Articles by Ross

Many people tend to take the starting of a Web site very lightly, assuming that the path to success merely consists of a little effort and (sometimes) having to make it look nice. This misconception is extremely widespread, and even I was guilty of it before I started my own personal blog. Read after the jump to see some steps you have to take before your site even has a marginal chance at gaining popularity.

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After a short while, developers will find that they prefer some tools more than others. Similarly, I have a group of tools and frameworks which I have found to be suited to my personal development environment which I use on a daily basis. Read on to see what they are and be sure to outline any tools that you have found to be helpful in your Web development projects in the comments.

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I have noticed, over the last couple of projects I have worked on, as well as in general within the Web Development industry, some frequently-asked-for features on Websites. The most frequent of these feature requests, is Facebook integration. In this article, I thought I would list a couple of these perceived necessities, and similarly, mention better alternatives where applicable.

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Recently I’ve been using CakePHP quite a bit, but prior to the large projects I had to undertake, because of how the projects I’d worked on previously had been somewhat small in scale, I didn’t have much experience using it in more irregular scenarios. Lately, however, I’ve been pushed a lot more and have been thrown in to the deep end if you will, of CakePHP. Dealing with topics like caching, security, and integration with APIs and vendors, I learnt a lot in a short amount of time. Therefore, I’m going to list a few of the things that I found helpful, so that maybe I can save someone some time in searching for the answers that took me long enough on my own.

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With the popularity of PHP frameworks increasing steadily each day, I thought that I could give my own two cents regarding which ones I prefer to use, and which scenarios I find each one to be ideal for.

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Apple is no longer the only software giant on the mobile scene. Both Google, with a large number of phones already taking advantage of its Android operating system, and Microsoft, who are planning to introduce their new Windows Phone 7 operating system later this year, mean business, and the public is starting to take notice. With the iPad’s recent release, and the (intentionally?) leaked photos of the iPhone 4G, will Apple have enough firepower to hold the throne?

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I started noticing over the last few projects that alot of the code I was writing was extremely similar, and thus, I wasted the time it took to write it, as I simply could have taken it from a previous project and altered it where necessary. Therefore I’ve started taking notice of what I can reuse, and made some changes to CodeIgniter so that I can share functionality among different classes as often as possible to start projects in less time.

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