Idevs

I know I said I would post articles every Monday from now on but this was too good to not post.

The Ultimate Infinitesmal Link Exchange SuperMatrix is a concept proposed by Adam Senour over at Walk on my Path. The genius of this post cannot be expressed here so I will leave it to you to check it out.

On a smaller note, after Mondays post I will be taking a small break to go and set up my house for the coming university year.

Due to commitments outside of this blog I am going to cut back the posting schedule to once a week for a while, this will mean that I can spend a lot longer on each article and so the quality will be far better. New posts will be published every Monday from now on.

I came across this article on facebook etiquette and thought I was share it with you all. Some of my highlights are listed below.

• When speaking with someone whom you have been casually ‘facebook stalking’, try to pretend you do not know everything about them. Avoid comments like: “So, I saw you and Mike broke up on facebook…”

• Drunken facebooking can get you in trouble… Try to restrain yourself from leaving an inebriated wall post on that cute guy or girl’s profile. -Note: This is very good advice.

It is all very good advice and ye should heed it well….

1. Waking Up
2. No Tech News
3. No Forum Activity
4. No New Blog Posts
5. Nothing to Blog About

Yeah, It is one of those lazy weekends….

In other words I was away for longer than expected and forgot to write a blog post for today. And it seems that I have 64 emails to mark as spam and 120 entries in my feed reader! Oh the fun of not plugging yourself in for a few days! So I will get on with that and normal service will resume again tomorrow.

This may sound like an odd thing to want to develop, but being able to create new problems to solve will enhance your developing skills. Coming up with new ideas is also very useful in todays information economy.

So how does one go about creating new problems? Here are a few ideas:

• Is there any piece of data or information which is difficult to markup or get hold of? Why not provide it?
• Is there something you would love to be able to do on the computer but can’t find the software for? Why not build it?
• Find something your language shouldn’t be able to do and then try and do it e.g Create a 3d game with JavaScript (but thats already been done)

I don’t know about you but whenever I have a problem which I can’t solve no matter how many ways I try and think about it, no matter how many patches and recompiles I try. With these types of problems I have come up with the best strategy to solving them - go to bed.

It may sound crazy but having a good nights sleep will not only relax you but also give you a clear head for the problem at hand. By simply attacking it with round after round of caffeine you become blind to the problem. Many times I have come back to a problem the next morning and thought “wow, the solution is so simple”. Generally this process ends with you kicking yourself.

Sometimes I even wake up and instantly the answer pops into my head, but I think this has more to with the fact that I stare at code way too much.

We have all been there, a new programming language comes out that is meant to be the “next best thing” in web or application development (sometimes both) and so we set about to learning the new structure and styles and idiosyncrasies this language brings. Here are a few tips to speed up this process:

1. Syntax hardly changes - Whether it be C, C++, PHP, Java, Javascript or even *shudder* Visual BASIC the general format of languages stays the same e.g. you will always get iteration and conditional statements. These are always the best way to start. Once you can control a programs flow the rest is just semantics.
2. Objects, Classes and the Old School. Procedural is going out of fashion (or so I keep getting told) so you should get used to finding out how to set up objects and classes in any new language (if it has those features). Of course you will always get the odd procedural language that pops up so be prepared to say things like “this would be so much easier with objects”
3. Practice by Importing - One of the things you can do is to import a piece of code you have written in one language over to another. This will help you understand the new language more and give you a nice piece of working code.

I was checking my statistics the other say and noticed that someone had some to the site using the query “Developing Secret Powers“, interestingly this site has nothing  to do with the subject but It gave me a great idea for a series of article.

Enhancing your “powers” is something every good developer has to do. Whether it is learning a new language , solving new and interesting problems or even creating the problems yourself.

Over the next few days I am going to discuss various aspects of these powers and list ways of improving them. By the weekend you should be a super code monkey!

I can’t remember the source but a few days ago a came across an article which stated that one could never redesign a site without rewriting the markup. This infuriated me somewhat since the author of the article clearly had not concept of semantics or document structure.

If you develop a site and outline your markup in such a way that it is structured and semantic you should never have to touch the markup again, of course there are always exceptions to these rules e.g. if you wanted to add a new section like a sidebar or menu. But the underlying structure of the page e.g. the header, the main body content, the navigation menu, the footer etc. don’t need to be touched.

CSS Zen Garden shows this concept of brilliantly and also raises a very interesting point which developers should take into consideration when developing their site structure, the concept of redundancy. I will illustrate this concept a bit further:

When I markup forms I always wrap each label and input in a div, this always me extra flexibility in the design and means I can create far better forms. I have been considering taking this one step further and assigning a unique id to every element, this would build in a lot of redundancy and most of the ids would never be touched by the stylesheet, but they would be there just in case the need did arise.

I would be interested in knowing other people’s opinions on this subject. Is redundancy a good thing? Does it cloud markup? Is content without style possible or will one always have to mess with markup in a redesign?