Posts Tagged 'Web Tools'

I recently had the need for some client side form validation and happened to find the jQuery Ketchup plugin. It’s a simple and flexible plugin that can be modified and styled for your own needs, plugin modifications are encouraged although the ‘out of the box’ code will work just fine for your basic needs. You’ll need to download the plugin files to get started. once download follow these simple steps to implement it into your application.
Step 1
include the files in the plugin as shown …

A quick search on Google for the term ‘Social Media’ currently retrieves over 203,000,000 results. Just before Facebook started to make a name for itself and emerged on the scene back in late 2006 the buzz word on the internet was ‘Web 2.0,’ even then people were quick to chime in with there 10 pence worth and were happy to give you their opinion on the next best thing on the internet. This unfortunate movement also bought with it a hell of a lot of …

I’ve been meaning to do something sporadic and creative for a while now but have never got around to it until now. I decided to challenge myself to build a site (wedeliver.papermashup.com) in under 24hrs from concept and design through to development. The site is a silly idea based on a simple delivery website with the twist of allowing users to deliver their precious package by an animal of their choice, much like we did in the war with carrier pigeons. I started by working …

I’ve recently been working on a large project that required a lot of JSONP encoding and parsing. To be honest its been a bit of a nightmare because of one simple problem. the formating that JSON spits out onto the page is non-existant its like a printing out a PHP array and viewing it in your web browser, however with an array you can either view the page source and see the formating or simple print_r($array); within pre tags which will format the array visually …

I’ve come across quite a few sites that explain how to create flexible CSS3 buttons but i’ve never really spent the time to implement one until i found a great little write up courtesy of the guys over at the Zurb blog who have a fantastic post on creating CSS3 buttons. So i’ve taken their example and tweaked it to fit my needs. It’s worth noting that if your using Internet explorer you’re not going to see all these effects as IE still doesn’t support …

I wrote a post mid last year about protecting your site images from being hotlinked as I found a site that had word for word scrapped one of my blog posts, you can see the post here, and I really wanted to go back to this and run over a few more things the .htaccess file is useful for. I mainly use the .htaccess file to rewrite URIs for example http://mysite.com/site/pages/contact.php would be accessed by visiting http://mysite.com/contact. So the URI is being re-routed to …

Is your site reaching audiences that would probably rather content in their native language? we’ll there’s a simple solution which models itself on the popular social sharing site AddThis. TranslateThis developed by Jon Raasch, a front-end web programmer from Portland, OR is a very easy to implement translation solution that uses the Google Language API and AJAX to translate your page content on the fly.
Why is it good?

It has several advantages over using the Google translate widget the main one being that TranslateThis processes the …

There are some great JavaScript graph libraries out there and one that’s recently come to my attention is Highcharts.com which is compatible with both the jQuery and Mootools frameworks. To get started point your browser here where you can download all the files you need including examples. Highcharts features include slick tooltips to reference points on your charts, it’s compatible with all standard web browsers, the setup for a graph as demonstrated below is simple and uses the JSON data type, there are also …

As the title describes we’re going to look at making cross domain ajax requests using JSONP I’m also going to show you how to get data from a MySQL database and encode it into a JSON string which can be parsed using JavaScript. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and essentially its a method which allows us to execute cross domain ajax requests without too much fuss. This post really follows on from my article about scraping content from a page but also allows you …

I stumbled across this pretty useful jQuery Plugin the other day that i though some of you would appreciate. It was written by Jeremy Martin a few years back. The plugin solves a big problem in that, if you have too much text you can not truncate it, or split it into two section allowing you to hide and reveal the text when needed. The plugin works well if you have have for example a set of user generated comments where you want to keep …

I’ve had a few pagination scripts over the years but I thought i’d share the one that i’m currently using as it’s a useful script to have in your toolbox. As a developer you’ll soon find a need to paginate data when displaying contents from the database, and rather than use JavaScript which could require all the data to be loaded into the page on load, we can use PHP to ensure that we’re only requesting the data that we need from the database. For …

Google Analytics is great to tracking your site traffic. I started out using Statcounter.com to track my site visits, but over the years i’ve wanted more information so I switched over to using Google Analytics. Google provides an excellent dashboard to monitor and dig into your sites traffic and drill down the information to see exactly what content on your site is popular. For advertising campaigns at MySpace we use a JavaScript technique to track specific clicks on content on a page, with the ability …

“Easy PHP Websites with the Zend Framework” shows you how to use the powerful Zend Framework to build websites with amazing speed and efficiency. Embracing a teaching strategy of learning by doing, showing you how to build website features you’ll actually want to use within your own websites. Among other topics you’ll learn how to manage data submitted through web forms, send e-mail through your website (both text and HTML), manage the user registration, login, and password recovery processes, and even create a simple social …

As a designer it’s usually quite hard to get constructive feedback on a design. All the people I know are either friends or relatives who only say, ‘Yeah that looks good’, or ‘Oh I like that’. Fivesecondtest.com aims to fix this problem by allowing you to upload any design and running a series of tests. The service is free to signup however you can buy tokens to allow further customisation of tests.
I happened to stumble upon the site and added a usability test for …

If you think you can just build a website and expect it to perform well you can think again. Getting a website to the top of search results is every marketing managers goal. Im going to run through five key points that will put you in good stead to getting the results your site deserves. SEO is often percieved as a dark art. If you start out well and get the basics done the quality of your content should speak for itself. However …

Its sometimes necessary as a developer to log and track data as it is processed either to debug or to keep a simple record of maybe who’s logged in or out of your site. You could easily do this by accessing a MySQL database and adding a row, but you then have to create and maintain that database. So today I’m going to run through the steps to writing and reading a .txt log file.
The Code
In order to write and access our log file we …

I want to just start this little post with that fact that I don’t know all the ins and outs of using Memcache but I have enough knowledge to just about get it working. I have access to a Mediatemple Dedicated Virtual Extreme server and managed to install it on the server using SSH, with the help of this little guide from Mediatemple which runs you through the installation process step by step.
Who uses Memcache?
Well Memcache was developed by Danga Interactive to enhance the speed …

API Knowledge
A key tool for any budding web developer is API knowledge. It’s good to familiarise yourself with a variety of application interfaces. I started out using the Twitter REST API with PHP and CURL when twitter first launched the API to basically get a users tweets, pretty simple now I look back, but at the time it was the first time i’d done such a thing. As the development of social media continues this will increasingly open up opportunities to develop more and more …

Yesterday I had the need to read a URL GET variable and complete an action based on the url parameter. I searched high and low for a solution and came across this little piece of code on Snipplr. It basically reads the current page url, perform some regular expression on the URL then saves the url parameters in an associative array, which we can easily access.
So as an example if we had the following url with the javascript at the bottom in place.
http://papermashup.com/index.php?id=123&page=home
All …

Learning a new programming language can be daunting to say the least. I’ve recently cracked it when it comes to jQuery. I wouldn’t say Im a pro by any stretch of the imagination but I can successfully build applications. It wasn’t an easy ride learning a new syntax, I’m going to run over a few tips and techniques that i found useful learning both jQuery and PHP.
Take Time To Learn
In order to get into your new programming language you need time and commitment to perfect …