Yelp: A Poster Child For Semantic Markup

Search Engine Land.com:
Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.
There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings [...]

Martin Belam’s Advice To Hackers At The Guardian’s July 2009 Hack Day

An amusing hacks-conference lightning talk-turned-blog post on web development: “Graceful Hacks” – UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days. Martin Belam’s talk at The Guardian’s July 2009 Hack Day must have been both funny and useful:

Funny: “However, I am given to understand that this is now deprecated and has gone out of fashion.”
Useful: “the Yahoo! Design [...]

SIMILE Timeline For, Um, Timelines

Timeline is a SIMILE project that uses Exhibit JSON (which you can create with Babel).

Another Approach To Web Forms

Just saw a cool demo of XForms and Orbeon Forms.

WordPress For Zach’s Web Programming Class

Zach is apparently too lazy to prep his own lectures for the last few days of his intro to web programming class. After bringing his students from zero to database-backed web-apps, he asked Matt do JavaScript and me to introduce WordPress as an application platform.
The WordPress API makes it easy to write plugins that modify [...]

Mobile Safari Advanced Features

f you’re already building web apps, you might wonder why you should bother to build an iPhone native app. The short answer is that you might not need to, but you should still optimize the app for iPhones.
Native-looking chrome
Set these in the head:

// set a custom icon for when a user bookmarks the app to [...]

New Plugin: wpSMS Supports Sending SMS Messages

Scaling PHP

This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow?
And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. We [...]

Web Form Validation With jQuery

Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms.

Browser-Based JSON Editors

JSONLint, a JSON validator, was the tool I needed a while ago to be able to play with JSON as format for exchanging data in some APIs I was working on a while ago. And now I like JSON well enough that I’m thinking of using it as an internal data format in one of [...]