Web Development Blog

Recently I had the pleasure of working on a project called DISQY. DISQY is a video aggregator that searches the Internet for the most mentioned videos each day. It then applies an algorithm to what it finds and decides which videos are the most influential and which are spreading the fastest. The most viral videos are then ordered and placed on the homepage with the most viral video that day getting embedded right at the top. Videos can also be sorted by the most viral each day, week and month. There is also an “upcoming” page which displays videos that aren’t viral yet but are spreading more quickly than the other videos on the site and may soon make the jump to being viral.

The video pages themselves offer up cool charts that are updated each hour and show how and where videos are trending. Users on the site can then react to each video with comments and preselected phrases such as:

This video made me… cry

This video made me… OMG

Users can also submit videos to the site themselves from a choice of around 10 of the largest video sites on the Internet. This gives them the ability to gain clout on the community by finding material before other people and before the site itself finds it. Another cool feature that members of the site are given is the ability to create playlists featuring their favorite videos.

Overall DISQY is a fun site for the casual visitor or the hardcore user.

Check out DISQY

Anyone with knowledge of HTML can do this and trust me it will save you loads of time in the long run. The main idea behind this structure is that anything that is going to be on more than one page in your website is going to be called through a php include. The reasoning behind it is that if you ever plan on updating the design or structure of your site, you’ll be able to do so much quicker through this method because instead of updating each page individually, you’ll only have to update one file. It is also a wonderful solution because of how clean your markup will look.

This is part one of a mini-series of blog posts that I will be referring to as “The Flaws and Delusions of Web Designer Depot”

I don’t get particular enjoyment out of pointing out the flaws in others, but in this case it is so worth it. For over a year, WebDesignerDepot (Web Designer Depot) has been handing out terrible advice and ripped off posts to its users. Their articles lack attention to detail, sense, and quality of any kind.

“I could ramble on about how talented Jared Lunde is at programming and design, but like any other artist or dedicated professional, I believe it is best to let his work speak for itself. After engaging with Jared and similar vendors on countless large projects, however, I can honestly say there is one thing that truly …absolutely…unequivocally set him apart from the rest: the process. In a business environment in which your success is becoming more and more interdependent with the success of outside vendors, I wholeheartedly felt Jared took the time to understand my needs and my goals which he then translated into the final product. He gave me a powerful level of confidence in his abilities that eventually developed into an incredibly trusting customer-client relationship.”

Frank O’Driscoll
E-Revenue Project Manager
American Cancer Society
Eastern Division, Inc.

I’ve coded a lot of websites for a lot of different designers and a common problem I experience with each one is something that should really be natural to them in the first place – the idea that form follows function. Most of this problem is rooted in the fact that they are not web developers. The most overlooked areas that I’ve noticed are those in SEO and in page load time.

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