With Christmas right around the corner, you’ve undoubtedly seen (and heard) the Salvation Army bell-ringers asking for your donations. While I’m all for helping those less fortunate than myself, I avoid the Salvation Army like the plague.
Why I Don’t Donate to The Salvation Army
How to change the image when you share a link on Facebook
When someone shares a link to your website on Facebook, certain information about your site (or more specifically, the actual link that is shared) is automatically gathered and displayed. For example, if you type www.google.com you will see something like:
This article is going to explain how this process works, and how you can change the image and information that gets displayed about your website.
Custom Kindle Screen Savers
In this article, I’m going to go over some of the basics for making and using custom screen savers on your Amazon Kindle.
One of the many things that I love about my Kindle is being able to personalize it by adding custom screen savers. Unfortunately, there’s not a way to do this from the factory — I’m still not sure why Amazon doesn’t include this feature. Thankfully, a group of skilled programmers have come up with a way to be able to use custom screen savers on your Kindle.
The Last Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour
If you missed the live launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour then I highly recommend taking the 15 minutes to watch it now!
PHP Session-Based Flash Messages
As a web developer, you will no doubt have the need to display feedback to your users. There are several times when giving your users feedback is critical — When the user has submitted a form, entered incorrect login details, etc.
In the past, a common way of handling feedback like this was to append the data to the URL:
http://www.website.com?error=invalid_email
This method is not efficient for many reasons. For starters, you have to add some kind of message handler, usually in the form of long if/else or switch statements to any page where you want to display your messages. This method also clutters up the URL, and if not handled correctly, runs the risk of having your error messages/pages indexed by search engines.
The Secret Advantage of Facebook Groups
Lately, at work we’ve been experimenting with the differences between Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages, and which of the two offers the best engagement with our users.
Among the things we found, we stumbled upon one major feature that really makes us like Facebook Groups: Deliverability.
When you make an update to your Facebook Page, the users who have “liked” your Page will see your update on their Wall. That’s great and all, but that’s it. Facebook Groups, on the other hand, provide a much wider variety of notifications. Users who have “liked” or joined your Group will receive:
- An update on their Wall
- A Notification
- And, perhaps best of all, they are also sent an email. The greatest advantage is that this email comes from an @facebook.com email address, so your chances of inboxing are pretty much 100%!
When choosing whether to create a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group be sure to keep this subtle advantage in mind. It could really impact the way that your users receive your message.
Welcome to My Little Piece of the Internets
I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with this site yet. I mainly got it to help secure my spot when you Google my name. Some old guy and a paleontologist with the same name were outranking me… And we can’t have that, can we?
I guess I’ll use this site as a medium to freely express myself. If you know me in real life, then you probably know that I have no “filter” — I usually say exactly what’s on my mind regardless of the consequences or who it may offend. This site will probably be no different. If you’re offended by cursing, dark humor, or pictures of cute kittens then you should probably leave now. Actually, on second thought, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll never see a picture of a cute kitten here. Sorry.
As I find the time, I’ll likely post things such as code samples, random photos I’ve taken, helpful articles, drunken ramblings, things that piss me off, books that I’m reading, awesome ideas I have, and pretty much anything else I feel like adding. That’s the beautiful thing about having my own website: I can put whatever I want on it.
Well, that about sums it up. Go find something else to do now.