Hello, I'm Paul.

I specialize in web design and online marketing. This site focuses on web design, web usablility, and development. I've been working on the web since 2002.

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Redmonster is a blog about web design, programming, and internet marketing. It's also the home to my Wordpress Plugins and other experiments.

Latest blog post

Creating JavaScript Functions Faster in TextMate

December 19th, 2010

TextMate’s JavaScript bundle has been getting some love from me this week. I am not presenting anything new here, but I often find gems hidden within the Bundles in TextMate that speed up my development.

f + tab

This creates an anonymous function, which is great when using jQuery or many other JS libraries out there. I tweaked mine to remove the semi-colon at the end.

functionname+shift+return

If you type out the name of your function, then immediately hit Shift + Return, TextMate will convert it into a function.

fun+tab

Construct a function with tab stops.

Recent Posts

Five Great Resources for Beginning PHP Programmers

November 11th, 2010

Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL Author Kevin Yank is a seasoned writer, who delivers a masterful explanation of how to program with PHP, in a tutorial-style format. The book is easy to follow and is specifically written for beginners. Sitepoint books are known in the community for their paramount [...]

Tweet Button Plugin for WordPress

August 28th, 2010

I started working on a simple plugin for WordPress that will add Twitter’s new Tweet Button to a WordPress blog. Right now it’s barebones. I am planning on finishing up the initial options page and releasing it this weekend. You can give it a spin now or check it out on GitHub: http://github.com/paulredmond/TwitterButton-Wordpress-Plugin Tweet

Coupling and Frameworks

July 4th, 2010

Around the same time that the Ruby on Rails framework was released as open-source, programmers have been going nuts about frameworks and code libraries. I love using frameworks, but, I have been thinking about how much code I have released over the last couple years that really didn’t need to rely on the work of [...]

Serious PHP debugging With XDebug

May 8th, 2010

Any serious PHP developer should use a debugging tool. Applications are becoming more complex, using OOP, and spanning more files. This post will quickly bring you up to speed and give you the most awesome debugging tools on the planet. I have been using Zend Server CE for local development. It has all the bells [...]

Better Than Grep

April 20th, 2010

A co-worker recently introduced me to a sweet Unix terminal command “ack.” Ack is a grep replacement (or supplement) that allows you to search your file system, but ignores folders like .svn, cvs, and other folders you would not want to search on a version-controlled project. Ack is fast, cross-platform, and easy to use. Test [...]

Making CakePHP Templates in TextMate

March 7th, 2010

I finally got around to exploring templates in the TextMate bundle editor. The PHP bundle does not have any templates, and so I set out to create a few to improve my workflow. I thought it would be helpful information for PHP developers using TextMate. I actually used the Ruby interpreter to power my templates, [...]

Introduction to CakePHP for Designers: Part II

March 1st, 2010

In the first tutorial, I covered basic foundations of views, and set out create a simple task management application. This tutorial will focus on controllers, which interact with both views and models. The process of the MVC framework is a simple paradigm, where controllers handle requests, get data from the model as needed, and process [...]

Introduction to CakePHP for Web Designers

December 8th, 2009

CakePHP hits the sweet-spot for many of my projects. The conventions and “baked” in classes are huge productivity boosters. Even if you just intend of working with visual elements on a CakePHP project (views), this series will walk you through hands-on lessons of building a simple task management application with CakePHP.

Official WordPress WP-EmailCrypt Plugin Page

November 19th, 2009

My first official WordPress plugin, Wp-EmailCrypt, is now live on Wordpress.org. Wp-EmailCrypt automatically converts email links into encrypted JavaScript code, and reduces the likelihood of emails being harvested.

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