Tools To Make Your Web Development More Efficient John K. Taylor Are you a developer who is sick and tired of having to do everything manually? Does sifting through your code to hunt down tiny mistakes make you want to scream? Then perhaps some of these web development tools will come in handy for making your work more efficient. CSS Grid Builder This is a framework that was developed by Yahoo! Clean AJAX This tool has been designed to speed up AJAX development, which is just not possible when done manually. CSS Sprite Generator This tool has been designed to reduce the number of HTTP requests are needed for rendering images in web browsers. Firebug This is an extension created by Mozilla Firefox that gives a developer a wide range of web development tools and features that they otherwise may not have had access to. CSSTidy This tool is an open source application that aims to reduce file size through analyzing text, fixing and optimizing the CSS code. This useful article is shared by John K.
SQL date performance problems Most obfuscations involve DATE types. The Oracle database is particularly vulnerable in this respect because it has only one DATE type that always includes a time component as well. It has become common practice to use the TRUNC function to remove the time component. SELECT ... It is a perfectly valid and correct statement but it cannot properly make use of an index on SALE_DATE. “This book is definitively worth having in the company library.” — Joe Celko There is a rather simple solution for this problem: a function-based index. CREATE INDEX index_name ON table_name (TRUNC(sale_date)) But then you must always use TRUNC(date_column) in the where clause. The problem also occurs with databases that have a pure date type if you search for a longer period as shown in the following MySQL query: SELECT ... The query uses a date format that only contains year and month: again, this is an absolutely correct query that has the same problem as before. SELECT ... MySQL Oracle PostgreSQL SQL Server Tip
The End of Pagination What do you do when you have a lot of things to display to the user, far more than can possibly fit on the screen? Paginate, naturally. There are plenty of other real world examples in this 2007 article, but I wouldn't bother. I can understand paginating when you have 10, 50, 100, maybe even a few hundred items. Once you have thousands of items, you don't have a pagination problem. But perhaps you don't know exactly what you're looking for: maybe you want a variety of viewpoints and resources, or to compare a number of similar items. Once we've chosen a suitable order and a subset of relevant items … do we really need pagination at all? It isn't just oddball disemvowelled companies, either. Pagination is also friction. I'm not necessarily proposing that all traditional pagination be replaced with endless pagination. Once you've done that, there's a balance to be struck, as Google's research tells us: The scroll bar, the user's moral compass of "how much more is there?"
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code by Joel Spolsky Wednesday, August 09, 2000 Have you ever heard of SEMA? It's a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. Of course, these are not the only factors that determine success or failure: in particular, if you have a great software team working on a product that nobody wants, well, people aren't going to want it. 1. 2. If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. For this very reason, the last company I worked at switched from WISE to InstallShield: we required that the installation process be able to run, from a script, automatically, overnight, using the NT scheduler, and WISE couldn't run from the scheduler overnight, so we threw it out. 3. Read more about daily builds in my article Daily Builds are Your Friend. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Build PDF files dynamically with PHP Sometimes you need control over exactly how pages are rendered for printing. At times like those, HTML is not the best choice. PDF files give you complete control over how pages are rendered and how text, graphics, and images are rendered on the page. When you search the web for PDF support for PHP, the first thing you are likely to find is the commercial PDFLib library and its open source version, PDFLib-Lite. Another choice is the Free PDF library (FPDF), which is native PHP. To demonstrate building PDF files dynamically, you'll use scores from women's roller derby tournaments. Listing 1. <events><event name='Beast of the East 2011'><game score1='88' team1='Toronto Gore-Gore Rollergirls' team2='Montreal La Racaille' score2='11'/><game score1='58' team1='Toronto Death Track Dolls' team2='Montreal Les Contrabanditas' score2='49'/> ... The root element for the XML is an events tag. Listing 2 shows the PHP code that you use to read the XML. Listing 2. getresults.php <? Listing 3. Figure 1.
How to Prevent Image Bandwidth Theft With .htaccess Protect your images from being linked by other websites while you pay the bandwidth! by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com If your website displays beautiful pictures, you may encounter the ugly situation where your photos and other images are used without your permission on other sites. Even worse, those websites "hotlink" your pictures, that is, they don't host the pictures directly on their site, but embed them into their pages by linking to the copy on your site. System Requirements The solution outlined in this article requires your site to be hosted on a machine using the Apache web server. If this is not the case for your website, you cannot use the suggestions given here. (To find out if your web server fulfills the requirements stated here, try checking up the documentation on your web host's website — the information is usually available on their list of web hosting packages, price lists or on their order form. Steps to Take That's all there is to it. Potential Problems
Hallmarks of a Great Developer - Test Guide If you ask me, I'll tell you a great developer Plans before coding A great developer takes the time to plan an approach before designing or coding. A great developer knows that the time required to do so will be more than paid back by the time saved by getting it more right the first time. Always knows why A great developer always knows exactly why they wrote a particular line of code, and why they wrote it the way they did. Writes situation-appropriate code Any developer can write code. Deviates where and when necessary A great developer not only knows the canonical implementation but understands it is the canonical implementation. Knows when not to change code A great developer knows that changing code is sometimes worse than fixing it. Approaches debugging scientifically A great developer knows that debugging is a science not an art and approaches it as such. Walks through their code A great developer knows that they don't really know their code until they've stepped through it. Documents
Geeks and Delegation: A Match Made in Hell Last week, I was invited to join 3,000 delegates to what turned out to be the largest entrepreneurship conference in the world. The Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2012 took place in Liverpool, UK (a few words about Liverpool in a moment) and its speakers and panels were selected in order to inspire us into entrepreneurial action. Upon arriving in Liverpool on the GEC Express Virgin train, chartered for the specific occasion (welcoming speech and random encounter with Sir Richard Branson), I didn’t know what to expect. Sir Richard Branson was the main ”attraction” for the day and who could blame the the crowd? Q&A with Sir Richard Branson Delegation was the first skill I was forced to learn when I made the jump from a technical to a managerial position. If we want to become leaders, founders and CEOs we need to learn to delegate. The crowd really loves what you do, you want to keep all the elements (balls, pins, flaming pins and chainsaws) but the risk is now very high.
The Future of Paid Search - Google, Bing & Beyond Paid search has cemented itself as a highly viable, cost effective marketing channel. In 2011, paid search spending is expected to reach $34 billion. Worldwide, paid search is a $34 billion industry. Data courtesy of efrontier.com and magnaglobal.com. Click on the image below to view an larger version of this infographic: View an enlarged version of this Infographic » Click here to download a .pdf version of this infographic. Want to display this infographic on your site? Simply copy and paste the code below into the html of your website to display the infographic presented above: <b>++ Click Image to Enlarge ++</b><br /><a href=" src=" alt="The Future of Paid Search"></a><br />Source: <a href=" Future of Paid Search Infographic</a> Facts and Stats to Tweet: