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Hello everyone!

I’ll write today about a code reuse, maybe one of the most interesting controversy of the IT industry. I have three questions that I’ll try to answer in this article:

1. Why it is good to reuse code and why it is bad?
2. How and when can we reuse the code?
3. How to minimize the problems that may appear? Continue Reading »

This is a very short post!

Congratulations MySpace! I found few days ago their Developers sections and I think is great. Since august 2006, when Facebook launched their API, I didn’t found any other important development platform on big social networks.

One more thing about APIs: everybody should “open” their application and allow additional modules, but be careful! Sometimes APIs make your life harder. That’s why on a social network I was involved, we will try to keep it simple and close for a while.

Many web applications use ip2location for ads targeting, restrict content to a specific location or just because they need to know where the traffic comes from. The initial setup of ip2location database is very slow. Important seconds are lost because ip2location and because the programmer will write the query like this:

SELECT countrySHORT FROM ip2location WHERE ‘.$n_ip.’ BETWEEN ipFROM AND ipTO

This query is very bad because of its highly execution time. Let’s try a different approach: Continue Reading »

I try to find different kind of approaches when I have to design web interfaces even I am a developer and not a designer. Reading about how to design an interface, I found the “Human Computer Interaction” (HCI) term. My first research on this subject was about 2 years ago and I found a lot of useful informations since then, but I am very far away of having a clear and complete vision about the subject.

I don’t want to spend more time on talking about iteration styles and paradigms, but the following piece of theory is very useful. Basically, the HCI goal is to improve the interaction between humans and computers by increasing usability and receptiveness to the user’s needs. Another important field related to HCI is User Experience (UX). User Experience talks about user’s perception of a device or system and tries to improve the interaction between the user and the device or the system.

Next articles about Human-Computer Interaction will focus on web and software interfaces with good or bad examples, evolution of software development process and I will try to find the answer for the following question: “How to improve an interface design?” .

Any website needs a good url rewriting policy. Simple urls will be easily followed by spiders and many search engines will love your site if internal links are simple and offer some clue about the page. On many sites I use the rewriting only to offer friendly urls, but always keep in mind the optimization for search engines. The following example I use on different sites is simple and works great.

First of all create a .htaccess file with the following content: Continue Reading »