Published in Fiftyfoureleven on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005
A little update... Along with the redesign of Fiftyfoureleven came some new features and some new URIs. A full set of feeds, including comments, and a new Links and Resources weblog have been added to the menu.
After having been up for a little over a year, I began to find the need to post little bits of news and ideas, things that were not necessarily worthy of full posts but stuff that I wanted to talk about nonetheless.
I did a bit of looking around and realized that many people were using a short type of link-blog whereby they would post a few lines of text along with a link (Matt does this quite nicely).
So I basically took that idea, and tied it in with a resources section where I'll be posting links to resources around the web. It is split into categories and has it's own feed that is updated a few times a day (thanks Philippe for the bug fix).
For the next little while I will be adding many old links that I have had here in my bookmarks, in addition to newer links, so subscribers to the feed may see some old links (some forgotten and worth revisiting!) in the mix of new ones.
Each link will be accompanied by at least a couple of sentences, if not a couple of paragraphs, and all of this content goes out with the feed. A short summary and the three latest links will be made available on the homepage.
The old version of Fiftyfoureleven had two weblog feeds, summary and complete. In addition to those two, this new version also contains a comments feed and the aforementioned links and resources feed.
Feedreading folks may not have noticed, but the URI for the main weblog has been moved to http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/weblog. A 301 redirect takes care of the old inbound links to /sandbox/weblog/.
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:
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 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.
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..
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