These 2 menu items are :

• "Recently Updated" - show all your friends with recent updates
• "Status Updates" - show the latest status updates of your friends

About Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. You can

• use it to make a web site more readable or more usable
• fix rendering bugs that the site owner can't be bothered to fix themselves.
• alter pages so they work better with assistive technologies that speak a web page out loud or convert it to Braille
• even automatically retrieve data from other sites to make two sites more interconnected.

Greasemonkey by itself does none of these things. In fact, after you install it, you won't notice any change at all... until you start installing what are called “user scripts”. A user script is just a chunk of javascript code, with some additional information that tells Greasemonkey where and when it should be run. Each user script can target a specific page, a specific site, or a group of sites.

Install Greasemonkey addon for Firefox

Go to Greasemonkey addon page, click on the "Add to Firefox" button and follow the instructions. After restarting Firefox, you will notice a monkey's head sitting at the bottom right its status bar.
If you right click on the monkey's head and choose "Manage User Scripts" from the resulting menu, you will notice there isn't any script which is quite normal since we have not installed any ;-).

Creating your first Greasemonkey script.

For a Greasemonkey to be recognized, it must end with .user.js, so let us create an empty file and save it as myfirstscript.user.js
Fire up your favourite text editor and open your newly created file.

Greasemonkey script metadata

All user scripts has a meta data section which tells Greasemonkey about the script itself, where it came from, and when to run it. For example, our script :

 
// ==UserScript==
// @name          My First GM script
// @namespace     http://htmlblog.net
// @description   basic Greasemonkey script
// @include       http://www.facebook.com/
// ==/UserScript==
 

You can find more information about the metadata here.

Remember we want our script available only for Facebook pages, that is why we use @include http://www.facebook.com

Show me some code.

Alright, to add our own menus, we need to get the parent element holding the drop down menu. After inspecting Facebook's source code, we can rapidly come to the conclusion that the parent element's id is "fb_menu_friends_dropdown". So the current Facebook code looks like that :

 
<div class="fb_menu_dropdown hidden_elem" id="fb_menu_friends_dropdown">
<div class="fb_menu_item"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/friends/?added&amp;ref=tn">Recently Added</a></div>
<div class="fb_menu_item"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/friends/?everyone&amp;ref=tn">All Friends</a></div>
<div class="fb_menu_separator"></div>
<div class="fb_menu_item"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/invite.php?ref=tn">Invite Friends</a></div>
<div class="fb_menu_item"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/?ref=friends">Find Friends</a></div>
</div>
 

and our goal is to insert the two menu items before the "Recently Added" item.

For us to do that, we need to get the first child of the parent element and then insert our elements before it and to help us, i.e walking through the DOM selecting parent and childs, I use a little piece of code found on Github, which eliminates whitespace issues between elements among other features. So our myfirstscript.user.js can be updated to :

 
// ==UserScript==
// @name          My First GM script
// @namespace     http://htmlblog.net
// @description   basic <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748" target="_blank">Greasemonkey</a> script
// @include       http://www.facebook.com/
// ==/UserScript==
DOM = function () {
 
    function get(id) {
        if (id && typeof id === 'string') {
            id = document.getElementById(id);
        }
        return id || null;
    }
 
    function walk(element, tag, walk, start, all) {
        var el = get(element)[start || walk], elements = all ? [] : null;
        while (el) {
            if (el.nodeType === 1 && (!tag || el.tagName.toLowerCase() === tag)) {
                if (!all) {
                    return el;
                }
                elements.push(el);
            }
            el = el[walk];
        }
        return elements;
    }
 
    return {
 
        // Get the element by its id
        get: get,
 
        walk: walk,
 
        // Returns the previousSibling of the Element (excluding text nodes).
        getPrevious: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling');
        },
 
        // Like getPrevious, but returns a collection of all the matched previousSiblings.
        getAllPrevious: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling', null, true);
        },
 
        // As getPrevious, but tries to find the nextSibling (excluding text nodes).
        getNext: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling');
        },
 
        // Like getNext, but returns a collection of all the matched nextSiblings.
        getAllNext: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', null, true);
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the firstChild (excluding text nodes).
        getFirst: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', 'firstChild');
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the lastChild.
        getLast: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling', 'lastChild');
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the parentNode.
        getParent: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'parentNode');
        },
 
        // Like getParent, but returns a collection of all the matched parentNodes up the tree.
        getParents: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'parentNode', null, true);
        },
 
        // Returns all the Element's children (excluding text nodes).
        getChildren: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', 'firstChild', true);
        },
 
        // Removes the Element from the DOM.
        dispose: function (el) {
            el = get(el);
            return (el.parentNode) ? el.parentNode.removeChild(el) : el;
        }
 
    };
}();
 

To get the parent element and its first child, we then append the following code :

 
// get drop down menu
var parentNode = DOM.get('fb_menu_friends_dropdown');
// get its first child
var firstNode = DOM.getFirst('fb_menu_friends_dropdown');
 

Creating our nodes

Now we must create our two nodes which will be inserted afterward. This is done easily with the following code which is self explanatory :

 
/** For "Recently Updated" */
// create our div with class fb_menu_item
var recentDiv = document.createElement('div');
recentDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_item');
 
// create our link
var recentLink = document.createElement('a');
recentLink.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/friends/?recent&ref=tn';
 
// add text to our link
var recentDivContent = document.createTextNode('Recently Updated');
recentLink.appendChild(recentDivContent);
 
// add link to our div
recentDiv.appendChild(recentLink);
 
/** For "Status Updates" */
// create our div with class fb_menu_item
var statusDiv = document.createElement('div');
statusDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_item');
 
// create our link
var statusLink = document.createElement('a');
statusLink.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status&ref=tn';
 
// add text to our link
var statusDivContent = document.createTextNode('Status Updates');
statusLink.appendChild(statusDivContent);
 
// add link to our div
statusDiv.appendChild(statusLink);
 

We can also add a separator, for having a cleaner look :

 
/** Creates a separator, just to look good */
var separatorDiv = document.createElement('div');
separatorDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_separator');
 

Finally we insert these 3 nodes before the first child element we got earlier on :

 
// add all divs before first child of menu
parentNode.insertBefore(statusDiv, firstNode);
parentNode.insertBefore(recentDiv, firstNode);
parentNode.insertBefore(separatorDiv, firstNode);
 

Just to be on the safe side of things, we surround the whole block of code with a try and catch statement.

Putting it all together

So finally our code is like this :

 
// ==UserScript==
// @name          My First GM script
// @namespace     http://htmlblog.net
// @description   basic <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748" target="_blank">Greasemonkey</a> script
// @include       http://www.facebook.com/
// ==/UserScript==
 
DOM = function () {
 
    function get(id) {
        if (id && typeof id === 'string') {
            id = document.getElementById(id);
        }
        return id || null;
    }
 
    function walk(element, tag, walk, start, all) {
        var el = get(element)[start || walk], elements = all ? [] : null;
        while (el) {
            if (el.nodeType === 1 && (!tag || el.tagName.toLowerCase() === tag)) {
                if (!all) {
                    return el;
                }
                elements.push(el);
            }
            el = el[walk];
        }
        return elements;
    }
 
    return {
 
        // Get the element by its id
        get: get,
 
        walk: walk,
 
        // Returns the previousSibling of the Element (excluding text nodes).
        getPrevious: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling');
        },
 
        // Like getPrevious, but returns a collection of all the matched previousSiblings.
        getAllPrevious: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling', null, true);
        },
 
        // As getPrevious, but tries to find the nextSibling (excluding text nodes).
        getNext: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling');
        },
 
        // Like getNext, but returns a collection of all the matched nextSiblings.
        getAllNext: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', null, true);
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the firstChild (excluding text nodes).
        getFirst: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', 'firstChild');
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the lastChild.
        getLast: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'previousSibling', 'lastChild');
        },
 
        // Works as getPrevious, but tries to find the parentNode.
        getParent: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'parentNode');
        },
 
        // Like getParent, but returns a collection of all the matched parentNodes up the tree.
        getParents: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'parentNode', null, true);
        },
 
        // Returns all the Element's children (excluding text nodes).
        getChildren: function (el, tag) {
            return walk(el, tag, 'nextSibling', 'firstChild', true);
        },
 
        // Removes the Element from the DOM.
        dispose: function (el) {
            el = get(el);
            return (el.parentNode) ? el.parentNode.removeChild(el) : el;
        }
 
    };
}();
 
try{
	// get drop down menu
	var parentNode = DOM.get('fb_menu_friends_dropdown');
	// get its first child
	var firstNode = DOM.getFirst('fb_menu_friends_dropdown');
 
	/** For "Recently Updated" */
	// create our div with class fb_menu_item
	var recentDiv = document.createElement('div');
	recentDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_item');
 
	// create our link
	var recentLink = document.createElement('a');
	recentLink.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/friends/?recent&ref=tn';
 
	// add text to our link
	var recentDivContent = document.createTextNode('Recently Updated');
	recentLink.appendChild(recentDivContent);
 
	// add link to our div
	recentDiv.appendChild(recentLink);
 
	/** For "Status Updates" */
	// create our div with class fb_menu_item
	var statusDiv = document.createElement('div');
	statusDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_item');
 
	// create our link
	var statusLink = document.createElement('a');
	statusLink.href = 'http://www.facebook.com/friends/?status&ref=tn';
 
	// add text to our link
	var statusDivContent = document.createTextNode('Status Updates');
	statusLink.appendChild(statusDivContent);
 
	// add link to our div
	statusDiv.appendChild(statusLink);
 
	/** Creates a separator, just to look good */
	var separatorDiv = document.createElement('div');
	separatorDiv.setAttribute('class', 'fb_menu_separator');
 
	// add both divs before first child of menu
	parentNode.insertBefore(statusDiv, firstNode);
	parentNode.insertBefore(recentDiv, firstNode);
	parentNode.insertBefore(separatorDiv, firstNode);
}
catch(e){};
 

Installing and testing our script

Fire up Firefox and select "File" -> "Open File..." in the menu bar and then browse for your script, i.e myfirstscript.user.js in our case. You will be prompted to install the script by Greasemonkey. After installation is complete, head to Facebook, login and hover over the "Friends" menu, you will see your newly created menus.

Download script
Install script

WP To Top is a Wordpress plugin that adds a "Back to top" link in your blog without modifying your template files. This is useful especially if you have long posts or long pages. You will have a nice "Back to top" or whatever-text-you-want link floating at the bottom right/left of your page.

Features

• Smooth scrolling animation and fade in, fade out effect, powered by the YUI library
• Customizable options via the admin panel, from the text to the position of the link
• Works on almost all browsers including IE6 (yes!)

Download

You can get the plugin here

Demo

You have a demo on this page. Just scroll a little bit and you will see a nice "Take me up" link appearing at the bottom of your page.

Installation

• Extract wptotop.zip in the "/wp-content/plugins/" directory
• Activate the plugin through the "Plugins" menu in WordPress
• Go to "Settings" and then "WP To Top" to configure the plugin. The options are self explanatory and easy to understand.

Thanks

I got the inspiration to write this plugin after having a look at David Walsh's jQuery topLink Plugin. Thanks to the YUI team for the great YUI library and Semih's Animated Page Scroll with YUI.

PEAR MDB2 is a merge of the PEAR DB and Metabase php database abstraction layers.

It provides a common API for all supported RDBMS. The main difference to most
other DB abstraction packages is that MDB2 goes much further to ensure
portability. MDB2 provides most of its many features optionally that
can be used to construct portable SQL statements:

• Object-Oriented API
• A DSN (data source name) or array format for specifying database servers
• Datatype abstraction and on demand datatype conversion
• Various optional fetch modes to fix portability issues
• Portable error codes
• Sequential and non sequential row fetching as well as bulk fetching
• Ability to make buffered and unbuffered queries
• Ordered array and associative array for the fetched rows
• Prepare/execute (bind) named and unnamed placeholder emulation
• Sequence/autoincrement emulation
• Replace emulation
• Limited sub select emulation
• Row limit emulation
• Transactions/savepoint support
• Large Object support
• Index/Unique Key/Primary Key support
• Pattern matching abstraction
• Module framework to load advanced functionality on demand
• Ability to read the information schema
• RDBMS management methods (creating, dropping, altering)
• Reverse engineering schemas from an existing database
• SQL function call abstraction
• Full integration into the PEAR Framework
• PHPDoc API documentation

MDB2 - InstallationWiki
How to use PHP and PEAR MDB2

Text_CAPTCHA

Implementation of CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
Using PEAR's Text_CAPTCHA to Secure Web Forms

Log

The Log package provides an abstracted logging framework. It includes output handlers for log files, databases, syslog, email, Firebug, and the console. It also provides composite and subject-observer logging mechanisms.
The Log Package
PHPBuilder
Debugging PHP With Firebug
Advanced Logging in PHP with PEAR

LiveUser

LiveUser is a set of classes for dealing with user authentication
and permission management. Basically, there are three main elements that make up this package:

• The LiveUser class
• The Auth containers
• The Perm containers

The LiveUser class takes care of the login process and can be configured to use a certain permission container and one or more different auth containers.
That means, you can have your users' data scattered amongst many data containers and have the LiveUser class try each defined container until the user is found.
For example, you can have all website users who can apply for a new account online on the webserver's local database. Also, you want to enable all your company's employees to login to the site without the need to create new accounts for all of them. To achieve that, a second container can be defined to be used by the LiveUser class.

You can also define a permission container of your choice that will manage the rights for each user. Depending on the container, you can implement any kind of permission schemes for your application while having one consistent API.
Using different permission and auth containers, it's easily possible to integrate newly written applications with older ones that have their own ways of storing permissions and user data. Just make a new container type and you're ready to go!

PEAR::LiveUser Wiki
Getting Started with LiveUser Permissions
Authentication
PHP Authentication and Access Control Libraries

Translation2

This class provides an easy way to retrieve all the strings for a multilingual site from a data source (i.e. db).
The following containers are provided, more will follow:

• PEAR::DB
• PEAR::MDB
• PEAR::MDB2
• gettext
• XML
• PEAR::DB_DataObject (experimental)

It is designed to reduce the number of queries to the db, caching the results when possible.
An Admin class is provided to easily manage translations (add/remove a language, add/remove a string).
Currently, the following decorators are provided:

• CacheLiteFunction (for file-based caching)
• CacheMemory (for memory-based caching)
• DefaultText (to replace empty strings with their keys)
• ErrorText (to replace empty strings with a custom error text)
• Iconv (to switch from/to different encodings)
• Lang (resort to fallback languages for empty strings)
• SpecialChars (replace html entities with their hex codes)
• UTF-8 (to convert UTF-8 strings to ISO-8859-1)

PEAR::Translation2 tutorials

Validate

Package to validate various data. It includes :

• numbers (min/max, decimal or not)
• email (syntax, domain check, rfc822)
• string (predefined type alpha upper and/or lowercase, numeric,...)
• date (min, max, rfc822 compliant)
• uri (RFC2396)
• possibility valid multiple data with a single method call (::multiple)

An introduction to PEAR's Validate package

Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer

Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer was born as a porting of the Spreadsheet::WriteExcel Perl module to PHP.
It allows writing of Excel spreadsheets without the need for COM objects.
It supports formulas, images (BMP) and all kinds of formatting for text and cells.
It currently supports the BIFF5 format (Excel 5.0), so functionality appeared in the latest Excel versions is not yet available.
Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR
What is Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer?

Net_GeoIP

A library that uses Maxmind's GeoIP databases to accurately determine geographic location of an IP address.
Tutorial from HTML Blog

File_Archive

This library makes it very easy to use, writing simple code, yet the library is very powerful.
It lets you easily read or generate tar, gz, tgz, bz2, tbz, zip, ar (or deb) archives to files, memory, mail or standard output.
File_Archive tutorial
SitePoint » File_Archive

XML_Serializer

XML_Serializer serializes complex data structures like arrays or object as XML documents.
This class helps you generating any XML document you require without the need for DOM.
Furthermore this package can be used as a replacement to serialize() and unserialize() as it comes with a matching

XML_Unserializer that is able to create PHP data structures (like arrays and objects) from XML documents, if type hints are available.
If you use the XML_Unserializer on standard XML files, it will try to guess how it has to be unserialized. In most cases it does exactly what you expect it to do.

Dev Shed XML_Serializer
Instant XML with PHP and PEAR::XML_Serializer

twitree makes extensive use of the YUI library. The following components were used :

• grids css - for the layout
• yahoo dom event - for DOM and event handling
• connection manager - for AJAX requests like getting the list of followers for a user
• container family - to display modal dialogs like prompting for a twitter username, displaying the loading panel
• JSON utility - to parse the JSON data twitree receives from the twitter servers
• cookie utility - to fetch username information from a cookie so that the user doesn't have to input his username every time
• and finally the treeview control which provides a nice tree and dynamically loads the data upon clicking on a node

The application is very much in an initial phase and there are some limitations, like only 100 followers are being returned, rate limiting, etc...

Stay tuned for further information

Latest update :

twitterers can now

• update their status via twitree
• follow a user by right clicking on the user and choose "Follow" from the contextual menu
• send a direct message to a fellow twitterer by right clicking on the user and choose "Send message" from the contextual menu

FAQ has also been added

This article will show you how to add alternate colors to table rows without any server side development or hard coding your scripts, thus providing good readability for your users and great flexibility for you. We will use the YUI library for that.

Demo
Download the demo

The HTML

We need to create our basic HTML file containing a table and adding a class name to it.

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<title>Alternate colors</title>
	</head>
	<body>
<table class="alternateRows">
<tr>
<td>First Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Second Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Third Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fourth Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fifth Row</td>
</tr>
</table>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

The Javascript

Next we need to include the YUI libraries, served from their CDN. We need the

• YAHOO global object which contains a number of methods that are used throughout the library
• DOM collection which provides methods that simplify common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management
• Event utility for various event handling

 
<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
 

And also our javascript file, alternate.js

 
<script type="text/javascript" src="alternate.js"></script>
 

So our HTML page looks like this:

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="alternate.js"></script>
		<title>Alternate colors</title>
	</head>
	<body>
<table class="alternateRows">
<tr>
<td>First Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Second Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Third Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fourth Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fifth Row</td>
</tr>
</table>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

Invoking the javascript

To add the alternate colors to your table rows, you just have to put the following javascript code in your HTML page.

 
	YAHOO.util.Event.on(window, 'load', function(){
		YAHOO.htmlblog.alternateRows.init('alternateRows', '#fff', '#ccc');
	});
 

That means that after the page has been loaded, we call the alternateRows.init function, with 3 parameters:

• the table class name, in our case it's "alternateRows"
• the first color in hex, e.g #fff
• the second color in hex, e.g #ccc

Our complete HTML page

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
<script type="text/javascript"src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="alternate.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript">
			YAHOO.util.Event.on(window, 'load', function(){
				YAHOO.htmlblog.alternateRows.init('alternateRows', '#fff', '#ccc');
			});
		</script>
		<title>Alternate colors</title>
	</head>
	<body>
<table class="alternateRows">
<tr>
<td>First Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Second Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Third Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fourth Row</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Fifth Row</td>
</tr>
</table>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

Demo
Download the demo

Event delegation refers to the use of a single event listener on a parent object to listen for events happening on its children (or deeper descendants). Event delegation allows developers to be sparse in their application of event listeners while still reacting to events as they happen on highly specific targets. This proves to be a key strategy for maintaining high performance in event-rich web projects, where the creation of hundreds of event listeners can quickly degrade performance. More on event delegation including examples.

This post illustrates the use of event delegation to create a "bubble" menu, inspired by Bedrich Rios' post on Nettuts.

Demo
Download sample file

The HTML

We'll need the following components from the YUI library:

• yahoo-dom-event - for DOM/Event handling
• animation - for sliding effects

So our basic HTML page is like this:

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js&2.6.0/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

Next we'll add some structural markup, a simple list, with "menu" as class name and with 5 items.

 
<ul class="menu">
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li>Menu item 3</li>
<li>Menu item 4</li>
<li>Menu item 5</li>
</ul>
 

Updated HTML page:

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js&2.6.0/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
<ul class="menu">
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li>Menu item 3</li>
<li>Menu item 4</li>
<li>Menu item 5</li>
</ul>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

The Javascript

Then we just have to add the bubble.js javascript file to our page and it's done, we'll have a nice "bubble" menu.

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<!-- Combo-handled YUI JS files: -->
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js&2.6.0/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script>
		<!-- our bubble file -->
		<script type="text/javascript" src="bubble.js"></script>
	</head>
	<body>
<ul class="menu">
<li>Menu item 1</li>
<li>Menu item 2</li>
<li>Menu item 3</li>
<li>Menu item 4</li>
<li>Menu item 5</li>
</ul>
 
	</body>
</html>
 

bubble.js

 
/**
*	Bubble Menu
*	@author Asvin Balloo (http://htmlblog.net)
*/
bubbleMenu = {
	// private variables
	// class name of our menu
	menuClassName: null,
	// by how much we are sliding
	moveToLength : 10,
 
	/**
	*	Init the whole process here
	*	@method init
	*	@params menuClassName {string} class name of our menus
	*/
	init: function(menuClassName){
		// set our class name to be used later one
		bubbleMenu.menuClassName = menuClassName;
 
		// get all the lists with the class name
		var list = YAHOO.util.Dom.getElementsByClassName(menuClassName);
 
		// loop through them
		for(var i=0; i
<list.length; i++) {
			// add the onmouseover event to it, call the mouseOverHandler function
			YAHOO.util.Event.on(list[i], "mouseover", bubbleMenu.mouseOverHandler);
 
			// get the first child and its padding left for future reference. Useful when using onmouseout to 
 
restore the item to original state
			var listItems = list[i].getElementsByTagName('li');
			var startingPadding = parseInt(YAHOO.util.Dom.getStyle(listItems[0], 'paddingLeft'));
 
			// add the onmouseout event, call the mouseOutHandler function
			YAHOO.util.Event.on(list[i], "mouseout", bubbleMenu.mouseOutHandler, {'list':list[i], "padding" : 
 
startingPadding});
		}
	},
 
	/**
	*	Mouse over handler
	*	@params e {Event} the event
	*/
	mouseOverHandler: function(e){
		// get the target
		var elTarget = YAHOO.util.Event.getTarget(e);
 
		// calculate the current padding left
		var paddingLeft = parseInt(YAHOO.util.Dom.getStyle(elTarget, 'paddingLeft'));
 
		// call the delegate method, with the target and the padding left value
		bubbleMenu.delegate(elTarget, paddingLeft);
	},
 
	/**
	*	Mouse out handler
	*	@params e {Event} the event
	*	@params o {JSON} JSON data containing the list + padding value, eg. {'list': mylist, 'padding': 10}
	*/
	mouseOutHandler: function(e, o){
		// get the target
		var elTarget = YAHOO.util.Event.getTarget(e);
 
		// calculate the left padding, the original padding value - by how much we have padded
		var paddingLeft = o.padding - bubbleMenu.moveToLength;
 
		// call the delegate method with the target and padding value
		bubbleMenu.delegate(elTarget, paddingLeft);
	},
 
	/**
	*	Cool things go here, like animation
	*	@params elTarget {Target} our target
	*	@params padding {Int} by how much we are going to padd
	*/
	delegate: function(elTarget, padding){
		//walk up the DOM tree looking for an <li> in the target's ancestry; desist when you reach the container with our class name
		while (elTarget.className != bubbleMenu.menuClassName) {
			// are you an LI?
			if(elTarget.nodeName.toUpperCase() == "LI") {
				// if so then animate, set the attributes, in our case the left padding
				var attributes = { paddingLeft: {"to": [padding + bubbleMenu.moveToLength] } };
 
				// create our animation
				var anim = new YAHOO.util.Motion(elTarget, attributes, 0.6, YAHOO.util.Easing.bounceOut);
 
				// then animate
				anim.animate();
				break;
			}
			else {
				// it's not an li, so we keep looking and looking
	            elTarget = elTarget.parentNode;
	        }
		}
	}
};
 
// init the whole thing here
YAHOO.util.Event.on(window, "load", function(){
	bubbleMenu.init("menu");
});
 

You can have unlimited (don't abuse) number of bubble menus by just adding the "menu" class to each one of them and including the bubble.js file.
If you're not happy with the menu class or you found another cool class name, then you'll have to update the bubble.js file towards the end:

 
// init the whole thing here
YAHOO.util.Event.on(window, "load", function(){
	bubbleMenu.init("mycoolclass");
});
 

Also you can modify by how much an item slides by modifying the moveToLength variable (default 10):

 
 
// by how much we are sliding
moveToLength : 30,
 

Note that the demo is using reset-fonts-grids CSS and the page has been styled with the following:

 
body {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	background: #1d1d1d;
	font-family: "Lucida Grande", Verdana, sans-serif;
	font-size: 100%;
}
 
.menu li{
	padding-left: 20px;
	line-height: 2em;
	width: 150px;
	color: #999;
 
	background: #222;
	border: 1px solid #1a1a1a;
	-moz-border-radius: 10px;
}
 

What is validation ?
According to the W3c, Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

Why taking the trouble to validate your XHTML ?

• Properly written XHTML code will render better, render on more browsers, and render faster than XHTML with errors. It's also more easily adapted to print and alternative browsing devices like mobile phones and handheld computers.
• Properly written XHTML code is more likely to be "future-proof" (backward compatible with future standards and future web browsers).
• Browsers are becoming more standards compliant, and it is becoming increasingly necessary and important to write valid and standards compliant XHTML code
• Poorly written XHTML can greatly reduce the amount of traffic your web site receives from search engines.
• Write XHTML code right the first time and write it once.
• You don't want to look foolish among your friends while not knowing the rules, uh?

Tip 1: Specify a DOCTYPE and namespace
Include a DOCTYPE at the top of your page and specify the namespace

For XHTML1.0 Strict

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 

For XHTML1.0 Transitional

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 

For XHTML1.0 Frameset

 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
 

Tip 2: Specify the character encoding

 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
 

Tip 3: Avoid using deprecated tags and attributes.
Deprecated tags :

• applet
• basefont
• center
• dir
• font
• isindex
• menu
• s
• strike
• u

Deprecated attributes and tags in which they are deprecated :

• align (caption, img, input, object, legend, table, hr, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p)
• alink, link, vlink (body)
• background (body)
• bgcolor (table, tr, td, th, body)
• border (img, object)
• clear (br)
• compact (dl, ol, ul)
• height (td, th)
• hspace (img, object)
• language (script)
• name (img, a, applet, form, frame, iframe, map)
• noshade (hr)
• nowrap (td, th)
• size (hr)
• start (ol)
• target (a)
• text (body)
• type (li, ol, ul)
• value (li)
• version (html)
• vspace (img, object)
• width (hr, td, th, pre)

Tip 4: All tags in lowercase
All tags and attribute names must be in lower case and attribute values must be between double quotes ("), i.e

 
<DIV>
	<Img src="test.jpg" ID=myimage alt='logo' />
</DIV>
 

is incorrect while correct version goes like this:

 
<div>
	<img src="test.jpg" id="myimage" alt="logo" />
</div>
 

Tip 5: XHTML must be well-formed
All opening tags must have closing ones, or if the tag is empty, like br tag, it must have a closing slash. For e.g

 
<div>
 
this is a paragraph
 
	<br>
<hr>
	<img src="images.jpg" alt="my company">
</div>
 

is invalid. The correct code:

 
<div>
 
this is a paragraph
 
 
<hr />
	<img src="images.jpg" alt="my company" />
</div>
 

Also, tags must be properly nested can can't overlap. An example of bad nesting is

 
 
<div><strong>this is a paragraph</div>
 
</strong>
 
 

It should be like this in order to validate:

 
<div>
 
<strong>this is a paragraph</strong>
</div>
 

Tip 6: Images must always have alt attribute
According to the W3C recommendations, the "alt" attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images. Including the alt attribute will not only validate your code but also improve your search engine rankings. In Google's webmaster guidelines, they advise the use of alternative text for images since they can't see the images. Instead they rely on the alt attribute.

Correct code :

 
	<img src="images/logo.jpg" alt="My Company" />
 

Tip 7: Surround your javascript between CDATA tags
If you're not using external javascript files, to prevent the validator from spitting errors from your javascript code,

simply surround them within CDATA tags, like this:

 
<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
var myfunction = function(){
 
};
/* ]]> */
</script>
 

Tip 8 : Encode HTML character entities

 
	<!-- incorrect -->
	my brother & me
 
	<!-- correct -->
	my brother &amp; me
 

Tip 9: Correct way to embed flash movies
Code which won't validate

 
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0" width="30" height="30"><param name="movie" value="music/sound.swf"><param name="quality" value="high"><embed src="music/sound.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="30" height="30"></embed></object>
 

Correct way to embed flash movies

 
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="music/sound.swf" width="0" height="0"><param name="movie" value="music/sound.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high"/></object>
 

Or if you want you can use swfobject which offers optimized Flash Player embed methods.

Yahoo's Exceptional Performance team has compiled a list of 34 best practices to have faster web pages. In this post I'll show you 8 tips which helped me to get a B grade in YSlow! for web pages that I develop. Currently YSlow's web page analysis is based on 13 identified basic rules that affect web page performance. In decreasing order of priority they are:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put CSS at the Top
6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags

You can get more info by clicking on each item. Of course using a CDN is not affordable by everybody, including me. This didn't prevent me to have a B grade though. I will guide you through some of the items which worked for me.

 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/container/container_core-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/menu/menu-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/element/element-beta-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/button/button-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/editor/editor-beta-min.js"></script>
 

Now with the Combo Handler service, it has been stripped to only 1 file:

 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.5.2/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js&2.5.2/build/container/container_core-min.js&2.5.2/build/menu/menu-min.js&2.5.2/build/element/element-beta-min.js&2.5.2/build/button/button-min.js&2.5.2/build/editor/editor-beta-min.js"></script>
 

If you're not using the YUI library or not interested in using the Combo Handler service, you can try Minify!
Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching.

Another tool which can be helpful is Dojo Shrinksafe which not only minifies your javascript code but also allows you to upload several javascript files and have them compressed in 1 single file.

Another way to make fewer HTTP requests is by using CSS sprites which are big images containing lots of smaller ones. An online tool which can make CSS sprites out of your smaller ones is the CSS Sprite Generator. You just have to upload your pics and it will generate your sprite together with the CSS code. More info about CSS sprites can be found on CSS Tricks.

 
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 2 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 years"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 years"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 2 years"
ExpiresByTYpe text/css "access plus 2 years"
 

In the above listing, all images(jpg/jpeg/gif) will have an expires header 2 years in the future.

 
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
 

 
	<html>
		<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
		</head>
		<body>
 
		</body>
	</html>
 

 
	<html>
		<head>
		</head>
		<body>
		...
		...
		<script type="text/javascript" src="myjs.js"></script>
		</body>
	</html>
 

Another great command line tool is Julien Lecomte YUI Compressor.

In order to use it you must have Java installed (>= 1.4).

Douglas Crockford also has something similar in JSMin

 
FileETag None
 

;-)

 
include('EmailAddressValidator.php');
 
$validator = new EmailAddressValidator;
if ($validator->check_email_address('test@example.org')) {
    // Email address is technically valid
}
else {
    // Email not valid
}
 

Random password generator
PHP password generator is a complete, working random password generation function for PHP. It allows the developer to customize the password: set its length and strength. Just include this function anywhere in your code and then use it.
Source : http://www.webtoolkit.info/php-random-password-generator.html

 
function generatePassword($length=9, $strength=0) {
    $vowels = 'aeuy';
    $consonants = 'bdghjmnpqrstvz';
    if ($strength & 1) {
        $consonants .= 'BDGHJLMNPQRSTVWXZ';
    }
    if ($strength & 2) {
        $vowels .= "AEUY";
    }
    if ($strength & 4) {
        $consonants .= '23456789';
    }
    if ($strength & 8) {
        $consonants .= '@#$%';
    }
 
    $password = '';
    $alt = time() % 2;
    for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
        if ($alt == 1) {
            $password .= $consonants[(rand() % strlen($consonants))];
            $alt = 0;
        } else {
            $password .= $vowels[(rand() % strlen($vowels))];
            $alt = 1;
        }
    }
    return $password;
}
 

Get IP address
Returns the real IP address of a visitor, even when connecting via a proxy.
Source : http://roshanbh.com.np/2007/12/getting-real-ip-address-in-php.html

 
function getRealIpAddr(){
	if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'])){
		//check ip from share internet
		$ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
	}
	elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'])){
		//to check ip is pass from proxy
		$ip = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
	}
	else{
		$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
	}
	return $ip;
}
 

XSL transformation
PHP5 version
Source : http://www.tonymarston.net/php-mysql/xsl.html

 
$xp = new XsltProcessor();
 
// create a DOM document and load the XSL stylesheet
$xsl = new DomDocument;
$xsl->load('something.xsl');
 
// import the XSL styelsheet into the XSLT process
$xp->importStylesheet($xsl);
 
// create a DOM document and load the XML datat
$xml_doc = new DomDocument;
$xml_doc->load('something.xml');
 
// transform the XML into HTML using the XSL file
if ($html = $xp->transformToXML($xml_doc)) {
	echo $html;
}
else {
	trigger_error('XSL transformation failed.', E_USER_ERROR);
} // if
 

PHP4 version

 
function xml2html($xmldata, $xsl){
   /* $xmldata -> your XML */
   /* $xsl -> XSLT file */
 
   $arguments = array('/_xml' => $xmldata);
   $xsltproc = xslt_create();
   xslt_set_encoding($xsltproc, 'ISO-8859-1');
   $html = xslt_process($xsltproc, $xmldata, $xsl, NULL, $arguments);
 
   if (empty($html)) {
       die('XSLT processing error: '. xslt_error($xsltproc));
   }
   xslt_free($xsltproc);
   return $html;
}
 
echo xml2html('myxmml.xml', 'myxsl.xsl');
 

Force downloading of a file
Forces a user to download a file, for e.g you have an image but you want the user to download it instead of displaying it in his browser.

 
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
 
// displays progress bar when downloading (credits to Felix ;-))
header("Content-Length: " . filesize('myImage.jpg'));
 
// file name of download file
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="myImage.jpg"');
 
// reads the file on the server
readfile('myImage.jpg');
 

String encoding to prevent harmful code
Web applications face any number of threats; one of them is cross-site scripting and related injection attacks. The Reform library attempts to provide a solid set of functions for encoding output for the most common context targets in web applications (e.g. HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc)
Source : http://phed.org/reform-encoding-library/

 
include('Reform.php');
Reform::HtmlEncode('a potentially harmful string');
 

Sending mail
Using PHPMailer
PHPMailer a powerful email transport class with a big features and small footprint that is simple to use and integrate into your own software.
Source : http://phpmailer.codeworxtech.com/

 
include("class.phpmailer.php");
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->From = 'noreply@htmlblog.net';
$mail->FromName = 'HTML Blog';
$mail->Host = 'smtp.site.com';
$mail->Mailer = 'smtp';
$mail->Subject = 'My Subject';
$mail->IsHTML(true);
$body = 'Hello<br/>How are you ?';
$textBody = 'Hello, how are you ?';
$mail->Body = $body;
$mail->AltBody = $textBody;
$mail->AddAddress('asvin [@] gmail.com');
if(!$mail->Send())
	echo 'There has been a mail error !';
 

Using Swift Mailer
Swift Mailer is an alternative to PHPMailer and is a fully OOP library for sending e-mails from PHP websites and applications.
Source : http://swiftmailer.org/

 
// include classes
require_once "lib/Swift.php";
require_once "lib/Swift/Connection/SMTP.php";
 
$swift =& new Swift(new Swift_Connection_SMTP("smtp.site.com", 25));
$message =& new Swift_Message("My Subject", "Hello<br/>How are you ?", "text/html");
if ($swift->send($message, "asvin [@] gmail.com", "noreply@htmlblog.net")){
    echo "Message sent";
}
else{
    echo 'There has been a mail error !';
}
 
//It's polite to do this when you're finished
$swift->disconnect();
 

Uploading of files
Using class.upload.php from Colin Verot
Source : http://www.verot.net/php_class_upload.htm

 
$uploadedImage = new Upload($_FILES['uploadImage']);
 
if ($uploadedImage->uploaded) {
	$uploadedImage->Process('myuploads');
	if ($uploadedImage->processed) {
		echo 'file has been uploaded';
	}
}
 

List files in directory
List all files in a directory and return an array.
Source : http://www.laughing-buddha.net/jon/php/dirlist/

 
function dirList ($directory) {
    // create an array to hold directory list
    $results = array();
 
    // create a handler for the directory
    $handler = opendir($directory);
 
    // keep going until all files in directory have been read
    while ($file = readdir($handler)) {
 
        // if $file isn't this directory or its parent,
        // add it to the results array
        if ($file != '.' && $file != '..')
            $results[] = $file;
    }
 
    // tidy up: close the handler
    closedir($handler);
 
    // done!
    return $results;
}
 

Querying RDBMS with MDB2 (for e.g MySQL)
PEAR MDB2 provides a common API for all supported RDBMS.

Source : http://pear.php.net/package/MDB2

 
// include MDB2 class
include('MDB2.php');
 
// connection info
$db =& MDB2::factory('mysql://username:password@host/database');
// set fetch mode
$db->setFetchMode(MDB2_FETCHMODE_ASSOC);
 
// querying data
$query = 'SELECT id,label FROM myTable';
$result = $db->queryAll($query);
 
// inserting data
// prepare statement
$statement = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO mytable(id,label) VALUES(?,?)');
// our data
$sqlData = array($id, $label);
// execute
$statement->execute($sqlData);
$statement->free();
 
// disconnect from db
$db->disconnect();
 

• adjust brightness
• adjust contrast
• cropping
• flipping
• negative
• resizing
• rotating
• tint

images.

What you need to get running

• PHP5.2+ installed on your webserver
• GD2
• a web browser

Demo

Installation
Unzip/untar the software in your web directory and that's all ;-)
Also ensure the images folder is writable by your webserver.
Have fun !!!

Download
Get it and follow it at github

All the image manipulation is PHP-based with the help of the great class.upload.php class by Colin Verot which I highly recommend.

The frontend is the most interesting part, where I've use the one and only YUI library. Here are the component I used (served from Yahoo CDN) :

• reset-fonts.css - for all resetting, style information
• utilities - for all AJAX, animation, drag drop, event handling stuff
• container - for all panels, dialogs, alerts
• menu - for the top navigation menu together with the submenus
• button - provides nice buttons
• slider - for adjusting contrast and brightness
• color picker - to choose the color to tint the image
• resize - to resize the image
• image cropper - image cropping utility
• json - to parse all JSON data returned from PHP scripts
• layout - the general layout
• tabview - for the about information

I've not used the grids.css since it caused some problems while using the color picker.

It's only the beginning of Pixidou and I'am currently looking for some collaborators. So, if you think you can give a helping hand in any way to Pixidou, don't hesitate to contact me (asvin.balloo [@] gmail.com), I'll happily add you as a contributor to the repository on github.

Since it's an early version, there must be some bugs lying everywhere, don't hesitate to drop me an email.