The other day I was at a Karaoke event and was frustrated that they didn't have the song I wanted. I have an extremely limited range vocally. I can do Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and non-autotuned Kanye and even then, only the slower songs. Essentially,…
ChatGPT recently rolled out DALL-E 3 image generation and the results are much better than the previous iterations. I experimented with creating some logos for this site and some friends. It's still working on stabilizing the spelling. I find it…
Allen Ginsberg's 1963 poem "Howl" is a literary work of art that juxtaposes the harsh reality of capitalism in America during the 1960s with vivid, almost tangible imagery. The poem is best experienced when read aloud, but what if we could visualize…
Over the years, authentication has been a topic that can elicit groans from even the most experienced programmers. The web has migrated from messy Perl scripts to social media logins, OAuth, and Single Sign-On. If you're creating a React Native app,…
I had my first drink in a hotel room in New York City. I was 19 and I had taken a year off from college. I was working for a company migrating OS2 to Windows95 and a Novell network to windows. When I first started I wrote a .bat script that could be…
I painted a Bob Ross once. I'm an amateur painter. At least I occasionally spend nights slopping paint around a canvas in a fashion that offers a lot of style in lieu of faithful reproduction. The truth is I've never been very good at drawing. I can…
One of the famously ‘hard things’ in programming is naming things - I’ve found following a few conventions in naming help you reason about a program. For example, variables should be named to describe what they are and functions for what they…
I've had a gmail account since as long as there have been gmail accounts. I remember waiting eagerly for an invite and asking around on the pre-facebook and pre-reddit internet for a hook up to this crazy new email service. When I finally got my…
When is a visitor to your website "converted?" For most websites and analytics programs, the answer is the confirmation page. You may have also heard this page called the Thank You Page or Receipt Page or something else entirely. The fact that it…
“For those who think business exists to make aprofit…think again. Business makes a profit to exist.” Ray Anderson, founder of Interface. I ran a small web dev shop that failed because I didn’t understand how much I should have been charging my…
Many landing pages, especially those designed to collect leads, will use a form as the primary call to action. In this guide, you will learn how to optimize your form to maximize your conversion rate without sacrificing your lead quality. Forms do a…
I had really hoped that things would fall in place and the mild flirtation we shared would eventually allow me to kiss you but instead you went back to your room and i paused, only for a second and saw myself in third person as a movie star in some…
Everyone loves the story about how a scrappy upstart changed the color of a button on its landing page and suddenly increased its conversion rate by 200%. Stories like that make for a great headlines. They also often spawn copycats naïvely trying to…
Everyone - well, everyone in my social circles, has a stash of great domain names that were bought in a moment of inspiration and are renewed annually in a pitiful sacrifice to the God of good intentions. It's high time to give someone else a crack…
Imagine you walked into a car dealership to look at a brand new Hyundai. You've wondered if they have the leg room you need. You approach a sales rep and ask if the Hyundai Sonatas have adequate leg room for a big galoot like yourself. The…
Last night on twitter I started this series based on the hashtag PHPConfessions I've never gotten the order of arguments right for strreplace without checking http://php.net first ~~~~PHPConfessions I'm always afraid I'll be seated with the Perl…
Productivity has skyrocketed in the past three decades, but all of the surplus has been captured by the top 1%. Wages have been flat. The workforce has lost a lot of leverage due to the cost savings of machines, labor competition with the third…
I couldn't find any usb drives tonight so i brought out an old external hard drive. That picture is one of the first "mastheads" of muddylemon.com circa the late 90s. I also found this poem from the same time period: Different Person i used to be a…
Perl There's more than one way to do it Python There is one way to do it PHP I found a way to do it but it didn't work. I'm just going to do it in WordPress ColdFusion You can do that? .NET There is one way to do it, but you can do it in any…
This site was offline for three days due to the unbelievable incompetence of Dreamhost. There is no excuse for a company in the business of hosting websites to fail so miserably and so often. The reason for the outage is unclear, their infrequent…