Freelance Developer

I've lately been spending my working hours getting rechargenews.com up and running. And now its here! The web release was friday 9th, and the first printed newspaper came out today.

All the design was delivered to us from apt, but we implemented the design and controllers inhouse. And I'm almost a bit proud to say that this has become one of the most visually and user friendly news sites on the web.

Rechargenews will deliver news and editorials on renewable energy - an important issue in today. And it is my hope that it will influence people to make choiches that will lead to a habitable planet in the future.

Using scrum on this project has made us able to deliver on time, and with an acceptable feature set. More will surely come in the future, but the important bits are already there.

This release marked the end of my commitment for this project at this time, and I will be moving my attention to the new work that needs to be done to dn.no - the leading financial news site in Norway.

There are times when you want to embed 3rd party elements into your web pages. If you have a high traffic site which has time critical output, you might come to realize that your 3rd party vendor doesn't have the same uptime as yourself, resulting in delayed GET statements that seem to bog down your site.

Here you are left with a couple of choices.

• Ditching the supplied elements all together, usually a very unpopular decision.
• Caching it - which might be a problem with licensing and time critical elements.
• Use JavaScript to fetch those elements - as explained in this article.

The goal here is to give a usable page to your visitors as quickly as possible.

Read the rest of this entry »

In accordance with my previous article about search engine optimization tips, I will in this article concentrate on how to dissect your website and figure out what needs to be done. And I'll only use free tools doing it :)

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm doing search engine optimization on some of our sites now. And in that process I have collected some tips about what helps the crawler do its job.

You are looking for new readers for your glorious content, but nobody is finding their way to your site. Did you wall yourself in by an accident?

SEO is usually a lot of common sense, really, and if you have good developers on your site with a bit of time on their hands you can do the job yourself instead of contracting this out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Separating CSS and HTML has been the big fuss for a while now. So why not separate your Javascript and HTML as well? Using event handlers instead of using the old onclick="somefunction()" can make your codebase a lot more manageable and clean. I'll demonstrate this technique by using prototype.js, a very nice and lean AJAX framework.

My goal is to create two lists (ul elements) with several <li>. Each of these li elements have checkboxes. And when you click on these checkboxes they will move from one list to the other. Okay, lets get cracking...

Read the rest of this entry »