Photo: tanakawho

After a long winter, its about time to come out of blogging hibernation. But unlike my furry counterparts, I did more than sleep the days away. In fact, I’ve been quite a busy. So if you’ve been scratching your head for the last few weeks, read on and find out what I’ve been up to.

As an aside, the current blog stylesheet is a bit borked. It’s a casualty of the site rewriting, and should be fixed in gif… er, jiff. And without further ado, here’s whats changed.

Read the rest of Site News - Updates! Redesigns! Oh my!

Photo: celesteh

Welcome to Part 4 of Learning PHP. If you’ve come here directly, be sure to check out Learn PHP - Introduction for an overview of the entire series!

Being a PHP programmer doesn’t have to be limited to staring at the computer screen and writing lines of code. The PHP community makes it incredibly easy to connect to the thousands of fellow PHP programmers out there. Hooking into the PHP community is a great way to learn more about PHP, find answers to your questions, or just blow off some steam after a long coding session.

In Learn PHP - Part 4: Taking Part in the Community, we’ll explore the many different ways of getting involved in the PHP community. Chatrooms, Forums, User Groups and more await. So let’s get this started.

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Photo: Mike 23

Ever wonder why lists are so popular on the internet? Theres no shortage of them on the pages of social bookmarking sites like digg, reddit and even del.icio.us. Lists organize information at a glance, changing our perception and hooking us into reading more. The following article explains how manipulating the eye’s focus can improve our web designs as well as our blogs.

The Secret Power of Lists

We click on the links out of a combination of procrastination and nostalgia (who doesn’t want to remember the 1980’s top fashions). Okay, so maybe its mostly out of procrastination. But what keeps us there is something less obvious.

The human eye scans the page in a seemingly haphazard pattern, jumping from one item to the next. Although its a subconscious act occurring on a scale of milliseconds, it has a large role in determining whether we continue to read an article or move on.

So what makes lists special? Lists organize and highlight pertinent information at a glance. Okay, I admit that’s a no-brainer statement. But its the crucial component behind the popularity of lists. The scanning eye doesn’t have time to digest everything on the page. By organizing the information, lists have a greater chance of catching the eye (and further interest) than a long expanse of similar sized paragraphs.

Read the rest of What Lists Can Teach Us about Web Design and Blogging

Photo: Phillie Casablanca

Before a website goes live, there’s a long laundry list of things to double check and go over. We’re only human, and we all forget a few of them from time to time. To help combat this, I’ve compiled a quick and dirty list of frequently forgotten items.

Read the rest of 6 Things Webdesigners Should Check Before a Site Goes Live