http://www.startupcto.com/ 2009-07-01T14:31:16-04:00 http://www.startupcto.com/ http://www.startupcto.com/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2009-06-30T14:23:31-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/resources/best-of-breed-tools-and-software?rev=1246386211 This is a list of tools, modules and libraries that I consider to be 'best-of-breed' for web development. This is heavily geared toward the areas and platforms that I use regularly; esp. Mac OS X, CentOS, FreeBSD, PHP, Javascript/CSS/HTML and Postgres/MySQL. text/html 2009-06-23T00:55:03-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/server-tech/quick-introduction-to-grep?rev=1245732903 grep is a command line utility that lets you search for certain patterns in files, and pull out the lines that match said patterns. grep supports a limited set of regular expressions, but egrep (it's cousin) supports a more complete set. fgrep (the other cousin) is grep without regular expression support, making it much faster. Realistically, you'll almost certainly want to use egrep or fgrep, not normal grep. text/html 2009-06-17T02:11:50-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/processes/documentation-practical-practices-and-ideas?rev=1245219110 This document aims to give some practical ideas and advice for Internet startups and Internet development shops as to what they should consider documenting when they're writing 'documentation'. There's probably a lot of things on here that you don't need to document in your particular case, and there's probably a lot of things that aren't on here that you do need to document. text/html 2009-05-25T16:40:18-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/marketing-tech/google-analytics/old-campaign-data-appearing-in-new-reports?rev=1243284018 If you've used Google Analytics for a while, and run a number of different campaigns (adwords, email, or anything you track with the utm_campaign variable), you may notice that you get really old campaign data showing up in new reports. For example, I'm still getting a few visits from a campaign that I stopped nearly four months ago! I know the campaign isn't running anywhere anymore, so how come new visits with that campaign source are still showing up in my analytics today? text/html 2009-05-25T13:40:46-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/marketing-tech/google-analytics/power-user-tips-and-tricks?rev=1243273246 Google Analytics is the best free traffic analysis software available. It can handle pretty much any sized website (at least within reason), and has a number of fairly advanced capabilities. Basic Install Basic Install is pretty well covered by Google's Docs. Be sure to use the new ga.js code, not the old urchin.js code. Make sure that the tracking code appears once, and only once, on all of your pages. Preferably at the very bottom, right above the closing </body> tag. text/html 2009-05-20T19:52:19-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/processes/web-qa-testing?rev=1242863539 This is intended to be a brief overview of some of the things you need to do think about when doing QA/testing a website or web application. It is aimed more at the front-end than the back-end, and is not comprehensive (but should still serve as an excellent guide). text/html 2009-05-11T17:16:05-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/marketing-tech/seo/search-engine-optimization-basics?rev=1242076565 Search Engine Optimization is a wide and rather unscientific field which changes constantly. Nevertheless, it can be a key to unlocking huge traffic...and huge profits...for a website. Tools FireFox Extensions * SearchStatus -- Firefox extension for seeing page rank, etc. text/html 2009-05-11T02:47:42-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/backend-tech/php/best-practices?rev=1242024462 Leave the slash (/) off URLs, file paths, etc. At some point, you'll probably need to create constants with URLs or file paths. It's rather tempting to put a closing slash on the end, because it looks 'more complete', is fully qualified, etc. Don't do it! You'll end up finding yourself taking the slash off with rtrim() or similar all the time. Better to just leave the slash off, and add it if you need it. text/html 2009-05-11T02:46:25-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/backend-tech/php/mysqli-vs-pgsql-vs-pdo-vs-zend_db?rev=1242024385 If your PHP app needs to talk to a database, there's a lot of debate as to whether you should use PHP's native database extensions (e.g. mysqli and pgsql) or PHP's new PHP Data Objects. mysqli and pgsql talk directly to their respective databases, whereas PDO is a database abstraction layer; it provides a common interface to talk to several different databases. text/html 2009-05-09T19:02:17-04:00 dordal http://www.startupcto.com/processes/code-documentation-standards?rev=1241910137 Documenting your code well is almost as important as making sure it is bug free. In fact, many people would argue that it is more important, because if you document it well, at least somebody else can come in and fix your bugs later on. I like using the *doc format for code documentation (phpdoc, javadoc, etc.) because it is fairly standard and easily machine+human readable. It uses @ identifiers for various peices of documentation (e.g. @param, @return, @see, etc.)