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. [...]
While recently experimenting with charting for web applications, and the various charting libraries popular among the PHP community, I came across the Google Chart API. I’ve since decided to outsource, as it were, all my charting needs to the API, a service provided by Google to generate just about any graph you could possibly need [...]
6. Use UFOs. Though not the flying kind, UFOs (Unobtrusive Flash Objects) are cool in their own way. They are DOM scripts that add intelligence to your website by allowing it to detect if the visitor’s computer has the Flash plug-in or not. They will only embed Flash objects on your site if they are [...]
We’ve created our table, our table image an we’ve begun to style it. The next step is to enter our content. Let’s remember the whole reason for doing things this way, we ant to make sure most of the table can be indexed by search engines like Google. At the end of this …
Now that you’ve designed your table it’s time to learn how to make it function as valid XHTML. The easiest way is create a hidden table on top of the image. 1. Create a table with the same number of rows and tables. My image had 8 rows and 9 columns. 2. So we’ve got [...]
We may be living in the 21st century, but as far as Flash SEO is concerned, it’s as if we’re trapped in the Dark Ages. While there are successful, high-ranking Flash websites, most of these are of already established brands and/or have the ability to generate a huge number of backlinks to boost their PR [...]
It seems the web is always abuzz when another web 2.0 startup releases an API. Everyone starts putting together little mashups; some take off, most don’t. Yet few seem to be familiar with the Yahoo! APIs: with immense power on offer, and with a serialized PHP output option, they’re great for PHP developers. Read on [...]
A few weeks ago, a team of Google researchers presented a project that may just revolutionize image search. See, during the last few years, image search has been rapidly growing in popularity. Development in this field, however, has been slow at best. Right now search results are still dependent on textual clues like filenames, image [...]
Grunge Tables with Photoshop and XHTML (Part 2) We’re learning to make grunge tables. In Part 1 we made a simple table, in this lesson we’ll add some grunge and text to make it look unique, and in the final lesson we’ll mark it up with XHTML. Make It Grungy 1. Import two of the [...]
If you offer web design or graphic design services at some point you’re going to need a price chart or service list so that potential clients can see what you’re all about. In this multi-part tutorial I’ll show you how to make one in Photoshop and then mark it up for XHTML. Then I’ll …
