Something I recently noticed in Google Analytics is that they show "(not provided)" for many search keywords these days.  They have recently started blocking search keyword tracking for individuals that are logged in to Google for "security reasons".  This block severely limits the usefulness of Analytics for search, as webmasters have no idea what 20% or more of their visitors are finding their site with.

I have completed my first real Ruby on Rails app and it's in production.  The app answers a problem I have at work: individuals ask me to format newsletter templates all the time and it breaks up my day too often.  It's called Newsletter Maker.

EDIT 2/2/2012: Google likes to randomly change the CSS/page structure of the Realtime Analytics page.  You can always get the updated version at the demo page I have set up (since I use it for the TV display at work and fix it when it breaks).  It has changed twice so far since this post.

I recently discovered the greatness that is adapt.js, or Adaptive CSS.  In a nutshell, it's a javascript tool that allows your website to activate different CSS files based on the user's current browser window size.  

I try to subscribe to security and release announcement RSS feeds in Google Reader since it's bad practice to let software become out of date, especially on a web server.  At the very least you'll know of a vulnerability and be able to patch it.  Here are some important ones I use:

I feel starting out as a person who makes websites today is different than it was 12 years ago when I started.  Back then I had literally no guide and I was a middle school student.  Somehow, I pulled through and that experience is an interesting thing to look at now that I'm a little older.  Compared to some I am still a beginning web developer, but I now do it professionally and make a living with it.

Here is a list of things I'd recommend to anyone starting out on the path of web development.

The upcoming WordPress 3.2 release will be thankfully dropping IE6 support.  This is a welcome change and means themers and developers no longer have to take a step back 10 years when doing their job.  I believe this change will hasten the removal of the browser since WordPress is a large chunk of the web.  

Disqus is likely the most widely used commenting system on the web today.  It has many advantages.  The one I find most convenient is that all of your Disqus comments are linked into one account and you don't have to enter credentials on 50 different sites when you want to comment.  I even use it for the comments here.

If you have an older Wordpress blog you probably have thousands of comments with the built in comment system.  The steps to migrating over to Disqus are as follows:

I'm tired of reading PHP rant posts on sites like Hacker News.  Who submits these things?  Here's a counter-rant, maybe some PHP hating language developer will see it.

The cloud isn't cheap.  Amazon just notified me that their new Dedicated EC2 instances are available that finally answer some performance issues in the cloud.