This post explains an approach to generating fantasy maps that is really interesting. One part of generating a non-grid based map, is to use create Voronoi polygons around some random number of x,y points on the map. There’s a lot of heavy math involved, but there are libraries for calculating them with Python and even …
Ben Ramsey shared how he got started with PHP and had the great idea of asking others to write about their stories and tagging it as #20yearsofphp. This is my story. When I graduated from college in 2000, I began looking for a job without a clear idea of what I wanted to do. In grad …
I read the following article this morning, and found a lot of useful insight in it about what it takes to be a programmer long-term. And, though I’m not approaching 55, as my 6 year old pointed out when I told him my age two weeks ago I am “almost near 100″… Yes I Still …
My friend Sandy shared a link to a fascinating natural experiment comparing the productivity of two similarly tasked developer teams. If you haven’t read it already, take a minute to check it out. I’ve seen this need for visibility throughout my career. The cable company was a rare laboratory, you could observe a direct comparison between …
I’ve been finding myself doing a lot for copy and tech editting. I needed a way to annotate a PDF based on the changes I’d made to our markdown source. Trying to eyeball this was difficult, and I checked if there was a way to do word-by-word diffs based on SVN output. Remember, SVN’s diff …
I wish I’d known about this plugin 6 months ago, but better late than never. This is a useful jQuery plugin that will use Raphael.js to draw a clickable map of the United States. Its easy to style and bind event listeners to react to clicks on particular states. Easily add a an interactive map …
I wrote a roundoup of articles explaining why carousels are bad and kill clickthrus earlier. Jakob Nielsen provides some advice on how to design one properly if you really must have one. Summary: Carousels allow multiple pieces of content to occupy a single, coveted space. This may placate corporate infighting, but on large- or small-view …
This question came up yesterday when Sandy and I presented at DC Web Women, an Introduction to PHP [slides]. I couldn’t come up with a coherent set of arguments at the time, in a way that I could explain easily. These posts do a better job, first a general programming article on the subject: Implicit …
Recently, I needed to migrate some WordPress blogs to another system. WordPress provides a handy way to export content in its WXR format. However, it’ll export all comments, whether approved or not. This is good from a data backup standpoint, but I didn’t need to import these. They were also bloating the XML file and …
Remove unapproved comments from WordPress exports Read More »
I’ve never been a fan of carousels. They’ve become a crutch for designers and clients who want to spice up a homepage presentation with something that moves. ShoulIUseACarousel was shared by a lot of folks I follow, NetMagazine did an interview with the accessibility expert who created the site. JS: Carousels are seemingly an easy …