As I mentioned in my very first post on this blog, I plan on posting about personal finance and saving money in addition to web development. This is my first post along those lines. All of this stuff is very interesting to me, and I hope you get some benefits as well. I mean, everyone likes to save money right?
Over the past year, I’ve been way into Ramit Sethi‘s website and book. He targets people in their 20s and 30s and has some excellent strategies on saving money in ways that make a ton of sense. Ramit’s main point is to go for the big wins (like saving hundreds on cable) instead of the small things (not buying coffee in the mornings) that waste too much time and give way too little in return. Its important to get your finances under control, but still allow yourself the freedom to spend on the things that make your life enjoyable.
Have you ever noticed those sweet blue outlines around input fields when using Safari? Something that looks like this?
Here’s a pretty cool trick to help speed up image loading. I’m sure you implemented an image rollover before. Typically, you would make 2 images – one for the default state and one for the hover state. When you first rollover your image, there would be a slight pause while the new hover image loads. Once the image is loaded, the rollover is way smoother since the image has been cached.
When coding the admin for PowerGallery, I used the 
WebAssist recently released a really cool PHP solution today called PowerGallery. I was the lead engineer on this solution and it was lots of fun to code it. Am I biased since I created this thing? Of course! But I have no doubts you’ll love it too. I don’t want this to sound like a sales pitch, but I am proud of the work we put into this solution pack. I also wanted to set the stage since some of my upcoming tips are direct results of things I learned during development of PowerGallery.
At home, I have an ubuntu linux box that I use to store all my media. I have multiple terabytes in this thing and it always seems like I am adding more and more hard drives to up the storage capacity. I found a really awesome command line tweak that will give 5% more space for each drive. So if we’re talking about a 1 terabyte drive, that’s another 50 gigs we can gain!