Web Development Blog

The latest posts are listed below. Check out the categories for older stuff.

Name the tool that has given you the biggest productivity gain in the last 1.5 years

Okay, one of the reasons why posting has been light on this blog is because we have been busy. My wife and I have also had our first child (well, two years ago) and to be honest, our work has become less innovative in terms of doing cool new things and more iterative, as in we have been applying a lot... Read more »

How an Internet Marketer convinces their child to go to school/day care/park

Lately I've taken to subscribing to many newsletters and the "free" programs being offered by internet marketers - think Frank Kern, Yanik Silver et al. - and people like Aaron Wall and Shoemoney and that Brian fellow over at Copyblogger. If you, like me, receive some of these emails, you may have... Read more »

Increase your pageviews! Or, creating an on-the-fly custom navigation system for new users

Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no? Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that? I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing... Read more »

Pulling in 3rd party data to your website? Be sure to shield yourself from 3rd party problems.

This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portability The blessing of popular and easy to... Read more »

When Bad News Follows You: SEO Redux?

I came across the article from Nicholas Carr's post Should the Net forget? This is an interesting consequence that seems to be getting pushed on SEO, rather then perhaps looking at it from the aspect of accountable reporting, no? Nicholas states that: With search engine optimization - or... Read more »

Check out the blog categories for older content

The latest from my personal website,
Mike Papageorge.com

SiteUptime Web Site Monitoring Service

Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:

The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.

The Art & Science Of JavaScript

The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.

The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..