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Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

The Dreamweaver Umbilical Cord, cutting loose…

Friday, July 27th, 2007

One of my biggest complaints of Dreamweaver was that it made me a lazy [in a bad way] programmer. Personally, I am always looking to make life easier. We’re programmers damn it, we are naturally lazy

Who is the Best Web Host?

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

For ThemBid.com we use dedicated servers; however, we have hosted over 200 clients through a sister company, using virtual servers through Layered Tech. Before Layered Tech, over period of six years, we have utilized hosting services from a variety of vendors with varying levels of success. My goal here is ...

Understanding the C in CSS

Thursday, July 19th, 2007

Now that ThemBid.com is implementing codename "secret sauce", we needed a brush up on the C in CSS, since the new project involves whole portions of the site needing style overrides. If you are not fully utilizing the cascading feature of CSS, or you just need a quick brush up, then ...

How to Handle Thousands of Users with Your Blog

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

There have been multiple occasions where I am trying to read an article and the website is down. I have encountered this multiple times where people say something like: "I got around 13,000 hits and server couldn't handle it". There are even websites that become popular by making ...

How to Easily Monitor your Website Uptime for Free

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Currently, there are a bunch of website monitors available, some are free, but I couldn't find any that was really simple and satisfy our requirements. We wanted a monitor that would connect to our site ThemBid.com every minute, retrieve a pixel image, and notify us if it retrieved something ...

Using the Decorator Design Pattern to Create a Dynamic Community

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

As ThemBid.com grows, we have received several requests to create communities that use ThemBid.com as the underlying engine, but niched to a certain vertical. Normally we would create this new community using a set of core classes and then an array of sub classes specific to each community. But I ...

Social Networks for Developers

Friday, July 13th, 2007

I was pleasantly surprised when I found over 400 visitors coming from Dzone.com. After checking the site out, I found it to be useful and it earned a spot in my treasured del.icio.us archive. This prompted me to take a look at the active social networks for developers. Following is ...

PMI Applied to Hacking

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Sometimes the simplest of concepts brings the greatest value. The PMI is such a concept. For the uninitiated PMI stands for Plus, Minus and Interesting. When practicing RAD, you will find that often many new feature requests will appear and you will need to make rapid decisions that could be ...

Free Web 2.0 Design Graphics and Tools

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

There are situations when there is no time to create all the graphics you need from scratch. Furthermore, you want to use resources that don't hurt cash flow and that have licenses that wont land you in court. This resource is for you. Enjoy!

The Ultimate Web 2.0 Color Palette for the Gimp

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

This is a follow up to a previous blog post where I provided a color swatch for Photoshop. This is the equivalent for the Gimp. You can download it free here. To install, copy the file to ~/.gimp-[version]/palettes.