We’ve all been there. Working flat out on a project for day after day, to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and start to consider launching. But wait! This is a dangerous situation to be in. Having looked at the same site for so long, you’re not going to be able to spot the mistakes that you’ve made. It’s worth spending an extra couple of hours to double-check your work – rather than have the embarassing situation of launching a site with mistakes present.
Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category
PHP Developers (and Web Design companies): Consider using someone else to check your work!
Monday, March 22nd, 2010The obligatory development tools post
Monday, March 22nd, 2010I’ve seen pretty much every other web developer with a blog do this, so why not jump on the bandwagon and do it too? This is a list of the tools I favour when doing my job – including my web-browser of choice, my favoured text editor and preferred FTP client.
Save your script some time: Remember to index those foreign keys!
Monday, March 22nd, 2010In my infancy as a web developer, I was often caught out by a lot of really simple problems. One of these really simple problems was slow SELECT queries on a MySQL database when using “JOIN” or “WHERE”. I was quite often baffled; the site seemed really quick when I first launched it, and I hadn’t made any code changes, so what could have changed that made the “News Listing” page so slow? The answer was staring me in the face, but it still took me a bit of time to find it. The problem? The database table had a higher number of records in it, and when JOINING or searching, the application was forcing MySQL to do what are called “full table scans”. Once I discovered this was the problem, I was amazed at the difference in performance something so simple could result in. (more…)
