giancarlo.dimassa.net
A web engineer’s blog
What is del.icio.us
Author: giancarlo16 Jul
As it’s about page says, del.icio.us is a collection of bookmarks, yours and the collectivity ones. You use it to pin your favourite sites and organize them not in folders anymore but by tags. By saving your links on a remote server, you don’t have to import/export/backup them, they are always there, even from another computer.
It is extremely useful if you want to:
- Organize all your bookmarks in a useful way
- Have a link under the attention of a friend or coworker
- Discover new links by looking at what other people are bookmarking
- Assign a link the collective tags, so you don’t have to write them yourself
- Have a network of friends, whose links are more relevant for your activies.
- Add a person’s feed to your RSS reader
Elastic and bouncing transitions in scriptaculous
Author: giancarlo11 Jul
Scriptaculous has a lot of transitions, but in some situations, you want to sprinkle up a dull animation, applying a different, custom transition type.
Back in 2003, Robert Penner wrote the easing equations, a set of math formulas in Flash Actionscript released under the BSD license, that simulate various types of physical effects, the most notable are the overshooting elastic and bouncing ones. For an example, look at the demo here.
Three years later, Ken Snyder adapted the equations for scriptaculous, enabling builtin and custom animations to use these new nice effects as transitions. However the Penner easing equations were highly configurable, where instead in the Snyder ones you can only set the duration, because the other parameters are fixed in the source code. Also, not all (indeed, only a few) of the transitions have been ported, and their names have been changed too.
How to separe PHP code and HTML presentation with Smarty, part 2: installation
Author: giancarlo10 Jul
Note: this is article is cut in parts, this is the the second one. Visit the first one if you don’t know what Smarty is and why to use it. The post supposes basic PHP programming skills.
Ok, last time we examined the goods and bads of using Smarty, this time we’ll install it.
How to separe PHP code and HTML presentation with Smarty, part 1
Author: giancarlo6 Jul
Note: this is article is cut in parts, this is the only the first one. More to come.
Programming in PHP without separating content and code can lead to unwanted results, low mantainability and slower production. Even nowadays you can find tons of scripts written by filling HTML pages with chunks of code. If you do that,
- Web designers with no programming skills will not be able to customize easily your script’s appearance.
- If you want to change a site, for example a festivity or a redesign, you will need to face a big amount of work adding again all the PHP code to the new HTML pages.
- You will not be able to focus on the project because you’ll have to manage yourself all the aspect of HTML production, from loops to file inclusion.
How to set up a test server that supports multiple sites and is accessible from outside
Author: giancarlo4 Jul
Before using a test server, my web programming experience was really slower. In fact, every time I had to modify something or try a piece of code, I had to upload it first to my remote server. If the Internet connection had a fluctuation, I could not continue working at all. This also meant I had to first set up a test website if I didn’t work on the live address. One day I had the curiosity of checking out one of these LAMP distributions (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), just with the Linux variable taken out. They call them a LAMP package for Windows. It contains a preconfigured Apache 2 server with PHP 4 and 5, a switcher between the two, MySQL 5 (you even got a phpMyAdmin script already set up) and a mail server called Mercury32 that enables you to send and receive mails from your own scripts, check out newsletters and so on.