An Example in the Wild

Over the past week and a half we’ve covered a lot of development material here at Taming the Wild Wild Web.

Now’s the time to admit that my inspiration for these entries came entirely from a project that I was working on during that time period. While it had a very close deadline, it was ultimately a practice in efficient development.

Therefore, let me lead you to Search Engine Optics, which serves as a great example in the wild for many of the past entries here on Taming the Wild Wild Web. Feel free to crack open the source for any guiding you may need in completing those design and development walkthroughs. I’ll also be listing other tutorials I wrote that go hand-in-hand with posts on this blog, further outlining the development process for Search Engine Optics:

•   .htaccess configuration and URL canonicalization
  - Look to the Catholic Church for Search Engine Optimization Techniques
  - URL Canonicalization, the Catholic Church and Your Web Site
• On-the-fly property and value organization in our CSS
  - Cascading Style Sheets, Play-Doh and LEGOs
  - A Better Way for Organizing CSS
• Easy clearing of our floats and ultimate cross browser compatibility
  - Floats Collapsing? Fear Not, Developer
  - I Ain’t Afraid of No Floats: Part I
  - I Still Ain’t Afraid of No Floats: Part II
  - Cross Browser Compatibility
• Using the CSS Important Rules to override specificity
  - Temporary CSS Specificity Problems
• Integration of Yahoo! Image Search API
  - Adding User Interactivity to Your Web Site
  - More on Using APIs to Spice Up Your Web Content
  - Building Your News Service API - Adding Fresh Content and Interactivity to Your Web Site
  - Aggregating News for Fresh Blog Entries
• Semantically Correct Headers (see source Index page for both a creative and proper usage)
  - Better Headers - Examining Proper Semantic Markup
  - SEO How-To: Using Hierarchical Headers
• Integration of both jQuery and Prototype/Script.aculo.us Javascript Frameworks
  - Which Javascript Framework to Choose?
  - Choosing a Javascript Framework That’s Right for You

As you can see, I tried to document the common problems that I faced, the solutions that I found, and the clever tips that I came up with in order to make this project easier on myself.

Hopefully, by following along with the tutorials/articles/entries, you can learn from both my mistakes and my solutions in order to minimize the time spent on your projects with the intention of helping others become more efficient (and standards aware!) developers.