Flying Dune Buggies & One Page Websites

Today I received an email from an online tech magazine announcing the dawn of the flying dune buggy. That's right... SkyRunner, a company out of Shreveport, LA has just announced that they're now taking orders for the super-cool, super-lightweight paraplane buggy.

I had to check out the link, and I noticed that they are employing a current trend in web design called the one page site. The idea is to put all of your site content in a single HTML file and use anchor tags to navigate throughout different sections of the page. You can check out their site at FlySkyRunner.com to see how they are doing it.

This seems to be a popular way to build sites these days, and with a little JavaScript, JQuery, CSS3, or Ajax, you can add all sorts of effects and animations for the transitions. The results can be impressive, as you can see for yourself at sites like OnePageLove.com and WebDesignerDepot.com.

However slick these websites can be, there is much debate about whether this trend is good for user experience, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, among other things. Some of the criticisms being brought up include usability issues on mobile devices, poor keyword targeting, and low quality scores for contextual advertising.

For now, it's still difficult to determine if the pros of this trend outweigh the cons, but in the meantime I'm going to take a little break to imagine flying around in my $119,000 flying dune buggy. Until next time...

The Rubber Meets the Road

Fund.io Admin Dashboard

So, I'm in the 4th week here at Coder Camps. Time to post on the blog has become scarce, but we're moving forward on the Fund.io Admin Dashboard. Josh Thoyakulathu, my paired programming partner, and I have been working on a Flagged comments page that will be used by Admin users to approve or reject flagged comments from the front-end of the website.

The daily schedule we've adopted is:

• Stand-up meetings to coordinate what we've done and where we're going as a group
• Function writing practice
• Short, focused lectures
• Paired programming 

After that, we're on our own. I'm continuing to use the Pluralsight videos in addition to sites like Microsoft Developer Network & StackOverflow to fill in the gaps and as a goto for finding solutions to problems. Next up, learning how to create AJAX calls to populate our table on the fly. 

The deeper I get into this stuff, the more I realize how much actually goes on behind the scenes. Somewhere, behind all these magically delicious gadgets and gizmos of the web, are lines of code that someone wrote. My hat is off to these wizards. I hope they don't mind me standing on their shoulders.