Eventually we'll see the day when we can purely use HTML5 and CSS3 and have no fear that anyone who actively browses the web will have such an ancient client that they can't see what we've intended. Unfortunately that day isn't today, so we still need to have options...
Web Design
Ruby on Rails Compared to PHP
I've been using PHP for years. In some ways it's a messy language, but it gets the job done and is widely adapted in the web community. How about another programming language called, "Ruby on Rails"? Let's have a comparison between the two. For those not familiar with...
Google Analytics Advanced Segments
Do you engage in social media, add SEO-minded keywords to your website, advertise with AdWords, and post or comment on industry blogs or forums, and now you want to know which of your myriad online marketing efforts is producing the most effective results? Enter...
HTML5 Video Tips
HTML5 has a lot of new features. One of the coolest but not often utilized is the newelement. It allows pages to embed video files without requiring the user to download a plugin. By default YouTube videos use HTML5 if the user's browser supports it, and use Flash...
About HTML Entities
If you're using special (non-Latin) characters in your pages or emails, you'll want to convert those characters to HTML Entities. This naturally raises a few questions. What are HTML Entities? Why does it matter? What will happen if I don't? How do I do it? If you...
Google Maps Adds Helicopter View
Out of all the various online services provided by Google, few have seen as many major updates as Maps. From in-browser Google Earth to public transportation and Walking directions to Live Traffic, and now 3D route preview, also known as Helicopter View. Paul Yang...
Image Scaling Tips
Recently Matcha president/creative director Chris Lo and I were hashing out a solution to a problem. We needed to create print-quality images for a client, and use those same images on their website, which we were also building. The problem is that print requires high...
Image Manipulation in PHP – GD vs IMagick
Recently I've been working with image manipulation in PHP, using GD and ImageMagick. Both libraries are very useful but they're quite different in a number of ways. I thought I'd take this opportunity to go over some of the differences and provide some suggestions on...
Web Design and SEO
A great website design is an important part of a good marketing strategy. However, it's also important to realize where the website fits within that strategy, and that it isn't the whole strategy. Even within the website itself, a great design is useless if nobody can...
QR Code Demystified – Part 6
We've covered almost everything we need to create QR Codes. The next thing we need is version information blocks. The version information blocks simply tell the reader what version the symbol is, and therefore how many modules wide and tall it is. Table 11 shows the...
QR Code Demystified – Part 5
Now that we've got the data and error correction sorted out, we're almost ready to place it in the symbol. As seen in Part 2, the data and error correction modules basically go everywhere that isn't taken up by something else. The reason we're not quite ready to place...
QR Code Demystified – Part 4
I had planned on holding off the error correction until later, but it really fits better right here. Before error correction is done, the data that we've generated must be broken down into "code words", which are just 8-bit bytes. All we have to do is take our "bit...