So if you’ve been using Blogging/CMS/Frameworks to develop sites for clients lately then you know the importance of having a development environment that supports PHP and MySql. All of the coolest packages take advantage of them these days: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, CakePHP, the list goes on and on. You may currently be developing these straight off your web host since they’ve already done the work of installing the all the goodies you need to run these systems. But the downsides to working on a remote server can be big, file transfers take time, and if your internet connection is down or you don’t happen to have an internet connection available because you’re working on a laptop in a plane flying high over the Atlantic you can’t work. Thankfully there’s a few solutions for you that allow you to take all the necessary components for running PHP/MySql based packages on your local computer, read on to find out what they are…
WAMP there it is…
Filed under: Server, Tips, Web Development | Tags: Apache, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, PHP, WAMP, Web Development, Web Development Environment, XAMPP
Rounding the corner…
Everyone and their grandma seems to want rounded corners on their websites these days. I imagine that it will eventually become as played out on the web as wallpaper has become to walls, but until then as developers we must find a good way to feed that desire. Rounding corners isn’t necessarily a difficult thing to do, but there’s a million different ways to do it, some require images, some require only css, some require javascript, and some require all three. Unfortunately the easiest way to round corners, via CSS3 with border-radius and browser specific selectors like -moz-border-radius, and -webkit-border-radius still has yet to be adopted by all mainstream browsers (ahem IE, we’re looking at you as always.) So as usual I’m forced to look for alternatives…
Working from Reset
As more and more browsers come on the scene these days it’s becoming more important that you do what you can to level the playing field before you start developing a new web page. How do you do this? With a reset style sheet. The idea is this, different browsers may have different defaults when it comes to rendering different elements on a page. Things like font sizes, margins, and paddings can vary a bit from browser to browser, so in an effort to bring everything to a baseline you would first implement a reset stylesheet and then make sure you explicitly declare values for the elements that are important to your design. The de-facto standard for the reset stylesheet these days appears to be the meyer reset found here. A very similar one is maintained by the YUI peeps here. They both pretty much do the same thing so pick one and try it out on your next project.
Windows screen capture like a Mac!
Filed under: Computers, Software, Tips & Tricks | Tags: Screen capture, Screen grab, screenshot, Useful tools
Here’s a simple little utility that has changed my life recently. For those of you that have worked on a Mac before, but generally use Windows, you’re well aware of the fact that the default Windows screen capture abilities suck compared to what Mac’s give you out of the box. Usually you would have to hit print screen and then open up an image editor to crop the area you want, then save it. I hated that… time consuming and tedious. On a mac you can just hit Apple-3 and it will let you select part of your screen and then save it as a file straight to the desktop, simple. Well today I finally got fed up with this and took to the internet in search of a free solution. Enter Lightscreen! I won’t bore you will all the details, it’s super easy to set up and use, and it really simplifies the process of doing screen captures by mimicing what Macsters have been doing for years… imagine that. If you’re not using something like this already, get Lightscreen here, you’ll be glad you did.
What is a framework?
Filed under: Frameworks, JavaScript, Magento, PHP, Web Development | Tags: CakePHP, extJS, Frameworks, JavaScript, jQuery, Libraries, MooTools, PHP, Prototype, Symfony, YUI, Zend
Frameworks (aka Libraries) are all the rage these days, but a lot of people don’t really know what they are or realize that they’ve been using them. Simply put a framework is nothing more than a shorthand for a given programming language. In the world of web development JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, extJS , YUI and many others are seeing more and more use. PHP frameworks like CakePHP, Zend, and Symfony are seeing more use by the day too. Why? For the same reason that people use contractions, slang, and text speak in their day to day conversations. It saves time by getting the same information across with less being written. As an example, we all know (hopefully) that “LOL” is text/chat speak for “laugh out loud” but rather than take 14 keystrokes to express the sentiment we’ve cut it to 3 a nearly 500% savings in typing! Frameworks work the same way, we take common tasks and create a shorthand notation for them so that we save time…