I’m glad you like my stuff, thanks for being on board!

You know I actually didn’t realize how true what you said is until I started creating sites. And not only helpful in solving problems you might not think of, but also in solving those you know of better. Coding is a very useful thing to learn, even just as a hobby :)

On another note, I’m trying to make Hack Your Day a lot bigger than it is, so keep on visiting! :)

Why I think a poll is better than relying on comment is that most of the readers do not comment. Especially to say you are against something is a bigger step to really give a comment.

A poll is anonymous which means you will hear the voice of a lot more readers which makes the statistic more trusted.

Like I said before I would love to have these kind of articles but why I think it’s not the best idea is purely from a branding/marketing point of view.
gHacks is branded as a blog where you get tips and hacks and get to know about software to make life easier. What’s making this so strong is that everybody can use them, even if you are not an IT person. You can see this as a niche, but still big enough to attract everybody who use a pc regularly and who are interested enough of course.
When you also write about specialistic things not everybody understand, you satisfy the minority but in exchange you probably decrease the interest of the mass by diluting the image of the brand gHacks.

The effect of talking about code is actually the same as talking about philosophy. It’s really interesting, but when it becomes difficult, little people stay listening while many start to wander off.

Thanks for your input! The “bad” side of this situation is that you might be right. I was thinking of what you said before undertaking this here at gHacks. Martin is definitely in on your comment and he will decide on the poll, but we have decided to deduce the attitude of the readers by the comments and if we get negative responses we will not post any more than a few of these articles :)

If you guys would like less coding articles I don’t think I will be guest posting, I’ll create a separate blog for it and let those of you interested know :)

Again, gHacks is for you guys, so if you don’t like these posts let me know and there will be no more of this evil! :)

Thanks for input rruben!

So although I like the idea of having this sort of posts I suggest that you first run a poll to do some research about how many people on Ghacks really are webmasters.

E.G.
You can make a poll like this:
Are you interested is posts about:
-PHP & MYSQL
-HTML & CSS
-I am not interested in coding related articles

In my opinion you could better post this kind of articles on a coding focussed blog as a guest blogger and you can of course link to that blog to give some more exposure to the articles.

Of course it is possible that I am not right, but like I said you might run a poll first to see how many Ghacks readers support this idea.

I wanted to address your issue separately. I did think about people who are just learning this stuff, that’s partyl why I added the reference to HTML and CSS.

I have good news though, I will be writing some articles aimed toward the beginner side! However I think there are plenty of great sources online for learning this stuff (w3schools.com, php.net, tizag.com and so on) so I will focus more on the practical side.

First of all, thanks for the positive comments, I’m glad you like the idea of web development posts here on gHacks!

Second of all, actually I agree with you guys too, but I can only share so much in one article, so I couldn’t explain better :)

In reality my code is very commented. I am actually training someone to work with me, so my code right now is about 70% comments. Also, with variables like $u it is VERY obvious in the code.

I actually only use that variable in the login script which is short, after that I use the session variable which is descriptive. Overall I agree that variables should be descriptive, but I also believe that coders should be free to save themselves time and use $u for username for example. I usually send along a documentation for all my websites I code, but I did feel a bit ashamed, so I might change my evil ways :D

Thanks a lot for your positive comments, I’ll try and make things as interesting as possible! Also, I feel I know quite a lot about this topic, but I am nowhere near knowing everything, I am anxious to learn from you guys so please do comment :)

I’ll admit that having naming conventions are a great idea when programming. You always want something standard across your code that you can quickly see and identify, but obfuscation is never the way to go. Not only does it make your code harder to read later on, but it makes it harder to make changes later on.

Sure when you program something you always intend to be the only person ever working on it, but say you run into a problem, you may need someone else to take a look at it and help figure it out, and now your obfuscation – however well intentioned – has slowed you down.

Granted it could be easily remedied by comments, and perhaps when you’re done creating your web site/application a simple find/replace all would solve the problem.

PS: web dev posts were the only thing missing to make ghacks the perfect blog, hope there is more where this came from ;)

PPS: happy new year everyone :P

If you write for someone else or might sell or distribute the code / product you might want to think about proper names and commentary.