Looking for a way to see how your web creations will look on iPhone? Look no further. iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It's the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development. And it's free.
Why is so hard for a Windows user to find any tools to assist with the creation of an iPhone App or an iPhone compliant website.
Even though its been tough to locate information I have managed to create my first iPhone compliant website. Looks great and looking forward to making it public very soon.
On most websites, content is stored in a database and served to visitors upon request. Databases are very fast, but there's lots of things that you can do to enhance its speed and make sure you won't waste any server resources. In this article, I have compiled 10 very useful tips to optimize and speed up your website database.
It doesn’t matter how many years I’ve been dealing with Javascript – it contains many little things that surprises me almost every week. For me, Javascript means a constant learning process. In this article, I’ll provide ten small Javascript tips, mainly aimed for beginner and intermediate Javascript developers. Hopefully there’s at least one useful tip for every reader :).
Rich-Text Editors, inline content editors, WYSIWYG editors – or whatever you want to call them – are web applications that enable users to enter, edit and manipulate alphanumeric characters while visiting your website. Wherever you have a textarea form input on your site, chances are good that its usability could be improved with a Rich-Text Editor.
Been using CKEditor, which used to be FCKEditor, for years in my projects.
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers.
Hopefully this will push it over the edge so Veign will no longer have to design websites with IE6 in mind. My stats still show enough usage that I have no choice but to support it.
We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
Very powerful feature that many users probably don't take advantage of.
Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money.
Do you have something that should be added to the list?
As developers, it is useful to know that Google hosts a lot of open source projects. Today, let’s have a look at the 10 most awesome projects hosted on Google code.
OpenFaces is an open-source library of AJAX-powered JSF components, an Ajax framework and a client-side validation framework. OpenFaces is based on the set of JSF components formerly known as QuipuKit. It contains fully revised codebase of QuipuKit and introduces many new components and features.
When scripting in PHP, we often restrict ourselves to a limited number of API functions: the common ones, like print(), header(), define(), isset(), htmlspecialchars(), etc. If some needed functionality doesn’t exist, we often write it making use of these basic components which we have in mind. The PHP API actually offers a lot of functionality, some useless and some useful; often seldom used. I have been looking through the available functions and was interested to find some really cool functions that I should have known about. Here, I share my findings.
GIFs of spinning @s on the “Contact us” page. Common usability mistakes for the sake of visual appeal. Splash pages. Fancy search box. No whitespace. Music on page load. Home page banner of a jigsaw-puzzle globe with a piece missing. Sometimes you just know that what a client is requesting is wrong and that you have to find a way to tell them. But how?
Sometimes you just can't and you have to weigh whether you want the client. Personally I find it very hard to do things which I know are an incorrect move for their website which could lead to a negative impact on their business. When this comes up I usually turn a project down.
Volusion: Starting an online business has never been easier. The experts at Volusion have done the work for you by compiling all of the tools you need to sell online into one search engine friendly shopping cart software solution. Volusion’s user-friendly ecommerce software gives you the power to start, grow and manage your online business with ease.
Often called a revolution, Twitter is a very easy and cool way to communicate and promote your blog or service. In this article, I have compiled 10 very useful code snippets to interact with Twitter in your web dev projects.
Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It's not only the DBA's (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.
jReject provides a simple, robjust, light-weight way to display rejections based on a the browser, specific browser version, specific platforms, or rendering engine. Provides full customization of the popup. Uses no CSS file (by default), and can easily be used on page load or during a specific page event. Also provides a flexible way to beautifully and cleanly display custom browser alternatives in the popup.
Using jReject you can block any browser from visiting your website. I would actually never do this. Why turn away anyone from your website just because of their browser preference.
You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time.
Since the invention of the internet, programmers have been using it to discuss software development techniques, publish tutorials, and share code samples for others to learn from and use online. If you're curious about how to become a programmer, you can get off to a running start using tons of great free web-based tutorials and resources.
The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.
Not going to test it but it claims to setup a PHP environment too. Personally I would recommend WAMP for setting up a PHP environment in Windows.
In this post we have put together a useful collection of new web development tools to save developers and designers time, energy, and headaches. Let’s take a look at 40 new useful web development tools and resources in a goodie bag for you, including easy and fast tweaks to forms, snippets of code, documentation at your fingertips, fonts, and cheat sheets.
Solving programming puzzles is a fun way to develop your logical and problem solving abilities. Also, when you’re familiarizing yourself with a new programming language, solving puzzles for that language can help speed up the learning process.
Here are the top 10 popular programming puzzle sites that will help test your thinking and improve your programming, problem solving, and logical thinking skills.
Welcome to the IE6 CSS Fixer: starter kit page. A tool specifically designed to ease the pain of the ie6 css debugger. If you want to read up on all the specifics, I advise you to check the articles on the ideology, the specific fixes and the scope of this tool.
Every little bit helps even though a true understanding of CSS and XHTML can make working with IE6 not too bad.
Google Analytics is an outstanding website analytics tool that gives you way more information about your website than you probably need. Better to get more than you want than not enough, right? Anyways I check my website statistics more often than I should and it ends up taking a few minutes to get logged in, select the right site, select the current day, etc. I found a great Google Analytics PHP API that allows me to get just the statistics I’m looking for.
Create a file called .htaccess and place in your root web folder with one of the follow declarations.
Copy and past the code between the line
Redirect a single page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ redirect 301 /old_page.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Redirect all pages to a new extension (like asp to php) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteRule (.*).asp$ /$1.php [L, R=301] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.
There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers.
Swift Mailer integrates into any web app written in PHP 5, offering a flexible and elegant object-oriented approach to sending emails with a multitude of features.
The amount of Wordpress Plugins available for download are endless, to sift through them and find one or two that you can actually use can be horrendous. Quite often you can find, like a Flickr Plugins, hundreds that do the same function. Others are far too complicated for the designer as well as the user to be useable. Some are even just pointless, and use up design space. How do you test all of them? Do you rely on word of mouth? Do you ask someone to write a plugin for your tailored needs?
mod_rewrite is an Apache module that allows for server-side manipulation of requested URLs. Incoming URLs are checked against a series of rules. The rules contain a regular expression to detect a particular pattern. If the pattern is found in the URL, and the proper conditions are met, the pattern is replaced with a provided substitution string or action. This process continues until there are no more rules left or the process is explicitly told to stop.
Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.
This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.
Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer shows your web pages rendered in Internet Explorer 6 and either Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8, depending on which version you have installed on your machine. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use rulers, guides and zoom/pan tools to precisely identify differences in layout. You can even compare your page comp to how the targeted browsers render the page.
This is a free tool that every web designer should have.
Choose one of our free flash music players for your website and use it to stream music on your web page. Premiumbeat.com offers the easiest way to add music to your website with detailed instructions.
A large collection of some great Google Analytics tips. Google Analytics is a great way to track your visitors and how your visitors interact with your website. This collections some powerful features to your Analytics results. From tracking 404 errors to get full referral links to tracking outgoing links and downloads.
Our PHP obfuscator application encodes and obfuscates PHP code to make the output difficult to reverse engineer. The application requires no pre-modifications to your code and no additional components on your server. This product allows for encoding of functions, variables and the removal of whitespace.
This is a great way to play around with the many Google API's. You can select from one of the APIs, a method or function of that API and edit the code provided by Google to see the results live. There is even a debugger and quick links to the documents on the API.
Unfortunately there will always be some one out there on the world wide web who will attempt to break any thing they can find on the internet so you owe it to your visitors/ members to ensure nothing malicious is being hidden on your site and there info isn’t being stolen. In this article i will cover 5 important steps you need to take to make sure your web site’s secure.
1. Giving out too much information Some people are just looking for information on how to accomplish a project and not really looking to hire someone to do the project. Giving too much information in a proposal just feeds the people who are fishing for information. Proposals should outline what you will be doing and how this directly affects the client without revealing all the details about what it takes to accomplish it.
Example: Don't say 'Setup a Joomla based website' when you can say 'Setup and configure a content management system (CMS) to allow full control over the websites copy and structure'. The second part states what will be done and what benefit the client gets without giving out the details of the CMS system that you recommend or have researched to fit their needs.
2. Not protecting yourself or your client Both you and your client should now how they are protected during the project. An example of some questions that should be answered in a proposal is; who owns the copy and graphics, when does the transfership occur, what happens if the project drags on too long (because of you or client delays), what is the payment schedule, how will reviews of the project be handled, whats included in the price and what may not be included.
Most of these questions would be in a Terms of Service and becomes the legal contract, signed by both parties, that the project follows. Having this in place often prevents issues from coming up since the questions have already been answered.
3. Not including enough information A well written proposal needs to define what the client is receiving and what benefits they will get by using you over your competition. Never think you're the only company they are talking to. Sure, you can leave them with a positive impression of yourself after the initial meeting but most likely the descision of who they will use will fall on the proposal. A proposal that best conveys the project to them and really hits upon all the benfits will do wonders in landing projects.
Think of the proposal as painting a visual picture of the project without saying specifically how you will accomplish things.
4. Not presenting the information in a professional manor This one is simple and sometimes most overlooked. The layout and presentation of your proposal, in the client's eyes, indirectly will represent the quality of the work you will be providing.
Make sure the layout is clean, neatly organized, consistent in its styling and free of spelling or grammatical mistakes. For an even better proposal oragnize the information into sections like: quote, scope of work and terms of service.
5. Leaving money on the table Don't undersell yourself. Alot of companies, especially freelancers, are afraid to price a project to its value for fear of losing the project. Sure its easy to undersell a project in attempt to get it but what you end up with is one of two situations: 1) The project cost is low enough that towards the end of the project you're working for peanuts and aren't happy. This results in a 'just get it done' attitude which affects the work or 2) By underselling yourself the client feels that your skills are directly related to the price you quoted them.
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.
a basic installation of Yourls, a server-based webapp that can run pretty much anywhere a WordPress installation can. There are lots of other options, which we'll get to as well, but Yourls is a fairly smart and fast way to get up and running with your own URL shortener.
In short words jCryption is a javascript HTML-Form encryption plugin, which encrypts the POST/GET-Data that will be sent when you submit a form. It uses the Multiple-precision and Barrett modular reduction libraries for the calculations and jQuery for the rest.
Normally if you submit a form and you don’t use SSL, your data will be sent in plain text.But SSL is neither supported by every webhost nor it’s easy to install/apply sometimes.So I created this plug-in in order that you are able to encrypt your data fast and simple.jCryption uses the public-key algorithm of RSA for the encryption.
sIFR: sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash.
cufon: In reality the generator is little more than a web-based interface to FontForge. First, the generator builds a custom FontForge script based on user input and then runs it, saving the result as an SVG font. The SVG font is then parsed and SVG paths are converted to VML paths.
Here is a step-by-step guide to adding Twitter to your blog without it hanging your web site. Below is a working example of loading twitters after the page has completed, thus preventing the whole page from locking up (notice that the spinner will continue until the twitters are loaded)
Magento is the eCommerce software platform for growth that promises to revolutionize the industry. Its modular architecture and unprecedented flexibility
A quick overview before we dive into code, in today's tutorial we will go over two slightly different methods of creating pretty URLs using HTACCESS. The difference between the methods is whether Apache or PHP is doing the heavy lifting to break the URL apart for parsing. I want to point out that mod_rewrite tutorials are almost as old as the internet itself and this is not the first. At the end I will use one of the methods to create a simple application to show how these solutions would look in a real-live website (well not 100% production quality).
Regular expressions are a very useful tool for developers. They allow to find, identify or replace text, words or any kind of characters. In this article, I have compiled 15+ extremely useful regular expressions that any web developer should have in his toolkit.
Typically, there are two main ways of debugging server-side code: you can utilize an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with a built-in debugger or log and perform your debugging processes in a web browser.
This article shares an elegant, simple, and more maintainable way of debugging Ajax apps via the web browser (more specifically for the Mozilla Firefox browser). You’ll learn the basics of leveraging Firefox in conjunction with Firebug and FirePHP to implement FirePHP libraries on web apps and logging messages in the Firebug console.
HTML email inline styler will convert a webpage with CSS rules to a webpage using inline styles. This inline style format is what is required for sending email newsletters and this online tool can save you the headaches of manually converting.
Veign's HTML5 reference Guide was featured on Smashing Magazine today. The guide is a work in progress (as the spec is changing) reference guide for the up-coming HTML 5 specification that someday will become the standard for the development of websites.
Smashing Magazine is the top website design and development blog around and its a honor to have something of Veign's featured.
Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the HTML Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C's position regarding the future of HTML. A FAQ answers questions about the future of deliverables of the XHTML 2 Working Group, and the status of various discussions related to HTML. Learn more about the HTML Activity.
Every once in a while we like to focus on different design elements and how to use javascript and ajax to make them more interactive and more flexible to the user. In this article we’d like to present a list of over 30 hand-picked Sliders, Scrollers and scrollbar techniques you can use to achieve some special visual effects in your designs.
10 UI Design Patterns You Should Be Paying Attention To: In short, design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects. In fact, you may already be using them now without knowing it.
Pattern Tap: Pattern Tap is here to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps. We aspire to be the one stop pattern shop for your next inspiration need.
40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns: In this article, we share with you the best of the best, cream of the crop sites, galleries, online publications, and libraries devoted to sharing information and exploring concepts pertaining to User Interface design patterns. Flickr Design Patterns: A great collection of design patterns on Flickr that are organized by category.
UI Pattern Factory: UI Pattern Factory is a mix of user interface design pattern library and UI gallery. It is a place to find user interface best practices, get design inspiration, and share design solutions with others
Open Source Design Pattern Library: The Open Source Design Pattern Library is a place where individuals and organizations can share, collaborate, and discuss design patterns.
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library: Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We're thrilled to be sharing patterns and code with the web design and development community, we hope it's useful, and we look forward to your feedback.
15 jQuery Plugins To Create An User Friendly Tooltip: Tooltip is a good way to show extra information when user hovers the cursor over an element. The “hover box” will appear when the mouse hover in, and disappear when the mouse hover out. If the tooltip is being used appropriately, it can improve our site’s user friendly level, and also save us a lot of spaces. Today, we are going to see 15 jQuery plugins to create an user friendly tooltip.
Want to display your own logo on the browser address bar and browser tabs? Simply select a picture, logo or other graphic (of any size / resolution) for the "Image to Use" and click "Generate FavIcon.ico"
A favicon is that small icon that appears in the address bar of a browser for the website your visiting.
Add the Custom Search element, and let visitors search your site and other sites you choose using the power of Google Custom Search. If you like, earn revenue from your site with AdSense for Search.
Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting.
Site Check: Site Check saves you time by compiling a list of websites, with your URL pre-filled in, to check your website in. No need to fill in your website multiple times. This makes manually checking your website a much easier process.
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.
Veign is now providing a service where we do a complete website check / analysis. From identifying website problems before your visitors do to search engine optimization guideline checks to ensure your site is ready for the major search engines, our report will give you the knowledge to fix those pesky problems that are often difficult to track down.
You can easily add a rating system to your website with JS-Kit. This is a great way to get immediate feedback on your website products, listings or posts from your visitors. Also, if you haven't heard Google will be displaying Rich Snippets which may include ratings. So, get your ratings now and possibly enhance your listings in a Google Search Result snippet.
From JS-Kit:
The best content on most web sites and blogs gets buried as new content is added. JS-Kit's Ratings service solves this problem by uncovering and displaying your top content. It lets your visitors rate your merchandise items, services, pictures, blog entries, or any other objects on your site.
The service can be used in two modes, either as a 5-star rating widget or a thumb-up/-down widget and is incredibly easy to install on any static or dynamic web page.
CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them: Do you really understand them? The name might be a little misleading, because sprites aren’t little images like you might be picturing, a sprite is actually one big image. Have you ever seen the CSS technique where the “on” and “off” states of a button are contained within the same image and are activated by shifting the background-position? Think of CSS Sprites as an extension of that technique. The difference is that instead of just two or three images being combined into one, you can combine an unlimited number of images into one.
CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death: Specifically, we’re going to replace old-school image slicing and dicing (and the necessary JavaScript) with a CSS solution. And because of the way CSS works, we’re going to take it further: by building a grid of images and devising a way to get each individual cell out of the grid, we can store all buttons/navigation items/whatever we wish in a single master image file, along with the associated “before” and “after” link states.
CSS Sprite Generator: This tool allows you to automate the process of generating CSS sprites. Simply give it a ZIP file containing 2 or more images (GIF, PNG or JPG) and it will generate a sprite image and the corresponding CSS rules to target and display each component image.
Magento is a popular open source e-commerce software platform that has a modular architecture and is extremely flexible. It comes with a number of online shop maintenance capabilities. It is also simple to configure and easy to customize. And despite the fact that it was launched just last year, it has been gaining more and more popularity among Web designers and e-business owners.
FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library.
This is how websites setup tools for performing audio and video conversions. Want to have users upload video that is then converted to a Flash video? FFmpeg can handle it.
Introducing the Microsoft Sync Framework – a comprehensive synchronization platform enabling collaboration and offline for applications, services and devices with support for any data type, any data store, any transfer protocol, and network topology.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Research Randomizer is designed for researchers and students who want a quick way to generate random numbers or assign participants to experimental conditions. Research Randomizer can be used in a wide variety of situations, including psychology experiments, medical trials, and survey research. The program uses a JavaScript random number generator to produce customized sets of random numbers.
Yup, that's right, IE8 is available today and that means I have to support another browser when developing websites. I just wish IE6's market share would drop enough so I could drop it from my list of supported browsers.
Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
This is great. Google is giving web developers much more control over sites that they push out. No longer do you have to go into Webmaster Tools to fix canonical issues with your website.
Actually, this method gives you much more control. In summary, you can have duplicate content on your website and specify, through a special tag, which is the page that Google should be indexing. This means you can easily filter out Print version of pages or pages with additional query parameters.
cloc counts blank lines, comment lines, and physical lines of source code in many programming languages. It is written entirely in Perl with no dependencies outside the standard distribution of Perl v5.6 and higher (code from some external modules is embedded within cloc) and so is quite portable.
Works great for comparing two projects. Recently I went through a code refactor on a project and I needed to give some information back to the client. CLOC made it simple to give a report as to the before and after counts. The before was approx 240K lines of code and the after was about 81K with zero changes to functionality.
JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework.jQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.
It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.
Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.
The 2009 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most significant programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They occur frequently, are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.
SitePoint is having a sale on their PDFs for website design and development that will let you choose 5 titles for the price of 1 ($29.95) with 100% of the proceeds going to a relief fund for the Australian fires. The reason is SitePoint is headquartered in Melbourne and they want to do what they can to help out.
Here are the titles you can choose from:
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques
I really don't have much need for this anymore as most of my time is spent developing in PHP but figured someone out there may need it or find it useful.
If you use it leave a comment on how well it worked for you.
This post presents 50 useful PHP tools that can significantly improve your programming workflow. Among other things, you’ll find a plethora of libraries and classes that aid in debugging, testing, profiling and code-authoring in PHP.
Then check out the large collection of PHP clones of popular websites. This is a great collection of some of the best clones around mixed in with some of the worst so make sure you read up before installing and going live.
Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer’s toolboxes for a variety of other CMS’, many readers requested a collection of resources for Joomla users and developers, so here it is. Joomla grew out of the Mambo CMS and has since built a large and loyal group of users, much like the other popular open-source options. What this means for users and developers is that there is a wealth of information and resources available, and in this post we’ll take a look at many of the best.
For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.
SEE programming includes one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.
Also, if you didn't know MIT opened up over 1800 of their courses through a program called OpenCourseWare
The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around. Some toolkits aim to create entirely new ways of envisioning and creating projects that appeal to younger minds, such as games and animations, while others aim to recreate the "basic"-ness of BASIC in a modern language and environment.
Extracts video and audio from FLV files without decompressing or recompressing. The video is saved as AVI (H.263/FLV1 and VP6/VP6F) or raw elementary stream (H.264/AVC). The audio is saved as MP3, AAC (with ADTS headers), or WAV (PCM).
EmEditor Text Editor is a lightweight, yet extendable, easy-to-use text editor for Windows. EmEditor is very customizable, and it supports Unicode and powerful macros. EmEditor now supports very large files - up to 248 GB or 2.1 billion lines! EmEditor is certified for Windows Vista! The x64 Edition is also available! The portable version is also available for USB drive setup!
In this version (8.0) there are many new features including a Large File Controller, Vertical Selection Editing, Binary Editing, Optimized Search and Replace, improved Projects Plug-in, and many more!
emEditor has got to be one of the best text editors I have come across. So much so that it is my main application for writing web development code (HTML, CSS and PHP).
This tutorial is aimed at people who are just past the beginning stages of learning PHP and are ready to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty with the language. Listed below are 10 excellent techniques that PHP developers should learn and use every time they program. These tips will speed up proficiency and make the code much more responsive, cleaner and more optimized for performance.
DamnIT is a free service that emails you when a user encounters a JavaScript error in your webpages. DamnIT makes it simple for beta testers to provide useful feedback by prompting them after an error occurs and combining their response with error message, file, line number, and back-trace information. You'll receive detailed automated error information instead of vague bug descriptions.
Awstats Awstats is a log file analyzer type of web statitics reporting tool. This means the data displayed will be the most accurate and complete than some of the other methods listed. Awstats can provide all the expected information (page views, visitors, hits) plus it can give you bandwidth used, and filesizes of downloads.
CrazyEgg One of the first to offer Heat Maps which shows where your user are clicking on your website. This alone makes Crazy Egg worth checking out.
FuseStats Another website offering Heat Maps, which is a color overlay so you can see where your users click, on top of the standard web stat information. They offer a free account, which is why I added it to the list, which can be used for very low traffic websites.
Google Analytics This, in my opinion, is the gold standard for client side web tracking (not a server log analyzer). Google Analytics provides some of the most powerful tool for tracking your visitors, analyzing your websites traffic flow, checking on goals for your visitors and general overall information provided. Plus they are constantly pushing out new features and I'm sure real-time tracking isn't far behind.
HiStats Another great option which provides a very user friendly interface (and quite appealing) and provides a hit counter which can be added to your website so your visitors can see how many visits you get. Oh, did I mention they provide real time tracking? Very nice option.
StatCounter A very popular web stats choice where a small piece of code is embedded in your web pages that handles all the tracking for your visitors. Not as reliable as Awstats but easy to setup, not tied to a server (so you maintain your history) and you can access your stats at anytime from any computer.
The Hit Counter Looking for a simple, simple to install (2 steps) hit counter for your website? Then The Hit Counter what you need. They have made the creation of a custom hit counter as simple as it can be.
50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials This post serves as a collection of useful tutorials on working with AJAX in a wide variety of ways. You’ll find tutorials on working with forms, building shopping carts, creating chat features, working with log-ins and usernames and much more.
The Top 40 Free Ajax & Javascript Code for Web Designers The list below is made up of the best FREE scripts available, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure.
jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices The article will explore what constitutes best practices with regard to Javascript and, furthermore, why jQuery is a good choice of a framework to implement best practices.
The competition to become the next markup language for the Web is heating up. This article takes a look at what's cool and what's uncool about the competing technologies.
This is something that is progressively getting closer to a topic web designers / developers need to start thinking about. The article 'How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web' is what brought this back to focus for me.
What the differences are:
XHTML 2 is a bold step forward intended to create an architecture that will become the host language to many other W3C technologies already in use, or in the works. XHTML 2 is based solely on XML, a technology that most believe will enable the Web to reach its full potential. XHTML 2 is driven by how markup should be used, rather than by how markup is currently used.
X/HTML 5 is an extension of HTML 4 and XHTML 1. It is an incremental step forward rather than a grand leap forward in the style of XHTML 2. Working within the confines of HTML 4 and XHTML 1, X/HTML 5 has devised clever solutions to address some of the faults in HTML 4 and XHTML 1. X/HTML 5 can be also be served as HTML or XML. So, unlike XHTML 2, X/HTML 5 is influenced by the current state of the art (Web browser technology, etc.) and how markup is currently used.
Who will win? I sure hope that it doesn't stay a split and one specification will become the standard. I think small steps forward at a faster rate of finalizing the spec is better than huge steps forward with long breaks between updates.
Programmers all have their pet peeves. Whether it's scope creep, Hungarian notation, or smelly coworkers, we've come to accept that there are certain nuisances that come with our line of work. The following is a list of the top 10 things that annoy programmers, compiled from the results of my recent question on StackOverflow (you must be a closed beta tester to access the link) along with some of my own experiences as a programmer:
codebase brings together source control, issue/ticket management & deployment tracking. If you find yourself managing multiple software projects and need a central place to organise your code.
Sending hundreds of pounds of equipment millions of miles through space to land and operate independently from direct control presents several interesting software development challenges. O'Reilly News recently discussed the project and its technology with NASA's Peter Gluck.
Also, be sure to read They Write the Right Stuff a very interesting article on the software that drives the space shuttle.
Cheat sheets are helpful to have around because they allow you to quickly remember code syntax and see related concepts visually. Additionally, they’re nice decorative pieces for your office.
In this article, you’ll find 23 excellent, print-ready cheat sheets for HTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including MooTools and jQuery).
The Sims Carnival is a new online community and gaming experience from The Sims that makes game creation and sharing more accessible and fun than ever before. The introduction of this new creative endeavor from The Sims is designed to convert millions of players into game designers - no programming skills required!
This is a great way to play around with the many Google API's. You can select from one of the APIs, a method or function of that API and edit the code provided by Google to see the results live. There is even a debugger and quick links to the documents on the API.
Veign's 
You can easily add a rating system to your website with 
Yup, that's right, 
