Category Archives: Web Development
2010: New Year’s Resolutions
Wow, another year has come and gone. I feel like the past few months have just flown by… which is either really good or really bad depending on how you look at things.
As 2009 comes to a close, it’s a good time to look back and see how well we stuck to our New Year’s resolutions. Although I’m sure that I am not alone, I will be the first to stand up and say that (yet again) I’ve failed to complete all of my goals for this year.
So how did I do in 2009? According to my New Year’s resolutions for 2009, I guess I did alright. The question now becomes: “What are my resolutions for 2010?” Continue reading
2009: My Most Popular Posts
2009 has been a landmark year for my blog. According to Google Analytics, I’ve increased my daily pageviews by more than 1000% since January… growth which I hope I can maintain over the next 12 months.
How did I manage to increase my popularity that much in just a year? Continue reading
ExtJS Unit Testing now on Google Code
Although I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, I finally released the ExtJS Unit Testing platform as an open source project on Google Code!
I’ve been talking about the need for a solid JavaScript unit testing platform for a while, specifically in relation to ExtJS. I gave a presentation on the subject a few months ago and have received some great feedback from the ExtJS community. I encourage you to take a look – I find it extremely helpful in my own day-to-day development. Continue reading
El Puerto Restaurant – Website Redesign
As many of you already know, I build websites for small businesses in my area. I recently finished creating and implementing a website redesign for El Puerto Mexican Restaurant in Fox Lake, IL. Here are the before and after shots. Continue reading
5 Tech Things I Want for Christmas
Christmas 2009 is officially two weeks away. (That reminds me… I should go shopping…)
Given the state of the economy this year (and my own personal financial mess) I have not been able to buy many of the tech toys on my wish list. As I’ve been a good developer this year, I’m hoping that Santa is reading this and will deliver one/all of the following items on Christmas day.
Of course, if Santa wants to simply give me money or pay the balance of my student loans… that would be great too. Continue reading
WTF? Unicode Byte Order Mark
You would think that if you bought a hosting plan on a Windows server that you could use ASP.NET to develop the website. That’s not an unreasonable assumption. But it’s very wrong to assume that.
If that weren’t interesting enough, I found that (in this particular case) PHP support was enabled by default. Yes, Windows servers can run PHP… but why is that the default option? Shouldn’t it be the other way around???
Long story short, I had to develop a recent project for a client in PHP. That’s not a problem; I’ve been writing PHP code for years (but I do prefer .NET). I wrote my code, uploaded it to the server…
…only to find that every file had a mysterious junk character added to the source code.
WTF? Continue reading
A Customized ExtJS Toolbar
I’ve been working on an application for some time that necessitates changes to my grid’s toolbar depending upon several factors. The challenge that I’ve run into is that the default Ext.Toolbar() object is not very helpful when you try to show/hide options which are not specifically grouped.
Now as far as I know, there isn’t a plugin or user extension available which meets the requirements my application needs. Therefore I created my own! Continue reading
Book Review: ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook
ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook is definitely geared towards JavaScript developers who have some basic understanding of and experience with ExtJS 3.0. If you’re brand-new to ExtJS, you may want to wait a few weeks until you’ve spent some time playing with the various components and layouts that ExtJS offers.
As an experienced ExtJS developer, I can say with absolute certainty that I learned some new tricks while reading this book. Continue reading
Top-level Domains: Do they even matter?
So I’m driving through Arlington Heights the other day (on a long day of shopping for baby cribs…) and I notice a billboard for some local business. I’ll be honest – I didn’t bother to write down or make a … Continue reading
ACTA Foundation Website is Live!
For the better part of the last year, I’ve been working closely with the Pastor of my Church on several web-related projects. I initially volunteered to help maintain and update the parish’s website and, after some discussion, I learned that … Continue reading
