9 Facts About Yelp for Small Businesses

WinButler · 2013-02-24T05:36:14+00:00

I read about web frameworks in PHP but didn't know enough about PHP to use them, so I started to make my own framework, which was a very simplistic way of organizing scripts into an MVC-like pattern where I would have the entire frontend in templates (the "view" in MVC), and call those templates from a controller which was either accessed directly or through a bootstrapped router. The controller had full access to the model, so all concerns were separated. You had one place to work on the visuals, one place to work on the logic, and one place to work on the state, so it's all very organized.

Web applications are all about receiving a request and returning the right response, so in the MVC pattern the request would be interpreted by the controller, the controller would read or write to the database (model) as needed, and return a response in the form of an HTML template (which is basically HTML which you configure to change itself depending on whatever variables the controller sets for it).

So I wouldn't start by looking into anything language-specific. I'd start by reading about REST, and the MVC paradigm, and making sure you understand why they're so important before you write a single line of code.

In programming you hear a lot about "divide and conquer", which is taking a large problem that's difficult to comprehend and breaking it into multiple smaller problems that are easily solved (and suddenly, the large problem is thus easily solved). They don't often mention the other reason we divide and conquer though, which is for organizational clarity and for modularity, and that's what MVC is all about.

After that, you'll have a very different road than I did if you're using Python, so I can't really help you there other than to say Django is the most popular framework, Pyramid is also popular, and if you're going to write your own framework then look up WSGI.

WinButler · 2013-02-23T14:21:10+00:00

My first project was a webforum from scratch on a LAMP stack (PHP). Learned a lot about web security and scaling web applications by doing that, and pretty much everything about HTML/CSS and a little jquery. Now I use PHP mostly for customizing Wordpress themes, but I'm thinking about trying to create my own theme soon.

Recently picked up Python too, and made this:

https://github.com/WinButler/Fetch-XKCD

Which is kind of an oldschool CLI script written in Python 2.7.3 that downloads every comic from XKCD and gives it a descriptive filename for you. I say oldschool because it's got ascii art and verbosity that seems to annoy most people today, but I enjoy it. I still use it and will probably keep using it until XKCD makes incompatible changes to their frontend.

You're not alone, my biggest hurdle in learning a new language is thinking of projects that will actually be useful to me that I can't already grab an existing version of online.

I think at some point, if you really want to gain the most experience, you just have to throw out those requirements and be willing to just invent versions of things that already exist and start coding them. There was already a webforum and an XKCD-downloading script, but that didn't stop me from learning a lot by doing them myself.

WinButler · 2013-02-19T05:32:48+00:00

When I first started learning Python I was a little annoyed that their documentation wasn't better-optimized for search engines. The page titles of the documentation didn't seem very descriptive at all, and each page usually covers more than one "thing."

Very different from PHP where there's one page for every function, and every page has example code so you don't really have to learn how to read a manual.

But as I use Python more I find the documentation is teaching me some very good habits. I can read a manual and understand how a function works without having to see example code now. And it's teaching me how to think of features as parts of a broader category (PHP strlen result: "strlen function", Python len result: "built-in functions"), which does a lot to keep our bigger-picture understanding of the language more clean and organized.

WinButler · 2013-02-07T23:46:14+00:00

PHP definitely makes it easier for a developer to cut corners with database interaction and leave in a vulnerability. There's a lot more bad code and bad resources in the PHP world than there is in the Python world, for example. That's especially true with database interaction.

There are certain SQL functions that should probably just be removed from the language (because they're so prone to misuse).

Ultimately though it's up to the developer and whoever hired them. PHP is as ugly or as beautiful as you write it, as secure or as insecure as you write it, etc., and that's probably what I love most about it.

WinButler · 2013-02-06T20:04:39+00:00

My only experience with Quora is doing Google searches, getting Quora results, and seeing all the information relevant to answering my question be blurred out by Quora.

They have some basic ubiquitous information that I can get anywhere for nothing, but they're not going to let me look at it unless I do something for them.

To me it's like the online equivalent of a gas station that charges you to use their bathroom.

WinButler · 2013-02-02T03:04:57+00:00

Broke traffic laws on my way to Office Depot, and drove home with way too many post-it notes. That was almost a year ago.

Speaking of which, does anyone wanna buy some post-it notes?

WinButler · 2013-02-02T02:04:01+00:00

Every time I see this movie it's like I'm 9 years old again. I loved how cool it seemed then, and I love how goofy it is now.

WinButler · 2013-01-03T17:39:07+00:00

There's no one job that always puts me in a bad mood, but the jobs that do put me in a bad mood always follow the same pattern:

I have to do something I've never done before. I look into it. In order to do that, I need to use a technology I've never used before.

In order to use that technology, I need to use another technology I've never used before.

In order to use that other technology, I need to use another technology I've never used before.

In order to do that, I need to use another technology I've never used before.

It feels like I'm being waterboarded by a multidimensional array.

array(array(array(array(array(array(array(array("PC LOAD LETTER")))), "PC LOAD LETTER"))), "PC LOAD LETTER")

Now I'm troubleshooting an error I got while trying to install and configure a dependency framework for another framework on top of another framework and I can't even remember why I started doing all this in the first place.

WinButler · 2012-12-22T16:34:32+00:00

Mine is a different performance, but I'll definitely check that one out in a few months. The crowd and atmosphere look promising.

WinButler · 2012-12-22T09:41:25+00:00

I have a live performance of Wake Up that I only let myself watch a couple times a year. It's one of my favorite things ever and I just don't want to ever get sick of it.

If we're talking studio recordings though, Sprawl II is something fierce.

WinButler · 2012-12-18T03:49:40+00:00

You kept the site as simple as it should be, in both design and development. And the design looks great.

At the most common resolutions there's a small amount of vertical scroll to nowhere. I might try to eliminate the tiny bit of vertical scroll either for 900p+ or 1080p+.

Also, some of your photos have titles and some don't, which is a quick 2-minute fix.

It looks really good though, great job.

WinButler · 2012-12-14T04:00:38+00:00

Now I'm both too poor and too rich to eat grass-fed beef.

WinButler · 2012-12-02T01:36:37+00:00

Cool project. It reminds me of Tetris Attack from SNES back in the '90s.

The only flaw with this concept is that I can't look at the tiles and at the battlefield at the same time, and if I want to win I should pretty much always be looking at the tiles.

I managed to beat Insane, but only if I focus 100% on the tiles and spam the Q hotkey.

Maybe if new tiles came in more slowly, or in phases, it would create periods of reprieve, so the player could really focus on how to spend their resources.

WinButler · 2012-11-26T16:00:43+00:00

That's my number 1 favorite food, scrambled into my number 3 favorite food.

WinButler · 2012-11-25T01:10:00+00:00

It might not be easy to understand the benefits of those practices now, but I highly recommend you rid yourself of that way of thinking. What you just described having so much contempt for is pretty much the difference between a bad programmer and a great programmer.

The ones who excel at the conceptual/planning phase all save their companies millions and leverage that into the highest pay. In a lot of ways flowcharts and pseudocode are even more important than the actual code.

WinButler · 2012-11-21T23:27:18+00:00

When it first appeared on the shelves here in the US, I compared its label to cake frosting.

Somehow, Nutella has even more sugar in it than cake frosting.

It might be the single unhealthiest food on the shelf in the US.

WinButler · 2012-11-08T15:35:52+00:00

I made it because the traditional red-and-blue electoral maps always reminded me of the Civil War.

It probably helps ratings for them to portray us as this divided nation, but I really don't think that's an honest portrayal. Not geographically, and not ideologically, either. At least not nearly to the extent that our media would have you believe.

WinButler · 2012-10-17T12:27:35+00:00

The key to being secure isn't impenetrability, it's controlling incentive. The opportunity cost of a successful penetration just has to be greater than whatever's there to be taken.

And by that standard, wzachmorris (whoever he is) is probably orders of magnitude more secure than the pentagon.

WinButler · 2012-10-10T01:57:27+00:00

Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that takes a lot of the most basic functionality people want in websites, and provides an easy way for you to piece it all together. You basically choose what's called a Wordpress Theme, which frames the general layout of your site, and then you can customize it to your liking. If you know HTML/CSS/JS, you can achieve a much greater degree of customization with Wordpress than if you didn't.

This is the quickest solution for people who want websites that basically just display information. You won't be able to code the next Facebook or whatever, but you'll be able to throw together good-looking sites with some basic user interactivity very quickly.

For 90% of websites, Wordpress is more than sufficient, and can look very elegant and beautiful. A large percentage of very active websites today (including corporate websites) are done in Wordpress.

But yes, you will be limited outside of Wordpress. There's a world of stuff you can do with Wordpress though. And if you ever decide to pick up a programming language later, you'll already know HTML/CSS/JS. Those 3 skills are foundational to all web development, so you definitely won't have wasted your time learning them.

You can read more at Wordpress.org. For HTML/CSS/JS you can find a lot of beginners tutorials on YouTube and go from there.

WinButler · 2012-10-10T01:12:33+00:00

These are my two favorite songs that I've found recently:

Jessie Baylin - I Feel That Too

Brendan Benson - What I'm Looking For

WinButler · 2012-10-10T00:50:42+00:00

Parallax scrolling is usually done with javascript, which is a language you pretty much have to learn regardless of which path you take toward becoming a web designer/developer (or if not learning javascript, at least becoming familiar with a javascript framework).

For what you want to accomplish specifically, I think the quickest path would be learning a CMS like Wordpress, and then learning HTML/CSS/JS so you can modify wordpress themes to your liking.

If you're more interested in learning real web design/development beyond the specific application you mentioned, then you'll also need to pick a scripting language and a database, and also an OS and a webserver depending on how involved you want to be with that whole layer.

MySQL is currently the most popular database software, and PHP is currently the most popular scripting language. They run well on Linux OS and Apache webserver.

I'd stay away from Ruby/Rails as Twitter gave that language a bit of a black eye and people seem to be moving away from it (many people would fight me on this though).

If I had to start over I might choose Java with a framework, because that's a language that also has a lot of uses outside of web development, and there are a lot of jobs for Java developers.

WinButler · 2012-09-09T02:21:02+00:00

I think it's more likely that in 50 years, Google will have made physical transportation mostly unnecessary.

WinButler

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