Links

Nettuts.com: 10 Most Sought-after Skills in Web Development

In a time of economic crisis, web developers and freelancers everywhere have started chewing their fingernails. However, no matter how bad the economy worsens, there will always be work in certain booming fields of web development.

As the moderator of the Freelance Switch job board, there are certain types of jobs that are constantly in demand. Here are the 10 skills that are or will be in highest demand for developers. If you are proficient in these skills, you’ll be in a great position to find work and weather any economic downturn.

Nettuts.com – Ruby on Rails from Scratch Week 3

Continuing the series from nettuts.com, week 3 has just been published.

Welcome to Ruby on Rails From Scratch Week 3! This week, we’ll focus on specific things that you need to know about the framework. For example, we’re going to talk about manipulating the structure of the project in two ways (rendering & redirecting). We’ll also talk about how you add links in rails, and how to comment code. Let’s get started already!

CSS-Tricks.com: Modal Login Pages

Over at CSS-Tricks.com, there is an interesting article about Modal Login Pages, complete with a tutorial to make your own.

These are common in desktop applications when a program needs an important decision made. They are becoming more and more popular in web applications thanks to the JavaScript “light box” (or one of it’s other many pseudonyms). Undeniably, they are overused. However, there are circumstances where modal boxes make sense and are used effectively to focus a users attention to the important task at hand. In some situations, logging into a website is one of these important tasks.

Nettuts.com – 10 Smart Javascript Techniques to Improve Your UI

Over at NetTuts.com, they’ve posted a useful arcticle discussing 10 smart javascript techniques to improve your UI.

Javascript can add a lot of special effects that can really improve the user’s experience. Here are 10 simple and clever Javascript techniques that add an extra dose of usability to any webpage.

Javascript is typically used as an aesthetic language in web development. This means that web developers should almost always be using Javascript for one thing only: Improving the visitor’s experience. There are many clever and useful ways to improve a site from the user interface perspective. A developer can find nearly any snippet of Javascript to achieve what he or she wants to accomplish.

Nettuts.com – Learn Ruby on Rails from Scratch: Week 2

Continuing the series from nettuts.com,week 2 has just been published.

Welcome to Ruby on Rails From Scratch Week 2. Hopefully this sequel to week 1 will help to further your education in Rails. This week, we’ll do a little bit more with getting an actual page up and running. We will also work on adding more interactivity by embedding ruby in HTML and learning a little about variables. After that, we’ll learn more about Ruby’s beautiful URL structure and how to manipulate it, plus other things as well. This is definitely going to be a packed week!

Nettuts.com – Learn Ruby on Rails from Scratch: Week 1

Over in nettuts.com, they’ve published a series of Ruby on Rails articles for learning the language.

Ruby on Rails. . .by now most people have heard the hype about it. It promises more effective code, total object orientation, and true MVC architecture to say the least. As far as my own personal experience, it has been all that and more. The code is beautiful, easy to maintain, and edit. In a recent project I was working on, it took me less than 10 hours to do the application, as compared to at least double that if I was writing in PHP.

Automatically back up your entire web server files and databases to Amazon S3

Christina Warren has a comprehensive and excellent tutorial on creating a Ruby script to back up your entire web server, including databases, and upload them directly to an Amazon S3 bucket. The tutorial is geared toward Media Temple, but I imagine could be adapted to other hosts. She also did a screencast demo demonstrating it [...]

Interspire.com: Creating a Basic Shopping List Script with PHP

Being healthy is the “new” thing around the office at Interspire. Rodney and I have taken up the challenge of Mitch and Ed and have been keeping to a strict routine of exercise and a healthy diet.

Instead of scouring the local take-aways for lunch everyday, we now pop on down to the supermarket to buy fresh produce and meats to make our own lunches. However, we always found ourselves in a situation where we would forget something. Sure we could be old fashion and make a list and put it on the office fridge, but then I asked myself, “why do that when I could whip up an online shopping list?”

Our list became a hot little item around the office, so I thought I’d spend an hour explaing how you too can build your very own shopping list with. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use this just as a shopping list – it can also be a To-Do list or practically a list of anything you need to remember.

In this article I do assume you have a small amount of PHP and MySQL experience, so if you don’t then you might have to stick to a written shopping list for now.