new earth online

Ajax is overrated, and I hope by now it's just a new name for something which has existed for ages which has now made it to mainstream. That aside there are still some pretty cool uses for it, such as what can be seen in Google Mail, Flickr, and of course Facebook and many other sites. Searchme uses Ajax to put a new twist on the way people search for sites they want. Historically we've always found sites from a list of titles and descriptions that result from what we search for. Since then the only major change in search we've seen is the ability to filter by content type such as Web, Images, Products, etc.

Searchme as you've probably guessed, does something different. Once you start typing into it's search box it replaces the beta button with a list of options to narrow the search down by which is based on the context of the results found. For example when searching for "New Earth Online", it produced:

• Stocks
• Global Warming
• Christianity
• Astronomy
• Non-fiction
• Distance Learning
• Online Games
• Basket Ball
• Weather
• Music

I'm not sure I'd really clash this site as any of those, so I decided to go for the "Search All" option. This then produces a "CoverFlow" like view previewing each of the results (I think this is limited to 10 though) which you can scroll through. There's also a "grip" like bar at the bottom which lets you view them as text results. The results aren't great, and the interface isn't all that practical, but it is quite an interesting concept.

Whilst reading some RSS feeds today I read about an amazing new product that is either on the market, or should be shortly, that is capable of uploading photographs to a site as you take them (as long as there is a Wi-Fi connection available). The Eye-Fi cards look like any other SD card though they actually have a Wi-Fi adapter built into them! This means once configured from a Windows PC or Mac, you're able to automatically upload pictures to a desired destination as you take them. If a Wi-Fi connection isn't available at the time it uploads them when there is one.

All Eye-Fi Cards come with everything needed to make it simple to set up and connect to your home Wi-Fi network. After that, pop the card into your digital camera and start capturing memories. It stores pictures like a regular SD card no matter where you are, and uploads automatically as soon as you return to your wireless network. All you have to do is turn the camera on.

It's not just the web it can upload to though, they will still allow your photographs to be transferred to your PC. There are 3 different versions available:

Eye-Fi Home

The cheapest of the options costs $79.99 (around £45) but does not allow transfer to sites - just to computer. Contains 2Gb of space.

Eye-Fi Share

Also has 2Gb capacity, and transfer to computer; but also unlimited WebShare services. Priced at $99.99 (around £55)

Eye-Fi Explore

This one includes unlimited Geotagging, Hotspot Access for 1 year, unlimited WebShare service, wireless Uploads to Computer, and still has 2Gb capacity. Priced at $129.99 (around £70)

At present there are only 20 different sites that are partners of their "Webshare" service - hopefully this is something that would be cool to be increased upon. Something else that would be good is support for custom settings for sending to sites using XML-RPC so that pretty much any site can accept photographs. It really does open the possibilities of blogging. Of course though, people using the iPhone can already do this!

Opera Dragonfly is the Opera teams latest developer tool intended for people that need to debug Javascript, inspect CSS code and the DOM, and view Javascript errors. So it sounds like it's their own version of Firefox's Firebug, or the Web Developer Toolbar on Internet Explorer. Can't really say much about it other than it does most what Firebug does, but is for Opera and works with their Mobile browser too. If you use Opera, or develop for Opera, then this is going to be the perfect tool to help you. If you don't use or develop for Opera then I guess this won't be much use.

In the leas up to the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (whoah huge title isn't it), Icon Factory are giving away free Indiana Jones themed icon sets.

The first one they've released is for Raiders of the Lost Ark (yes I've used a few of them to theme the logo at the top!).

Indiana Jones is out May 22nd, can't wait! Seems some of the new film is set in Peru, which is where I'll be off to in a couple of weeks.

So it's Star Wars day once more, May the Force be with you!

Don't forget that New Earth Online currently has a Star Wars figure archive in development that you can use to mark off what figures you have in your collection. It's not quite finished yet, but still feel free to try it out whilst it's in Beta.

To fix over 120 bugs in this patch makes PHP 5.2.6 one of the biggest point releases to date.

• Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.
• Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.
• Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.
• Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
• Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

On top of that are many other bug fixes such as the implicit conversion of variables to a string leaks memory.

Link: Complete Source Code

Link: Windows Binary

On the blog of a Roman Cortes, he's done something really impressive - created an image of Homer Simpson using only CSS to style HTML elements - no images involved! Now that's pretty amazing. It just goes to show what CSS can do. He's reported it as working in:

• Internet Explorer 5.5, 6 and 7
• Opera 9
• Firefox 2
• Safari 3

To get it working in such a range is what really impresses me.

Notepad++ can be quite a useful application for editing code since it has syntax highlighting, it's quite small, and doesn't use much memory. There have always been a few problems in terms of the UI being buggy, but all that now seems to be sorted in their latest version 4.9 release. They list the following fixes:

• Add smart highlighting feature (double click a word to highlight all the same word in the document).
• Enhance visual effect of Mark all feature.
• Enhance Incremental search dialog docking.
• Enhance Incremental search : add Highlight all feature.
• Add auto-hide menu feature (IE7 style menu - Alt or F10 to toggle).
• Enhance tool bar GUI usability (display a chevron while some tool icons hidden).
• Add style transparency feature, right click on color to enable.
• Fix the files not opening by DnD bug.
• Enhance Find Replace dialog : Add "Extended" option - search (and replace) for tabs(\t), newline(\n\r), and a characters by it's value (\o, \x, \b, \d, \t, \n, \r and \\).
• Bug fixed : Find dialog always scrolls text into view now.
• Add places bar in save as dialog.
• Fix non-recognized relative path bug in command line mode (under Dos prompt).
• Add 2 messages for doc monitor plugin.
• Fix the transparency bug (in Styler Configurator).
• Make search in hidden directory (for Find in files) optional.
• Fix the replace bug while replacing nothing.
• Fix the F3 searching direction bug.

I've been using it all day and so far so good, no problems with the UI.

I've never been to fond of OpenID, that's no secret. It just doesn't feel secure enough, and having to copy and paste the URL into a log-in box feels cumbersome and to the average computer user I think it could actually be confusing which is what will stop OpenID from becoming mainstream. By the way, by "average computer user" I mostly mean those that really don't use computers much and probably understand the internet as being that blue "e".

ID Selector seems a possible solution to the problem of getting it mainstream by trying to make it easier and more understandable.

• Helps new users get and remember their OpenID.
• "One click" login experience for return users.
• Consistent login experience across OpenID enabled websites.
• Takes minutes to add to your OpenID enabled website.
• Attaches to your existing form.
• No changes to your form processing code required.
• Capability aware to help users choose an OpenID provider that will just work.
• You choose which providers appear in your selector, and in what order.

At this point not sure how accessible the option is, it's something I'll have to report back on soon.

Adobe have started something new, the Open Screen Project which is an attempt to provide a consistent way of delivering rich internet experiences on pretty much any internet capable device. Already they've had a huge response with people such as Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, and many others supporting the project. It's an excellent, and worthy idea trying to bring a standard forwards to make it easier for consumers to choose which devices to get. However there is potentially a downside - will it work? Since the project is specifically for delivering Adobe Flash and AIR to devices that means that there is a pretty reasonable chance that Microsoft won't be happy and will start their own project that pushes Silverlight. Of course this will mean people will still be no better off - but the the project does still have benefits:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

With the SWF and FLV formats now being open there is the possibility that we'll see people customising and proposing changes in the near future.

Not exactly web development news I know, but Del Rey books are giving away a free e-Book / audio copy of the "Legacy of the Force: Betrayal" story that kicks of Jacen Solo's descent into the darkside of the Force - an event that forever changes the Star Wars universe.

If you've not already read any of the 9-book series then the first book is indeed a good place to start, especially for free. It seems a lot of publishers are giving away full versions of things lately as a way to better publicise what they do. Away from literature, some recording artists have been doing the same for a few months now. Such as Coldplay, who will also be giving away a free single later today. It's a pretty cool thing for consumers, and I think it does help retail too. By giving away a free single or the first book out a series it helps generate attention to that bulk of work and is more likely to generate more sales from people that would otherwise have never listened to or read it.

Adaptive Blue have come up with a great idea for extending metadata to better describe products and media detailed / reviewed on a page. AB Meta is based on the eRDF Standard meaning that is is fairly simple and easy to learn how to use. An example they provide is what could be used for describing a book.

<meta name="object.type" content="book"/>
<meta name="book.title" content="Kite Runner"/>
<meta name="book.author" content="Khaled Hosseini"/>
<meta name="book.isbn" content="1594480001"/>
<meta name="book.year" content="2004"/>
<meta name="book.link" content="http://books.com/1594480001.html"/>
<meta name="book.image" content="http://books.com/1594480001.jpg"/>
<meta name="book.tags" content="fiction, afghanistan, bestseller"/>
<meta name="book.description" content="Story of an Afghan immigrant."/>

This metadata provides information that could easily be used to uniquely identify a book and is something that would be great to be used by search engines for product results. Their reasons for AB Meta are:

• Object-centric: Focuses on everyday things that we encounter around the web
• Semantic: Upgrades pages to be part of growing Semantic Web
• Lightweight: No complex markup, no changes to the body of the document
• Intuitive: The names of things and attributes are easy to understand for anyone
• Efficient: The meta headers are easy to get to without parsing entire HTML page
• Extensible: Additional attributes and concepts are easy to add
• Compatible: Alternative markup based on existing standards is supported

On their site they describe briefly some of the rules they plan for it, and how it should be interoperable with Dublin Core metadata. There are examples of object types for:

• Albums
• Blogs
• Books
• Gadgets
• Items
• Movie Stars
• Movies
• Recipes
• Recording Artists
• Restaurant
• Stock
• Video Games
• Wine

Best to keep an eye on this one to see where it goes and whether it gets taken up by any search engines.

In the months since I last reported statistics for New Earth Online, quite a bit has changed - the Firefox 3 Beta was released, as was the Internet Explorer 8 Beta.

I'm quite suprised to see people visiting the site from a Playstation 3 - does it actually display okay on one? No suprise, but the top 3 are Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari with Firefox and IE getting the most hits between them.

Looking at individual stats for the browser I can see the majority of people are using the latest version of Firefox for those that are using Firefox; but some are still using very old versions such as version 1.0 - whilst others are using the Firefox 3 Beta. For those using IE, 99% are using either IE7 or 6 - the rest are using a variation of version 5 or the beta of IE8. I'm quite amazed to see quite a few people still using old browsers!

Just a quick update on what articles I've already started writing and hope to have online as soon as possible.

• Subversion - Managing your code repository
• Using sIFR
• Adobe Flash Cheatsheet
• Microformats, Accessibility, and Usability - The Balance
• Microsoft Silverlight Basics
• Implementing an OpenID solution
• Expiring Content with Apache mod_expire
• Using vim for Development
• Parsing vCalendars and vCards in PHP
• Create an RSS Widget for OS X
• Coding Efficiency (Big Oh)
• Beginners Guide to Encryption
• Creating a Photo Gallery
• Compression Methods
• A Quickstart to the DOM
• HTML Emails
• Making Fire in Photoshop
• Structuring your markup
• Colouring Photographs in Photoshop
• Using Masks in Photoshop
• Implementing SSL
• Creating a Testing Environment
• Privacy on the World Wide Web

As usual please feel free to leave a comment or email me using the contact form if there's anything topics you'd like me to cover.

As your site traffic grows it takes longer and longer to generate a dynamic page from sending multiple queries to a database. One possible solution to limit queries is to cache the result of each query that is needed, or to have a complete full page cache for your site.

The purpose of this article is to help with ways of caching your PHP powered site. It only touches very briefly on using Cache_Lite (part of PEAR), APC (part of PECL) and developing your own solution. Ideally it should be used in such a way that if your database server goes down it also acts as something to fall back on.

Article: Caching PHP pages