Web design and development by Jonathan Dean

I started playing with html5 and wanted to share some good resources I’ve found for anyone trying to get up to speed on the specs, browser support and code samples.
For a very detailed overview of everything html5 is (and isn’t) head over to diveintohtml5.org. The section entitled “What does it all mean?” is a great [...]

There’s a “quirk” about Ruby that I often forget when going back to it after a long period of time using other languages. If you divide two integers in Ruby then it’s going to give you an integer as a result. Consider the following:

some_int = 3
another_int = 2
answer = some_int / another_int # answer [...]

Apache already comes pre-installed on OS X but PHP is not enabled by default. To enable PHP we need to edit our Apache config file by opening the Terminal and typing sudo nano /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf and hitting enter (put in your admin password when it asks.) Type Control+W to bring up the search option and type [...]

If you’re running an Apache server there’s no need to hard code your links to force https/http or write server-side code. A few simple rewrite rules will allow you to redirect your secure pages to https and your non-secure pages back to http.

A while back I posted this article about friendly URLs in PHP and Apache. Today I’d like to update that a little to not only show another method but also to enhance it a bit. When we’re done we’ll have search engine friendly URLs that look like the ones that Blogger uses.
Why? Because search engines [...]

I’ve tried a few different ways of doing friendly URLs in PHP and all have their advantages and disadvantages. For a good introduction and some other methods that don’t necessarily require an Apache server, take a look at this sitepoint article. I’ve used Method 2 there before (.htaccess Error Pages) but I don’t [...]