I’m excited to announce one of the things that’s been keeping me busy lately. 24 ways to impress your friends is a festive blog designed to act a bit like a seasonal advent calendar. Instead of counting down the days to Christmas with little cardboard doors, allow me to present 24 web development tips and tricks from myself and my good friends.

Each day from now until 24th December, we’ll be publishing a new short article or tip designed to teach you something that perhaps you didn’t know, and in turn can share with your friends. It’s a holiday thing – share the lovin’.

Many years ago, my friend Massimo Foti urged me to learn about regular expressions – “Learn regexp and impress your friends!” he used to say. I always liked that notion. There’s a lot of fun to be had in learning something that will impress those you work with – especially if then you can share what you know to everyone’s benefit. Impressing your friends is a great thing to strive for.

So, to get the ball rolling, first up is Easy Ajax with Prototype which I wrote after just a short while playing around with some Ajax. Thought Ajax was rocket science? It’s really not, especially with so many good frameworks available now. Prototype has its roots in Ruby on Rails, and does a nice job of handing the tiresome bits and letting you get back to building your applications. Do give it a go.

Oh, and to keep the surprise going (just like an advent calendar) we won’t be telling you who the next guest author is each day. Let’s just say there’s an awful lot of names you’d recognise.

So enjoy – and spread the word. Ho ho ho.

Update: Ending up on the home page of digg.com is both a blessing and a curse. Hopefully the server will be up again shortly.

Update: I’ve ditched Textpattern and am serving static pages. Basically my server doesn’t have enough memory to keep up with demand (we’re still on the home page of digg, and currently hold spots 2 and 3 of del.icio.us/popular). Perhaps I should be running lighttpd. I’m trying to get the server upgraded now.