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. Read the rest of this entry »
Five Handy Web Development Bookmarklets
July 23rd, 2008
Debugging PHP with Firebug and FirePHP
July 21st, 2008FirePHP 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Five Tools For Faking Advanced CSS
July 20th, 2008When 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!
Running background processes in PHP
July 18th, 2008So 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Testing email routines in web applications
July 15th, 2008For 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Turn Your Wordpress Blog into a Social Network
July 14th, 2008
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.
First Look at A.viary.com
July 14th, 2008One of the hottest application suites to hit the design community since Adobe was born is now upon us. A.viay.com is a well executed visionary attempt at becoming the ‘CS3′ of web apps. And I’m not sure how it happened, but while Adobe wasn’t paying attention this group may have just snatched the market.
We all love web apps, as long as you’re connected they provide cheap, fast and less resource alternatives to desktop solutions. On top of that they store your data in the cloud, a good place for it if your computer ever crashes or is stolen.
SimpleTest: Unit Testing for PHP
July 14th, 2008We 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. Read the rest of this entry »
Getting Started with ORM in PHP
July 14th, 2008ORM, or Object Relational Mapping, is a database design approach that simplifies managing complex databases for programmers. Instead of direct database access, an ORM layer in a PHP framework can make “objects” stored in a database behave like actual objects from a programming perspective - for example, creating a new “car” stored in the database could involve a call to $car->new(). By abstracting actual database access, web development can be more productive and result in more reliable applications. Here’s a quick intro to ORM in PHP. Read the rest of this entry »
Create a Custom Firefox Search Tool in Five Minutes
July 13th, 2008site: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 Custom search to improve your earnings and it’s functionality?
