Chris Mallinson

I’ve hated almost every CSS framework I have come across. I’ve always viewed CSS as something very unique to every site. Since every single view of your content involves parsing a CSS file, I feel it really needs to be as optimized as possible. CSS frameworks have always added a bunch of code that would never be used.
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99% of the people who visit a web site don’t care how it works, or how it was built. They don’t care if you’re using ColdFusion or PHP, and they don’t care if you’re using post or get variables. The remaining one percent comprises some techie types like me, and probably you, and some people with less than honourable intentions. For members of the latter group, you don’t WANT them to know what type of technology you use.

This is a good argument for URL rewriting, as is the fact that semantic and descriptive URLs assist in search engine ranking, and general usability. I rewriting my URLs because I like the way they look. I think a website looks much more polished when the URLs are descriptive, free of variable/value pairs, and as short possible.
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This is for Mac people only – sorry Windows friends. I’ve been looking for this for a while.  Now, I’m pretty hard core, but I’m not hard-core enough to use the command line for all my interactions with MySQL.  If you’ve been using the MySQL Query Browser that can be downloaded form mysql.org, you probably know that it will crash if you breathe on it. I’ve looked at a few of the clients that have come out for MySQL, but none have made me want to shell out money to replace what I had.
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I read a really cool book recently. OK, I listened to it. I’ve recently discovered audio books, which are an awesome to be able to read during a commute, or in my case, while painting the house.

The book is Brain Rules by John Medina. It’s a great introduction to the way the human brain works. It covers the biology of the brain, and much of evolutionary origins of its physiology, and human behavior. It’s fascinating enough by itself, but it really gives some good insights on memory and learning that are very applicable to programmers.
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There is a lot of buzz about “The Cloud” and I think it’s warranted. Every time someone gets a CFML engine running in a cloud environment, like the recent cloud successes involving Railo and Open BlueDragon, the community gets a little more interested. I’m sure there’s a way to get ColdFusion server, in certain deployments, to run in the cloud, but licensing issues would arise.
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Bandwidth concerns for web developers used to be centered around the user. I remember making sure every page loaded no more than about 30k worth of assets, just so dial-up users could see my sites in only a few seconds. Now that most users have fast connections, and the few people using dial-up are used to the wait, you can start thinking about how much data your server is pushing out rather than how much data your clients are pulling. Those two numbers do not have to match.
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