CategoryCoding

March 7, 2012 — When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat. Read more…

March 1, 2012 — A lot of community extensions (or modules) are available for the feature-rich open-source e-commerce solution Magento but what if they don’t quite work as you want them to? What if you could understand the structure of a Magento module a little better, to the point that you could modify it to suit your needs or, better yet, write your own module from scratch? Read more…

February 22, 2012 — Paper.js, Processing.js and Raphaël are the leading libraries for drawing on the Web right now. A couple of others are up and coming, and you can always use Flash, but these three work well with HTML5 and have the widest support among browser vendors. Read more…

February 13, 2012 — Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments. Read more…

February 9, 2012 — Are you fascinated by dynamic data? Do you go green with envy when you see tweets pulled magically into websites? Trust me, I’ve been there. Read more…

January 30, 2012 — We do more reading on the screen today than we did even a year ago. If we are ever to have a golden age of reading on the screen, this might be the start of it. Tablets, Nooks and Kindles make buying a book or magazine for the screen almost unavoidable. With smartphones, we carry our reading material with us and enjoy instant Web access, enabling the reading experience to flow smoothly from one device to another. Read more…

January 23, 2012 — At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the text-based computer terminals of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s. Read more…

January 16, 2012 — In this article, we’ll look at Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), one of the most underused technologies in website development today. Before diving into an example, let’s consider the state of the Web at present and where it is going. Website design has found new vigor in recent years, with the evolving technique of responsive design. Read more…

January 6, 2012 — Back in 2009, the WebKit development team proposed a new extension to CSS that would allow Web page elements to be displayed and transformed on a three-dimensional plane. Read more…

December 27, 2011 — A few days ago, a tutorial on how to Create A Christmas Wish List With PHP was published on Smashing Magazine’s Coding section that frustrated me. It frustrated me as it was incredibly easy to predict the comment reactions it caused. It also frustrated me as it was a classic example of a tutorial resulting in very happy readers who will go out and cause a lot of terrible things on the Web unless they understand that this was meant as a “beginner tutorial”. A lot of the bad feedback was about security — something we shouldn’t take lightly. Read more…