Unemployed Developer

Post-to-Wall Facebook-like using PHP and jQuery

Quick and easy tutorial to follow in making a post to wall script, using jQuery Read More

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I’m a bit late to blog this, but better late than never.

Since I’m a big fan of jQuery I felt I should at least plug their new release and you can find it at jquery14.com

The code has been heavily re-factored to improve performance and reduce it’s overall complexity. Day One took the opportunity to show off some fancy bar charts of it’s speed improvements. The uncompressed file is 156KB and the minified file is a 23KB(gzipped).

They also announced they closed 207 bugs. Which as a developer is impressive because we all are petty lazy, amirite? Ok bad humour aside, 207 is an impressive number to me.
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Doing a little bit of self promotion here, in hopes of getting some notice for my first jQuery plugin.

I decided to create a Google Maps plugin and carry over many of the different features that the Google Maps API offers in jQuery form. The goal of this plugin was to make a quick and easy way for someone to implement a Google Map on their page with minimal to intermediate experience.

This plugin has many cool features, well at least my mom says they are cool! I’ve given the ability to allow a user to put options on the map from single to multiple markers, polyline, panning, depth, latitude, longitude and more. You can see some working examples at my web development portfolio.
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Continuing my Lesser Known PHP Functions series, today’s function is metaphone(). This function is pretty interesting and I had no idea it existed in PHP. However, Metaphone is a phonetic algorithm and it’s purpose is to index words by their English pronunciation. Similar sounding words share the same keys.
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There are several database wrapper libraries out there for your favourite web development languages. For instance, there’s PDO for PHP and DBI for Perl. What do these do? Well they give some handy functions that encapsulate away a lot of the dirty details of database work you shouldn’t have to worry about. For example, these allow you to use any database backend of your choice (MySQL, Postgres, sqllite, etc) and connect with them easily. Instead of building a messy DSN connection string, pass a couple of arguments and you’ve got yourself a useful database handle to perform database operations with.
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HTTP Headers for Dummies

I have had a couple job interviews where I was asked about HTTP methods and while I have used some of the code in this link, describing it was not my forte. This article has not helped me get a deeper grasp of what I was doing it and how to explain it to another person. Read More

5 HTML Tags You Might not Know

Acronym was the only tag I did not know about and for SEO purposes it looks like it might be really helpful. Check this article out and see if the other ones are new to you as well. Read More

IE6 Fixes For PNG Alpha Transparency

Still stuck on IE6 and need PNG support? this article has listed 5 methods of enabling transparency for PNG images, although the fixes are superb, they are not without flaws but they certainly will help your site more aesthetic in IE6. Read More

At my prior job I had a very brief look at Balsamiq Mockups and I was really interested in what they offered to us developers. My experience with it was through receiving a bug writeup telling me about a new feature to one of our internal auditing systems. This bug writeup contained some screens created by Balsamiq Mockups, and as a developer it allowed me to visualize what the client wanted very easily. At the same time the client could also visualize what he was to get on the page when I was done.
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I really should keep up on these link roundups, but you know…

How to Get Hired at a Startup

This is a real interesting post for those looking at getting hired at a startup. Most startups I know are looking for the relationship over the merits of a potential employee. This blog posts highlights some useful tips to help you show the company that you will fit in. If some of these tips don’t apply to you, then chances are low you will get hired. Read More

10 Performance Tips to Speed Up PHP

I like to read about these performance tips even though I know and do my best to practice them in my code. I think it’s important to always ensure your code not only works but works efficiently.. Read More

8 Very Useful jQuery forms

We all like lists don’t we? Well this site has a great but small list of useful jQuery form plugins. jQuery is my favorite JavaScript library and I don’t hesitate to use it where necessary. Some of these plugins are great to use in web forms. it can give your forms and added edge in professionalism, in my opinion. (beware of users who turn JavaScript off!!)… Read More

23 Pure CSS Effects/Solutions to Make JavaScript Angry!

I can’t just leave well enough alone can I? The last link I’m promoting JavaScript, and now I’m promoting CSS solutions to make JavaScript Angry! This is another nice long list of effects that can be achieved in CSS and/or JavaScript. some of these would be better suited as some users still browse the web with JavaScript off… Read More

If you haven’t heard of sIFR, it is Scalable Inman Flash Replacement which allows you to utilize flash, CSS and JavaScript to create custom typography on your web page. The font-family class in CSS can only load so many fonts as it will only load the fonts that the browser supports. sIFR allows us the option to use our own fonts and harness the SEO power of our text as we don’t have to rely on having images or flash files to display any custom text.

I’d like to look at a feature that more Flash developers would know about. I came across this issue when I was trying to find a solution to having drop shadows in my font, so my initial thought was to use the drop-shadow CSS class, but I didn’t like the lack of browser support for it, so that solution was out. sIFR seemed like the next reasonable solution to try. Since I prefer to use the jQuery library with any JavaScript that I use, I used the jQuery sIFR plugin. Read more »

I’m sure a lot of us have searched through the web and the job boards out there to find out how to pick an hourly rate for our freelance work. Normally you are told pick a number that you want to make in a year, subtract your expenses and voila you have a number. It’s certainly more complex than I’ve described, but in a nutshell that is how it can be done. For your help here is a great page that can help you determine your rate should you need help: Freelance Switch Hourly Rate Calculator. Read more »