VT’s Tech Blog

Google Doctype

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

This site’s currently got some good HOWTOs on Web security, DOM manipulation, CSS and styles and more. A worthwhile place to check if you’re looking at some quick reference and help.

Link: Google Doctype

Posted in CSS, Links, Security, Web Development | No Comments »

Google Friend Connect

Google’s just released a preview version of Google Friend Connect, which allows you to add social features on your site with minimal coding. This is still a preview release so you’ll have sign up to get into the queue.

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Here’s a video introduction of Google Friend Connect:

Link: Google Friend Connect

Posted in Sites, Web Development | No Comments »

DamnIT - Find Javascript Errors

How would you like to get an email with the javascript error and debug info about that error as soon as a visitor on your site encounters it? DamnIT provides you just that service:

DamnIT is a free service that emails you when a user encounters a JavaScript error in your webpages.

To get DamnIT installed for your site, just signup for an account and call a JS script - this works fine for IE and Firefox. If you want to install DamnIT on other browsers, you’ll need to place try…catch blocks. Learn more about DamnIT over at: http://damnit.jupiterit.com/home/learn

Link : DamnIT: Javascript Error Handling

Posted in Javascript, Web Development | No Comments »

10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

Usability and the utility, not visual design, determine success or failure of a web-site. Since visitor page is only person who clicks mouse therefore decides everything, user-centric design has become standard approach for successful profit-oriented

Link: 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine

Sent from BlueOrganizer

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Quicker and cleaner Form using Zend Form

Usually handing forms involves coding the form in HTML and performing client and server side validation, which usually makes the code for complex forms quite unwieldy. Zend_Form which is available in Zend Framework version 1.5 aims at simplifying this process.

You can now create and add methods for validating form fields completely in Zend_Form. Here’s an example from an article at Zend Developer Zone:

$form = new Zend_Form;
$form->setAction('/resource/process')
    ->setMethod('post')
    ->setAttrib('id', 'login');
$username = new Zend_Form_Element_Text('username');
$username->addValidator('alnum')
    ->addValidator('regex', false, array('/^[a-z]/i'))
    ->setRequired(true)
    ->addFilter('StringToLower');
$form->addElement($username);
$password = new Zend_Form_Element_Password('password');
$password->addValidator('stringLength', false, array(6))
    ->setRequired(true)
$form->addElement($password);
$form->addElement(new Zend_Form_Element_Submit());

To learn more on this head over to the Zend_Form Quick start guide at : http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.form.quickstart.html or an article by Cal Evans at Zend Developer Zone: Lifting the Skirt on Zend Framework 1.5 - Zend_Form

Posted in PHP, Web Development | 2 Comments »

Improve page load time with a class and 3 lines of PHP

Here’s a PHP script from Leon Chevalier which improves your page load time drastically. His compressor class improves your site’s performance by combining and minifying the css, Javascript and HTML files on the page, allowing for fewer HTTP requests and smaller sizes of these files. All you need to do is to download the class file and add the following php lines at the top of your page

require_once('class.compressor.php');
$compressor = new compressor('css,javascript,page');

and the following line of PHP code at the end of your page

$compressor->finish();

Read more about this script and see the benchmarks of this over at: Aciddrop.com| Improve website load time by 500% with 3 lines of code

Posted in PHP, Web Development | 1 Comment »

Rules for High Performance Websites

Here’s an excellent article on Yahoo on how to speed up your website.  The points covered in this are:

• Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Use a Content Delivery Network
• Add an Expires Header
• Gzip Components
• Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minify JavaScript
• Avoid Redirects
• Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Configure ETags
• Make Ajax Cacheable

Read on at: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

Here’s a Firefox plugin from to grade your site performance according to the rules outlined in this article:

YSlow for Firefox: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Posted in Techniques, Web Development | No Comments »

Google Gears for offline apps

Google has released a beta version of Google Gears which is an open source browser extension which  enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs.

Here’s what you can do with the API’s:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

You can take a look at the sample applications at http://code.google.com/apis/gears/sample.html once you install the browser plugin.

The news out there is that Google’s planning to offer offline support for their current applications like Google Reader, Docs & Spreadsheets.

Posted in Ajax, General Stuff, Web Development | No Comments »

Getting started with Aptana and Yahoo UI - Aptana

Want to create cool Web2.0 UI’s? You can use Apatana to create these using the Yahoo UI Library. Aptana provides you the IDE to create UI components with YUI and provides you with code complete facilities to do this too ! Check the link below to get started. Aptana also provides the same functionality for the following (”web 2.0“) libraries:

• AFLAX
• DOJO
• JQuery
• MochKit
• Prototype
• Rico
• Scriptaculous

This walkthrough will instruct you how to create a new Yahoo UI library project and get started with your coding using the documented Yahoo UI library supplied by Aptana.

Getting started with Aptana and Yahoo UI - Aptana

Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments »

Php UTF-8 Charsets

An interesing article which explains what can go wrong when you’re handing UTF-8 character sets in PHP. The current versions of PHP do mangle up UTF-8 characters when you use the built in string functions in PHP.

“When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.”

“Darn near impossible” is perhaps too extreme but, certainly in PHP, if you simply “accept the defaults” you probably will end up with all kinds of strange characters and question marks the moment anyone outside the US or Western Europe submits some content to your site

Link to article: Php I18n Charsets - Web Application Component Toolkit

If you’re looking for a function set for PHP which is UTF-8 character safe, head over to the following link:

http://dev.splitbrain.org/view/darcs/dokuwiki/inc/utf8.php

They have a whole set of helper functions which allow you to manipulate UTF-8 data without corrupting the data.

Posted in PHP, Web Development | 2 Comments »