Welcome to Ask Away where I answer some of the questions sent to me or found on the web. Today’s question comes from a comment on one of my Reddit threads that I answered recently about language selection for high performance: NakedHowler: I’m thinking about creating an app that hopefully one day will have tons of people using it. My problem is should I learn Python and Django or just stick with PHP and advance further to learn Laravel?

Welcome to “How It Started”, a feature where I talk about how different sites around the internet were built to give an idea of what’s involved in a real world web application. I hope to illustrate that some of the biggest websites today had very humble beginnings that are achievable by learning the basics of web development. Ravelry The first site I want to look at is Ravelry, an online knitting and crocheting community site where users can share and track projects they’re working on and talk about different topics of interest with others in the community.

Welcome to Ask Away where I answer some of the questions sent to me or found on the web. Today’s question comes from a Reddit thread that I answered recently about mobile development: problemod: If a student or non-degree beginner takes a year and a half or so (or however long it takes to learn to build an app from scratch) to create a quality native app, will the skills be transferable if he/she wanted to work in web development (filling in holes in knowledge like HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT etc…)?

The call came in around 3:00 PM and I ran outside to take it in private. The call was from the start-up in Michigan that I had been interviewing with for three weeks and they had finally made a decision. They were going with someone else. I was more than a little surprised. Things had been going great and we were already talking about future strategies and how I could get them to where they needed to go.

I’ve seen a lot of posts on /r/learnprogramming and other places wondering how to get started with web programming. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years now and I’m here to give you some good news. Everything that I’ve done, from bill pay sites for Fortune 100 companies to lead tracking applications for small businesses, is essentially based on one simple concept and that’s CRUD. CRUDdy Applications In the computer world, CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete, which describes the four basic actions that most web applications need to do.

Having been in web development for over 15 years, I’ve had to learn a lot of new technologies. When I started, JavaScript was something you avoided and no one had heard of CSS. Now, you’re nothing it you don’t know both of those like the back of your hand. Things change fast on the internet and you better be able to learn programming quickly. Most of that was on the job training and that means picking things up enough to be productive now.

When building your WordPress theme, you might have been planning it to be used mainly as a blog theme or perhaps you lean in the web pages direction. Either way, to make a fully integrated WordPress theme, you need to make sure both Pages and Posts are fully supported. And that means you should have a single.php and a page.php included in your theme and they shouldn’t look the same.

WordPress isn’t always the friendliest thing in the world to style and the WordPress menus are no different. To get at the WordPress menu CSS takes a couple of hoops to jump through, but I’ll walk you through them now to illustrate how it can be done. With everything wrapped up in that wp_nav_menu() Template Tag, how do we get our styles and customizations in there to make that navigation look the way we want it?

Someone asked this over at http://wordpress.stackexchange.com and I put a lot of research into it, so I figured I’d post it here too. Someone had asked how to go about securing RSS feeds behind a firewall in WordPress. It’s not an overly easy process so I dug in to try and figure it out. I knew that WordPress had a lot of action hooks, little pieces of code that a developer (like you) can tie into to change how WordPress behaves.