Articles & Essays Feed

Articles, essays and tips & tricks on topics including web development, web education and Canadiana.

  1. Saving Signatures with PHP & MySQL

    A small PHP tutorial on how to capture the signature from Signature Pad and store it in a MySQL database, for later retrieval.

  2. Marking Up Code for the Ambitious

    Code markup in online content and documentation can be improved. Here’s a proposal for the ambitious semanticists out there.

  4. Mobile Testing Suite

    Since the mobile internet is growing at an extremely quick pace I felt it was prudent to start testing/developing sites on mobile devices.

  5. Open Data Ottawa

    My trials and tribulations in creating the Ottawa Park data set and a little overview of what my Open Data Ottawa app will be.

  6. Save View Source

    View source is an extremely important part of the web and one of the most important tools in my belt. But its existence is being threatened. Save View Source!

  7. Mercurial or Git?

    Recently I made the decision. When SVN started to go wonky after my update to Snow Leopard, I knew I had to switch to a DVCS, but I didn’t know which to use.

  8. First Lab Project: Signature Pad

    Signature Pad is a jQuery plugin for assisting in the creation of an HTML5 canvas based signature pad. Records the drawn signature in JSON for later regeneration.

  9. Mental Visualizations: Colour Association

    One common trick to remember things is association. To continue my series in mental visualization I am going to discuss my mind’s automatic, subconscious association of colours and numbers.

  10. Mental Visualizations: The Year Loop

    Do you ever think about how you think about the calendar year? Meta-thinking? We all have our little quirks about how we see and visualize things in our mind. The following is how the year passes in my mind.

  11. The Web is Not Microsoft Word

    Rich text editors are all over the web, dumbing down users and proliferating WYSIWYG content. The following is a proposal for a semantic text editor, AKA a WYSIWYM editor.

  12. Canadians are Afraid to be Canadian, Online

    I’m proud to be Canadian and I want the whole online world to know. The simplest way to scream ‘I am Canadian’, online, is to lease a .ca domain. So why do so many Canadians use .com instead of .ca?

  13. A Proposal for CLF 3.0

    All Canadian web developers have had a run-in with CLF and its frustrations. CLF 2.0 has a few issues—many less than CLF 1—that could be solved in the next version.

  14. Evolution of a Personal Website

    Covering the trials and tribulations of designing a web-site for myself, an overview of the new design and my inspirations.

  15. Obligatory Hello World Post

    An introduction to my new site, a quick overview of what it’s all about and a sample of the exciting things to come.