End Your If

Today at work I was advancing one of our iPhone applications.  It’s a pretty basic application, has a menu which displays some data from the web via XML; all of that fun stuff.

On occasion, I would try to push a view controller and the application would randomly crash, e.g.:

Code block

-(void) showMainMenu {
[mainNavigationController pushViewController:mainMenuViewController animated:YES];
}

CakePHP offers a lot of functionality to us as developers. The ability to develop websites rapidly provides a trade-off in how quickly the website will load. As we expand our skills, we will learn the techniques that will slow down/speed up performance.

Objectives

• Apply techniques to speed up CakePHP’s load time
• Optimize our queries
• Cache query results

More »

Two of the biggest things that will improve your search engine rankings are keyword rich website titles and keyword rich links to your content. Today’s lessons will cover both of these topics.

Objectives

• Improve our search engine rankings
• Set a title tag
• Map a specific URL to a custom controller and action
• Avoid using ids or numbers in our URL

Before I start, I would like to make it clear that this article is and does not intend to be a be-all-to-end-all of the SEO necessities for your website. It is meant to describe some excellent techniques to quickly and easily improve upon CakePHP to make it more SEO friendly. More »

Last night was the premiere of my current favorite TV show “How I Met Your Mother”.  If you are not familiar with the show, former childhood star Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser), plays a character named Barney Stinson.  Barney is known for several catch-phrases as well as special high fives.

Borrowing some of the more popular high fives, I have created a top five high fives for developers.

Without further adieu, let’s begin the countdown. More »

The other day, I had chopped up a design.  Sliced and diced if you will.  I proceeded to creating the HTML once all of the images were sliced up.

Things were going great.  As per usual I began designing in Mozilla to use Firebug to tweak the CSS and HTML.  Once I finished the design, I proceeded to test in Chrome, Safari, and of course, Internet Explorer.

Every browser but Internet Explorer was working perfectly, what gives? More »

Ugggh what a disaster today was!  On a client’s site, we have an older version of CakePHP, pre containable functionality.  Because of this, we have to use unbindModel and bindModel to accomplish the same functionality.

Over the past while, it has not been such a big deal.  However, for some other unknown reason, a search feature wasn’t returning back the appropriate associative data.  This had been working for quite some time, then suddenly stopped.  As I mentioned, I’m not exactly sure when and why it stopped working, but it did. More »

I don’t know about you, but there are many times during a work week where someone ticks me off.  It could be something small or something major.

I’ve always wondered what I could do about this, so I finally did something.

I created a Facebook application called Head Slap!  It let’s you type in your friend’s name on Facebook and give them a slap on the head.  Enter a personalized message letting them know why they deserve it!

Today I am going to share with you a little story that has saved me so much time and energy that always drove me crazy.  I bet many of you will be able to understand where I am coming from on this one…

Let me guess, you just bought a brand new monitor or a brand new hard drive, maybe even a DVD burner?  So you plug it in and it works, but it doesn’t work like it should.  I just had this problem with my nice new monitor.  Rather than being the nice 1440×1080 resolution with the millions of colors I expected, I get this crappy old 1024×768!  What did I just pay all of this money for if I am getting the same old garbage.  I decided to search for video drivers and I found an excellent site that had all of the Windows drivers that I needed. More »

I’m sure you are well aware of Twitter by now.  If you are not, perhaps you should crawl out of the hole in the crowd and begin checking out the latest fad on the Internet!  People are absolutely obsessed with Twitter right now.  There are a million sites out there on how to make money on Twitter, how to find followers on Twitter, etc…

Over the past two months I have been receiving some traffic from Twitter.  Nothing major, just a few visits a day here and there, so it never really caught my attention.  At work, my boss wants to jump on the band wagon with Twitter and check it out and see what we can do.  Being a web development firm it’s important to be able to develop in the various API’s for the hot trends, e.g. iPhone, Blackberry, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

So, I began looking into it a bit more.  I signed up for my blog; you can follow me here if you like: http://twitter.com/endyourif More »

Using the right keywords are important, but don’t let this drive your content.  It’s important to remember what your first goal should be and not your second.  Your first goal is write and provide useful content to people who do find your content.  Your second goal is for search engines to rank it well.

So, how can this be done?  Start by thinking about what your keywords are for your content.  Once you have your keywords decided, create a title for your content and integrate your keywords into them.  Make sure your title is intuitive, keyword rich, and catches people’s eye.  This can be done through good keywords, a secret, and/or a descriptive title describing exactly what the user wants. More »