Using “click here” as anchor text is considered a bad practice because it doesn’t tell the user what the link will direct them to by itself, without users having to read the surrounding text; because “clicking” is irrelevant in many situations (assistive devices, smartphones, etc); and because it is meaningless to search engines indexing the page.
Scaling WordPress Installations
TJ Stein gave a really good presentation at WordCamp Chicago 2011 about scaling and performance issues with WordPress installations. He focuses a lot on using ngnix instead of Apache, but also covers PHP object caching, Varnish, CDNs, benchmarking, etc. It’s a good overview of current practices, but there’s also a lot of specific tips throughout.
Rejecting Small Font Sizes
D Bnonn Tennant makes a good case for using larger font sizes, although I would probably vote for 14 pixels instead of 16. And of course it should be set in em’s instead of pixels.
Passing Extra Arguments to a jQuery Event Handler
This Fiddle shows how to pass extra parameters to an event handler function in jQuery.
Why Hash-bang URLs are Bad
WebMonkey has a good article explaining why hash-bang URLS are a bad idea. If you’re not familiar with them, they have #! symbols at the beginning of the path, e.g. http://twitter.com/#!/username. They rely entirely on JavaScript to parse and therefore make the site inaccessible to browsers without JavaScript (or those with it turned off by the user), assistive technologies […]
Another Obtuse Attempt to Control the Internet
Check out Mark Jaquith’s post on the PROTECT IP Act for a basic rundown on why it’s bad and what you can do to help stop it.
Deflating the Hype Behind Cloud Computing
In a lot of ways I’m leery of the recent trends towards converting traditional products that you buy once and own into services that you have to lease every month, and hosting data with centralized corporate networks instead of locally, so I appreciate Mark Maunder’s post on his experiences collocating his company’s hardware instead of using the […]