Unemployed Developer

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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