Author: Brian Nelson

  • Why You Shouldn’t Talk to Strangers on Facebook

    Facebook, for the most part, is a safe place to meet friends and talk to people. However, it’s good practice (and simply common sense) to stick to conversations with people you actually know. Recently, I’ve been receiving messages from complete strangers asking seemingly-legitimate questions about my livelihood, such as programming or brewing, since both are […]

  • How to Prevent Facebook and Google from Tracking You Online

    These days it’s impossible to casually surf the web and avoid sites that use tools from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others that make the experience more social and immersive.  Still, with privacy issues at the forefront of technology news, it is worth noting that many of these social media tools make your e-life more convenient […]

  • A Return to Old-School Gaming: Emulators and Retro Games

    A Return to Old-School Gaming: Emulators and Retro Games

    Back in the early ’90s things were different and, in some ways, better. MC Hammer was lighting up MTV with inflatable pants, Compuserve 3.25″ diskettes were confusing households across the US, and my family’s 66 MHz Pentium PC was a $3500 fiery hellbeast that made the Pentagon as nervous as current-day Wikileaks. And the video […]

  • Stay connected & save: 6 tips for padding your bank account in the New Year

    Stay connected & save: 6 tips for padding your bank account in the New Year

    With the New Year just around the corner, saving money seems to be on the minds of many people. Being a graduate student, I am not among these people, because Academia pays huge sums of money for almost zero work. Let’s be serious, I’m broke, and I need to save some dough.  New Years is […]

  • How To: Make a CSS background slideshow with jQuery

    If jQuery has one strength, it’s the library’s fantastic ability to manipulate HTML objects. Built into the library are easy to use methods for moving objects, adjusting CSS and tag attributes, changing visibility of anything on the page, and many more. To sweeten the deal, jQuery includes animation effects that allow you to transition any […]

  • How to Perform Age Verification with jQuery and Cookies (mmm, cookies)

    If you’re a freelance developer, chances are good that you’ll encounter a situation where you’ll have to make some content “off limits” to the kids. In most cases, such as with alcohol-related material, this is required by law. So, how do you do it? Well, if you’re using jQuery, the answer is “easily.” The first […]

  • Want to Create a Web Application? Use CakePHP for Rapid, Secure Development

    So you’ve got a sweet idea for a web application—great, let’s get to work! You’ll need a basic GUI, some sort of user registration, a templating system, logic processing, error handlers, form verification, AJAX processing, and… woah, this is adding up in a hurry. At what point do you get to start making the app […]

  • Create your own Apache, MySQL, and PHP testing server with WAMP

    PHP, MySQL, and Apache have become prominent ingredients in small and large website alike. After all, they are free, robust, and they each have a large community of supporters from which to troubleshoot. However, unless you have a server on which to develop your application, you won’t be able to enjoy these platforms or the, […]