Sunday, July 30, 2006

Playing nicely with Search Engines

The subject may be as old as the web itself but still today, one tool to market your website is to have it have a high ranking with search engines. The Ultimate SEO Checklist seems to be a comprehensive article on this subject. It does not compile all the new ideas into a single article but also presents some new techniques.

I like the style of this article since it presents facts rather than "shoulds" and "mays".

Saturday, July 29, 2006

Google Code - APIs and more

The recent hype for mashup-applications has certainly fueled the run on the it's AJAX Maps API. But there are plenty other APIs, which google offers, also worth a look. What will be certainly interesting for me, will be the Blogger Atom API which you can use to search and modify your blogs on www.blogger.com.

Also Google now hosts your open source projects, similar to the sourceforge.net way.

PHP Sockets Made Easy

There is a really nice tutorial up about creating and consuming sockets usiung PHP. At the time of this writing the first part of a 5 part tutorial series is published. I am going to following it, since I have recently written a generic Socket-Server and want to see things, I may improve.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Adobe - Reader Download

What the hell is this? I am trying to upgrade my quite old instance of acrobat reader 5 since some new documents seem to require it. But this seems to be not quite such an easy task.

On the download-page for the adobe reader I am getting a EXE-file which tries to execute an AOM file, which of course I have no runtime for. If I retry downloading, the AOM file hops directly into my face. Since I am not willing to get me yet another installer for an installer, I guess I'll stay on acrobat 5 for awhile.

Way to go guys! This certainly spreads adobe reader faster ;-)

dompdf - The PHP 5 HTML to PDF Converter

Finally there seem to be a decent API for PHP developers to render HTML to PDF. I have just downloaded and unpacked domPdf on my WAMP and it worked right away.

Ok I had to disable php_domxml.dll first but after that it worked perfectly. Well almost, since there seems to be a problem with special characters. I guess I need to import some additional forms first before this works correctly.

Anyhow this API is a big step forward for PHP developers trying to find an easy and convenient way to create PDFs from what they know best: PHP and HTML.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Download SYSCON's Magazines

Browsing some old Links of mine and modifying some URLs. I got access to the public PDF download area of SysCon, who have brought to you e.g. the MXDJ (Macromedia Developer Journal, which all of it's issues may be downloaded here). I liked reading the magazine in the past and might continue now...

Sunday, July 09, 2006

2Advanced Studios

2Advanced Studios have released their new site called "v5 Attractor". Again its a very impressive experience graphical-wise and certainly worth a look if you like surfing the web just for enjoyment and to see what Flash can do.

Patterns For PHP - WebSites

Since PHP-Patterns does not seem to get any new content for quite awhile (probably because Harry Fuechs has moved his activities over to Sitepoint), the new Patterns For PHP website seems to take the same approach of an open wiki on the subjects of design patterns for PHP.

Hopefully this time there will be a longer lasting effort on the subject since I personally like pattern-pages very much. For all those of you that are craving patterns on an abstract non-implementational level Martin Fowler's website might be worth a look.