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Blogs » Archive for August, 2007
Top 3 (Free!) Domain Name Generators
Finding an available domain name is getting harder and harder everyday, not only because of Domain Name Kiting, but also the huge business of domain name speculation.
Thankfully, when it comes time to register a new domain name for your business or venture, you’re not on your own. Here are three (free!) tools that will help sort through millions of available domain names and help you find the perfect one.
The most powerful domain name search tool available.
Enter a couple of keywords, use the included thesaurus by clicking on the blue arrrow in box #2, and watch the software combine the words into dozens or even hundreds of possible variations. You choose how many words to combine, what domain name extension you want, as well as prefixes and suffixes to add to your list of keywords. You can even plurize your nouns (pant -> pants), and drop vowels (flicker -> flickr).
Best of all, once a list is generated, you can sort it by readability, length or the number of syllables.
Simply enter a primary keyword, a second keyword (optional) and specify whether you’re willing to accept domain names with a hyphen and …
Watch out for CouchDB
I’ve been watching the CouchDB database project since it has started. It’s the pet project of programmer Damien Katz. I was excited to read an update today announcing that it will be accessible via a RESTful JSON API and the query language for CouchDB will be JavaScript. How cool is that?!
CouchDB is not a relational database but rather a distributed document database. Instead of inserting a row of column values into a table, you save a document, with any number of named fields and values (now represented as JSON objects) into the database where it exists in a kind of addressable pool. Documents can be created, retrieved, updated and deleted without having to worry about schema-design as there is none.
If you do require a little structure you can create views. A view is a dynamic structure that acts like a search query, providing a virtual table of documents matching the query. The query, previously expressed in a proprietary language, is now a JavaScript function which is used to determine which documents to include in the view. Because the views are completely virtual you can have as many as you like …
News Wire: 27 things you don’t know about PHP
- GWT 1.4 release and out of betaThe latest release of Google Web Toolkit is out, and this is the first release not marked as Beta! As usual, the release is full of must-have improvements, including fundamental improvements to application size and performance.(tags: java javascript google gwt software opensource )
- Plone 3.0 released!A major update to the venerable Python CMS based on the Zope framework , Plone 3.0 includes many powerful new features, including document versioning, inline (Ajax) editing, link checking, and tons more!(tags: python opensource software )
- 12 Things You Should Dislike About PHPAnother impressive list of things you may not know about PHP, this time focusing on the annoying foibles of the language.(tags: php )
- 15 Cool Things About PHP That Most People OverlookFar from another lame collection of semi-obscure PHP functions, this list of language features will likely contain at least a few mind-blowing items for all but the most seasoned of PHP veterans.(tags: php )
- The IPhone Is IE4 Again (in a good way)Joe Hewitt (of Firebug and iUI fame) speaks out against those …
Simply JavaScript: The Core Library
With the first print run of Simply JavaScript now all but sold out and the second printing currently underway, the time is right to do something I’ve been looking forward to since Cameron and I first dreamed up the book: release the Core library into open source.
Download: core.js (ZIP file, version 1.0, 2007-08-29)
As I explained previously in Simply JavaScript: How Simple is Too Simple? this book takes a unique approach by teaching unobtrusive scripting from the very first page. It achieves this by using its very own JavaScript library—the Core library—to hide some of the nitty gritty details of JavaScript event handling and other cumbersome tasks until the reader is up to speed. And now it’s my pleasure to make this library available to everyone—not just owners of the book.
Another library?
Why do this, you ask? After all, there are plenty of other good JavaScript libraries out there, from the svelte (base2, jQuery) to the swollen (YUI, Dojo). Is there really a need for another?
All those libraries do a wonderful job of making JavaScript a more powerful, more featureful language. They have been tuned and re-tuned …
The Future of Imagery? Content Aware Image Resizing
Every now and again something comes along that just makes you go ‘wow’. I think this is one of those moments.
Last week Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir demonstrated their new ‘Content Aware Image Resizing‘ research for the first time, as seen in this YouTube clip. The demonstration does a far better job at explaining it than I can, but the executive summary goes something like this:
Currently we have two methods of presenting photographic imagery within a liquid (resizable) layout. Most of the time we crop our image to a size that we like and then lock it to display at those exact dimensions, allowing the text to flow and wrap around it when resizing occurs.
It’s also possible (though not common) to set the image size as a percentage of the page width, allowing it to scale with the page. Of course, this inevitably results in generated artifacts, distortions and noise at all non-standard dimensions.
‘Content Aware Image Resizing’ (CAIR) takes a completely different tack. If we scale our image width down by 1 pixel, rather than removing a random vertical column of pixels, the CAIR process …
sitepoint.com ranked 3rd most popular eBusiness site in the world!
sitepoint.com was today recognized as the 3rd most popular eBusiness web site in the world by ebizMBA.com, just behind news.com and ZD-Net.com.
The article used a number of metrics to list 25 must-have bookmarks for anyone serious about succeeding in online business. Web sites were ranked by a combination of inbound links, Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast.
Here are some reasons why I think we made the list:
- Our online marketplace continues to grow at warp speed. I’ve posted before on why I believe that if you haven’t taken the plunge to get involved, you should do so now.
- We produce some pretty awesome kits, books, articles, and newsletters sharing the secrets of doing business on the Web to entrepreneurs all around the world.
- To top it off, we’ve got a massive online community of entrepreneurs sharing their online success stories every day in the SitePoint Forums.
So if you’re looking to make money from the Web, be sure to put sitepoint.com on the top of your shopping cart.
Which reference sites do you trust?
While completing the tech edit on the 2nd edition of the PHP Anthology the issue of linking came up; specifically, linking to authoritative reference material on the web. It came up because I would often link to a Wikipedia page and half of the editing team were opposed to such preferential treatment of one web site.
The issue isn’t simple one. Regarding PHP, the php.net manual is the authoritative reference site. The various web technology standards are also represented by authority web sites. For example XML-RPC has xmlrpc.com and CSS and XHTML have the W3C. But what about general topics like REST, design patterns or role-based access control? If you need reference material on such topics who can you trust?
I like Wikipedia because their pages are often an excellent focal point for a topic, are readable, contain links to other references and nerdy topics are always well represented and maintained. And of course, when using Google to search for general …
Making IIS 6.0 Play With UrlRewriting
Getting IIS to play with your url rewriting scheme can be a bit of a trick. Read more for a few solutions to the problem.
FullCodePress: Pre-built vs Custom?
One of the most interesting outcomes of last weekend’s FullCodePress international site in a day event was that each team chose a wildly different approach to tackle their client’s site.
The Aussie team chose to use a pre-built, open source CMS (Drupal) while the CodeBlacks (Team New Zealand) chose to build their site from scratch.
Initially my thoughts were that the CodeBlacks had bitten off way more than they could chew. When I stuck my head into their room at the 11th hour (actually, the 23rd hour) the team was huddled nervously around one screen, while their programmer scratched his head and began doubting himself. However, full credit to the team’s programmer, Mark Rickerby: despite having had no sleep and being under enormous pressure he managed to resolve whatever technical issue it was that was holding them up, and his team came out victorious.
In the post-mortem, the New Zealand team asserted that a custom build was the right solution for their client; given the scant resources that would be devoted to working on the site, and the general low computer literacy of the organisation, the back-end admin screens needed to be as simple as possible — more simple …
SitePoint Proposes Four SXSWi 2008 Panels
Planning to attend South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2008 in Austin, TX? Team SitePoint had a great time this year, and we’re eager to repeat the experience!
Voting for the 2008 panel discussions has just opened, and SitePoint has four in the running:
- The Great Web Development Debate: Standards vs. Practice
- Design Contests vs. NO!SPEC
- Simply JavaScript: How Simple is Too Simple?
- Workin’ For Da Man: Finding Job Satisfaction Without Risking Your House
Help Team SitePoint get to Austin by voting for our panels! If we get them approved, our popular “Books for Beers” policy from this year will no doubt make a return!
