From the monthly archives:

May 2009

Poor programmer’s website monitor

If you manage your own web site, it’s critical to know when there are problems, and hopefully you’ll know before your users do. There are several enterprise-grade server monitors and website monitors available ranging from free to expensive, but if you need something right now that’s simple and free, you might consider the solution I [...]

Read the full article → May 26, 2009

Building a Twitter mashup

This week at Squidoo we released a new Twitter tool that provides a way to aggregate, archive and evangelize the best tweets by topic. We call it TwttrList. Having been a part of its development I wanted to write a brief post about the experience.
TwttrList is deeply integrated with the Twitter API, taking advantage of [...]

Read the full article → May 22, 2009

Memcache, memcache, memcache!

Possibly the single-most important piece of advice I give to every software developer right now is to use memcache (or memcached to be specific). I’ve become an evangelist of the software since working for Squidoo.
Memcache is just exactly what it says it is — a memory cache daemon (service). It’s lightweight and very fast and [...]

Read the full article → May 20, 2009

Improve Google Analytics load delays using jQuery

I’ve spoken about the complex interdependencies of modern web applications before so today’s massive failure of Google services (#GoogleFail) reminds us again to be careful and deliberate when building our applications.
For my own sites, I’ve noticed occasional slowdowns while loading Google Analytics. While the analytics are important to me, they’re not important to you (my [...]

Read the full article → May 14, 2009

jQuery date chooser

Providing a simple, consistent method for allowing your end-users to enter a date in a form is another great reason to use jQuery and jQuery UI. There have been many date selection tools created — you may have invented one yourself — but few are as great as the jQuery UI datepicker.
As with all things [...]

Read the full article → May 12, 2009

Amazon web services change for associates

Although I haven’t written about it yet, for me the most important set of web services and APIs for my work are provided by Amazon. Without a doubt I use these services more than any others. Today I received this message:

Effective immediately, we are renaming the Amazon Associates Web Service as the “Product Advertising API.” [...]

Read the full article → May 8, 2009

Using Google docs as a data store

Have you ever wished you had a web-accessible data store for a project but you either can’t or prefer not to create a database? Recently while developing a Google gadget, I ran into just that scenario. The gadget needs to display some mostly read only data. By mostly, I mean that the data needs to [...]

Read the full article → May 6, 2009

Building an Ajax content proxy in PHP

Last week I wanted to write an article about using Google docs as a data store for use in Javascript, but in order to do so, I first need to provide a basic article about content proxies.
For security reasons, Ajax requests are only allowed to domains from which the code originates. For example, if your [...]

Read the full article → May 5, 2009

Thesis theme update

Version 1.5 of the Thesis theme has been officially released. Check out the video demo to see what you get with the Thesis theme.
The video demo focuses primarily on the advantages of Thesis from the design perspective, but I have to say that my favorite features of Thesis are all behind the scenes. Without Thesis, [...]

Read the full article → May 1, 2009