Latest in web development

Points, badges and leaderboards – the staple of gamification is found in so many places nowadays that the act of avoiding a numerical designation of your worth or status is nigh impossible. Regardless of your personal feelings toward the concept though, there’s no doubt that rewarding users for specific actions on your website, such as sharing [...]
Keep Reading »

Botnets around the world have turned their attention from sending out spam emails to systematically hacking into Wordpress installs; it's a lucrative business given that Wordpress powers 40% of all blogs. Especially considering that even we fell victim to this, it's about time we did a comprehensive post on exactly how to protect your self-hosted Wordpress install.
Keep Reading »

Over the past few years, you may have heard the term HTML5 every once in a while. Whether you know anything about web development or not, the concept can be somewhat nebulous and confusing. Obviously, it’s the next step in the line of HTML, but what exactly does it do? Why is there so much excitement around it? And why does it matter for you?
Keep Reading »

I honestly never thought that I'd be paying for any sort of advertising for my blog, at least not until it entered into the "big time", with many hundreds of thousands of pageviews per day. I never really believed that the cost of advertising on a small scale could really be worth the results. If you only invest less than $10 a day into an advertising campaign, can it really have any impact at all? Don't most advertising campaigns require hundreds of dollars a month or more? This is the question that I set out to answer at the beginning of this year
Keep Reading »

A personal website is probably one of the biggest aspects of your online presence. Sure other areas such as social networks and blogs are important, but your website is like a home base – a hub that everything branches off from. Let's now explore some reasons how just such a website will benefit you tremendously.
Keep Reading »

While Android is a great platform for Facebook and Angry Birds, it can also be a viable mobile solution for web developers. However, web developers can't be pleased with just any regular old text editor -- they need specialized code editors to make it quicker and easier to do their work. I'm going to show you the top four HTML editors that should allow any web developer to do plenty of work on a tablet or some quick fixes on a smartphone.
Keep Reading »

After a rather thorough and taxing look at both Blogger and WordPress.com it's time to evaluate the possibility that some of you might want to switch from one service or the other. That or you floated in on a wave of search traffic, looking at whether this is possible. It's a rather simple operation, but one that requires a bit of testing to see how your content will look on a different platform.
Keep Reading »

Google Analytics is one of the most robust options out there for keeping track of how visitors are interacting with your website, where they're coming from and more. But sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming trying to figure out what all the data means, and to filter down to the data that you really want to to view. There are a few apps that plug themselves into Google Analytics and make it easier to read and view the content that matters to you.
Keep Reading »

For most people, SEO consists of making sure your page content is compelling and the metadata accurately describes the page without keyword stuffing. But there's another side to SEO - the world of blackhats. The dark enclave of the blackhat SEO is a fascinating place, and I took some time to talk to a friend who was involved in the business for some time - here's what we discussed. I know you can't exactly MakeUseOf this, but I hope it's interesting nonetheless.
Keep Reading »

The Cloud is the answer to all the worlds problems, it would seem - a buzzword technology that sends computing full circle right back to where it started - with a thin client model and all the power in a remote server. Economic downturn? No problem - just put it in the cloud! World peace? There's a cloud app for that. I joke, of course - but there are actually some legitimate uses for this "new" technology.
Keep Reading »

In our final lesson in this jQuery for Beginners tutorial series, we’re going to take a brief look at jQuery UI - the most widely used jQuery plugin for adding graphical user interfaces to web apps. From fancy forms and visual effect, to draggable widgets, spinners and dialog boxes – jQuery UI gives you the power to create rich web UIs.
Keep Reading »

Traditionally, writing is a solitary affair. It's just you and the screen, or a piece of paper. Man versus text in a battle of wills, wits, and emotion, until suddenly – you're done. Now it's time to show the world, to put your text out there and watch what happens. But in these digital times, that's not the only way to go about writing.
Keep Reading »

As we near the end of our jQuery mini-tutorial series, it's about time we took a more in-depth look at one of the most used features of jQuery. AJAX allows a website to communicate with a server in the background without require the entire page to reload. From Facebook-style infinite status streams to submitting form data, there's a million different real life situations in which this technique can be useful.
Keep Reading »

Today we're going to kick it up a notch and really show where jQuery shines - events. If you followed the past tutorials, you should now have a fairly good understanding of the basic code structure of jQuery (and all the horrible curly braces that go with it), as well as how find elements of the DOM and some of things you can do to manipulate them. I also showed you how to access the developer console in Chrome and how you might use it to debug your jQuery code.
Keep Reading »

If you've been following my jQuery tutorials so far, you may have already run into some code problems and not known how to fix them. When faced with a non-functional bit of code, it's very difficult to actually pinpoint the offending line of code - and that's where debugging and developer tools come in. So before continuing with some more complex jQuery code, I thought we'd examine the tools available in the world's most popular browser - Chrome.
Keep Reading »