I have just come across a very interesting website that just simply blew my mind away. It's called JsFiddle it's a virtual playground for Web Dev's to try out snippets of code.

JsFiddle comes with a variety of preloaded Javascript libraries for every taste, it also come with an Ajax echo backend so you can dive right into hacking code.  You can also check out some very cool pre loaded examples.

It has a very slick and intuitive interface, thre distinct boxes for js, Css and HTML code to be placed and a fourth box where the results of the executed code will be displayed.

And something this handy wouldn't be complete if it didn't count with a very cool sharing and embed options to share your hacks with your programming peers.

Happy coding and enjoy!

So it's a very practical and recommended practice to reset these styles to prevent obscure quirks to appear in our designs. Applying this technique will remove and neutralize the inconsistent default styling among A-grade Browsers providing a solid foundation on which to create great web designs.

When it comes to resetting your CSS styles I've come across things of this nature:

* {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
border: 0;
}

I don't recommend using this technique it's to aggressive and breaks many default properties on some HTML elements.

The technique I use to reset my CSS styles is based on the Eric's Meyer technique which he also based from YUI's reset.css.

So enough said lets dive into the code:

html, body, div, span,
applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dd, dl, dt, li, ol, ul,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	font-weight: inherit;
	font-style: inherit;
	line-height: 1;
	font-family: inherit;
	text-align: left;
	vertical-align: baseline;
}
a img, :link img, :visited img {
	border: 0;
}
table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
	border-spacing: 0;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}

It's almost a copy of the same rules used by Eric but with 2 small changes, I removed the property of font-size:100% which I find conflicts with the default behavior when using the Header HTML tags ( <h1> ..<h6>) and also removed the styling rules for block quotes which I have found doesn't work quite right with multilingual website designs.

Enjoy.

Opcode cache mechanisms preserve this generated code in cache so that it only needs to be generated a single time to serve hundreds or millions of subsequent requests.

Enabling opcode cache will reduce the time it takes to generate a page by up to 90%. After enabling opcode cache on my own server, I saw page loads drop from about 1.5 seconds to as low as 300ms.

Opcode Cache Solutions

After a bit of research and a lot of asking around, I concluded that Eaccelerator was the best choice for me. It's compatible with PHP5, is arguably the most popular of its kind, and is successfully used on sites getting far more traffic than you or I are ever likely to see. Also its worth noting that Eaccelerator works wonderfull with Zend Framework.

Implementing eAccelerator

Implementing opcode cache is far easier than you might imagine. The only thing you'll need is admin (root) access to your server. If you're in a shared hosting environment, ask your service provider about implementing this feature if it is not in place already. These instructions apply to *nix environments only.

Installation Steps:

• Step 1. Compiling Eaccelerator

Go to the source directory were eAccelerator is located, and in the parent folder run the following commands:

phpize
./configure
make

• Step 2. Installing

Now for the installation process run the following command:

make install

• Step 3.  Configuration

For configuring your recent install of eAccelerator access your php.ini configuration file, at the end add the following lines:

extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

• Step 4. Create Cache Directory

Last but not least all you have to do is create a cache directory, if we follow the above example the cache directory should be created using the following commands:

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator

Well their you have it that all you need to start serving blazing fast PHP pages. If you want to
configure the admin panel for eAccelerator all you have to do is copy the "control.php" file located inside
eAccelerators source folder into a web enabled folder which you could access via a web browser.
After copying the file edit the "control.php" file and add a username and password.

Example from Control.php file:

/*** CONFIG ***/
$auth = true; // Set to false to disable authentication
$user = "username";
$pw = "password";

piz

So here are some nice online web apps that have helped me in the past and I found that are pretty useful:

Let me just state before I continue that my de facto browser for development purposes is and will ever be Mozillas Firefox.

Having said that lets dive into the plugins I use:

• Firebug : Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
• fireRainbow : Javascript syntax highlighting for Firebug
• WebDeveloperToolbar : he Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
• Yslow : YSlow analyzes web pages and why they're slow based on Yahoo!'s rules for high performance web sites.
• Live HTTP headers : View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
• FirePHP : FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call.
• showIp : Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar. It also allows querying custom information services by IP (right mouse button) and hostname (left mouse button), like whois, netcraft,etc.
• colorzilla : Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
• Screen Grab : Screengrab! saves webpages as images. It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame... basically it saves webpages as images - either to a file, or to the clipboard.
• x-ray : See the tags on a page without viewing the sourcecode.

Also some very cool web apps that I commonly use:

• Jslint : The Javascript Code Quality Tool, created by Douglas Crockfor.
• JsonLint : A handy Json Validator.
• CSS selector gadget : A point and click CSS selector, works as a bookmarklet, very handy tool.

That would be it any questions or comments feel free to do so.

Happy coding!

Without going into much detail into the why Google Buzz privacy setting are so awfully bad, am just going to share with everyone this link which shows users how to turn Buzz off.

http://tinyurl.com/yfywcfd

If you want to know more about this matter and get properly informed on exactly how much private information your handing out while using Buzz ad how intrusive it really is, just read the following articles .

http://tinyurl.com/yff55mq

http://tinyurl.com/ylooemf

http://tinyurl.com/ykka5q7

Having noted that not many people have heard about Dropboxs magic I decided to dedicate this post to all who haven't had the chance to try it out.

Dropbox is easy to install and totally cross platform. (PC, Mac and Linux).

Main features would be:

• Enable file syncing among various computers and mobile devices.
• File Sharing among friends, co-workers and Dropbox users.
• Online backup.
• Web access to all your Dropbox files.
• Mobile Device access
• And last but not least excellent Security & Privacy settings.

Dropbox will replace and simplify the following common daily tasks:

• Emailing file attachments to yourself and other people.
• Using USB drives to move files between computers.
• Renaming files to keep a history of previous versions.
• Complicated backup software and hardware.

Here is the Url where you can watch a quick video tour of Dropbox features and download the installer.

https://www.dropbox.com/

Hope you enjoy it as much as me and my friends and spread the word.

bye

Having said that I would like to share some of the books I have read through out the years that I have particularly liked, and most importantly found its content useful.

OReilly - Javascript the Definitive Guide 5th Edition

Apress - Pro JavaScript Design Patterns (2008)

Apress - Pro Javascript Techniques

OReilly - Javascript The Good Parts

Well hope you enjoy them as much as I did : )

Happy Coding.

piz

Well I've finished setting up my first blog and spent some time fine tuning all the setting, but have no idea what's gonna be my first post.

So before I start rambling an incoherent post with cryptic code examples am just gonna start off by sharing some of the blogs I read on a daily basis and have been my source of inspiration in creating a blog of my own.

Joel Spolsk - blog about software

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

Jon Resig - Javascript programmer

http://ejohn.org/

Joseph Smarr - Chief Technology Officer at Plaxo

http://josephsmarr.com/

Peter-Paul-Koch - Mobile platform strategust and consultant

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/

http://ajaxian.com/

Well the list could go on and on but I've decided to leave it like that. I think you can get a picture of what my future posts will be about!

That will be all for now, next I will posting some recommended reading material.

piz