Category Archives: Web Development

All articles related to web development including tips and tricks for other web developers, potential pitfalls, career advice, new and useful tools, and links to important sites.

Placeholder Images For Your Site

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Placeholder Kitten

Placeholder Kitten :}

Sean Yo from last night’s Guelph Web Maker Meetup shared a few awesome web tools I’d never heard of and I thought they were so neat I resolved to share them (and a few extras) today with everyone here.

Every web designer and developer under the sun has used (or at least heard of) the default ‘lorem ispum‘ text that is used as a filler for unfinished text copy on websites that are a work in progress. Well, now us web developers and designers have an option to use something similar for our images as well.

The image on the right should give you some sort of indication where is going… check it:

 

Featured WordPress Plugin: W3 Total Cache

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Let me be straight with you: Every WordPress blog on the web should have this plugin installed.

And, no, I’m also not being paid to say that. :)

W3 Total Cache is exactly what its name suggests: A total caching solution for WordPress blogs. WordPress is a good publishing platform and content management system (CMS) but runs into problems quickly when more than a few visitors hit your site. Even moderately busy websites can buckle under the strain of the database connection pools, stylesheets, Javascript, and HTML that WordPress uses.

Some of the neat features that W3 Total Cache includes:

  1. “Minifies” CSS, Javascript, and HTML by removing all whitespace. To see an example, view the source code of this page. This means there is less data to send to viewers of your website which also means your website loads faster.
  2. Final output is cached and then re-served to the next viewer without having to rebuild. This means that in many circumstances, your blog might only be recreating your site dynamically once an hour. Otherwise, the cached version will be served, greatly increasing the performance and stability of your site.
  3. Uses advanced disk caching techniques to cache output or can also take advantage of Memcache technology (if supported by your server) to increase speed even more.

Before W3 Total Cache I was a fan of WP Super Cache. And before that, I used WP Cache. Neither of the latter two can hold a candle to the capabilities and caching power of W3 Total Cache.

For more information on how this plugin can increase your website’s performance, take a look at W3 Total Cache on the WordPress Extend website.

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Windows Azure SDK + Visual Studio 2008 Error

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Error creating Windows Azure project in VS2008. Help!

This is not a typical blog post for this blog and I apologize for this one in advance. I’ve been working with some friends from Coffee and Code on gearing up Azure development and I need the community’s help. Your help.

I’ve freshly installed a copy of Windows 7 in VirtualBox. I’ve installed Visual Studio 2008 Professional and its SP1. I’ve also selected .NET framework 3.5 from the Windows features menu. I’ve reinstalled DX11 and Uninstalled then reinstalled the Azure SDK and the Azure VS2008 tools.

Every time I go to create a new project I get this error:

'Grid' object cannot be added to 'Grid'.
Exception from HRESULT: 0x88980406.
Error at object 'System.Windows.Controls.Grid' in markup file.
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.CloudService.Wizard;component/newprojectdialogcontent.xaml'.

After I click OK (the only option available), Visual Studio shows the message in the status bar:

Creating project AppTest ... project creation failed.

I’ve searched on the web and asked around to find a fix for this error as I’d really like to get going on Azure development. Can anyone in the community help me?

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Breathe New Life Into An Old Computer

Posted on by John Rockefeller
The IceWM Start Menu is supposed to resemble t...
Image via Wikipedia

My laptop is an Averatec 3260. 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard disk, and 1.6GHz processor. It’s had the front panel LCD and battery replaced, by me. It’s still missing the front bezel (I thought it looked cooler with it off.) Up until yesterday, the performance of the machine was just above what I’d consider to be “survivable” regardless of OS.

Then, everything changed.

While I was working with Cory Fowler at Red Brick Cafe and then later at my apartment, I was updating my copy of Mandriva Linux from 2009.1 to 2010.0. During installation something must have gone wrong because KDE4 no longer started properly. It kept bringing me back to the login screen. So, instead of using KDE4 I used IceWM.

I haven’t gone back to KDE4 since yesterday. And I’m the hugest KDE4 fan there is.

If you’ve got an old laptop or an old desktop that’s struggling under the weight of Windows XP or KDE4, grab a copy of Mandriva Linux for free and install the IceWM packages. Give it a go. I’m sure you’ll be impressed with the performance of your machine. I know I was! I remember running IceWM a few times when I first started using Linux quite a number of years ago but it has really come a long way since then.

IceWM runs all of the KDE4 programs I care about and even the Gnome programs, too. Watching a video on YouTube is made much easier with the lighter-weight desktop, as is just general browsing.

IceWM offers a lot of customization but some of it is complicated to configure. The easiest thing to do is to replace the God-awful default theme with something way cooler and easier on the eyes. The theme I’m using now is psicopoire.

The Box-Look.org website includes hundreds of awesome themes you can try out. And installing them is actually pretty simple. To install a new theme in IceWM, try this:

  1. Download the tarball
  2. Untar the tarball into the ~/.icewm/themes directory (if it does not exist, create it)
  3. Right-click on the desktop and go to Settings->Themes->Your New Theme’s Name

Does anyone else know any other neat, lightweight software to replace large-scale, heavy applications? I’d love to give them a try.

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Google Chrome for Linux Now Available

Posted on by John Rockefeller
Google Chrome Icon
Image via Wikipedia

The world’s fastest web browser, Google Chrome, has recently been released on the Linux platform. This is big news since it will greatly improve the web browsing performance of many of the world’s netbooks.

I’ve been a huge fan of Google Chrome since it appeared in the summer of last year, but haven’t used it heavily simply because of the lack of Linux support. It is installed on my Windows 7 virtualization, however.

Word on the street is that Google Chrome is also available for Macs, so if that’s your platform, take a look!

One thing that I think is important to note that I haven’t seen anyone pick up on is this line on the Official Google Blog post about Chrome being available for Linux and Mac:

“At Google, most engineers use Linux machines …”

Hmm.. No wonder they’re winning! ;)

Go for it -> Download Google Chrome for Linux

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