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...
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 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...
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...
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...
I've seen people on websites talking about using iPads as light for photography, and videos of people holding a panel of three iPads to illuminate a face to snap a portrait. Although the result is good, attaching several iPads to a rig can be quite complicated,...
This week I want to get into some more details along the lines of last week's info on creating emails for varied mail clients. For starters, I got some statistics on email client popularity from CampaignMonitor.com. Here are the clients with more than 5% market share....
When building a web page, one must always keep in mind the differences between the way browsers implement (or don't implement) web standards. When building emails, this is much, much worse. For starters, there are no specific standards regarding what should and...
Everyone who accepts credit/debit card payments online needs to be familiar with and implement the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This is easiest for merchants who don't directly handle any cardholder data. For example, if your store hands the shopping...
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...
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...
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...