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Articles, notes, and technical writing from the Firefly team — restored from our archives for reference.
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November 2, 2004
Why Web Standards Matter
Jonathon L. Duckworth on why standards-based design is cheaper, more accessible, and future-proof.
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December 30, 2014
Unobtrusive PHP Debugging
Wouldn't it be nice to debug your PHP application variables without interfering with page content? We've written a handy little function to pipe your output to the Javascript console.
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October 1, 2014
Why Firefly Requires an SLA to Support Outside Hosts
Occasionally a client will ask us why Firefly charges more to work with third-party web hosts than we do to physically host applications internally. Because many factors are at play, we have put together a brief post…
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May 5, 2014
Introducing Gitdown - A Markdown/Pygments Class for PHP
One of the things missing from PHP is a syntax highlighter as good as Python's Pygments. Enter Github, which renders beautiful, extended Markdown along with Pygmented code - and they expose it through a simple API!…
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July 5, 2013
Jump to EOL with SublimeText
Using SublimeText for your dev? If you find the right arrow key maddeningly far away, and you want to jump to the end of your current line, enter the following into your user key bindings: { "keys": ["super+j"],…
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June 3, 2013
Compressing Serialized Objects in GET Parameters
Many web applications face the common problem of parsing GET parameters to render a page. Most often, those parameters drive some sort of database operation that delivers the correct records or view; a process that…
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February 20, 2013
How Search Engines Work
Search engines are complex, but it takes only a little knowledge and common sense to succeed.
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February 15, 2013
Making the most of developing on Mac OS X.
Many people like using Mac OS X as their development platform, and for a good reason: modern versions of OS X already include a number of useful software packages — Apache, php, python, ruby, etc. — as…
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February 10, 2013
First Post
Welcome to the Firefly, LLC blog. We'll be using this area to discuss daily developments as well as store various insights, snippets and tutorials involving PHP, HTML, Actionscript, jQuery, MySQL and other…
