Development Archives

  1. Friendly Search URLs

    I’ve recently gotten several e-mails asking how I created my friendly search URLs here on alexking.org (also used on the Crowd Favorite web site, etc.); I figured others might be interested in this as well. It’s really rather simple, there are just a couple of places to make changes. Note: you must be using nice…

  2. CAPTCHA or a Challenge Response E-mail?

    SPAM sucks for everyone and fighting against it is a losing battle, yet we web developers have to do our best to limit it the best we can. I’m facing a number of situations where I have to choose between offering the user a CAPTCHA or a challenge-response e-mail (e-mail them a link to click).…

  3. Weird WordPress Settings Issue

    I debugged a strange WordPress issue for a client today, one I hadn’t seen or heard of before, so I thought I’d document it. The symptoms: IE7 would try to download the wp-login.php page instead of loading it. Mobile devices (using my mobile plugin would complain that they could not view the site due to…

  4. Mail.app Plugin Wanted: Kill This Thread

    Would someone create a Mail.app plugin to implement kill this thread1 functionality? That would be grreeeeaaaaat. Basically, auto-delete (or create filters to auto-delete) all future messages by In-Reply-To headers (and possibly References headers, now exactly sure how it all works). [back]

  5. Startup Weekend Status Report

    Startup Weekend is in full swing – so far it has exceeded my expectations. If any of you have been involved in startups before then the idea of a big team of people, many of who have never met before, trying to build something in a weekend is probably one that will make you a…

  6. jQuery Position Tip

    I recently switched a project from Prototype/Scriptaculous to jQuery, and overall I’m very pleased with the move. It’s sometimes a little weird using jQuery because I’ve been thinking JavaScript in DOM for so long, but I don’t feel an urge to go back. 🙂 Everything was working great after the conversion, with one exception. Elements…

  7. “Bottom Section” Footers

    One of the elements I added to the Crowd Favorite web site is a bottom section footer. This is part of my mullet design of the site: business in front, party in the back (or at the bottom in this case). The top of the site is a little more corporate and traditional, the bottom…

  8. Tips for Migrating Between Macs

    I’ve used a variety of means to migrate from one Mac to another over the years: Manually copy stuff over and do clean reinstalls. Clone the HD from one machine to another. And today, I used the migration assistant. I imagine the migration assistant is great for most folks, but it’s less than ideal for…

  9. Building alexking.org 2.0, part 11: Monetization

    Note: This is the eleventh (and last) in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. When I first launched alexking.org back in 2002, I didn’t plan to make any money from it or do any advertising on it. I remember friends telling me I should put up ads when I was slashdotted…

  10. SVN Repositories

    If you’re not a developer, feel free to skip this post. 🙂 I’ve been re-organizing my SVN repositories over the last week or so. This is what I’ve finally come up: clients – all client projects live in here, with a sub-dir for each client. documentation – docs for Tasks Pro™, Tasks™, etc. Having them…

  11. Building alexking.org 2.0, part 10: CMS Benefits

    Note: This is the tenth in a series of articles about the building of alexking.org 2.0. I’ve covered a lot of the benefits to having your entire site in a single CMS earlier in this series, but let me quickly highlight them again here. Flexibility With the content completely separated from the presentation, you can…

  12. alexking.info, Themed

    As noted previously, I’m using Tumblr for my tumblog. On of the cool things Tumblr allows you to do is create a custom theme for your tumblog – which I’ve done: It basically matches the theme you see here on alexking.org, but the navigation menu at the top has links out to the sources for…

  13. “Crazy” User Requests

    I get lots of e-mails regarding my WordPress plugins, running the entire spectrum from: Thank you so much, this works perfectly and is exactly what I wanted. to: Your plugin sucks, it dosen’t work and it doesn’t do what I want. Thankfully I get much more of the former than the latter. 😉 This is…

  14. All Things Digital

    Yesterday evening All Things Digital, a new home for Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and John Paczkowski was unleashed on the internet. I’ve been working on this for the past month and a half, and it’s been a real whirlwind project. When we got the contract to build the site using WordPress, we were warned that…