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. 1. ReCSS ReCSS [...]
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 …
We recently looked at front-end testing of web applications with Selenium. Today, we’ll take another approach to testing your PHP applications: backend unit testing for your actual PHP code. As part of our posts on test driven development, here’s a quick intro to using SimpleTest to test your PHP applications. SimpleTest is a PHP unit [...]
site:yourblogname.com searchterm This is an example how to search your blog as a query in Google. But have you ever wanted to learn how to make your own ‘Search Tools’ for Firefox so that you can look-up information on your own blog quickly, from anywhere on the internet? Or do you want to hack Google [...]
As part of the Information Revolution that is changing the way that the world works and plays, people are increasingly turning to the Internet for the information they use to make decisions — financial, professional, health, etc. Consequently, news publications that are printed and mailed through the post are being supplanted by portal news sites, blogs, and online newsletters (oftentimes referred to as “e-zines” — electronic magazines).
Ever setup a demo for a client, only to find you had a syntax error in one of the key files? Or maybe you’ve forgotten to setup the database on the staging server and your boss is staring at a screen of MySQL errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to put together a [...]
As Ivo Jansch pointed out on the Ibuildings blog, there’s barely a month left till security fixes are discontinued for PHP 4. While support for PHP 4 officially ended last December, security updates were offered until 08-08-08. Most major web hosts have been phasing out PHP 4 support, but many legacy applications built with PHP [...]
jGrowl is a plugin for the jQuery that generates unobtrusive notification boxes on a page. It has a similar design to the OS X Growl Framework, after which it is named. With jGrowl, web developers can easily display brief information messages and alerts to their users during busy sessions with complex web applications. jGrowl integrates [...]
Fiddler is a request inspector, form tamperer and general debugging proxy for HTTP. Fiddler enables web developers to monitor HTTP requests to their web application, watch request and response headers, tamper with query strings and form values, collect statistics and even rebuild and send new requests. It has inbuilt HTTPS support using a middle-man approach, [...]
Often you need solid metrics on the performance of your web application. Benchmarking your website can provide insight into which sections of your application might need major optimizations, and helps in dealing with scalability issues. Apache Bench, or ‘ab’, is a command line load testing utility which ships with Apache, and allows you to simulate [...]
