I’ve gone back and looked at this year of 2009, and the things I’ve blogged about, and I thought I’d give a little recap.

My CSS Conversion

At the beginning of the year I realized I had 100% percent to using CSS. I’m still a little in awe that being such a table junkie I finally did it. There were a few key things that I did to help me learn all the difficult things with CSS. I hope I can help some poor web developer out there understand their CSS a little better.

A Year of PHP IDEs

I really invested some time in trying out and experimenting with several PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I had been using Zend Studio for several years, however more and more I found myself frustrated with it’s quirks. However, I haven’t had time yet to blog about the new IDE I am using, NetBeans. I’ve made the switch from Zend Studio to NetBeans, and while I’m not completely sold, I’m still giving it some time. Maybe over christmas break I’ll blog some about it.

Interesting Challenges w/ MySQL

While I haven’t blogged about most of them, I have had some interesting challenges w/ MySQL over the last year. One was converting 40 Million rows from a MyISAM engine to an InnoDB Engine. I’ve been having some serious heart-to-heart conversations with MySQL (metaphorically of course) on how I’m going to scale it to millions and billions of rows. I think I’ve mapped out in my head how we’re going to handle it for Dating DNA. That will be one challenge I’ll be addressing in 2010.

New Blog Design

This year I got around to re-designing my blog using the Carrington Theme as a base. I kinda like it, but it still could use a little more polish. One day I’ll find time to give it that extra polish.

Memcached

This year I really got into the theory on how to design an application with Memcached. I’ve decreased the load on several websites by using it, and wrote an in-depth article on the theory of caching, and how to implement it effectively. I’ve been amazed at how well it works, and that I hadn’t used it before.

A Year of Presentations

I’ve given two presentations this year, my Memcached presentation at UPHPU, and my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I got great feedback from both presentations, and I look forward to what I’ll present on this upcoming year. I’m thinking about putting together a presentation called “Being a Web Ninja with jQuery,” and showing of the dozen of awesome applications I’ve built using jQuery.

Utah Open Source Conference 2009

This year I helped organize and throw together the Utah Open Source Conference. I was made the Sponsorship Manager, and it was interesting trying to talk to companies in a recession about donating to a non-profit conference. I haven’t had a chance to blog about different techniques on how to professional ask for money for something like this, but hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to share some insights.

Things I Didn’t Blog About

There were a lot of things I didn’t get around to blogging about this year. I’ll quickly touch on them here, and hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to blog about them more.

Web Services – I’ve done a LOT of web service work. Web services provide a unique challenge, since many times its hard to debug them. At my old job, one of the biggest challenges is we really couldn’t debug our web services until all of the other pieces of the puzzle were done. Then we spent long hours with trial and error, debugging via dumping logs. I’ve learned a lot of tricks with PHP and web services. Hopefully I’ll be blog more about those soon.

Performance Tuning LAMP – I’ve had to do a lot of tuning to keep the Dating DNA website afloat. Because of the awesomeness of our iPhone apps, we’ve had a lot of load on our web servers. There are a lot of things you can do to get the LAMP stack to run well.

Alienware Arena – Here was a fun little project I was able to crank out for probably the largest client I’ve done work for: Dell. We made them a website for their Alienware brand called “Alienware Arena.”

There were a lot of challenges to this website, mainly timeline and budget. But we were able to walk away happy with our work, and the Dell / Alienware team were really happy. It was interesting going through and trying to copy / mimic the look and feel of the Alienware website. I’m really proud of what we made.

Never Ending iPhone App Store Saga – Anyone who knows me has heard of the bloody wars that my current employer has had with Apple, their iPhone, and the App Store. The ridiculous approval process, the extremely long wait periods, and Apple’s OCD when it comes to their phone. I won’t say much anything else on the topic, but boy it has been frustrating.

What to Expect with 2010

Boy, 2010 will be interesting. What to expect? I’ll be doing some pretty sick programming in jQuery, as I’ll be adding integrating chat to the Dating DNA website. What else? A lot more when it comes to integrating websites into other social network platforms.

From a business platform, 2010 will be a lot of work spent on taking some great ideas and trying to monetize them. While working on awesome stuff is great, its important to pay the bills with them. I will have an entire year to sign up Sponsors for the 2010 UTOS Conference instead of 2 short months.

Hopefully I’ll get in a better habit of documenting my discoveries and solutions here in my blog. Sharing information is the best way to help everyone out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and good luck in the new year! 2010, here we come!

Related posts:

1. Speaking: Utah Open Source Conference 2009
2. So You Want To Be A Web Developer?
3. Presentation: Real Life Scaling

So over the next few days I’ll be checking out a few plugins, but if you know of a plugin that can mass edit schedule times, that’d be great. If there isn’t anything out there, maybe some day I’ll have to make one. Anyway, thanks for the help in advance!

Related posts:

1. WordPress Plugins – Documentation Please!
2. WordPress & OOP
3. iPhone and WordPress

Smaller, Concise Entries

I have a tendency to write longer, more in-depth posts about subjects that are more like full fledged articles rather than blog posts. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, its difficult to have long drawn out posts and post frequently. These posts can take a week or two to put together over the little spare time I have. I think if I have a more in-depth topic, either I’ll work on it while publishing smaller posts, or split it up into small sets of series.

After examining the blogs that I follow on my Google Reader, I like blog posts that are easy to read in a few minutes, because any longer and I tend to just skim it and skip the details. Hopefully it will be useful to readers, as well as keep me being more consistent in writing something.

Scheduled Posts

While each day I can’t hope to write, I can keep a “buffer” of scheduled posts. So perhaps one day I’ll write three posts, accounting for a day of travel or vacation. Hopefully I won’t fail, but I really do believe my writing can benefit from frequent postings.

Broader Topic Scope

Before I would try to keep my blog posts focused on PHP, Web Development, or some other topic. What I’ve found out is I’ve had great blog post ideas that weren’t exactly about those topics, but I think would appeal to my audience. Back when I was posting several times a week I would have ten times the traffic that I do now, and I think I can my traffic back up. Worst case scenario I just improve my writing skills, which is never a bad thing.

September 13, 2010

Hopefully I’ll see you in a year with 365 more blog posts to my name. I think if I focus and really try to be consistent, I can pull this off. Wish me luck, and I hope you enjoy reading.

Related posts:

1. Writing Effictive PHP Caches with Memcached
2. Test post from iphone.
3. 100th Blog Entry – First Year of Real Blogging

I thought I’d write some of my thoughts on my impressions of my first year of blogging. I’ve tried to blog several times before, wrote maybe three or four entries, and then never used it again. I think one of the reasons I had so many problems was that I spent the majority of my time setting up my blog, verses using my blog. I spent the majority of the time tweaking my blog, customizing themes, installing plugins, that I kinda burnt out before I even got writing.

This time I set up the blog, picked a theme, and then started writing. I slowly made changes to the theme and plugins over time, instead of a huge up-front investment into making the blog. Another big difference is before I was blogging with the idea of becoming this big programming blogger. My focus was on “what can I do to drive the most traffic?” This time around, my focus has been on “what do I want to write about and share today?” There hasn’t been this huge concern about generating a huge audience. The irony is that when I started to focus on blogging for myself, the more traffic I got. The more meaningful my entries, the more people liked them.

Some months I had lots of creative juices and wrote 15+ articles a month. However, when I got really busy, or just didn’t feel inspired, I didn’t let it get to me. Only 2 posts in a month? Oh well, it isn’t the end of the world. When I had this attitude, I ended up not feeling guilty about not writing, and the next month or so I would write more.

The year 2009 holds lots of potential, as a blogger, a developer, and an entrepreneur. Dating DNA, my current full time project, is going very well. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve been able to do a whole lot with very little. I think we’re very close to exploding with user sign-ups. CEVO has been going very well, and I’ve been able to help move them to a more robust infrastructure. I’ve been enjoying my time with the Utah PHP Usergroup, and gave a presentation this last month. I thought it went really well.

Only time will tell, and while the country might be in a recession, I think the future looks very bright.

Related posts:

1. Blogging – Meeting up with Family
2. Blog WordPress Theme Experiment – Grunge Style
3. Redesigning blog….

10 Years Ago

I started web development back in 1997. My tools back then were:

• Notepad – That right, the one and only. It was how most people did their websites back in the day. It hasn’t changed much over the years.
  
• Adobe Photoshop v4 – The must have program for image editing:
  
• Dreamweaver 1.0 – Thats right, I’ve been with dreamweaver since the beginning! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot)
• ws_ftp95 – This old school FTP program was the bomb in my eyes since day 1. Boy have things come a long.

Technology wise I was serving up static HTML pages. When I had mastered Dreamweaver’s template system, I was able to run a website with 20+ pages not too bad. It was definitely interesting. Every time I made a change, it would go through and update every single page, and then I would upload every page to the server.

Website wise I started off piddling with the Knights of Honor’s website (Web Archive: http://www.knightsofhonor.org/). It is no longer up, but it was for a guild for one of the very first MMO’s called The Realm. It was a lot of fun for a long while.

Knights of Honor Website:

I then started my own website called RPGLegacy.com (Web Archive: http://www.rpglegacy.com/) where I did reviews for video games. It was a lot of fun and I had about 20-30 visitors a day. I was really happy with the traffic. I did it under my writing alias of Kevon McCoy, because I was only 14 or 15 at the time.

RPGLegacy Website Archive:

Up until this point I had done everything with static HTML pages. It was a nightmare looking back now. So ineffective and tedious. However, it did add a level of accomplishment and self-reward. Running your own website was a lot of work.

In 2001 I started a website called Counter-Hack. It was a website dedicated to the education and protection against illegal video game cheats. At the time I was playing a game called Counter-Strike. It was plagued with people using programs to see through walls, auto-aim, run super fast, etc. This was running the fun for the rest of us. I started the website like my others, with static HTML, until my friend Anthony Ouwehand (a.k.a H3X) introduced me to a wonderful language called PHP. He spearheaded the new design of the website.

Within a few months, due to some luck and great SEO, we started to have 1,000-3,000 visitors a day. I was astounded! We continued to have success throughout the years. We were even mentioned in an article of Rolling Stone Magazine about hackers. We have had a great staff there and I’ve been lucky to work with such great people (Anthony, Nick, and the rest of the CH gang!) While Counter Hack is still running itself, it has slowed down a lot. However, my current projects are anything but slow.

Counter-Hack Website:

Web Development Today

Today I have more tools and utilities than I know what to do with. It is amazing how different developing for the web is now.

• Zend Studio 6.0 – This PHP IDE has been a time saver. While there are some other good IDEs for PHP, this is my personal favorite. With features such as debugging and intellisense, I’ve come a long ways from the days of just Notepad. I mainly use this for coding PHP. I use other tools for CSS and HTML Layouts.
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 – This program has come a very, very long way. While many parts of the layout have stayed the same, Dreamweaver is a good WYSIWYG editor. I use this mainly to create HTML templates before cutting them up into their PHP parts. It also has great CSS editing capabilities. I mostly use it in the split mode, so I can code by hand quickly and see the results below.
• Notepad2 – While I don’t use Notepad, I love Notepad2. It is a free program with code lines, syntax coloring, and a few other features. It makes for a great lightweight editor. If I need to do something quick, I find myself using Notepad2.
• Visual Studio 2008 – While some people dislike .NET, I will have to say ASP .NET has it’s situations where its quick and fast, especially for larger corporations who already have Windows Servers.

The technologies of today for developing for the web have also increased greatly:

• PHP 5.1 – I’m a avid PHP believer. Its a very scalable and affordable.
• MySQL 5 – I love this database. Its a great open source database that is getting better every version.
• JQuery – The best Javascript Library in my humble opinion.
• CSS – Cascade Style Sheets, the new way to design websites.
• XHTML – The new HTML.

With all the new technologies, web developers have never been empowered as much as now. Many websites are approaching near “rich-application” experience. With the new ideas of “Web 2.0″ breading new ways of sharing and presenting data, the imagination is the only limit (well, almost).

The current websites I’ve been working on have been pushing my personal limits of knowledge and creativity. I always enjoy the challenge and experience.

CEVO – Cyber Evolution – Online Video Game Competitions

http://www.cevo.com/

I’ve been working with CEVO since March of 2005. It is a service geared towards video gamers to provide a venue to play their game competitively for prizes, glory, and fame. We’ve successfully served over 17,000 teams and over 70,000 members these past three years. The technology behind CEVO is pretty complex and demanding due to the fact that 95% of all of our business runs through our website. It is the lifeblood of our organization. We use PHP and MySQL for out website, and have been including more jquery and AJAX techniques across the website.

I’ve learned a lot about managing a mid to large sized websites. We’ve had a lot of bottlenecks with inefficient MySQL queries and structures. Its different when programming with millions of rows, not hundreds. We’ve had to do a lot of optimizations over time and we’ve done 4 different version of the site in 3 years. I know, a lot.

WhySecurity.org – Security Resource for Regular People

http://www.whysecurity.org/

This is a small project I’ve whipped up real quick with the goal of being a site on PC security. We’ll see if it takes off.

DatingDNA – Social Network Dating Website

http:/www.datingdna.com/

I’ve very excited to be working on this project with some great people and a lot of potential. We’re working on some cutting edge stuff and positioning to be a very popular website. I cant say much, but it is a very fun project.

Hopefully you’ve found this all intriguing and enjoy this blast to the past.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Web Development: Controlling the viewport via Javascript
2. LT PACT 2008 – Day 1
3. LT Pact ’08 – Overview of Experience

Every week she has a blog challenge, and to make sure I keep up my blogging I thought this week’s challenge was appropriate for my blog. She challenged to blog about your computer setup, now and then. First lets talk about my setup back in the day.

Quite simply, it was the family computer.

My family has always had 2 or 3 computers around the house. Having a technology business father always meant we had new stuff around the house, and usually the kids got the old used left overs. So there was always a “family” computer used to do homework and play games. I can remember a few of them: the Compaq Presario, the Dell Insperon, the Totally Awesome Computer (not a joke, there used to be a company called that here in Utah), and finally I built my own from there on out. The computer was always in the kitchen/family room area where everyone could see what we were up to. It had only one monitor, keyboard, mouse, and usually a joystick.

Boy have I come a long way from that:

We just moved into our new house, so things are a mess still, but that is basically my computer layout, in all of it’s grandeur. Thats right, you see 4 monitors. Well, its really three monitors and a laptop. You have my trusty chair which has always served me well, although my wife tells me it leans way to far back (she is probably right).

My computer is a custom built, about $2,000 machine. For how much I use it, its worth every penny. I’ll get into the specs another day.

Its a full tower, and it is super heavy.

And it is kind of a mess in there. I feel some what naked showing the insides of my PC to the world…

Then you have my three trusted monitors. My primary 24″ Gateway:

Then my secondary 21″ sceptre:

and then my third, old school CRT monitor:

That CRT is really nice to have around, being able to change resolutions to see what I want is really nice. So when I do a screencast I usually screencast from that monitor because I can scale it down without it looking like crap.

Then I have my new MacBook Pro:

I like it a lot, and I switch between my Mac and PC with my wonderful KVM:

I couldn’t recommend a better USB KVM. It works flawlessly. Then you have my killer G5 mouse with… a Rocketfish mouse pad!

There are tons of gamers who swear by their lives about the Icemat or Steelmat gamer mouse pads. I’ve had and tried both, and I much prefer this generic brand mouse pad found at any BestBuy location. Its bigger, lighter, thinner, and feels a lot better. I hate my Icemat now compared to this.

As you probably noticed, my desk is just an old school fold out desk. Hey, it might not look like much, but it works well for me!

Hope this works for ya Lorelle!

Related posts:

1. A New Stage in Life: My MacBook Pro
2. iPhone & Vista 64-Bit…. Finally!

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