Category Archives: Web Development
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
New Book: ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook
A few days ago I was contacted by Packt Publishing. As an active member of the ExtJS community, I have been asked to review a new book called ExtJs 3.0 Cookbook. My copy of the book is in the mail and should be arriving shortly and I’ll be posting my review within a few weeks Continue reading
Book Review: Essential ActionScript 3.0
A few weeks ago, I ordered Essential ActionScript 3.0 (by Colin Moock) from Amazon.com. I’m trying to pick up some new skills (i.e. Flash), and the book had mostly positive reviews.
Overall, I rated the book a 2 out of 5 stars – and it would have been a 3 if the book wasn’t advertised toward new programmers. It’s a great book for reference, and Moock really did a fine job writing clear definitions for each concept. He just fell short of teaching us how to use them. Continue reading
A Farewell to GeoCities
In 1998, GeoCities was simply the coolest thing. Ever. Now it’s gone forever. The moral of this story is that I probably wouldn’t be where I am today without GeoCities. Continue reading
