Every trade has it’s tools and web development is no exception. It has quite a few in fact. Throughout the years of doing web development I have used many different tools and have settled on a core group of half a dozen or so. It is definitely worth your while examining those I recommend, and possible a few that will receive honorable mention here. While it’s true that tools don’t make talent, they certainly speed it along!
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Author Archives: jay
Building Web Sites for Profit and Fun – a Money Making Tutorial Intro.
There was once a time when business moved with the pace of the locals, generally slow and steady. Today, business must keep up with the world and the fast pace of the internet. It’s a fascinating prospect and a momentous movement. But it can be very challenging and scary at times as well. More and more, it seems, success is dependent on the effective and efficient utilization of the internet. Throughout my sojourn in this digital realm, I have run across many who have an aptitude and a desire to build effective websites for profit but really don’t know the finer points of making a success out of it. So here I am going to expound and share some secrets I have learned over the ten years I have been doing this.
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Ruby on Rails – Tutorial 1 – Creating a Rails Project
I heard about Rails back when I was a programmer at BlueHost / Hostmonster since they are one of the “preferred” web hosting companies for Ruby on Rails type applications. There weren’t very many clients who used it, but when questions came in about it, I always seemed to be approached with them. I guess tech support people think that if you are generally willing to help them out and you know a programming language, you know them all. Well, I eventually got sick of saying I don’t know and got some basic knowledge going of Ruby on Rails, and was pleasantly surprised!
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Perl on Linux – Greedy Regular Expressions and the Question Marks that Tame Them
In 1986, Larry Wall invented a scripting language to solve the problems of generating reports for system administrators on unix. He called it the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language since that was its function. And it does do that. In a Unix based OS where everything is output in text, Perl has dominated somewhat because it so easy to use but mostly because of its powerful and easily used regular expression capabilities.
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Perl on Linux – Formatting Text and Reports
Surely one of the most annoying things about working in a non-gui environment is convenient formatting. We have all had output that was off due to tabs or new lines or variables that overran their boundaries in the output area, etc. Provisioning for such things can be tedious, time consuming, and highly annoying. Luckily for us, perl provides a text formatting feature that is built in and fairly easy to use.
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Perl on Linux – Bitwise Manipulations
Today’s attention is directed at one of the less well known and certainly one of the least understood and used areas of perl. Although direct manipulation of bits is the only thing that a computer really does, programmatic manipulation thereof has been abstracted out for all but the tasks that can only be solved by its use. Still, there are situations and times when it becomes necessary and proper for one bit to dissolve the logical bonds which hold them to the byte and to assume, amongst the operators and variables of the language, an equal station.
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Perl on Linux – Anonymous Hashes, Hash References, and Passing Them to Subroutines.
There comes a time in every perl programmers life when they have to master the hash. Anyone who has programmed in Perl for very long has run into problems such as subroutine arguments getting confusing, lagging programs due to hash tables being copied over and over, and searched for a simpler way to maintain and access data. All this and more can be achieved by the simple use of anonymous hash tables and the passing of hash table references to subroutines for processing.
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Windows .NET in C# Major – Web Interaction With Self Signed SSL Certs. Part 2
Last week, we started making the web interaction class and did the self-signed compatibility functions as well as some setup ones. You can see all that here. Today we get into the meat and potatoes and get started on the functions that will actually send and receive the data we care about. So here we go!
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Windows .NET in C# Major – Web Interaction With Self Signed SSL Certs. Part 1
I am going to shift gears a bit, actually change cars entirely, and do a windows programming tutorial in Microsoft’s .NET environment using C#. Why? Because the world runs windows and in the World of Windows, the fastest method of development is through the .NET framework and the best language on that framework is, without a doubt, C#. I know. I took a poll. Stats never lie.
In this tutorial we are going to create a class to handle website interactions, giving us a simple way to post or get information from a web server, with or without an SSL cert and even a self signed one. Usually self signed certs present a problem since the cryptographic side tries to validate the authenticity of the cert, presenting problems. We will get around that.
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Perl on Linux – Making a Daemon
One if the nice advantages to linux is the ability to create daemons relatively quickly and get them to do your brute and routine work for you. For this example, I am going to use perl to create the daemon, since perl is the glue that holds the bricks of linux together. Its regex functionality combined with fast and easy syntax makes it almost too easy to use for quick and dirty programming in the text based realm of linux. So without further adieu, the daemon:
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