beer planet

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who read and gave their 2 cents about the [Wordpress Plugin Development] How To Include CSS and JavaScript Conditionally And Only When Needed By The Posts post. The article was well received and will hopefully spark some optimizations around loading styles and scripts.

Here are some discussions and mentions around the web:

• an article on Weblog Tools Collection
• a forum post on WP Tavern
• twitter retweets

Sure, there are drawbacks to this method and it does require some more processing on the backend and it's not…

Updated: January 25th, 2010

Introduction

If you follow web design at all, you probably see 5 billion top NN posts on a daily basis mentioning site and blog designs, fonts, icons, etc.

However, nobody seems to be paying attention to these little but important guys: comment forms.

If you have an appealing comment box, you are more likely to receive comments (this is based on days of scientific research that I imagined I did in my head) and your content is more likely to be re-shared, voted up, and saved.

I really do feel that way when I visit blogs, especially when an…

Updated: August 8th, 2010

Introduction

In this tutorial, I am going to introduce a WordPress technique that I believe was unpublished until I raised the question a few days ago on the WordPress forums.

In short, the problem I was trying to solve was plugins unnecessarily loading their JavaScript and CSS on *every* page of the blog, even when doing so would achieve absolutely nothing and the plugin wouldn't do any work.

…

As a backend developer, I don't get to work with JavaScript much anymore. However, from time to time, a project would come along that uses JavaScript (specifically, AJAX) to load some backend data on the fly. Of course, nothing works 100% right away*, so I would often have to tweak this JavaScript and massage it until it does what I need.

Here's where Firebug comes in with its JavaScript debugger. I'm used to using a debugger in every language I deal with, so using Firebug is a no brainer. Since it supports breakpoints, stopping execution and inspecting local variables…

Updated: August 8th, 2010

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to…

Updated: June 10th, 2009

* Lightning Fast is a blatant exaggeration. Got you to look though, didn't it?

Introduction

Whether you are a web developer or a self-hosting business owner, the only excuse for not activating compression capabilities of your web server can be that you didn't know about it. And now that you are reading this, there is no excuse left at all.

Here is how big a single page of this blog was before compression was enabled on CSS and Javascript files (computed by YSlow):

And here it is after compression:

As you see, the difference is quite…