Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ﾂｻ Archive for May, 2004
PHP Certification for Hosts?
From time to time the subject of certification gets raised in PHP circles (and usually vanishes again later), as means to prove your mettle as a PHP programmer to potential clients / employees. Whether programmer certifications “work” in general, is a subject for long debate. Right now, I don’t think there’s any organisation with both the credibility and resources to put together an effective program for PHP developers. There probably isn’t a enough demand anyway, to make it sustainable.
That said, been wondering recently whether certification would work for web hosting companies - the sort that offer $5 / month accounts with “PHP enabled”? Having had bad experiences with shared hosting myself in the past and having heard of others with similar problems, what seems to be common is those running servers have little or no knowledge of PHP itself - it’s simply something to add to that list;
- PHP Installed
- 1 x MySQL Database
- 10 x Email accounts
How many web hosts provide any more detail than just “PHP Installed” to potential customers? It’s rare you find detail like whether it’s installed as an Apache module or a CGI executable, which extensions are available, which version (exactly) of PHP are they …
Quick and Easy Depth Tricks
I was rooting around in the Flash MX 2004′ sock drawer and stumbled across a rather nifty AS file (DepthControl.as) buried in the installation directory; a little further exploratory work and i was pleasantly surprised to find some very simple methods for depth shuffling (kinda cool if you’re into game or windowed application development).
Here’s the list of publically available functions for the class:
bringForward(target:MovieClip)
sendBackward(target:MovieClip)
bringToFront(target:MovieClip)
sendToBack(target:MovieClip):Void
And having created a simple movie clip with a linkage identifier of depthTest, I added the following code to the first frame of the timeline allowing simple press-release functionality to the duplicated MCs on the stage
for (i=0; i
Getting creative with visited links
Many web developers instinctively start a new stylesheet by declaring the style of links and visited links in a single statement:
a:link, a:visited {
/* rules here */
}
Doing this avoids the tricky issue of picking a subtly different (but at the same time visually obvious) colour for visited links, but also kills off an important usability feature embedded in all modern browsers. If your site is larger than a few pages, allowing users to quickly see if they have visited a link or not can really help them navigate your site.
Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru everyone loves to hate, has written a great deal on this subject. Change the Color of Visited Links and Guidelines for Visualizing Links are his latest postings on the subject. If you find it hard to take Jakob’s advice seriously due to the complete lack of design sensibilities on display on his site you may enjoy Design By Fire’s Design Eye for the Usability Guy, which remakes Guidelines for Visualizing Links and shows just how much good design can improve usability.
What people often forget is that there are other ways of distinguishing between visited links than simply using colour. I have a side-links collection on …
Blackstone and Future ColdFusion versions
Blackstone is the code name for the next version of ColdFusion. There has been a lot of talk on the net about this new version. People are posting their thoughts on what needs to change, what needs to be added, and what should be removed from this new version.
I haven’t developed the in-depth mind-meld that a lot of these people have so I can’t tell you what’s wrong or what needs to be added for the next version. However I did find a post by Ben Forta in which he talks a bit about a future feature which was supposed to be in CFMX but didn’t make it.
He talks about the ability to run CFML code with out the source! As he puts it “There were no smoke-and-mirrors involved, I really did write CFML code, compile it, and then run the application without local source”.
How cool would this be! Without the source code our customers wouldn’t be able to go in and muck up or nice applications, and they wouldn’t be able to steal our hours of time with a simple cut-paste operation. Sure you can Encode your current templates now but this isn’t the same idea here. I …
Why are we Infused?
So why did we go from “The Fuse” to “Infused”? Well it’s a personal thing really. I’ve always seen my ColdFusion code as infusing life into an otherwise dull (ie static) web site. Also since I’ve started ColdFusion I’ve been spending a lot of time taking old PHP sites, or PHP products and “infusing” them with ColdFusion so I could use them with my CF apps.
Just like in my sites and products I’m hoping that we, the SitePoint ColdFusion community will be infused with life, and show others the wonders of ColdFusion. Of course I’m not a big proponent of telling anyone that one language is better than another. I agree with David, the original SP CF Blogger, when he says that ColdFusion is not for everyone, and that it can’t solve every problem. You really have to pick the right solution for the problem.
An Overview: How Every Web Professional Should Think About Marketing and Sales
A number of you have emailed to inquire about my overall approach to and philosophy about marketing.
That will take more room than the scope of this blog. However, the following link will get you to a PowerPoint presentation and Tele-seminar that I recently posted on my web site that gives such an overview. The link that follows takes you straight through to the presentation and tele-seminar, so that you don’t have to register. That way, you get information and no promotion by me, and there is as little conflict of interest as possible. The presentation is a good example of an informational presentation, in that it informs without pitching products or services.
http://www.itprosuccess.com/tele-seminar-thankyou.shtml
As an aside, tele-seminars are a great marketing vehicle. If you have a decent prospect list or newsletter list, you can offer a tele-seminar to the people on your list. Sites like freeconference.com or blackandwhitecom.com offer free or low cost lines, and record calls. The tele-seminar link you see cost me $25 to record and $50 for my web designer to post. So, for $75, I reach a ton of people who hear my voice and style — while I do other things. That’s the kind of marketing we …
MySQL Updates
My latest column is up on SitePoint and takes a look at the MySQL Roadmap.
Also - some MySQL news from yesterday:
A new maintenance release (4.0.20) was announced on lists.mysql.com by Patrick Galbraith, a senior software developer with MySQL. It can be accessed at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/.
For developers using OS X, Navicat has released version 5.1 of their popular MySQL GUI. This allows remote administration of MySQL database on numerous platforms from a 10.1 or greater version of OS X. This is a commercial tool but affordable for developers leveraged in MySQL development work at $95 US.
As of May 19th, MySQL Professional Certification is now available, with lots of detail available on the MySQL site, and access to study guides.
Tantalizing Remark on PHP and Web Services
Davey Shafik has posted a tantalizing remark on generating WSDL from PHP code, related to some work he’s doing. There’s nothing really to see yet, other than this example;
Why is this interesting? The answer takes a little explanation…
If you’ve read web services demystified you’ll know WSDL (Web Services Description Language) is an XML markup that allows you to describe a web service in a manner that a computer can use. When building a client to a web service, it cuts out a lot of manual effort, as you can see by comparing the client1.php vs. client2.php examples, in Zend’s article on the new PHP SOAP Extension.
So for building web service clients, when using WSDL, it’s remarkably simple with PHP (and other dynamically typed languages). The same cannot be said though, when it comes to building servers with PHP, where WSDL generation is concerned.
In WSDL, when describing the arguments a SOAP method accepts and the value it returns, it’s expected that you use XML Schema. XML Schema is “strongly typed” - it has the full range of primitive types (e.g. string, int etc.) as you can see here from which you can build complex types to represent things like objects and …
Jonese in da house!
Hello Everyone!!!
First off I壇 like to thank the academy, my fans, my editor, my stylus, my masseuse, my cats, my mechanic yada yada yada…
Yes I知 excited to be here and I can’t wait to bring the wonderful world of ColdFusion to your computer screens on a somewhat regular basis. What’s regular? Well I知 told I have to post at least 3 blogs a week. Now I知 a smart guy but even for me to have 3 original thoughts a week might be a stretch. So let’s do what we’ve always done here at SitePoint and involve the community!!
Here’s my plan
I watch a lot of other ColdFusion blogs and other news sites so as I find tid-bits of information I feel are important I値l post em here, along with my own original thoughts etc. BUT I壇 also like to hear from all of you. If you find something, or want to share something with the SitePoint ColdFusion world then send it my way and I値l bring it to the blog. So like a plan! Good, cause i love it when a plan comes together!
Other notes about me and this blog
I’m still a new kid to ColdFusion. I’ve got close to three …
This week’s useful resources
HTML and XHTML both impose rules on which elements can be contained within which other elements. The definitive guide to these rules are the various DTDs (Document Type Definitions) that govern the different flavours of HTML. Unfortunately, DTDs aren’t exactly friendly to read. Enter Cameron Adams’ brilliant DTD Mapper, which presents an easily navigated tree style view of a DTD and makes it easy to see which elements are allowed where. Cameron’s blog entry has more.
Plenty has been written about the CSS Box Model (I made my own attempt at explaining it last year) but it’s rare for anyone to discuss the way in which the layers of the box model interact in the third dimension. Jon Hicks has published a beautiful diagram of the 3D CSS Box Model which neatly demonstrates this little documented aspect of CSS.
I’m pretty terrible at picking colour schemes, but thankfully the web is overflowing with tools to make it easier. My favourite is still Eric Meyer’s Color Blender which calculates a number of mid points between two colours, but Pixy’s impressive Color Scheme is very useful as well. Dave Shea’s recent article on Colour Schemes has some good tips, and Andy Clarke has some …
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