PHPDeveloper.org

Troy Hunt: 10 lessons for uncultured web developers

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:53:06 -0500

Troy Hunt has posted ten reminders for "uncultured web developers" out there to think about when they're developing applications for a world-wide audience.

What a lot of this boils down to is culture, or more specifically, lack of cultural awareness. I'm talking about making assumptions based on what a developer may personally hold to be true but in the broader global context is incorrect and often marginalises their audience. In the pursuit of a more globally harmonious online experience, let's take a look at 10 lessons relating to aspects of web development with a cultural bent. Some of this may not be new to you, but all of it is relevant if you want to play nice with people from all cultural walks of life.

Among the list of his ten tips you'll find things like:

Firefox and Chrome command 91% of the market
Almost always, 8/7 comes before 7/8
Country code top level domains give context
Time zones matter (and they're not universally understood)
Don't deprioritise your international audiences

Check out the rest of the list in his full post.

Nexen.net: PHP month of functions

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 10:16:00 -0500

As mentioned in this new post from the Zend Developer Zone, Nexen.net (creator of the monthly PHP statistics) has kicked off something they call the Month of PHP Functions.

The month of PHP function aims at introducing PHP developers to a new PHP function every day : one that gets too little usage and spotlight, though is highly useful. [...] During this month, we'll present one or several function every day : they all deserve more attention. You don't have to search for it : most of the time, it will be available in your PHP installation, especially if you're using PHP 5.

So far, six functions have already been posted:

Keep an eye on their official page for the project to keep up with their latest function spotlight.

Ben Ramsey's Blog: Create an Image from XML Data

Fri, 19 May 2006 05:50:53 -0500

In the ever-continuing work that he's been doing with SimpleXML lately, Ben Ramsey shares a new bit of code

It's not really a "problem," but FeedBurner's FeedCount image is a rigid 88 pixels wide, and I wanted to include it on my homepage under the "syndicate" heading, an area that I've defined in my template as having only 80 pixels in width. The 88 pixels were throwing things off, so I used the width attribute of the HTML img tag to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it just squeezes the image, making the text in it appear fuzzy.

FeedBurner conveniently provides what they call their "Awareness API," which is a RESTful interface to retrieve (as XML data) the same exact information displayed in the FeedCountTM image. I simply fired up an image editing program, shuffled things around a bit until the image was a nice, clean 80 pixels wide, and saved it as the base image (shown to the right) I would use for generating an image similar to the one FeedBurner provides.

He explains what the script does via the SimpleXML call and gives the code to accomplish it. It's a short bit of code, but quite powerful when combined with the API from Feedburner - grabbing the data from a local image and integrating the text response from the API. It's great that they have that too - definitely a wise move to allow users even more flexibility in integration for their site.