In MySQL there is command "procedure analyse". It can be used to find out if you're using the right types in a table. As an example you can call:
SELECT * FROM user procedure analyse()
It will output the types you use, min-max value and min-max length and some more information. This could give you some advices which file types you should check.
More detailed informations you'll find in the MySQL Performance Blog.
More and more users are surfing the web over mobile devices like the iPhone. It's crucial that webpages also are displayed well on mobile devices. Nettuts published the article "10 Tips for New iPhone Developers". It gives you some hints what you should change in your webpage that iPhone users also have a good experience on your webpage.
PHP 5.3 was release about a week ago. There are several new features like namespaces. Also the speed should be improved.
Google published some nice links and videos about how to make the web faster. There are also some nice tutorials.
Almost for every webpage it's essential to improve the loading speed because this is one important part of the user experience. A lot of people today have broadband so loading big images or JavaScript files seems to be less a problem. But keep in mind that still all around the world people are surfing with 56KBit/s and nowadays more and more people are accessing the internet over there mobile phone with EDGE or 3G.
There exist some nice tools to get a report about you're webpage speed and what you could optimize.
This two tools are very similar. Yahoo also offers a very extensive list of "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site". There are a lot of small improvements that are also worth to implement on small webpages. But for some it's necessary to change the server configuration or to work with subdomains.
It's important to also use coding guidelines in your SQL queries you write for example inside your PHP Code. Most MySQL SELECT queries are cached and since MySQL 5.1.17 also prepared statements are cache (with some exceptions).
For SQL query caching to work it's important that a query is exactly the same (Byte by Byte) as the one before. As an example the following three queries are all different for the query cache even if they return exactly the same result:
SELECT * FROM tbl_name
Select * From tbl_name
SELECT * FROM tbl_name
In the last example we have some more spaces. So be careful when you write your SQL queries.
I wrote my own Zend Translate Adapter. Today, I updated to 1.8.2. Although most of it worked straightforwardly, I had to make some minor modifications. However, one thing was confusing: When file caching was enabled, my translation adapter no longer worked.
I tried to detect what had been changed by comparing my adapter to the current translation adapters. If you compare the _loadTranslationData of version 1.7 and 1.8, you will see the following difference:
$this->_translate[$locale] = $data + $this->_translate[$locale];
In version 1.8, a return value was added and the variable name was changed.
$this->_data[$locale] = $data + $this->_data[$locale];
return $this->_data;
It seems that it does not make any difference that they changed the name to _data instead of _translation, because both names work. When you use version 1.8, it is important to add the return command in your own Translation Adapter. Otherwise, the translation cache is empty.
If you have a new company it's not easy to find the right domain name. The article from Smashing Magazine can be some help here.
Naming is linguistic design, and a good domain name is an important part of the overall design of a website. A name plays a prominent role when people discover, remember, think about, talk about, search for, or navigate to a website. It establishes a theme for the branding of a website before people even visit it for the first time.
Matthew Turland writes in his article Subversion Commit Hooks for PHP about how to implement subversion hooks to check for example if all commited code is valid PHP code.
First, the pre-commit hook. Its purpose is to perform a PHP lint check (as in the -l flag when using PHP from the command line) to ensure that PHP files being committed contain no syntax errors. When I received this task, I actually already had a copy of a pre-commit script to do this that Elizabeth Smith graciously provided to me ages ago. The script is written in bash and my skill level with the associated shell scripting language is admittedly rather low, as is my experience in creating and setting up Subversion hook scripts in general.
The release of Zend Framework 1.8.0 just came out. Once again we have a lot new features like Zend_Tool and others.
There are two major stories in this release: first, the addition of several components designed to provide and promote Rapid Application Development; second, two offerings that make using Zend Framework in the cloud easier.
MySQL Performance Blog made some performance tests with the new MySQL Version 5.4. It seems like the MySQL did a good job and it's performing really well.
In this article weierophinney talks about autoloader in PHP in general and also how it is implemented in Zend Framework 1.8.
In this article, I'll discuss the development and features of Zend_Loader_Autoloader and its related functionality. However, the main point of the article is to show the various concerns and design decisions that go into developing a comprehensive autoloading solution for your PHP applications. Autoloading, while seemingly a trivial optimization task, has many facets that are often overlooked.
This is an interesting review about the new storage engine Tokutek.
SEO Optimizing is always a big subject if you create a webpage for a company. Here is a interesting article from TechCrunch about the whole subject and why it often fails in big companies.
Search Engine Optimization is the way companies make it easy for customers to find their website using Google. Because search engines don’t publish their algorithms, SEO is mostly reverse-engineering.
Despite the guessing game, SEO produces quantifiable results. In a down economy, evaluating success by the numbers becomes even more important.
At the moment most people are talking about the Oracle aquisition of Sun. A big discussion is also what is going to happen to MySQL. But Oracle stated, that both databases can coexist.
But there is one other big announcement: the MySQL 5.4 preview release is available. The most changes in this release are performance base.
Typography is an important design part of your webpage. Antonio Carouse gives some simple hints how to improve typography in your design.
Many people, designers included, think that typography consists of only selecting a typeface, choosing a font size and whether it should be regular or bold. For most people it ends there. But there is much more to achieving good typography and it’s in the details that designers often neglect.
In the article "Create a Progress Bar With Javascript" Dan Wllman describes how you can create a progress bar with jQuery UI.
The Progress Bar is one of the latest components to be added to the excellent library of UI widgets and interaction helpers built on top of jQuery. It was introduced in the latest version of the library, which at the time of writing is 1.7.
Is your website really finished when you think it's finished. Here are some links you should check before you release your website.
One more thing about SEO optimization could be the markup hierarchy. This two articles describe this subject.
Sometimes it's necessary to filter content blocks. Here is a tutorial from CSS Tricks how you could do it with JavaScript and CSS.
Have you ever wondered about the comments in mysql dump files in the form like /*!40101 SET NAME utf8 */; ? Eli White wrote here an article about this MySQL "extension".
There are different approaches to handle errors in Zend Framework. Here is one from CodeUtopia.
Choosing the right Content Mangagement System (CMS) is not easy. So it's worth to read the article "10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS" from Smashing Magazine to choose the right one.
Adobe Air is a platform to build rich desktop applications. Here is a list of Adobe Air Tutorials and Tools.
Google offers the possiblity to link some JavaScript libraries like jQuery directly over Google CDN. But what is the advantage of loading it directly from then loading it from the own server? There are at least 3 advantages:
Icons are a really important part of Webdesign. But the question is how and where to use icons. In the article How To Use Icons To Support Content In Web Design you'll find a good description.
Baron Schwartz from MySQL Performance Blog makes a list of 10 things you need to know about backup solutions for MySQL
Nettuts shows 10 reasons why your HTML code doesn't validate and how you could solve it.
Peter from MySQL Performance Blog makes a nice definition of what performance optimization means in general.
Before I stumbled over the from Matthew Turland, I didn't even know that there exist a "Standard PHP Library" (SPL). In this blog entry he shows how to use it and makes some benchmarks.
Nice tutorial from Smashing Magazine to create a good portfolio webpage.
Here is a nice phpUnderControl tutorial that show how to set up phpUnderControl.
Titanium is in a way the open source version of Adobe Air. It allows to build rich desktop applications with HTML, JavaScript etc. Appcelerator (the company behind it) just released version RC3. Titanium runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. It's worth to take a look at it.
Jason Lengstorf from Ennui Design wrote a tutorial to create one more content slide with jQuery. It looks good an works fine.
Smashing Magazine also wrote an article on how and when to use Slideshows in web design.
Jim Plush from Panasonic wrote an article about using Zend Framework in an Enterprise environment. He talks about migration code, testing and why Zend Framework could be a good choice for Enterprises.
Smashing Magazine shows in its article "Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert" some nice tips how to improve a webpage in the way to sell more.
George Godula talks in his guest post on TechCrunch about social platforms in China. Most social platforms in China were first only copies of Facebook or MySpace. But now QZone is probably the biggest social network in the world.
I just stumbled over a NetBook solution from AlwaysInnovating. It's a NetBook where you with touch screen and it's also possible to detach the screen.
SEO is still a big subject in web development. CSS Tricks wrote a list of ten points about simple SEO optimization. The subject is a complicater, but it's a good idea to start with small steps.
With the second link it's possible to analyze the own page. Then it gives automatically some good hints what you could optimized or fix.
If you're looking for some MySQL Administration and Development Tools, here is a nice list of the most usefull tools from Smashing Magazine.
One great tool I haven't know yet is MySQL Workbench. It's also available for Mac OS X and there is a free community version. With this tool it's possible to create DB diagrams and directly import and export SQL dump files.
Nettuts published a list of 10 rare HTML tags. Some of them you should know and use.
Release candidate 1 of PHP 5.3 just came out. There are a lot of nice things in PHP 5.3, for example namespaces.
net tuts+ just published a really good list of 30 amazing apps for developers on Mac OS X. I think I should add here at least 2 good applications. One is the Text Editor Smultron and the Fire Bug plugin for Firefox.
Today we just release our new webpage Xodoa.com. To keep all our customers up-to-date we will use this blog to publish company news, but also articles we read on the internet or sometimes we also blog about how to solve some web development problems.
To improve out business and platform we need your help. So please leave your comment in the commen section. Here you can also login with your Facebook account if you have one.
