Resources

Friday, November 30. 2007

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6

Newer breeds of browser such as Firefox and Safari have offered support for PNG images with full alpha channel transparency for a few years. With the use of hacks, support has been available in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, but the hacks are non-ideal and have been tricky to use. With IE7 winning masses of users from earlier versions over the last year, full PNG alpha-channel transparency is becoming more of a reality for day-to-day use.

However, there are still numbers of IE6 users out there who we can’t leave out in the cold this Christmas, so in this article I’m going to look what we can do to support IE6 users whilst taking full advantage of transparency for the majority of a site’s visitors.

Thursday, November 29. 2007

Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered

In this article that goes hand-in-hand with the release of Emails-Standards.org, David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going. A great collection of tips and tricks for sending HTML email, and covers all of the major issues with sending them.

CSS on the fly with Javascript

So, apparently it would be nice to be able to do certain things with CSS. Traditionally, these sorts of things are done on the server side using a server side language (like PHP) that generates CSS every time you hit the page. Wouldn't it be nice to do it on the client side? As the page loads and after, as the user interacts with it? You can do just that with this package, a simple line of Javascript can add styles to your elements on the fly. Check it out here.

Icons for Web Designs (and Desktops)

The value of icons lies in their ability to communicate with visitors or users in a more intuitive and effective way. Jakob Nielsen, the maestro of usability, postulated few years ago that “recognition rather than recall” is one of the basic heuristics for user-friendly design. In fact, it’s necessary to “minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.”

In the overview below we present some of the fresh high-quality free icons which you can use for your desktop; we also showcase free professional icon sets, buttons and vector graphics you can use for your web designs. You might know some of them, but hopefully not all of them. Not all listed freebies can be used for commercial projects, however you can use all of them in your private projects of for you personal purposes. Please read the disclaimers carefully before using the icons - they’re changing from time to time. Check them out at Smashing Magazine. You can also find another round up of Free Icons at Design Vitality.

Wednesday, November 28. 2007

HTML and CSS for forms

The Wufoo Form Gallery is a resource for web developers and designers to help get a head start on data collection. They have a nice collection of themes, templates, color palettes, and other stuff as well. Check out their gallery here.

Understanding Classes and OOP

Knowing what functions are is pretty common knowledge to most programmers, as well as the idea of Object Oriented Programming, or OOP. But the move from procedural code to object orientation can be daunting to some at first, to say the least. Even back when I was new to programming, the idea of objects instead of structured procedures was an odd mindset, and hard to wrap my head around. This is a guide to understanding the basics of classes and OOP in concept, and in practice within PHP.
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Tuesday, November 27. 2007

Datejs - Open Source JS Date Library

Datejs is an open-source JavaScript Date Library. Comprehensive, yet simple, stealthy and fast. Datejs has passed all trials and is ready to strike. Datejs doesn’t just parse strings, it slices them cleanly in two. Syntactically beautiful, very useful, and slick. Don't waste any more time on making dates.

Monday, November 26. 2007

PHP Toolkit - Version 0.1

The PHP Toolkit is a collection of functions that I've written and have ended up using on more than one occasion, thus making it my Toolkit. There's a little for everyone in here, sanitizing input, validation, generation, security, and more. As of version 0.1, it can...

- Force HTTPS
- Filter and remove 'bad' words
- Sanitize user input
- Validate user names
- Validate email addresses
- Validate hex colors
- Validate postal codes
- Generate cryptographically secure hashes
- Generate random strings of any length
- Generate a select list of countries and states
- Test regular expressions against common user input ailments

And there are even more tools inside. And of course, it's licensed under the GPL.
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Saturday, November 17. 2007

67 Killer Resources for Web Developers and Designers

As a designer or developer, efficiency, proficiency, and timeliness are of the essence. The quicker we can implement our ideas, and go from a mock up to fully documented, functional code, the better. Here are 67 killer resources to help you get the job done quicker, and easier than ever. All of my favorite (mostly) open source tools, with some Ajax, PHP Frameworks, Palette tools, Icons and layouts, MySQL tools and managers, RSS parsers and more. And there's plenty more where that came from.
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Thursday, November 15. 2007

Automating MySQL Backups with Cron

Thousands of web applications use MySQL for their databases, and almost all of them store some sort of valuable information. You never know when a hard drive will fail, a server will die, or in the absolute worst case, when someone will find a vulnerability that allows them to delete your databases. Sometimes we just take for granted how well everything just... works. We're going to look at two simple ways to backup your databases, and how to automate them using crontabs.
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