Ah now this is pure gold, 21 things to keep in mind when coding for MySQL. Most of these I knew but it was good to be reminded. Some of them are entirely new to me though:

• Use ENUM over VARCHAR: ENUM type columns are very fast and compact. Internally they are stored like TINYINT, yet they can contain and display string values.
• Store IP Addresses as UNSIGNED INT: Many programmers will create a VARCHAR(15) field without realizing they can actually store IP addresses as integer values. With an INT you go down to only 4 bytes of space, and have a fixed size field instead.
• Do Not ORDER BY RAND(): This is one of those tricks that sound cool at first, and many rookie programmers fall for this trap. You may not realize what kind of terrible bottleneck you can create once you start using this in your queries.

Priceless information. I’ll be referring back to this list over and over again.

Let’s face it: Web-safe fonts are very limiting. Maybe a dozen fonts are out there that are widely enough adopted to be considered “Web safe,” and those ones aren’t exactly spectacular for much other than body type. Sure, Georgia, Arial or Times New Roman work just fine for the bulk of the text on your website, but what if you want something different for, let’s say, headings? Or pull quotes? What then?

You have a few options. Many people just opt for more elaborate CSS font stacks, with their preferred fonts up front. But that still leaves a big chunk of your visitors seeing the same old Web-safe fonts.

Enter dynamic text replacement. In addition to font stacks, why not replace the heading text with an image, embedded font, or bit of Flash? These methods are easier than they sound and the end result is that the vast majority of users will see the beautiful typography you want them to see. A word of warning, though: don’t use dynamic text replacement for all of the text on your page. All that would do is slow it down and frustrate your visitors. Instead, save it for headings, menu items, pull quotes and other small bits of text.

Photo Credit: “The Parade of Autumn Begins Today” by Brian Hathcock

“Something for the weekend sir?”

If you’re a little bored this weekend why not check out some of these great websites? There’s some amazing content here and I guarantee that you’ll be able to kill a few hours with these exciting Internet destinations. Continue Reading…

Photo Credit: George Steinmetz/Corbis, © National Geographic

A directory of my recent bookmarks. Maximum coolness!

Continue Reading…

Scripts like sIFR, Flir, and of course Cufón made it easy for developers and designers to be able to use nice fonts as such as Myriad Pro or Helvetica Neue and a lot of websites have taken advantage of these engines to beautify their typography with great-loking fonts.

This is clearly a great thing, because web safe fonts are extremely limitating. Though, there is a problem that many people seems to neglect: Lots of fonts licences — even free ones — don’t allow you to embed them on webpages, or redistribute them.

In this article, you’ll find a showcase of ten absolutely beautiful fonts that you can embed with @font-face, Cufón, sIFR, or Flir.

A nice, basic list of web writing best practices to tack on your wall.

You are not alone. None of the rest of us can fathom CSS either.

Look, writing installers is not glamourous, it’s tedious, and it’s also completely fucking important. The installer is either the first or second experience someone has with your work. (It’s second if physical media, first if a download.)

All computers are connected. You can access the information on the villain’s desktop computer, even if it’s turned off.

From CWE/Sans. If you work on software in any capacity, you need to read this.