PHP has become the hot commodity recently, exploding into the public as one of the most popular and easiest programming languages to learn. It has quickly swept the web by storm for its easy of use and also vast expandability for web 2.0 applications. With more and more people interested in web development every day, there are countless resources for learning PHP from beginner to professional rather quickly.

I have compiled a great list of some of my personal favorites for learning PHP, and I encourage everyone from beginner to expert level of PHP to take a look at them. Not only are these books great resources for learning new concepts with PHP, they are also great reference materials for future projects! Continue reading…

With more and more resources being shared across the web today, there are tons of people starting careers in web design or web development. With how many tutorials about HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP there are out there, becoming a web designer has never been easier.

I collected a list of 26 great websites to follow to learn web design. These sites have blog posts, tutorials, tips, tricks, articles, freebies, and more for all of you aspiring web designers. If you have a feed reader, I definitely recommend adding some of these sites as they are constantly posting up new and valuable material for beginning and new website designers, front-end web coders, and backend web developers. Continue reading…

After spending some time on the web today researching a few web design tpics, I ran into a very peculiar concept: a CMS system based entirely in Flash. Is it possible? Oh, it’s very possible, and it’s in active beta as you read this!

FlashMoto is a groundbreaking script based on Adobe’s ever popular Flash. As more and more websites turn to Flash for enhanced UI, visual effects, and heightened creativity, there have not been many frameworks for developers to work with and base their applications around Flash. However, although it may seem like a real hassle, the development team with FlashMoto really did a great job Continue reading…

I know it’s been forever since I’ve updated this blog, so I figured I’d post a bit about what I’m doing currently. I had, a few months ago, started school again, and since this is my senior year it’s been a great time. However as my first semester has come to a close, I have lost 2 great classes (unfortunately). I was signed up for an independent study to practice for my A+ certification, a class with just me and my friend in it. It was a great learning experience, and definitely a change of pace from my usual software and programming-based use of computers. And even though I do work for Geek Squad, it was nice to have a class where I could just work on whatever.

I spent a lot of the class working with CentOS Linux, which was and still sort of is 100% new to me. I realize that most websites and web hosts use Linux-based servers, and I’ve found out through careful examination and readings that the Linux distro most commonly chosen is CentOS. So I grabbed an old machine the school had, downloaded a copy of CentOS 5, and thew that on there and started going at it. At first I didn’t really see how much different it was from Windows, until I started getting into the folder structure and such… it was all so different! I spent a good 5-6 weeks studying Continue reading…

Forums are a very popular part of the internet today. They allow members to discuss all sorts of different topics, share knowledge and experience, and learn from each other. I am going to introduce to you 5 different forums on the web that will teach you a ton about website design, website development, and maintaining a website. So strap on your thinking caps, and get ready to delve into these awesome communities!

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Contrary to popular belief, it’s not very difficult to build a website from scratch. The idea seems confusing and causes many to give up before even starting! But do not fret, building a website can be both fun and easy, and I’m going to prove it.

I have a few tips and tricks up my sleeves for the upcoming and interested web developers reading this, and you don’t even need to know how to code! Granted it does help A LOT if you understand some basic HTML and CSS, but it’s not needed to build a website. What you should have is a decent hosting company and domain name at the least, that way you can brand yourself.

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There are new start-up companies that pop up every day, and there are always new ideas being shared across the internet. However there will always be the top sites as well. The creme of the crop of social networking, web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it. These are the websites that everybody loves to visit and uses on a daily basis, and these are also the companies that are looking for the most help. Most people to visit YouTube do not think about getting a job there, though I would bet it would be an awesome work environment. So with a little digging around, I have found 11 of the coolest companies to land a job as a web developer. Note that I have never actually worked at any of them, so I can’t say first-hand how it would be, but why not give them a little consideration if you’re interested?

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Along with Digg’s sleek color scheme and AJAX-based development, there are many fancy features on the site that fascinate me. So for today’s demo, I have decided to create a character counter that counts how many characters you have entered into a field a limits the amount you can have. This is seen on Digg’s submit page, which limits the amount of characters you can enter for a title and a description. It is a really neat effect that can be useful for many different reasons, such as limiting how long a username can be, or making sure a set number of characters are entered for information (like a phone number).

If you are interested in checking out the demo, you can view it by clicking below:

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If you have ever been to Digg’s submit page, after entering the URL, you will see some forms to fill out. These include a title and description, along with choosing a category for your submission. These are very common fields that you would expect to see on a submission page for an article, but what is great about Digg is that it shows you a live preview of your submission at the bottom of the page, and it updates as you change it around. Today I am going to show you how you can mimic this behavior with your own site using just simple JavaScript, and how it can really help improve your user’s experience!

If you would like to view a live example of this, I’ve got one hosted right here. Check it out and let me know what you think, and please do continue on with the tutorial!

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