Blog

In an attempt to improve this blog, I’m currently doing Darren Rowse’s 31 day better blog challenge. Today’s task is to review an existing blog (in a similar niche) and answer a few questions about it. I’ve picked Signal vs Noise, a blog on web design by the 37 signals guys. These are the same [...]

I wanted the Calcatraz API to be fast enough to be usefully callable within a single page request. To this end, I performed some optimisation and was able to reduce the runtime of an API call to around 1/6 of its original time. To establish a baseline, I looked at the fastest page load time [...]

When XDebug is installed it will produce a file each time you load a PHP webpage on your localhost. This file contains detailed timing information on which functions the PHP file called and for how long. This is essential information for improving the speed of a website as it allows you to pinpoint exactly which [...]

The Aim   I’ve been working on an API for the new version of Calcatraz (both API and new version coming soon). As part of this, I’ve been trying to configure the API to use nice URLs. This has caused me to bump up against a tricky problem in Apache’s mod_rewrite module. I want to [...]

While working on the back-end Calcatraz management system, I came across a situation where I wanted to display strings, but if they were too long I wanted to truncate them and add three dots (ellipsis) to the end to show that this had occurred. I first got on Google and looked for a solution. The [...]

In Firefox, it is easy to create an inline div (i.e. a div which adjusts its width to fit its contents). You just do this: div#elemid { display: inline-block; } However, it doesn’t work in IE. It took me a while to figure out how to get it working, so here’s the solution: div#elemid { [...]

If your web pages have a large number of nested div and table tags you may end up wondering whether they are all really necessary, and whether you might not be able to get by with less. While you could run through your code and assess each one individually and decide if it can be [...]

Recently I attempted to define in as objective a way as possible how much value my online calculator is providing to its users. The idea is to come up with an equation which gives me a ‘score’ of how much value has been provided to users. With this, it will then be possible to optimise [...]

The qualities of a great web application I aim to make Calcatraz into a great web application. To do so effectively it is important to understand the qualities a great web application exhibits. So what are they? Here are a few things I have thought of: 1. Punctual A web application should be quick: quick [...]