Programming

In the days before Google, search engines like Excite , Hotbot, and Altavista larded themselves up with content in a desperate effort to delay users beyond the two pages of a se... 09/24/2006

Ever since Alan Cooper’s 1999 book The Inmates are Running The Asylum was published, everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels o... 09/24/2006

The proliferation of usability labs is a sign of success for the field of user-centered design. Whether it’s a low-rent lab comprised of a couple adjacent conference rooms... 09/22/2006

“…looking at a company’s homepage is like reading its palm…” This truism appeared in a recent Business Week article about Yahoo. The author goes... 09/22/2006

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rav... 09/22/2006

The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate a system for manipulating a database without writing SQL queries. I introduce a number of concepts including the DataObject and DataA... 08/31/2006

Web developers now face problems of similar difficulty in dealing with decent-size desktop application projects. Project support and continuous evolution involves lots of effort... 08/26/2006

In the world of corporate development I've known a few phenomenal developers. I'm talking about those A+ people whom you would quit your job for to go start a company. A... 08/22/2006

Ever wondered how different popular sites function? The key to this answer is a dedicated server. Such a server that is completely owned by its user thereby avoiding all of the... 08/16/2006

Be inspired. Some tips that can be useful for website developers. 10/30/2007

(...)I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a long article. More than likely, I'll put a version of this up on the MySQL developer zone and PHP zone. This article... 08/13/2006

When you are trying to optimize your queries to run quickly and efficiently, you may encounter queries that really should run faster. That's where EXPLAIN comes in handy. Th... 08/12/2006

(...)You get object-oriented languages like Java and Smalltalk, and function-oriented languages like PHP. Well that was the theory, until PHP introduced its objects model in PHP... 08/08/2006

The Singleton is one of the simplest Patterns to understand. It's common usage is to ensure that only one instance of a class is ever instantiated. The reason for wanting su... 07/30/2006

The Registry is one of those Patterns where once you understand it, it seems so incredibly useful. Think of it as a basket; using a Registry you can add data (both values and ob... 07/30/2006