All sorts of links that we have found useful over the years. From form layouts to icon sets, from AdSense tips to databases and backup strategies. If we've needed it, we've linked it.
I haven't spent any time looking at the Google Charts API, however this little class - which aims to provide a simple and lite charting solution in PHP - looks like a good place to start before diving into the whole API. While I haven't looked at the code, the result allows you to quickly build simple charts and pop them into your site or application. Very nice if you are in need of a quick solution.
The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog provides their list of things to do when moving a site to a new domain. If you ever have to take this up and are worried about How do you do it without hurting your site's performance in Google search results?
, then be sure to bookmark this link.
Ideally, you should contact the webmaster of each site that links to yours and ask them to update the links to point to the page on your new domain. If this isn't practical, make sure that all pages with incoming links are redirected to your new site.
Not sure if that first part would ever be practical...
The title kinda says it all, but seriously head over to the site and check out the demo to see for yourself. A class that allows you to extract data from html by using an sql like query! I have no idea where this will be useful, but now that I know it exists I'm sure something will come up.
Our CMS handles Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn out of the box, or so I thought. Lately on one server I've noticed some issues which I'll have to dig into, and this brought me to the PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet. This little guide provides some steps of common things to do to get utf-8 working in php. Be sure to scroll thru the comments as there are many good links and pieces of advice left by other readers of this post.
Adam Audette provides an excellent post on building links, which he concludes with:
...what’s the most efficient method of building powerful backlinks?
The answer is simple, but the way is hard: you must build exceptional resources and provide information that’s unique and valuable. Only then will you succeed long-term in link building, and therefore, internet marketing.
The more things change, the more they stay the same: content will always be king.
Written by Major Hayden, a Rackspace employee, this blog is a great read for those of us who are managing a server for clients who have a dedicated or virtual dedicated server (hello MT).
Major covers a lot of ground, but a great start would be Speeding up MySQL, where he offers up a few nuggets that are not usually seen in these types of posts.
Some of you probably recognize the name from his MySQLTuner script, which when run and iterated thru for a few days helps to get your my.cnf tuned up and your server performing well (keeping in mind his hints from the post linked above also helps for server performance :).
An interesting looking light weight wysiwyg editor for jquery.
We haven't tested this yet but if it outputs decent markup and works across a decent range of browsers it will be hard to look elsewhere, what with its light footprint and simple setup and use (i.e. links and images are js modals, not html pages in pop-ups).
Jquery's innovative what-you-mean text editor.
We like this editor in house, and as one may imagine have found it a bit too advanced for people who do not know html or who are easily confused by the extra detail. Nonetheless it is an option in our CMS as some writers appreciate the structure it offers.
We've been using jquery for our projects here but are still looking for a decent wysiwyg editor to build into our CSS.
This editor is a bit different, in that its not wysiwyg but simply a markup editor, that is it will simply insert tags into your code in a fashion similar to your favorite html editor (or at least mine :).
This is going to be a new option in our CMS for those people who prefer to see code in its raw format rather then a wysiwyg format.
I can see this lightweight little list based calendar layout - via css - coming in handy for something (see blog post). It couldn't get much simpler in terms of markup, even more so considering it includes showing/hiding events on rollover.
I'm certain it wouldn't be too hard to put together a little PHP to spit out a given month with the right list layout (gaps for filling out non-days at beginning and end of the month).
Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek provides some more information about SimpleDB, having spoken with Adam Selipsky, VP of Product Management and Developer Relations at Amazon, who had this to say:
"It's basically a great place to store metadata and information about objects," said Selipsky. "And often those objects are going to be stored in S3. In addition to being a standalone service, it's really designed to be tightly integrated with our other services."... "Any kind of product catalog will be a popular use case," he said.
Sriram Krishnan provides an overview of SimpleDB, covering much of what is available on the SimpleDB site but also going into some of the details, including comparing the pricing structure with Amason's S3 service, and discussing Eventual Consistency:
This is going to surprise a lot of SimpleDB users (and probably cause a lot of hard bugs). Reading data from SimpleDB immediately after a write may not reflect the latest updates. SimpleDB relaxes the 'C' in ACID and doesn't promise that you'll instantly see your updates (due to it being propagated across all the copies of your data). Amazon may not have a choice here (see CAP Conjecture) but I don't think this is going to be popular with a lot of programmers.
From the webpage:
Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.
The main site for SimpleDB™ includes links to resources and a description of the service, API, pricing and more information on how and why to use the service.
The good folks over at Particletree provide this useful little examination and tutorial of the differences between using an <input type="submit" versus the more versatile <button> element.
They provide some screenshots and sample html and CSS to help you get started on styling up better looking form buttons, which can even include images inside the button itself. Also see some good discussion in the comments.