The Dev Scene

Design & Code a Cool iPhone App Website in HTML5

Roger Stringer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:41:04 +0000

HTML5 is definitely the flavor of the month, with everyone in the design community getting excited about its release. In this tutorial we’ll get a taste of what’s to come by building a cool iPhone app website using a HTML5 structure, and visual styling with some CSS3 effects.

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Grow Tall & Stand Out in Your Company

Roger Stringer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:39:21 +0000

While watching BBC’s Planet Earth the other day, I drew a strong comparison between plants and humans.

In areas with dense foliage, plants are in a constant race to grow taller than each other in order to gain their share of available light. The tallest plants leave the others behind to die as they blanket the forest floor with shadows.

Just as plants compete with each other for light, you’ll have to stand the tallest if you want to thrive in your company.

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The Perils and Plusses of a Persistent Project

Roger Stringer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:37:16 +0000

As a freelancer, I’ve tackled plenty of projects. Not all have been enjoyable, naturally, but I’ve been able to keep a steady flow of work. I don’t think every job has to be perfect, and as long as I’m making good money and maintaining my freedom, I’m generally satisfied with my career.

While I’ve worked regularly for some of the same clients, I have never had to work on one project that required multiple weeks of single-client focus. It’s a totally different beast. Not only can it be unpleasant, but it can uproot your whole vibe.

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Quick Tip: The HTML 5 Audio Element

Roger Stringer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:50:06 +0000

As of Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3, and Safari 4, we can take advantage of many of the new HTML 5 features, including native audio support without the need for Flash. As you’ll find, we only to create the new element, and set a few attributes. In this four minute video quick tip, we’ll review the mark-up, and also a quick way to play audio with jQuery.

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WordPress plugin: Protect your blog from malicious URL Requests

Roger Stringer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:40:13 +0000

Due to its popularity, WordPress is often the target of hackers. Today, let’s see how we can build a plugin that will check for malicious URL requests (Long request strings, presence of either “eval” and “base64″ php functions, etc.) and use it to protect our blog.

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Getting started with CouchDB

Roger Stringer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:32:04 +0000

Apache CouchDB is one of a new breed of database management systems. These new systems are known as NoSQL. NoSQL is a buzz word term first popularized in early 2009 to describe a database that is non-SQL… NoSQL is a term for a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases and ACID guarantees. Data stores that fall under this term may not require fixed table schemas.

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The Web as a Database

Roger Stringer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:32:38 +0000

One of the things that’s great about the Internet is that it’s open to everyone. There are a million sites, all different, and everyone is free to invent their own way of doing things. Of course, that has left us with a legacy of systems which don’t always work well together.

When you are using a web browser things mostly work because everyone adheres more or less to web standards, or at least the bits major browsers support. When you want to get data from the web to use in your app things aren’t quite as simple. Enter YQL (Yahoo Query Language).

Almost every developer knows about using SQL for getting data from databases. We wanted to do that for the Internet. YQL allows you to access all kinds of information from the internet in a very similar way to the way you would get data using SQL.

HTML5-Powered CSS Framework: Less

Roger Stringer — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:29:26 +0000

Less Framework is an HTML5 powered CSS framework for building flexible multi column website layouts for varying screen widths. It contains an eight-column grid optimized for a line-height of 24px, as well as a set of typography presets based on the golden ratio that fit into the grid’s vertical rhythm.

Less Framework layouts work perfectly in Chrome, Safari 3.0+, Firefox 3.0+ and Internet Explorer 7+. Your layout will collapse into a single column in legacy browsers and on small screens. The frameworks allow you to use HTML5 tags with the help of HTML5 enabling JavaScript file.

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Google Translation PHP wrapper

Roger Stringer — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:25:51 +0000

Google translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. I recently needed to create a Wordpress plugin to translate post titles from one language to another. As the translation API is only available for Java and Javascript, I decided to create a quick one for PHP. In this post we will see how to translate text from one language to another in a simple and quick way using the created class.

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Using HTML5 elements in Wordpress post content

Roger Stringer — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:07:31 +0000

Nicolas Gallagher:

Here are two ways to include HTML5 elements in your Wordpress post content without Wordpress’ wpautop function wrapping them in p tags or littering your code with line breaks…. Both ways rely on hand-coding the HTML5 markup in the Wordpress editor’s HTML view.

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