Fiftyfoureleven

The 'how this was done' and 'what is that' of this weblog.

In Search of New Clothes

The motivation for the new look was, as always seems to be the case when redesigning here on Fiftyfoureleven, to shoehorn the site into the latest version of our CMS. Another ongoing theme is that the other design was never really finished (see The last 10%), and that the layout had become quite busy... Read more »

@ The Future of Web Apps

Happily for me, I'll be there. If you happen to be going, please come up and say hello. If you are curious, I look a lot like the guy on the About page.... Read more »

Cleaning House

The API series, published every Wednesday, will not be published for the next two weeks (November 30th, December 7th). After publishing the tag articles, I need to finish integrating tags into the CMS, and with over 350 links waiting to be published in the resources, there is a bit of work that I... Read more »

A Node of Inspiration

I know that I'm not the first to write about this, but one of the things that I do on a regular basis is keep small snippets of design around that I enjoy. Magazine clippings tend to end up in a box in my office, while screen captures litter a folder on my desktop. As a non-designer (Garrett has more... Read more »

Retool, Redefine, Redesign... Reboot!

CSS Reboot Before I get into details, I though I'd mention that this re-launch was part of the November 1st CSS Reboot, which allows you to give this new redesign a thumbs up or down, via a slick little Ajax voting script. Nice. There are roughly 1000 Rebooters and some great work over there, so... Read more »

Feeds and The Resources Area

Links and Resources 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... Read more »

Fiftyfoureleven Version 3.0

Objective Having spent a year working with my own home-grown blog script, I began to realize that things needed upgrading around here. To put it simply, I needed to make a better website from the ground up, built on a new framework that is the core of the CMS I use. The Look It's worth noting at this... Read more »

Comment Highlighting

Sometime last week some very subtle changes were uploaded here, mostly affecting the comments area of the site. Besides a little restyling, now when you visit and you have a cookie from this site, your comments get a little orange glow in the top left hand corner of the comment box (yes I know the hover... Read more »

Control on the Home Page

Well, it's been a long time coming! We've been after this sort of 'control center' on our homepage ever since we saw the unused Kinja mock-ups and then their use over on Textbased. The missing link The missing factor all along has been that we hadn't implemented the categories for... Read more »

Goin' UTF-8

We'd been wanting too for awhile, and were finally inclined to make the swith to utf-8 by Anne Van Kesteren's Quick guide to UTF-8. There were a few glitches, and some time was lost due to an entity encoding bug in Opera (which, upon examining the comments at that link, I knew about - how soon... Read more »

Link Elements

The link element A short while back I took the plunge and added a few instances of the Link element to the Head of the pages here on the weblog. I must admit that I have been a bit lax with respect to learning about this element and when and where to use it etc. I added some link elements based on... Read more »

Context Boxes and Cross Browser Bliss

Context Boxes Having hinted at it in a previous post, something that we first saw on Asterisk, then at Mezzoblue and Sidesh0w, context boxes have been added to the archived posts of this site. The right hand column here has been seriously lacking in direction, though mostly as we I test out different... Read more »

Goin' Beta

For beta or for worse? over at 37signals and the Wired article Mo' Beta Testing Blues are two articles that discuss the proliferance of 'beta' products on the web today. In the Wired article, they quote both Jason Fried (of 37signals fame) and Blake Scarborough, the latter having the following to offer:... Read more »

Colophon 1 - The Credits

Rather than write up a colophon for this weblog, we thought that having a colophon category would be the way to do it. That way, the colophon page would serve as a simple colophon category filter, and updates to the colophon would be more visible, as they would occur as posts to the blog. So here goes... Read more »

Function and Design Upgrades

Just a short note to confirm what site visitors may have noticed over the last few days, and in particular this morning: things are evolving. Changes We're slowly starting to tighten up the blog script, and I am trying to tighten up the design. In brief, we've changed the navigation, made the... Read more »

Redesign in Progress

Well, if you can see this that means you're seeing the next version of fiftyfoureleven.com, a new site on a new server. It's been a while between posts, but a new 1500 page website and three new projects started, and we barely had time for sleep (the story of the internet, no?). We'll be... Read more »

Home » Blog

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..