8 practical tips to make your web pages faster

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 [...]

10 code snippets for PHP developers

I’ve compiled a small list of some useful code snippets which might help you when writing your PHP scripts…
Email address check
Checks for a valid email address using the php-email-address-validation class.
Source and docs: http://code.google.com/p/php-email-address-validation/
 
include(’EmailAddressValidator.php’);
 
$validator = new EmailAddressValidator;
if ($validator->check_email_address(’test@example.org’)) {
// Email address is technically valid
}
else {
// Email not valid
}
 

Random [...]

Pixidou - an Open Source AJAX Image Editor (PHP and YUI based)

Pixidou is a new open source AJAX image editor which will allow you to :

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 [...]

AJAX image cropper with YUI and PHP

This post will show you how to build an AJAX crop image tool using the image cropper control from YUI library and PHP.
Demo
Download sample file
The ImageCropper Control from the YUI library gives you an interactive interface for getting the dimensions to crop an image and using these dimensions in PHP, we can do some cropping.
The [...]

f-lv.com - download YouTube videos in FLV/MP4/3GP format

After playing with the YouTube API and Python over the past week, I’am pleased to announce the launch of f-lv.com
You will be able to :

download your favorite YouTube videos in FLV/MP4 format
email the video download link to your friend
have a look at a nice carousel (thanks Bill for that) with the latest downloaded videos

Site is [...]

Add RSS feeds to your website

Adding a RSS feed to your website has never been this easy with PHP, especially with MagpieRSS.

About MagpieRSS
MagpieRSS is an RSS and Atom parser for PHP which supports RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, the various Userland RSS versions (0.9x and 2.0). Additionally it supports Atom 0.3, and many custom RSS namespaces.
Features of MagpieRSS

Easy to Use
Parses RSS [...]

Geolocate your visitors with PHP (part 2)

In the first part of this series I showed how you could get the country of a visitor via his IP address. Now with this precious information, I’ll show you how to map the visitor visually on the world map using Google Maps.
Sample preview.
You must sign up for a Google Maps API key if you [...]

SEO friendly URL in PHP

When I started implementing mod_rewrite in websites I had a problem in PHP as how to make a SEO friendly URL. All tutorials were geared towards how to implement mod_rewrite, about modifying .htaccess files, but none treated how to make the urls friendly with dynamic content. For example I have a news section which are [...]

Geolocate your visitors with PHP (part 1)

In this short post I’ll show you how to geolocate your visitors with PHP. First of all let’s have a look at what you’ll need :

PEAR GeoIP
MaxMind GeoLite Country

Installing PEAR GeoIP
Using your console or using the command prompt type :
 
pear install http://download.pear.php.net/package/Net_GeoIP-1.0.0RC1.tgz
 
Obtaining MaxMind GeoLite Country
The database can be downloaded freely here. Download it and put [...]

10 starting signs of a good web developer (php version)

Nowadays many people call themselves PHP programmers / web developers as soon as they know a bit of Frontpage or using Dreamweaver to generate the code for them. But are they really good web developers? Here’s my top 10 characteristics of good web developers, feel free to comment.
1. Ability to hand code
Instead of using an [...]