I just spent a good hour trying to diagnose a problem related to the view lifecycle in the iPhone OS, so I thought I'd share the solution here. My problem was in trying to grab some data from the network immediately after loading a view from a UITabBar.

Something that has always irked me is having to take the value of a textarea and convert the text into HTML paragraphs (especially when using a WYSIWYG is not an option). Here's a quick PHP snippet to take care of that, whether the user uses one or two line breaks for new paragraphs.

I've finally gotten around to picking up a copy of The Mythical Man Month, a collection of essays on software engineering written by Frederick Brooks which was originally published in 1975. While the majority of the book has stood the test of time remarkably well, Chapter 3, entitled "The Surgical Team," especially intrigued me.

I have spent the last few days redesigning my personal blog from scratch with a totally new look and feel. The motivation for this came from multiple sources, including the desire to practice my design skills by creating something new (which was not fully satiated by designing my new mini-site recently).

If you are building an iPhone web app, chances are you have gotten a bit tired of relying on your device for testing changes. It can definitely be tedious to upload your changes, pick up your device, and refresh Mobile Safari each time you make a change to your code. Here's a way to use your Mac to eliminate the device (and even your internet connection) from the process.

So you built a website. The design is beautiful, the content is filled in, and it has been submitted to all of the major search engines. Maybe you have even purchased a bit of ad space on Google or another PPC network. So why is no one visiting your site? Turns out that there's a lot more that goes into bringing visitors to your site (and keeping them there) than what many people initially realize. 

"Remember the days before spam?" I barely can, but this slogan for Akismet might really hit home for some. Spam has become quite a nuisance for just about everybody who uses the Internet, not to mention the added trouble for those who run websites.