MooTools Zebra Tables Class

Here’s how you execute a POST using the PHP CURL library.

I’m pretty sure i bookmarked this at some point, but since IE6 is *STILL* king it’s still handy to hang onto. I cringe when i still IE6’s browser share. [ via 31three ]

PHP Client Library for our Address Book API. Seems practical for social networking applications.

The Address Book API allows for a user to import their email contact list (from Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail) into any site. Our API is used on dozens of sites and applications, and is a way for users to invite friends to a site, share content with people in their address book, and import their social relationships.

Auto-populating Select Boxes using jQuery & AJAX is a great tutorial on working with jQuery, Ajax, and JSON… with select boxes. I was able to recently complete some client functionality thanks to this.

This select box manipulation jQuery plugin came up in my research. Bookmarking for later use, since there doesn’t seem to be anything else simliar for jQuery that i could find.

How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax

Just caught this nice code example from Eric Wendelin. Looks great, bookmarking for future reference.

An AJAX file upload tutorial that doesn’t really use 100% AJAX, but instead a solution which imitates the AJAX process, but uses a normal upload process and iFrames.

Jaisen Mathai shows how he improved speed with PHP and .htaccess. There are endless schools of thought and execution on this, but worthy of a look.

Create Resizing Thumbnails Using Overflow Property… limit the default dimensions of the thumb, and show it in full size when user mouse-overs it.

Not my personal best but these10 best CSS hacks should be known by any coding pro.

Just linking to two scripts I found of use recently. Both involve pagination with Ajax and Javascript. One involves actually loading separate pages, and the other is a “virtual pagination script” where the elements are already on the page and you want to create pagination functionality based on that.

moo.rd is a “super lightweight javascript (object oriented) library based on the MooTools framework.” The effects are ok (though i don’t see any big demand for them) but the custom alert and custom boxes along with the table row features make this bookmarkable for any MooTools fan.

New To CodeIgniter 1.6.1: Active Record caching, a new Path Helper, and a series of enhancements for working with multiple character sets, etc.

Elliot Haughin’s article on Optimizing and Scaling your CodeIgniter Application looks like a must read for anyone designing application and websites that wouldn’t qualify as “small”. Just beginning to get into this, but if you work with CodeIgniter this looks like a bookmark no-brainer.

This simple library gets status updates from Twitter to use in your CodeIgniter application. Looks like Elliot Haughin has more CodeIgniter libraries for Simplepie, Amazon S3, Flickr, and Lastfm.

Spellify is “an automatic text field spell checker” that’s available for download, with the following requirements:

- PHP 4+ with CURL library installed (developed using PHP 4.4.6)
- script.aculo.us 1.8.0 (only effects.js and scriptaculous.js required)
- Prototype JavaScript Framework 1.6.0

While i’m on the topic of Google Maps, I decided to bookmark Pamela’s other article which is more like an introduction on how to use Google Maps with a MySql database. Related article - Using PHP and MySQL to create KML.

I’ve seen similar effects, but FancyZoom 1.1 seems to pull off javascript image zooming rather well. Works in Safari and Opera. The link has examples, but i copied the list of nice features.

Focused on the smoothest, most polished zooming animation possible
Automatically scales images from any image link, with no HTML changes
Preloads full-size images in the background on link mouseover
No resource-heavy Javascript libraries — 100% coded from scratch to zoom
Draws a nice drop shadow under the full-size image to offset it from the page
Uses Safari 3’s “box-shadow” feature to draw the drop shadow natively, no images required
Requires only two new lines of code in your HTML
Tested and works with Safari, Firefox, IE7, and IE6. (Looks better in modern browsers.)

Google Grabber: “Using a short amount of PHP code, you can query Google to retrieve the number of pages your domain has listed in Google.”

This topic comes up frquently enough to warrant a bookmark to Pamela Fox’s how-to on a Store Locator with PHP, MySQL & Google Maps. Being on the Google Geo APIs Team, i can’t wait to dive into this.

I’ve bumped into PHP scripts like this before, but haven’t bookmarked them until now.

I’m horrible in math. So I hope I never have to figure out how to select a random, weighted element from an array in PHP. But if I do, I now have something to refer to! Thanks Jesse!

Scott Klarr must be collecting sheet sheets… he now offers the ultimate Linux-Unix Cheat Sheets collection. I also this Linux Command Line Tips and this Unix/Linux Command Cheat Sheet to be worthy bookmarks.

Yahoo focuses on the full capabilities of the iPhone’s Safari browser including browser cache and transfer speeds. It’s an interesting read, for example:

The iPhone has an amazing UI, but it is limited by the small cache size and slow network speed. Downloading large components over the air through the EDGE network is slower compared to DSL. According to published reports, the typical data download speed varies from 82 kbps to 150 kbps. Though the WiFi network speed is usually more acceptable, it’s better to give users the choice in which experience they’d prefer.

Niall Kennedy has a nice summary:

Web applications built for the iPhone’s Safari browser need to specifically target web performance these small devices and special cache rules. Desktop browser best practices such as zipped components and combined files for CSS and JavaScript may be too bloated for the Safari mobile browser. A few tips:

• Limit cacheable components to a decompressed size of 25 KB or less
• Limit yourself to 19 or less cached components
• Minify CSS and JavaScript for slimmer file weights.
• Use CSS sprites to combine multiple small images into a shared image under 25 KB

Also, don’t assume those viewing your iPhone / iTouch site are using wifi. Remember, iPhones will probably be using slower EDGE.

Apparently you can sniff browser history via Javascript for (hopefully) an “improved user experience”.

Top 15 Music APIs

Scott Klarr has cheat sheets for Javascript, jQuery, Scriptaculous, MooTools, Prototype, Microsoft Ajax Library, Yahoo YUI, and Symfony. Quite a list, probably should grab these or bookmark.

Chyrp appears to be a light weight blogging engine, done in PHP/mySQL (some Ajax) and is “loosely based on the MVC design pattern.”. It’s been recently upgraded. I don’t like the fact you need to give an email for a live demo, but at least you can download the code.

Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is driven by PHP and MySQL (with some AJAX thrown in), and has a pimpin’ theme and module engine, so you can personalize it however you want.

John Gruber picked up on this (and so did i) that Cameron Hunt switched from Tumblr to Chyrp, an interesting endorsement.

As a Wordpress user, I use Akismet of course, but what if you had to design one from scratch? Or at least wanted to know how to put one together? Jonathan Snook tells how he built an effective blog comment spam blocker. Results will vary of course, but I found it interesting how he identified and treated his spam.

You may think with “125.125.1.1″, you would want a VarChar type of field. That would be my first instinct until this tip made me think. If you are storing an IP Address in MySql (or any database for that matter) it’s better to store it as an Integer. MySQL has two built-in functions: INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() to convert the IP. This allows for better storage and possible indexing.

I’m bookmarking this sample Facebook application with CodeIgniter mainly for the CodeIgniter aspect since i’m not really an active Facebook user. Still interesting, and worth a look.

The fact that CodeIgniter 1.6 has hit the streets has got me excited about this php framework again. One or two new client projects will be built with this version in the coming weeks. I especially like how you can extend the helpers, but the biggest thing of all is that a CodeIgniter 2.0 might be in our future since development is accelerating.

PHP4 is still supported, and I would agree with that thinking since PHP5 is not yet everywhere in the shared hosting universe.

John Resig notices that Safari, IE, and Firefox browsers round pixels differently.

Take the following page for example. You have 4 floated divs, each with a width of 25%, contained within a parent div of width 50px. Here’s the question: How wide are each of the divs?

The problem lies in the fact that each div should be, approximately, 12.5px wide and since technology isn’t at a level where we can start rendering at the sub-pixel level we tend to have to round off the number. The problem then becomes: Which way do you round the number? Up, down, or a mixture of the two?