February 21 Development Techniques galin
Caibarién I love the Mac OSX. Hot corners for organizing work flow makes me think the developers of it must of done research on the normal human brain. When I am working on something on my Mac and want to go check out something I was working on a couple hours ago, I just throw my mouse into the top-right corner. I was amazed the first time I started using this (was a Windows person up until recently).
Itaboraí That being said, I still think Windows and Microsoft wins when it comes to text-editors. This is because of Notepad++. Notepad++ accomplishes what a couple programs accomplish for me on a Mac. Its that great with its list of features.
One example is the FTP window. You can FTP to any server directly from Notepad++. Once you set up an FTP location, just choose a file, edit it and then save. When it saves it automatically uploads directly back to the server and overwrites the old file. This is a remarkable find for a web developer (who actually codes).
Because of Notepad++, I usually work with two computers at all times. One my laptop with Notepad++ open and one my Mac where I do most of my research and work, just not code editing for the most part.
I hope this blog post gets some notice and convinces someone who loves Mac to develop the equivalent to Notepad++. Or for someone to show me the equivalent.
February 14 Development Techniques galin
My route towards web development is very unusual. I received two Bachelors of Science in Math and Economics at the University of Michigan. I took one computer programming class for my Actuarial Math degree in C++. That and a basic intro to javascript class through my old company are the only formal trainings I have had. Today, I feel comfortable researching and building whatever a customer may want. Why is that?
The internet is why. When I first started at my old job, they needed extra hands to do some HTML/CSS work. I didn’t have enough work to do, so I said to myself “Why not”. A co-worker there showed me a website, w3schools.com. If you want to learn computer languages, go there. Read through a tutorial. Read through it again. Then read through it again. The tutorial I would start with is the CSS and HTML stuff.
I still use this website as a reference point for how to code things I want to code. It has most of the syntax stuff you would ever want in the languages of PHP, Javascript, and HTML/CSS.
I do think my analytical degree background and my extremely analytical brain are other reasons why I am so efficient and comfortable with web development. If you think you have a similar mindset and want to get involved in an excellent industry, read that site and feel free to email me questions at galin@gpmwebsolutions.com.
February 7 Development Techniques galin
People sometimes look at the prices we offer and wonder how we can offer things for such a low price? The answer is WordPress.
When I was initially getting into web design, I learned about WordPress from a co-worker. The best thing about WordPress is its popularity. So many features have been developed for it. Most of the time when you have a development demand for something, you can find the need pre-developed on the Internet to either fit your need or at least get you started. Just looking at their available plugins site should give you a good idea.
You may be saying, well if everything is that simple, why are you telling that to us?
First, nothing is as simple as it sounds. Sure, developers are making new things every day for WordPress, but knowing what to do with what they made, including both using it and tweaking the code, is where we possess great strength. On top of that, we aren’t trying to get rich off the stuff we do for you. That is why we start so low with our prices: we like to think of it as us just charging you for the time involved.
Our goal is to get rich, just not through a typical customer. Our personal projects, may it be only with ourselves or a joint venture where we partner up with someone, are where we want to make our money.
February 7 Development Techniques galin
Back in May 2010, my now business partner in personal ventures, Jon Krane, showed me his idea for what to put up on BoredRoulette.com. I saw it and liked what I saw as far as a starter for an idea, but was laughing at the design of the site. Jon had taken the name BoredRoulette literally, thinking what do I do when I am bored on the internet. I’m assuming one of his first thoughts was “YouTube”. What he decided to do was post his favorite YouTube videos through a blog.
This was actually pretty cool in my opinion. I hate looking for stuff to watch on YouTube but love being entertained by the videos. Jon had solved that by choosing which videos for me to watch. I liked the idea of having a high-quality list of videos to watch from YouTube.
Once I started looking at the design more closely, I noticed an issue. FLASH!
Never put too many flash animated things on one webpage. I love some of the things flash does and accomplishes, but it is a resource hog. By resource hog I mean this: Too much flash can be too much for your browser or computer and slow things down.
This slowing down your computer is the main reason people have issues with flash. I’m so tired of seeing Steve Jobs v. Adobe (Where is the name of the guy who owns Adobe?). It has nothing to do with Apple. The issues all lie in Flash’s memory inefficiencies. Because of this, we strive to use as little flash as possible in our designs, looking for solutions through Javascript and HTML simplicity as oppposed to something flashy that may look neat but is really the main reason your page may load slowly.
The main thought behind this is, “why would I want to slow down my site?”. This is the exact thought that came to my head when I saw my friend Jon’s initial BoredRoulette design. WHY? His site consisted of about 50 flash YouTube videos on one page, which was just disastrous for load time.
If you go to BoredRoulette now, you will notice it no longer looks this way. Maybe you can kill some time with the site!
February 6 Development Techniques galin
One of the best things on the Internet, that everyone already knows about, is Google. Google makes it so you easily find information that is already available on the Internet. This is perfect for development. Here is an example.
A couple weeks ago, I was asked about how we could add a chat room to a website and if it would be difficult. I knew that the chat rooms you see on sites were mostly in Flash, which I knew minimal about, but after 5 minutes of research, I replied “Yes”. Why?
Chat rooms have been around forever. From my development experience, I know that for stuff on the Internet that has been around for a while, there is a 95% chance a developer put a free solution of it out there somewhere. The reason why would be a good lesson for an intro to microeconomics class.
Initially someone made the first ever chat room. This was initially expensive for the consumer since there was no competition. Then competition joins because there are plenty of developers out there who can figure out what that first person made. This drives the price down. On the web, the price keeps getting driven down until it is free (a lot of the time). This is because a developer realizes he can make the tool for free and then make money off of other areas like monetizing the traffic they would get from giving away a useful thing for free.
So that answers why I can most likely answer yes, but it does not answer why I that was my answer. The answer for that is Google. Smart Google searching can answer whether something has been already developed for free rather quickly.
But what should I search for? The first search you probably think to do is the wrong one. “Free Chat Rooms” popped into my head. This just gave me a list of a bunch of free chat rooms to sign up for and use (not what I wanted). The best thing about Google is if your initial search fails, just dust yourself off and try again.
Here are two easy tips for smart Google searching.
- It should be something detailed but concise. For this example, I knew what language I wanted to develop in which was PHP. This was a good starting point on a good search. So I tried “Free PHP Chat Code”. Sure enough the first thing that pops up is something called “PHP Free Chat”, exactly what I wanted.
- Just type the complete question. I do this a lot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I typed in for this search “How to add a chat room to my website”. Sure enough there are some results that should start leading me down the right direction from this search as well.
My method is usually to see if I can come up with a detailed enough search that gives me exactly what I am looking for and if that fails, then trying the type in the full question method. I do this because as you can see from the above example, doing the first method tends to give you exactly what you are looking for while the other tends to start leading you in the right direction.
Either way, Google is awesome for this. I still think they are creepily similar to “Big Brother” from 1984 with how much information they have on me as a person. That’s a different discussion though.
