The Quickest (and Best) Way to Create Forms: Wufoo

Feb 2nd, 2010 in Other by Siddharth

Wufoo is a web application which intends to simplify forms. Forms can generally be tedious to work with. You’d have to write the XHTML/CSS for the form elements, set up the back end code to capture all the data and then work on generating usable reports for it. Wufoo simplifies this entire process right from form creation to integrating it within your site through extensive theme support to producing pretty, usable reports for you to parse your data.

It even does a lot of advanced stuff, including web hooks and a proper API to access the collected data. Today, we’ll look at how to create a simple form with Wufoo, and then use the API to programmatically access and modify the data collected.

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Cron Jobs 101

Scheduling Tasks with Cron Jobs

Jan 26th, 2010 in Other by Burak Guzel

Cron Jobs are used for scheduling tasks to run on the server. They’re most commonly used for automating system maintenance or administration. However, they are also relevant to web application development. There are many situations when a web application may need certain tasks to run periodically. Today we are going to explore the fundamentals of Cron Jobs.

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An API for the Web: Learning YQL

An API for the Web: Learning YQL

Jan 25th, 2010 in Other by Andrew Burgess

The Yahoo Query Language is a great tool that’s guaranteed to speed up your web development time. The more complex your project, the more time YQL will save you. So, is it a framework, an application, a beverage? Today, you’ll find out what it is and how to use it!

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Getting the Hang of GitHub

Getting the Hang of GitHub

Jan 11th, 2010 in Other by Andrew Burgess

A project is always more fun when you’ve got friends working with you, but how can do it when working on a coding project? I’ll keep my keyboard to myself, thanks.

Enter GitHub. With this web service, you can share your coding projects and collaborate with ease!

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Zero-to-Sixty: Creating and Deploying a Rails App in Under an Hour

Zero-to-Sixty: Creating and Deploying a Rails App in Under an Hour

Jan 4th, 2010 in Other by Adam Hawkins

Give me an hour of your time, and I’ll take you on a fly by of the Ruby on Rails framework. We’ll create controllers, models, views, add admin logins, and deploy using Heroku’s service in under an hour! In this article we’ll create a simple bookshelf application where you can add books and write thoughts about them. Then we’ll deploy the application in just a few minutes. So buckle up because this article moves fast!

This article assumes that you may know what Ruby on Rails is, but not exactly how it works. This article doesn’t describe in-depth how each step works, but it does describe what we need to do, then the code to do that.

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Microformats: What, Why, and How

Microformats: What, Why, and How

Dec 8th, 2009 in Other by Andrew Burgess

There’s a lot of data on the web. Like, a lot. But I would guess that the data most useful to the masses—such as information about people they need to contact or events they need to attend—is stored in HTML, where you can’t easily get at it. So, who you gonna call? Microformats is attempting to take on the job!

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How to Choose a Web Development Framework

15 Most Important Considerations when Choosing a Web Development Framework

Dec 7th, 2009 in Other by Siddharth

New web development frameworks are sprouting out at a more rapid pace than anyone could keep up with. In this article, we are going to determine how to decide on a framework for creating your next, hot web application.

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HTTP Headers for Dummies

HTTP Headers for Dummies

Dec 2nd, 2009 in Other by Burak Guzel

Whether you’re a programmer or not, you have seen it everywhere on the web. At this moment your browsers address bar shows something that starts with “http://”. Even your first Hello World script sent HTTP headers without you realizing it. In this article we are going to learn about the basics of HTTP headers and how we can use them in our web applications.

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20 MySQL Best Practices for Beginners

Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

Nov 25th, 2009 in Databases, Other by Burak Guzel

Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.

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Easy Version Control with Git

Easy Version Control with Git

Oct 28th, 2009 in Other by Andrew Burgess

Have you ever worked on a project that was so unwieldy, you were scared to update a file or add a feature? Maybe the problem was that you weren’t using a version control system. In today’s tutorial, we’ll learn the basics of what might possibly be the best VCS in the world: Git.

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