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Posts concerning web-development

2017 Goals/2016 Goals Review: A Year of Treading Water

16:10 01 Jan 2017

On every front except work, 2016 was a bad year for me.

Not in big ways; I didn’t have any major setbacks, bad injuries, or dramatic blowups. It just sucked in a low-key but consistent way.

It was bad in terms of the goals I set myself at the start of the year, too.
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2013–2015 Goals Review/2016 Goals

18:16 01 Jan 2016. Updated: 23:21 01 Jan 2016

I haven’t written about yearly goals since 2013. Time to revive the practice.
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What I want from Blogging Software

23:03 06 Oct 2013

I’ve grown increasingly unhappy with WordPress, despite the fact that it’s served me fairly faithfully for over seven years. The main reason is performance—this blog is now just too slow to load. There are definitely things I could do to tackle that, but having to do so is a sign that it’s not the right platform. The other reason is philosophical—I no longer think that a web application backed by a database is the best approach for a blog.

I’ve been thinking about writing my own—of course[1]. So first I should establish the requirements.
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Guide to How the Web Works II: For Website Owners

21:14 18 Aug 2013

Second in a planned series of five posts about the technical side of the web. The first post covered what every web user should know, and this one is intended for people who own websites—who also need to know what was in the first post.

This is a work in progress, and I welcome feedback.
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Guide to How the Web Works I: For Web Users

22:47 28 Jul 2013. Updated: 13:47 01 Apr 2015

What I think every web user should know about the technical side of the web. This is intended to be the first in a series of guides aimed at increasingly advanced levels of use[1].

This post covers the basics; enough so that after reading it you won’t mistake a blog post for the new Facebook redesign.

This is a work in progress. Please let me know if you see errors, or if you don’t understand something here—that’s valuable feedback!
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LESS CSS

21:32 26 May 2013

LESS is the name of a stylesheet language that “compiles” to CSS. It’s been around for a while, as have similar projects such as Sass. I finally decided to start using it today, prompted by fairly common issues with CSS repetition. Even though the project I used LESS for is quite small—a little under 1,000 lines of CSS—it made an immediate difference.
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Spam Wave 2013: Adopting Akismet

20:07 03 Mar 2013

Spam comments to my site have reached ridiculous levels over the last few weeks; in the last two weeks there were over 35,000 messages awaiting moderation and another 10,000 or so marked as spam.

I don’t have the ability to moderate that kind of volume, so I’ve taken a couple of steps to deal with it.
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What I Want From “Bookmarks”

23:50 09 Dec 2012

I mentioned last week that I wanted to work on “better bookmarking” as my next coding project, basing my approach off of my own thoughts and recent Mozilla research. Now I want to examine what that project might be like.
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jsCheckMate

23:42 02 Dec 2012. Updated: 21:04 03 Dec 2012

I wrote a JavaScript utility that lets you create a rectangle on a web page by dragging your mouse cursor, and then toggles the state of all checkboxes under the cursor. If you’ve ever had to deal with forms that have lots and lots of checkboxes, you’ll know why I decided such a thing was necessary.
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Moving tadhg.com

21:38 11 Nov 2012

Since my primary server died in February this year, I’ve been running tadhg.com on a cheap virtual machine. That’s worked fine, but the original server came back to life quite some time ago, and today I finally completed the process of moving tadhg.com back to it. The move is now complete, and hopefully you’re not seeing anything unexpected[1]. This post is about what’s involved in that move and what I’ve tried to improve along the way.
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Blog Features I Want

22:44 11 Mar 2012

A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
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jQuery Plugin: Chosen

21:13 25 Jul 2011

I often come across unwieldy select elements, and it’d be awesome if every site used Chosen to make them more usable. In fact, I should probably look into using GreaseMonkey to make Chosen ubiquitous for me.

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Awkward, Definitely Awkward

07:41 12 Jul 2011
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Nothing on Facebook is Then

22:56 09 Jun 2011

This is an excellent post/rant about Facebook from Jason Scott; one of the key aspects of being a proprietary walled garden is that it’s very easy to be an information black hole, with the attendant ill effects on historical archiving.

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CrossFit Open 2011 Criticisms

19:56 15 May 2011

Through the seven weeks of the CrossFit Open, plus an additional week or so to allow for the system to settle on a reliable ranking for me, I’ve been focused on my own performance and hitting my goals. But it was impossible not to be very aware of the significant mess that CrossFit HQ made of the event, and the problems in the community this exposed.
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A Historical Comparison of IE Versions

23:35 17 Mar 2011. Updated: 00:36 18 Mar 2011

I’ve been struggling all week with a JavaScript issue that’s either caused or uncovered by Internet Explorer 9, and while this video has nothing to say on that front, it’s still fascinating to me:

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WordPress 3.0.5 Upgrade

22:07 20 Feb 2011

I upgraded this blog today, the first time I’ve done that in over a year. Everything looks okay.

I’ve become slightly less paranoid about it; I still back everything up first, but I no longer preview the upgrade in my development environment, instead being prepared to restore from backups if something goes wrong. This might not be wise, but I’ve been lulled by the smooth upgrades the past few times.

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How Much is Blog Shilling Going for These Days Anyway?

22:53 18 Feb 2011

I received a kind of monetization offer for this blog today, one that I hadn’t encountered before: a service that would pay me to put up articles that they would provide. The kicker would be the links at the bottom of these articles (no porn or gambling, they assured).
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sfmagic.org: Stepping Away

22:48 10 Feb 2011

I hate giving up on projects. Especially projects that I’ve spent a lot of time on, that have had some success, and that have come close to being finished without making it the final, crucial steps. I really wanted to get a new version of sfmagic.org written, in Python, with good web development practices from top to bottom, but it’s far past time to let that go.
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Online Convenience in an Ideal World

22:36 18 Jan 2011

I’ve recently been doing some online banking reorganization, and have realized just how inconvenient a lot of the services are. The main issue is that they’re all different services, where I want centralization.
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2010 Goals Review

11:51 31 Dec 2010

I once again had eight goals for 2010, and it’s not too likely that any more of them will be accomplished before the end of the year.
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Adding reCAPTCHA to tadhg.com

20:18 07 Sep 2010

The rate of spam comments I’ve been receiving has gone utterly nuts recently, and as a result I’ve decided to try out adding reCAPTCHA to the comment forms on the site. I apologize for this, because I know it makes adding comments a pain and I’d prefer to make it as easy as possible to add them, but the wave of incredibly annoying spam comments is just too much to deal with right now. Please let me know if you have any serious problems with it.

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2010 Goals: First Quarter Review

11:12 30 Mar 2010

Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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