Category: Articles (Page 179 of 259)

A few months ago, I published a post that covered how to achieve single page tabbed navigation in WordPress. In the post, I mentioned the following:

In some cases, it may be best to load pages via Ajax, in some cases, it’s better to load things up all in the first page load.

Generally speaking, I stand by this statement. I know Ajax is fun and I know that it’s gotten incredibly easy to implement, but there are times where it makes sense to load all information with the page and times when said loading should be done asynchronously.

In the comments, someone asked:

I am also very interested and awaiting post regarding your take on when to use ajax and when to load it all.

Though this could have been answered in the comments, it seems as if this is an ongoing discussion among those who build things for the web, so I thought I’d take the time to answer it in the form of a post. If nothing else, perhaps it will spark you to share some of your opinions on it, as well.

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Hang around any community long enough and you are going to see the good parts, the bad parts, and the weird parts . Similarly, I think that anyone who has been involved in any type of community for a significant amount of time will have plenty to complain about.

I’m not just talking about online communities either – this is just as applicable online as it is offline.

But, if you’re reading this, then you’re reading this online and odds are you’re active on Twitter or Facebook or some other form of social media where we all use the services as our own platform for sharing our opinions with the public where others can read, respond well, respond negatively, or ignore.

Whatever the case, I think that we’ve gotten far too comfortable sharing our criticisms in 140 characters or less without showing enough empathy or understanding or education for our peers and it’s to our own detriment that this is happening.
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About four months ago, I received the following comment on one of my blog posts:

I’d love to hear some thoughts, maybe in a future post, on setting boundaries and establishing routines. My ideal would be to have already been to the gym, at my co working space and starting work by 8:30, finished by 6pm, no exceptions. Despite my best laid plans, I haven’t been to the gym in 2 weeks, I find myself starting work any time between 7am and 11am, and occasionally working late into the night once my son is in bed. Some people dig this freedom, but I find that I crave some structure – I just reject having it imposed on my by an employer.

For some time, I’ve sat on this particular topic because it’s something that I’ve wanted to write about, but either had a backlog of other things I wanted to cover, or it didn’t fit with the type of content I was trying to publish at the given time.

yes – working near your tv is risky business!

But now seems like a good time to look into this: Partially because I’m preparing a few posts that are dealing with a number of tools that I use to get things done, partially because a number of people I know who work from home have shared the same feelings, and partially because this is something that I’ve been doing for the past seven years or so.

But for those of you who want to skip the entire post, here’s the TL;DR:

It depends on your personality type.

Honestly, though, there’s more to it than that.

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For anyone who’s been programming long enough, I’d venture to say that some of the most productive times of the day come when you’re in the zone.

You know what I mean, too: When you’re minimizing distractions, when you’re listening to whatever music helps you get into the groove, and whatever you’re working on feels almost effortless (not that it doesn’t come with it’s share frustration, but you’re just there and totally focused on the task at hand).

We know this feel.

At the same time, I think that it’s incredible that we get as much work done as we do. Granted, we all have different ways in which we work, but at any given time I could have the following applications open:

• Email
• Twitter
• Slack (for chat)
• Google Hangouts
• Feedly
• Downcast
• Notifications from my phone (or tablet)
• …and so on

And that’s in addition to my IDE. I’m sure the same can be said about you and your environment, too. But here’s the thing: Each of the above contributes to making sure we’re aware as many demands that we have being placed on us, but can you argue that they all make us more productive?
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