by Josh Highland on April 13, 2011
That’s right, I’m speaking at the 2011 Orange County WordCamp, May 14th.
What is a WordCamp? WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.
I’m going to be presenting the topic, “Optimizing WordPress: Speed Matters”
By itself, WordPress is fast and snappy application but over time your site may become sluggish and laggy. A slow site is not good for your readers, or your search engine rankings. In a one hour presentation, I’m going to show some practical ways to optimize your WordPress sites content and configuration. The presentation will cover best practices, helpful plugins and real life optimization examples.
I’m excited to check out the other topics that are being presented. The OC WordCamp has three distinct tracks of sessions, beginners, advanced, and business minded users.
If you’re free on May 14th 2011 and love WordPress, you should come and hang out with some fellow WordPress users. http://2011.oc.wordcamp.org
by Josh Highland on March 22, 2011
I originally found this on TheOatmeal.com. It’s funny because its true. I can hardly read my own handwriting now, but I sure can type!
by Josh Highland on March 3, 2011
by Josh Highland on February 12, 2011
Years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Forta and listen to his thoughts on web development. One thing that stuck with me was his statement that:
“Dynamic programming languages like PHP and Coldfusion are great, but developers need to leverage the database more. Allow the database to do it’s job, the heavy lifting”
With that being said, I was recently working with a database that contained users first names. The data was not snantized at entry, and contained a mix of lower cased (ex. josh) and upper cased (ex. Josh) first characters in the firstname column. I needed to always present the users first name in a capitalized format.
The first solution that most developers would reach for is dynamically parsing the users first name, then upper-casing the first character. This works, but in my opinion isn’t the most elegant solution.
With a simple SQL statement, like the one below, we can return the users first name already in a capitalized state.
SELECT (UPPER(LEFT(firstname,1))+SUBSTRING(firstname,2,LEN(firstname))) AS firstname
FROM users
It’s quick to implement, its easy to work with, and it’s also very fast on the performance scale.
Yes, I understand that there are cool convenience functions in like
ucfirst() in PHP, but I’m a lazy programmer and I don’t want to have to remember to use
ucfirst() every time I’m dealing with the users name. I’d rather get the information in the correct format the first time, then remembering to groom it every time before I use it. Set it and forget it.
by Josh Highland on February 3, 2011
Most of the time I only work with UTF-8 or UTF-16 character encodings. With that said, recently I was working on an old coldfusion project. Do to database restrictions, required all inputs from the user into the application to be Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character encoded.
Coldfusion does not have a good way of checking the character encoding of a string, so I had to pull out some of my Java skillz.
Dropping into Java from ColdFusion is a lot easier then it sounds. Check it out
<cfscript>
//use this to test character encoding. We only want Latin-1
encoder = createObject("java", "java.nio.charset.Charset").forName("ISO-8859-1").newEncoder();
if(encoder.canEncode(testVar))
{
//its Latin-1
}
else
{
/NOT Latin-1
}
</cfscript>The Java layer of Coldfusion is very powerful and under utilized by many developers.
If you want to see some true ColdFusion magic, check out the ColdBox Framework, http://ColdBoxFramework.com
