http://giancarlo.dimassa.net A web engineer's blog Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:49:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en   it happened to  me to have a photo of a nice clean sky in a garden near the place where I live, and my client (the Negombo garden's director) had to produce his christmas postcards. That's the result, click to view bigger. The second image instead is more a photoshop ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/11/29/just-tought-it-would-be-nice/ 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 ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/16/what-is-delicious/ 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 ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/11/elastic-and-bouncing-transitions-in-scriptaculous/ 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, ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/10/how-to-separe-php-code-and-html-presentation-with-smarty-part-2-installation/ 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 ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/06/how-to-separe-php-code-and-html-presentation-with-smarty-part-1/ 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 ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/04/how-to-set-up-a-test-server-that-supports-multiple-sites-and-is-accessible-from-outside/ These are the Firefox extensions I found out to be the best so far: Fasterfox: it tweaks your Firefox settings, in some situations you really go faster with a good ADSL line. However, it defaults not activating the "Prefetch" function, really useful in ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/04/the-top-ten-best-free-firefox-extensions/ Last time we talked about Firebug, the Javascript Debugger. This time I'll write about the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox, by Chris Pederick. This invaluable tool really changed the way I work, so I'm really excited to explain all the functions it has. First of all, you can ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/04/exploring-the-web-developer-toolbar/ CSS, DHTML and Javascript work really good together. In fact, I tend to use the combination to replace Flash whenever it's appropriate (usually, most of the time!). Javascript 'building' is a technique where you dynamically add original nodes to your DOM, usually based on existing content. ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/02/optimize-pages-for-search-engines-with-dynamic-cssjavascript-html-building-make-your-own-lightbox/ Part of creative process during web programming and design involves streamlining and optimizing the workflow. That means trying to make things done faster, in less time. One tool I find really valuable is Firebug. Download and install this javascript console and debugger ... http://giancarlo.dimassa.net/2007/07/02/javascript-programming-using-firebug/