http://blog.midstride.com Powerful, simple & easy to use. Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:23:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here is the first installment of our top 10 links for the week.  Every week, we will be picking ten links we see as being very useful and important to the web development/business crowd.  This list covers both technical articles for developers and higher level business ones. 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/12/08/top-10-links-for-december-week-1-2008/ With php becoming a more mature language and frameworks becoming a standard practice, it's increasingly important to analyze your code and test the performance where possible. Frameworks and libraries can speed up the development time and make code maintenance simpler, but it's important you understand how they work.  It's not just ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/12/01/5-tips-and-tools-to-optimize-your-php-application-part-1-simple/ At work the other day, I was forwarded an email with a co-worker asking for my thoughts to a question. The question went along the lines of: "How many emails in a defined time period should we be sending to our customers? How many emails is too many?" My answer? ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/10/20/e-mail-marketing-how-many-emails-is-too-many/ A quiet shift is happening in the world of web design and development - one that has been in the works for a few years, but is now starting to come to fruition: the mobile world is mobilizing to point a whole lot of eyes onto our websites. Our canvas ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/09/21/what-the-iphone-android-and-chrome-mean-for-web-professionals/ Usability testing is a phase in the development process that often gets overlooked, shortchanged, or outright stricken out of project plans. Sometimes usability testing is ruled out because of time constraints, other times it's because of a lack of resources such as equipment or expertise. On other cases, it may ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/09/14/5-reasons-why-you-should-do-usability-testing/ A couple weeks ago we took a look at some of the first steps to take when selecting an open source publishing platform. From starting off with doing some guerilla market research and viewing source code to figure out what tools others are using, moving on to trying to gauge ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/09/10/how-to-select-an-open-source-publishing-platform-step-3-determine-your-capacity-for-internal-design/ When web applications like basecamp started appearing, a lot of attention started turning to Ruby on Rails.  Suddenly small groups of technically driven people could release powerful applications in a month or two.  With this awareness, the usability standards for web applications increased and so did the technical challenges for ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/09/09/5-tips-to-develop-php-applications-fast/ One of your worst nightmares as a web designer is getting caught up in a conversation where you're trying to defend a design decision, and what you're battling isn't a rationed and informed perspective based on sound design principles of ratios, colour theory or typography, but rather the personal opinion ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/09/02/using-web-statistics-to-make-informed-design-decisions/ In the last post on selecting an open source publishing platform we offered a pretty simple tip to help you get started: take a look at the source code of other sites in your field and see what tools they're using. Once you've figured that part out, the next step ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/08/28/how-to-select-an-open-source-publishing-platform-step-2-determine-your-capacity-for-internal-development-work/ Introduction If you have been following the Zend Framework at all, you'll know that Dojo has been selected as the UI library to be adopted into the Zend Framework. The question is what does this exactly mean? I'm still trying to figure out how they are going to use ... http://blog.midstride.com/2008/08/26/integrating-ajaxdojo-into-the-zend-mvc-in-8-steps/