Archive for July, 2008

It’s not easy being a web developer - in addition to a server-side language, we also have to learn a markup language, yet another (client-side) language and a presentation system. As a result, we tend to focus on what we’re closest to - the business logic - and neglect the front-end.

But you don’t have to be a web dev guru to build great applications: with just a few simple tricks, you can make your web based interfaces more usable and more visually appealing. Here are a few simple CSS tricks every PHP / web developer should know. (more…)

The other day I came across an interesting website with tons of factual information about relatively unknown world-class designers that have created brand identities that have shaped the world around us. It got me thinking about some of my own favorite logos, so I did some research to find out who created them.

(more…)

Designers are always looking for new ways to make their portfolios stand out from the pack. One method that Adobe is promoting is the new feature in Acrobat 9 for PDF Portfolios which allows users to organize a variety of files and compress them as portable PDF documents.

What sets PDF Portfolios apart from other solutions like Powerpoint, Keynote, Illustrator and Word is the ease of navigation and customization it applies to ‘files’, where as most other solutions only let you embed content, offering little control over how it’s displayed once embedded. Click the image for a live demo.

For anyone who’s ever tried to fetch multiple resources over HTTP in PHP, the logic is trivial, but one key challenge is ever-present: latency delays. While web servers have perfectly good downstream links, latencies can increase script execution time tenfold just by downloading a few external URLs. But there’s a simple solution: parallel cURL operations. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the “multi” functions in PHP’s cURL library to get around this quickly and easily. (more…)

When developing a UI for your web application, it’s easy to lose a lot of time waiting for reloads, dealing with browser quirks, even just trying to identify a particular element in the DOM. Here are five handy bookmarklets that will help you finish your client-side web development faster and more effectively. (more…)

FirePHP is a plugin for Firebug, the web development plugin for Firefox, that allows PHP scripts to talk to a Firebug panel. FirePHP installs alongside Firebug, and provides a simple PHP library to bridge the two. FirePHP provides a window of insight into your PHP applications, with a simple debugging interface that won’t interfere with your page content. If you already use Firebug on PHP-powered applications, FirePHP is definitely worth a look. Here’s a quick guide to getting started. (more…)

When some people find a well-designed blog with a few neat tricks, they tend to automatically assume the owner is a CSS genius who’s the next big designer to hit the web. That very well may be the case but more often than not the designer is using ‘tools’ that you just haven’t discovered yet. Here’s five web generators that will make you look like Nick La!

(more…)

So you’ve just built a fantastic processing routine for your application. You’ve checked and double checked the integrity of user input, and you’re doing some serious processing. There’s only one problem: it’s too slow. There’s a simple solution: forking your processing script, and running the code as a background process asynchronously. It can email your user when it’s done: they’ll wait. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started with background processes in PHP. (more…)

For any web developer that’s ever had to build a signup routine, email is the necessary evil that takes pride of place among hated activities. Sure, a simple call to the language’s mail library will send a message through, but the moment the boss wants a HTML email, or users need attachments, everything starts to get tricky. To top things off, automating testing of an email routine can be near impossible with the usual tools. Today we’ll look at some of the options for testing email routines in web applications. (more…)

Wordpress is a CMS that was built for blogging but many people have repurposed it for magazines, newspapers, blog networks and all sorts of other goodies! But did you know you can hack your Wordpress blog to be a no-cost solution for a social network? Well you can, and here’s fifteen plug-ins that will let you do it.

(more…)