web development

Certification schmertification! Metrics schmetrics! Measuring the Drupal social/rockstar graph

Posted 5 Oct 2010 by Laura Scott

Certifications in software make me sneeze. Or roll my eyes. Or shrug. Yes, I'm a skeptic of certifications, and leery of motives of people pushing them. To me, certifications are a way to make money not from clients but from peers. It's like a tax. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Instead, pay thousands to some firm so you can get that seal of approval. And in the end, does it mean anything?

And yet there is this obsession with measuring people. It's a way of gatekeeping, of creating scarcity, of one-upsmanship. I don't think such things are a measure of quality. They're typically market tools employed to help one group of people compete over another group. It's part of a "there oughta be a law" approach to life.

Web designers and developers, take the A List Apart survey

Posted 15 Dec 2009 by Laura Scott

The more the merrier (or at least more accurate). Take a few moments to fill out the A List Apart Survey. This isn't just for designers.

A cautionary tale regarding theme download sites

Posted 7 Apr 2008 by Laura Scott

Via GigaOM:

Back in November, we looked at WordPress themes being distributed by third parties who’d embedded hidden code to allow the insertion of arbitrary content. Now a rash of sites are reporting that their blogs have been subverted....

...There are lots of reasons a hacker may want to inject code into a page:

To infect visitors by exploiting a browser vulnerability

To place ads they can then get revenue from

To embed links to blogs they own, improving their page rank

To entice people to click on links that lead them elsewhere

The clever thing about the WordPress hack was that it would check for code to insert into a page each time it was loaded, but if none was available, it would just sit there quietly.

Firefox 3 making online life much nicer

Posted 24 Mar 2008 by Laura Scott

Today I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 Beta 4. I could not do it before, but now that the Web Developer tools are updated and Firebug has a 1.1 beta that works in FF3, that's enough for me.

I don't know about you, but on both Macs I use regularly, Firefox 2 was crashing all the time. Last night, while writing a blog post for BlogHer, my browser crashed at least a dozen times. On my Mac Pro, Firefox completely melted down -- twice -- requiring complete rebuild from the start, manually adding one plug-in at a time. But I had to stick it out because I need those developer tools. I cannot imagine working without Firebug.

The new UI is clean, and seems to take up a bit less space. And so far FF3 is fast. Me likes.

On the frontier, not everyone knows their way around

Posted 6 Oct 2007 by Laura Scott

While I was laying in bed last night, I found myself questioning my post yesterday and the attitudes reflected in Joe the Peacock's mocking of what appears to be a rather clueless potential client.

He seems to have struck a nerve, judging by Joe's forums:

Yes let us hear the douchebag please!

I think Joe's got to have at least a little bit of masochist in him to be a consultant, especially an Internet consultant. Sir Geek and I did it for several years and listening to the clients blather on about what they think they want/need is enough to make your brain explode.

Freaking hysterical.

Okay, at first reading of Joe's rant, I confess I did laugh a little. It certainly was outrageous enough to inspire me to post a link.