As I have been recently afflicted with a fascination for usability and accessibility and how they relate to search optimization, I found this definition posted by Joe Clark absolutely hilarious:

accessibility theatre

conspicuous but ineffective or counterproductive measures giving the appearance of responsible attention to accessibility

I am officially a Web Directions North affiliate. What a fantastic resource! If you’re a web developer and you haven’t heard of Web Directions… you have GOT to check it out.

Web Directions North | February 6 - 10, 2007

An Aussie creation that spans the globe, Web Directions is a mecca of veritable web talent brought to you by Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Maxine Sherrin, John Allsopp and including speakers like Kelly Goto, Andy Clarke, Adrian Holovaty, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Veerle Pieters, Jeremy Keith, and others.

Workshops will cover Ajax and Javascript, CSS, Microformats, mashups, standards based web design and development, accessibility, web app development, XHTML and HTML and more. Top that off with two optional days of skiing and boarding at Whistler, and Web Directions North is 2007’s web design and development event not to be missed.

Often, web developers turned database designers begin their coding endeavors by picking up whatever snippets are printed in the O’reilly title at hand or whatever Google throws their way. Building a database-driven website is easy. Making it fast is not. A little attention to schema, indexes, query optimization, and benchmarking could give your app the performance boost it needs to reach greatness.

1. Benchmark to measure success
2. Get familiar with the EXPLAIN command
3. Know how the storage engines differ
4. Narrow, non-redundant indexes are better
5. Smaller data types are better
6. Fewer reads = faster results: Use the query cache for read intensive apps
7. Learn to use joins properly
8. Use calculated fields only when necessary
9. Increase memory

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I was ecstatic to see visits from syr.edu in yesterday’s site stats, so I decided to take the plunge and switch out the new design I’ve been working on for designsimply.com. The new look is quite photographer-trendy with black backgrounds for photos and white for text. Check out the updated photo gallery to see some of my recent stock photography work. I am quite proud to say, this site is now WordPress-powered, and layout was achieved with valid W3C standards-based XHTML and CSS protocols. You can still reach the old portfolio until I cross it over into the new blog format and photo-friendly style. Enjoy! And thanks for visiting!!

Presentation: Page Source Order and Accessibility
Speakers: Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley
Event: OZeWAI 2005 & WSG
Links: Study, Podcast, Presentation slides
Date: Friday, December 9, 2005

Restructuring page source order has become a recent phenomenon due to CSS layouts that allow developers to create visual presentation using stylesheets that break out of rigid inline, structurally ordered html. Separating presentation from content leads to this question: is placing content first more accessible?

Roger Hudson and Russ Weakley set out to answer three questions in their presentation, “Page Source Order and Accessibility”:

• Is source order important for screen reader users?
• Are skip links a waste of time?
• What are structural labels and do they help?

The study offers up user expectations and observed behavior of screen reader users and text browser users. The conclusions (or recommendations) that result are interesting and not necessarily what the average web developer might expect.

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This is a simple mysql connection class that I’ve been using. I follow Jay Pipes advice about lazy loading from this post.

Here are the files in text.

• includes/database.inc.php (txt)
• includes/db.php (txt)
• dbtest.php (txt)

Presentation: Scaling for Your First 100k Users
Speaker: Matt Mullenweg
Event: Webvisions 2006
Date: Friday, July 21, 2006

I was impressed and intrigued by the best practices Matt Mullenweg presented despite the hardware-heavy titled presentation, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” As the founding developer of blog software WordPress, the Jazz musician turned blogging software developer has garnered world-wide recognition and a following of blogging elite. The Q&A after the session was equally as interesting and tech-filled with lots of questions from the audience about infrastructure and hardware. If you would like to start a blog, you should sign up at WordPress.com. Read the rest of this entry »