topic to the technical field of web development (et al), keep reading.

13. Flickr's API is driving me nuts
    November 09, 2008

    I'm trying to do something with the Flickr API that I consider to be relatively trivial. I have the impression that the API is fighting me every step of the way. Why, oh why, can’t the wonderful people who designed Del.icio.us’s new API hop over to Flickr and slap together something that makes sense from the perspective of the end user?

14. Generating Etags for static content using Nginx
    November 08, 2008

    Nginx is a brilliant little HTTP server that I'm using on this website to quickly serve static content. It bothers me a (very) little that it doesn’t correctly generate Etag headers for static content, however. I'm attempting to remedy that oversight by releasing an Nginx module: nginx-static-etags.

15. Smoothly Migrating to a New Server
    November 02, 2008

    Hopefully, you didn’t notice a thing yesterday when I moved the site off my shared accelerator at Joyent, and onto a custom built slice at Slicehost. That was very much the goal. Briefly, I’ll go through the steps I took to make the transition as smooth as possible both before the launch and directly afterwards.

16. Fallow fields and new beginnings
    November 01, 2008

    It’s been quite some time since I put any serious effort into mikewest.org. I've had tons of work, I've been burnt out, I've been complacent… the excuses pile on top of each other, each valid, each sufficient, none satisfactory. For the sake of my own sanity, I need to start working on personal projects again. Last week’s GitHub dump was the first step in that direction. Consider this relaunch to be the second.