Welcome to devbytes. I want to build up a personal collection of useful code snippets, programming sayings, paradigms and ‘gotcha!’ moments (like when you first understand the JavaScript closure) for future reference. A bit like an ever evolving personal textbook, library, reference and cook-book.

I decided to put it into blog format because I know how useful it is to stumble across that page which has the solution to my problem on it. Now I’m not imagining for a moment that this will be anywhere near as good as many of the resources out there – but if it helps one person solve one problem then being a public blog rather than a private notebook then it’s all worth it.

Plus, at the end of the day, a blog is far more searchable than paper ;) For this reason, I intend to over-tag each of the posts too (it helps me search through delicious because I super-tag everything on there) but keep the categories relatively tight to separate the posts into things such as thoughts, design patterns, programming philosophy and other distinct types. But I guess I’m not really doing anything groundbreaking there, am I? It’s just that I use the categories in such a ridiculous way in all of my other blogs!

Anyway, I believe that I’ve waffled enough for now – I present to you devbytes.

As mentioned – this is designed as a personal reference – but if you find it useful or interesting too – then all the better! Naturally, it has a twitter account which will auto post when a new byte is posted (@devbytes) or you could subscribe to the RSS feed if that’s more your cup of tea.

Go to devbytes →

I present you with my diary of things which I intend to use as an outlet for the frustrated writer in me who wants to write short snippets about cool stuff. That’s not the aim of the site, however. The aim of the site is for me to write about ‘that interesting thing’ which I found. I am planning on writing something every day (wish me luck on that!) but because it’s really only a microblog I hope that it will happen. And I reckon that a happy side effect of all of this will be that in the end I find it easier to write here because I will have already expunged the crap from my head :)

I’m not really sure what content will be going on to the site – I don’t even know what will be going on it tomorrow until I find it. All I can tell you is that if you’re a little bit nerdy, like me, then a lot of the content should be quite interesting and relevant. Be sure to follow @diaryofthings on Twitter to see when something new has been posted.

Or subscribe to the RSS feed if that is more of your cup of tea.

So roll on down and have a look. As mentioned in the previous announcement – I’ve set up an RSS feed specifically for this section, so if you find that you like what’s on there, please subscribe to have the entrails of my mind appear in your feed reader.

Oh, by the way, a slug is a part of the URL which uniquely identifies a post in a CMS. For example, in the URL http://www.example.com/blog/my-new-post, the slug is my-new-post

The rant

Take my new FGQ – What does the -= operator do?. Auto-slug-generators will (mostly) create the slug what-does-the-operator-do – which I’m sure you’ll agree is not too useful. Firstly, it would be difficult from a user’s point of view to remember which characters to remove and add in to the URL, but secondly, from an SEO point of view, it’s not terribly descriptive. Thirdly, if I then wrote an article with the title what does the += operator do – wordpress would create a very similar slug.

The point

Most, if not all, CMS systems allow you to change the slug of the post or article. Most of them also automatically create one for you. I am making the point that the automatically created slug is not always the best. When you create a new post, take a moment to think about what you’re trying to say, how people might search for it, and optimise for both. For example, this post is called Don’t leave post slugs as the default, but I have decided that the best way to describe it SEO-wise is post-slug-optimisation. It’s a minor thing, but it can make all the difference between being on the first or second page on google.

They all sound like stupid questions if you know what the answer is, but all questions do, don’t they? I have decided to start a series of quick posts answering some of the more obscure search terms that cause people to arrive at this site. Hopefully you might even find some of them useful.

The posts won’t get in the way of normal blog posts, they’ll be exclusively posted in the fgq section, but they’ll still appear in the feed so remember subscribe to that to keep up to date.

Take me to the new FGQ section!