Maggie Nelson points out a cool way that you TextMate users out there can get better syntax highlighted code for your blog posts.

A coworker, Craig Campbell just launched a new blog recently. One of the really neat things about his blog is how he handles syntax highlighting for code samples - check out examples in his interesting post about Cool Object Building with PHP. In fact, he got so many good comments about this approach that he even wrote a post explaining exactly how he does it: Syntax Highlighting for Your Blog Using TextMate.

Craig's process is as simple as selecting the TextMate bundle and choosing "Create HTML from Document with Line Numbers". The resulting output takes a little tweaking in the HTML and CSS, but the end result is quite nice (and better than several of the syntax highlighting plugins out there).

On the TotalPHP site there's a new tutorial showing how to pull data from your database and export it as a CSV file that tools like Excel can read in and use.

There are some occasions where you would want to export your site's information in CSV or similar text format. You might want to do this so you can view reports in a spreadsheet, or you might want an export of your product information to upload to a service like Google Products. Either way the method and end result are essentially the same.

The tutorial shows how to grab the information (via the mysqli functionality in PHP5) and formatting each row with the correct values in a certain order. Finally, the entire contents are echoed back out with the correct header() to force a download on the user's browser.

If you're a user of the PhpED IDE in your development work and have had a bit of a hard time with the CVS support, you might want to check out this new post from Richard Davey with a guide on how to get started - specifically with the CVSDude.com hosting service.

If you use NuSphere's excellent PhpED IDE then you'll know it has built-in CVS support for source control. This is a guide I wrote to using PhpED with the CVSDude.com service, so you can get your projects up and running in no time at all.

He talks about getting a new project set up, configuring the server correctly in the Project Properties, and running an import for all of the files in your application's directory.

With that all in place, he also helps you set up the reverse - a place to check the files back out to be able to work with them easily (in a few simple steps). There's even shortcuts you can assign to help make running the CVS functions simpler.

There's plenty of 2D graphics libraries out there, some 3D ones as well, but that hasn't stopped Jakob Westhoff from creating his own driver for the Image_3d package to allow for live 3D image browser rendering.

Quite some time ago my friend Kore Nordmann had a talk at our local PHP Usergroup about 3D rendering techniques which was quite inspiring. Shortly after that talk I decided to write a simple 3D renderer. But, hey there are so many of them already out there, that I decided to do something more unusual.

I just started over and began to write a ECMA Script based live 3D renderer for browsers which understand the new "canvas" tag. After some simple tests I realized that it would be quite cool to implement this as a driver for Kore's Image_3D package, which is entirely written in PHP.

Be sure to check out his post to see what this new driver makes possible. There's an image complete with controls to rotate, zoom, turn of its axis and export to both the SVG and PNG formats. Definitely work checking out!

WebCheatSheet.com has two new tutorials posted today - one dealing with the export of a database schema in an XML format and the other about sending emails from PHP.

Here's a link to the first article.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a dump of the current database schema. This script reads the schema from a MySQL database and outputs XML that describes the schema.

And a link to article number two.

So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.

According to this note from the International PHP Magazine website, there's a new tool being offered by Aivosto that allows PHP developers to "reverse engineer" their code back into flow charts and UML activity diagrams.

Visustin is the ideal diagramming tool for software developers and document writers. Save your documentation efforts by automatic charting! Visustin reverse engineers your source code and visualizes it. No manual drawing is required. Your existing code is all you need. If you see a real complex case, print it out as a big mosaic and hang it on your wall.

Functionality includes the automatic creation of a optimized layout, the ability to do a multi-page printout, saving the graphs/charts/etc in various formats, run a "bulk chart" on all of your files at once, and export options including PowerPoint, out to the web, and Word.

You can get the full details on the product (as well as screenshots and a demo) from their website.

In this first part of a new tutorial on Ryan Malesevich's blog today, he introduces you to a set of scripts that can help you get the play stats from Apple's iTunes software out to a MySQL database for report/display/whatever you want.

I'm back with the third and final way that I know how to get iTunes play stats. In case you missed it, the previous methods were Javascript in Windows and Applescript in Macintosh. This way is Mac-centric again, well just the exporting the iTunes data to a MySQL database is only for Mac, you can write the PHP scripts with whatever platform that makes you happy.

He starts off with the "hardest step" in the whole process - using SQLTunes to export the data from iTunes. He goes through the configuration of the software and the steps needed to actually get the stats out. With the data in the database, he wraps up part one. Keep an eye out for the second part, display those stats via PHP scripts to your anxiously waiting viewers.

As most people, especially those on a shared hosting environment, know, phpMyAdmin can be indespensible for managing your database setup. There are times, however, when you need to work with your databases without it - epecifically in doing a backup. If all you're left with is the command line and you need to make a backup quick, Sephiroth.it has a quick tip to help out.

I often read threads about export/import data from MySQL and it's always mentioned phpmyadmin as the only way to do that (with PHP indeed).

But that's not true, and it's indeed the slower way to do that, expecially when importing large database files (because phpmyadmin has problems with large db)...

He gives an example of the mysqldump functionality, complete with parameters for passing in things like a username and password. The reverse is also shown - reimporting the database data back into the system.

Devshed has posted the second part in their "An Image is Worth a Thousand Words in PHP" series today - this time working more with the content, characters, and colors.

We are about to pick up where we left off in part one, but first a quick summary of what we have done so far. We began by creating our conversion class and naming it 'img_to_txt'. Inside this class we defined several basic accessory methods, to allow our users a variety of options. Last, we also set up a method for returning the appropriate CSS markup based on the user's browser type.

That's what we've done so far - but there's a lot more to do, so let's get started.

They wrap up the series by showing how to change some of the colors (inlcuding the code for each color) and, finally, how to export it out to an image...