Check out A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo for a good introduction to the concept of data visualization and some interesting examples of the more exotic techniques being used to describe complicated data sets.
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Podcasting Guide
PoducateMe has created a comprehensive guide to podcasting that covers planning, equipment, recording, editing, hosting, feeds, etc. I think it’s just the right depth of information to get started with; it touches on all the major topics and gives some practical recommendations, but doesn’t overwhelm you with too much information. Update: The Reel Reviews podcast […]
Unit Testing WordPress Plugins
Nikolay Bachiyski gave a good talk at this year’s WordCamp San Francisco about unit testing WordPress plugins. His method uses PHPUnit, which is an additional PEAR package you have to install on the server. You can then use MockPress to simulate WordPress in the tests. Another option is the SimpleTest for WordPress plugin, which uses SimpleTest […]
The Internet Was Built on Open Principles
“The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles… If we want to track what government is doing, see what companies are doing, understand the true state of the planet, find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, not to mention easily share our photos with our friends, we the public, the […]
Visualizing Project Schedules
I’ve been tracking projects on a spreadsheet for awhile in order to make sure I’m on time/budget, but I also recently started using a timeline application to help visualize the scheduling, and that’s been a huge improvement. You get a much better picture of what’s going on at any given point when you’re looking at […]
A Primer on Responsive Web Design
Ben Callahan from Sparkbox shared some good links on responsive web design recently, one of them being this introduction to the subject from A List Apart. One of the things that struck me from the article was that “[mobile] browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.” Another link to Smashing Magazine was a […]
Performance Improvements for Dedicated WordPress Servers
Mark Maunder benchmarked several performance tuning measures with a WordPress installation on a VPS server to show which are most effective. The biggest improvements were from installing PHP-APC, setting up Nginx to proxy concurrent connections for Apache, and using MySQL’s query cache.