Another one from the “this is not a syntax error” department. The front-end developer is a strange beast who has to jiggle to and fro and code in several languages literally at the same time – javascript, html, css, php or some other server side language, some SQL dialect… No wonder that sometimes we make […]

As bloged before, my publisher organizes a “Best CMS” award thingie and I’m one of the judges in the “Best PHP CMS” category. It’s time now to sit on my behind and judge, as scary as it sounds. I have to pick three from the five finalists in the PHP category in any order, so […]

Simplified, but still… <?php if (!function_exists(‘file_put_contents’)) { function file_put_contents($filename, $data) { $f = @fopen($filename, ‘w’); if (!$f) { return false; } else { $bytes = fwrite($f, $data); fclose($f); return $bytes; } } } ?>

So there is this group of local LA web developers that meet every month or so to meet and discuss what’s up. More about/join the group here. This month Yahoo will be hosting the meetup in the Santa Monica office (my workplace), it’s actually tomorrow, so if you’re in LA, don’t miss the opportunity for […]

Nominate your favorite open-source CMS before August 31st. (Yours truly is one of the judges in the PHP category.)

Here are some convenient tools I’ve added to my TextPad editor, hope you’ll like ’em. TextPad tools Stuff can easily be added to TextPad’s Tools menu, like I did, shown on the screenshot. In order to do so, you go Configure -> Preferences. Then select Tools on the tree to the left, then Add. You […]

Let’s go ahead and optimize our phpBB installation for front-end performance. I’ll follow Yahoo’s 14 optimization rules, but only implement the ones that apply for phpBB. During this short workshop there will be no changes to the phpBB code, we’ll create a new template instead, so that in case something bad happens, your board will […]

So I launched this little tool csssprites.com that allows you to upload images and create one CSS sprite image, plus it gives the background-position CSS definitions to use in order to show parts of the sprite. People have been trying it out, but unfortunately sometimes uploading 20 megs of images to create a sprite, which […]

Here’s my last weekend’s project – a web-based tool to generate images for CSS sprites: http://www.csssprites.com. Cool domain name, eh? I couldn’t believe it was not taken. CSS Spr…what? This is a simple technique used for page load performance purposes. Since HTTP requests are the most expensive thing you can do in regards to front-end […]

I’ve been selected as a judge in this year’s Open Source CMS Award, organized by Packt Publishing. I’ll be voting for three out of 5 PHP CMS projects where those 5 are selected by votes from the site visitors. Join me in a discussion I started at opensourcecommunity.org “What do you think makes a good […]

Nice title, eh? OK, so all of a sudden theweathernetwork.com buttons I was using to show the weather in Sofia, Bulgaria and selected Canadian cities on the community site bgcanada.com, stopped working. Reason: unknown. So it was time for a change, since those buttons were generated by some javascripts, hosted by theweathernetwork, which is kind […]

If you use PEAR::MDB2, you can set a custom debug handler and collect all the queries you execute for debugging and performance tunning purposes, as shown before. But what if you’re using PEAR::DB? Well, since PEAR::DB doesn’t allow you such a functionality out of the box, you can hack it a bit to get similar […]

What could possibly be better for a writer’s ego other than being read and being praised? Hmm… So I wanted to have a page that shows the books I’ve written, together with their Amazon sales rank and the average customer rating and number of reviews. It’s really easy. I took one example out of the […]

Today I saw a post at digg.com on image resizing with PHP and there was quite a discussion. Let me share the laziest way (that I know of) how to do it – PEAR::Image_Transform is all it takes. Here goes: <?php require_once ‘Image/Transform.php’; $i =& Image_Transform::factory(”); $i->load(‘test.jpg’); $i->fit(100,100); $i->save(‘resized.png’, ‘png’); ?> In addition, the Image_Transform […]

This is a follow-up to Lars’ comment about the PEAR book. In the MDB2 chapter I showed an example how you can create custom debug handlers in MDB2 and then gave a suggestion about a useful application of this functionality for performance tuning. Basically the idea is that your custom debug handler collects all queries […]