Netbeans and Drupal 8 — Setup and Review

Drupal 8 is going to bring some huge changes. Fortunately, Netbeans is ready with support for Symfony, Twig and composer built in and available addons for SASS, Drupal development and, of course, a full-featured IDE.

Monitoring and Tuning Network Traffic in Windows 8 with Netbalancer

I was having trouble with Google Drive wreaking havoc on my internet connection and need to see what was going on. No tool I know of is better for that than Netbalancer and I was pleased to find out that, unlike another tool I know, this one works in Windows 8.

Google Drive Bandwidth Problems Make It Vastly Inferior to Dropbox

Short version: even if Google Drive isn’t actually transferring a file, it manages to slow down my internet connection to the point of being unusable. It doesn’t make a huge number of simultaneous connections. It doesn’t actually use that much bandwidth itself. It seems to just sort of be a black hole for bandwidth. VERDICT: Completely Unusable.

The Wright Brothers’ Kites: Why the Bacon Number Calculator is the Key to the Future of Google

Google’s Bacon Number Calculator has drawn a lot of laughs and sneers, but the last laugh will be Google’s, or whoever gets this technology correct. True, the BNC is a funny and mostly useless toy. I also think it’s the harbinger of the biggest change in the organization of human knowledge since the invention of writing. The BCN is small. The concept is monumental.

Highlighting Ads In Google Search Results

Google has made it hard to tell ads from regular search results. With a bit of CSS, though, you can make the ads stand out so that it’s easier to tell them from the organic search results.

Thinking about URLs and Overthinking about URLs

A discussion about trailing slashes on URLs for “listing” pages got me thinking about what a URL is and should be. Yeah, this post is a bit obsessive.

Mega Menus: SEO Concerns and Usability Pros and Cons (Intro)

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Mega Menus Usability and SEO

After a much-mentioned article by Jakob Nielsen, “mega menus” became all the rage, but there are some serious issues to consider before diving in. The can create serious usability issues and negatively impact your site information architecture and, ultimately how you are found, ranked and categorized by the search engines.