PHP Development
How to Design Websites for Mobile Phones
It is officially 2009. I am proud to say I was awake to watch the ball drop. Generally I end up in bed long before it is time to ring in the New Year. In preparation for 2009 I have read about 50, what is coming in 2009 prediction posts. Almost all of them had [...]
University of Northern Colorado Promotional Video
This morning we released a fun and engaging Flash/video promotion for the University of Northern Colorado which I thought some of you may enjoy. Zipline completed the project in conjunction with MagnerSanborn advertising. The project builds on the earlier success of another MagnerSanborn/Zipline joint project, InspiredSeason.com. InspiredSeason.com is a viral video project which promotes Gonzaga [...]
Creating Symbolic/Softlinks Using PHP
PHP is a fantastic language and it has some very useful capabilities. I am currently developing a website that has a unique structure. Basically, I am using symbolic links to act as subdomains that all point to a single program. I am then using PHP’s built in $_SERVER array to find the HTTP host. From [...]
Create an Array of The Last X Days using PHP
Today I needed to generate a graph that showed activity over the last 30 days. Realizing I was going to have to create multiple customizable graphs in the future, I wrote a simple function that takes an argument for number of days and then returns an array of the last X number of days from [...]
Free Graphing/Charting with PHP Using the Google Chart API
This morning I have been searching around for a free graphing solution for a program I am going to be writing today. I am basically creating a simple analytics package that analyzes the number of hits and conversions per day to an online application. During my searching through pre-built PHP solutions I came across the [...]
Free Animated AJAX Loading Graphics Generator
When loading AJAX requests on website you frequently see a variety of animated loading graphics. Some are spinning circles, some are progress bars, and some are random but all are a pain in the butt to make. Awhile back, Sheldon tipped me off to a great site called ajaxload.info which automatically generates a number of [...]
How to Easily Parse a RSS Feed with PHP 4 or PHP 5
Today I had to parse a WordPress RSS feed for display on a customers website. The basic goal was to show the latest blog postings on the customer’s homepage without them having to manually feed in the data. I have done this before using some of the great XML tools in PHP 5 that make [...]
Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools
There are a number of helpful in-brwoser web development tools out there. I have used Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar for quite some time. Recently, I have added some additional features like YSlow and Live HTTP Headers which have proved to be helpful. I know there are a number of other tools out there [...]
How to Create a Simple Podcast RSS Feed using PHP and MySQL
Generating a podcast RSS feed with PHP is actually very easy. I have had to do it a few different times and every time I do it I have to look up the syntax of the XML document. To save myself time in the future I thought I would document the process here for myself [...]
MooTools / JavaScript Popup Calendar / Date Picker for HTML Forms
MooTools 1.1: If you’re using MooTools 1.1 on a project here is a great MooTools based calendar / date picker popup for use in HTML forms. It is very easy to get running and also to customize. Both the style and position of the calendar can easily be modified. The author also has good instructions [...]