posts on "Development"

Coding standards are critical

mikesmullin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:25:36 -0700

Odds are, if term coding standards is new to you, you are wasting time on a daily basis arguing over the syntax semantics of your programming language. (e.g. tabs or spaces? 4 spaces or 2? print or echo? etc.)

Programmers are required to make hundreds to thousands of micro-decisions like this every day, and especially when there is no standard, this costs time and time is money. If you were to benchmark the programmer's brain, you could begin to see exactly just how much time is wasted asking, answering, remembering, and changing each answer.

This form of unorganization has many more side effects than one, however.

Good code works; better code is also easy to read, maintain, and debug.

According to Sun Microsystems, 80% of the lifetime cost of a piece of software goes to maintenance, and hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by its original author.

There's nothing worse than inheriting a project that requires a lot of your time to decipher. It should not require the original author to translate. What if that author were to die or simply become uncooperative? Frequently, this is the sort of coercive survival technique novice programmers resort to when their job is threatened. Even more frequently, it becomes the primary cause of frustration for new programmers. The novice instinct is to throw everything out and start over from scratch--do not do it!

Good programmers rewrite; better programmers reuse.

The real problem is the lack of coding standards. Insist on them with every project.

What can coding standards do for me?

Standardized code is easy to document. (e.g. Doxygen, JavaDoc, PHPDoc, etc.)
Standardized code takes care of easy decisions for you, leaving you free to concentrate on the real work.
Standardized code reduces friction in collaborative group development.

So what do you recommend?

The set of standards can vary by language and by project. It doesn't matter what they are, as long as they are there. In PHP I recommend the PEAR Coding Standards. These are the same set of standards used by many large open source projects, such as Drupal. Examples include:

Indent with 4 spaces; no tabs.
Always use <?php ?> to delimit PHP code, not the <? ?> shorthand.
Class names should always begin with an Uppercase letter.
Constants should always be all UPPERCASE.
etc.

Of course, every programmer starts out with their own quirky way of writing code. In high school, my C++ teacher used to pride himself on being able to detect cheaters (i.e. plagiarism) in class... He knew when I was helping my friends because he could recognize my work. Even though the program looked the same on the outside, on the inside the code was unique and personal--like poetry. I find it interesting now, when working with teams of developers, that now two of us can write code to accomplish the same goal--and the resulting code is nearly identical.

Great minds think alike.

Thanks to coding standards!

Achilles’ Heel of Tabless CSS Design

mikesmullin — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 05:03:05 -0600

By now most people have noticed the Achilles' Heel of tabless CSS design is currently the inability to align footers to the bottom of the window. (eg. always at the very bottom until content actually overflows)

Currently you can only achieve this effect in all browsers with *gasp* tables—but it's different now in XHTML 1.0 Strict than it was in HTML 4.01 Traditional.

For some CSS purists, that fact is an acrid pill to swallow. I tend to agree with Eric Meyer though—don’t try to map table design mental models onto CSS—it’s a recipe for heartache; practicality over purism.

In my case--designing a WordPress template--I used the THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT tags to distinguish between the blog's template header, content, and footer. Like so:


<table cellspacing="0"><thead><tr><td>
  <h1><a><img /></a></h1>
</td></tr></thead>
<tbody><tr><td>
  <div id="content"></div>
  <div id="sidebar"></div>
</td></tr></tbody>
<tfoot><tr><td>
  <p>Powered by WordPress.</p>
</td></tr></tfoot>
</table>

Then I used CSS to get the table to fill the full height of the window. Like so:


html, body, table, thead, tbody, tfoot, tr, td, h1, img {
  margin:0;padding:0;border:0
}
html, body, table { width:100%;height:100% }
thead td, tfoot td { height:1px }
td { vertical-align:top }

Remember: This solution is Section 508 Accessible, Well-Formed, and Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup.

Not too bad once you understand it.

Blogger JS Pagination Hack v1.0

mikesmullin — Tue, 02 May 2006 02:41:30 -0600

Since Blogger doesn't want to provide the feature for some reason, here is a simple JavaScript that will achieve the pagination effect you've been looking for on your blogspot.com blog.

Demo:

To see the hack in action, visit Utah Monitor.com.

Features:

Lightweight (<1.5Kb)
You can choose the number of posts to display per page
Each page can still be bookmarked normally
Customizable design via CSS stylesheets
still works traditionally if browsers don't support JavaScript (or have it disabled)
works in current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and Safari.

License:

No license; feel free to implement with your Blogger template whenever you like. All I ask is that you leave a comment/trackback here so others can see your implementation.

Download:

Version 1.0: js_pagination-1.0.zip

Installation:

Unzip/upload the two files pagination.js and pagination.css to Blogger.
Modify your Blogger template. You only have to insert four lines into your Blogger template, but where at is the important part.
(see template-example.html: lines 29, 30, 70, and 101)
Change your Blogger Settings.
- Login to Blogger.com
- Settings tab > Formatting sub-tab
- Set it to Show: 999 days on the main page

NOTE: Although the examples provided are for Blogger, it could really paginate anything. Here is a sample demonstrating pagination with an unordered list.

UPDATE:June 16th, 2006 - Added a template-example.html to the .ZIP package.

Aaron Wall's SEO Book

mikesmullin — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:31:44 -0600

What better way to proove that you understand SEO to the world than to write a book about it and make sure it is the #1 rank on Google, Yahoo, and all major search engines? I love this guy's approach.

On his blog he promises "a new chapter every day" as he himself is a consultant and always learning new and better ways to optimize content for search engines on the web.

I read his blog, I have his book, and I would recommend both!

CSSVista

mikesmullin — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:39:41 -0600

CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. If you like this, you may be interested in their browser compatibility service, SiteVista. Yes, that's why this software is free!

I have personally fallen in love with this application. I can't imagine how I ever wrote CSS without it. Dreamweaver is no match, and neither is the Firefox inline CSS editor that comes with the Web Developer plugin. This has saved me literally hours of work and I highly recommend it if you are a cool web developer like me.

You can download it here.

Also for those who don't know...

SiteVista is the company behind it and their site is very fresh and I'd put them right up close to 37Signals. I recommend you browse around their site after you check out this product.

Yesterday I was thinking I should start a .com where people could go to test their sites with different browsers on different platforms (eg. IE5, IE5 Mac, Safari, etc.)

Well, of course, they have already done it and although its a bit slow it does look like something I will have to purchase soon. Either that, or a Mac.

I'm still crossing my fingers for the OS/X-on-PC hack.

Spiffy Corners

mikesmullin — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:20:35 -0600

Over 2000 people dugg Spiffy Corners.

What is it? A pure-CSS alternative to Nifty Corners by Greg Johnson.

I found it on WaSP, as Ian Lloyd was lamenting its redundancy and non-standards markup.

What's wrong with what we have? Nothing. Except like Greg, when I found Nifty Corners, I too was dismayed at yet another js include for something as trivial as rounded corner effects.

Spiffy Corners is a step closer toward optimizing the process, but...

I still think it is up to us to bring together the most important elements:

I should be able to define an id or a class for my DIV and automatically have the corners rounded.

It should work in ALL browsers, on ALL platforms.

It should comply with existing Web Standards.

With Spiffy Corners I may avoid another js include, but now I have another css include.

So, the real question is:

Can we use minimalist javascript to add these important features and still keep it as compact as this pure-css solution?

I think if we utilize a) compact code to begin with, plus b) obfuscation, c) condensation (removal of all comments/whitespace), and possibly even d) mod_gzip we can.

Pending testing in other browsers, I plan on adding this to my Prototype library.

Backbase AJAX Library

mikesmullin — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:37:56 -0700

Introducing Backbase, a 3-year-old company that develops and sells great AJAX applications. Like 37Signals, they too have released a Community Edition of their framework. Beyond great asynchronous capability, they've got some pretty sweet objects demonstrated by their drag-and-drop shop, directory explorer, RSS reader, office locator, and more.

For those of you who have seen the script.aculo.us drag-and-drop shopping cart example, this one is much more complete.

UPDATE: This is not an open-source solution as indicated by digg.com. Sucks for them!