harry palmer's Bookmarks tagged web-development →  View Popular

5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know

swfObject updated V2.0







In case you didnt know already swfObject has now been updated to V2.0




I have only recently started using this version so i thought i would post some information about it.

Why should you use SWFObject?






• Is more optimized and flexible than any other Flash Player embed method around


• Breaks the cycle of being locked into vendor specific markup and promotes the use of web standards and alternative content


• Uses unobtrusive JavaScript and JavaScript best practices


• Is easy to use






With swfObject V1.5




Your code would look like

Modal window effects or well known as lightbox effects has became a new web 2.0 buzz words, since lightbox released, many clones has launched, made by creative developers around world wide web.

Lightbox effects used to implemented to overlay image, to have flash likes effect in non flash web page using javascript, but nowdays the implementation has became various can be used to overlay images, video, flash movie, dialog or alert box, even wrapping external web page and form submission collaborated with ajax method.

Here i listed some of the excellent lightbox effect libraries that you can choose to have overlay effects in your web pages.

Tracking Christmas Cheer with Google Charts by Brian Suda

Let’s get something out in the open: I love statistics. As an informatician I can’t get enough graphs, charts, and numbers. So you can imagine when Google released their Charts API I thought Christmas had come early. I immediately began to draw up graphs for the holiday season using the new API; and using my new found chart-making skills I’ll show you what you can and can’t do with Google Charts.

But barring that niche, designing for the web is a lot less about making something dazzle and a lot more about making it work. The design decisions that matter pertain directly to the constraints of the materials. What form elements to use. What font sizes. What composition. What flow. Those decisions are poorly made at an arm’s length.

I’ve worked with many web designers in the past who only did abstractions and then handed over pictures to be chopped and implemented by “HTML monkeys”. It never really gelled well. The things that got strong attention were all the things that Photoshop did well. Imagery, curvy lines, and the frame. All the around stuff, never the it stuff.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers

Though I have a tolerably good handle on e-commerce software, I've
not written much of it myself. In this respect, I'm not one to
know what's going on under the hood at any given site: maybe there
is a reason why something works the odd way it does.

But I've observed one technique that has been nearly universal: the practice
of refusing to allow spaces or dashes in credit card number entry fields
(this example from The Teaching Company):

Credit card numbers are always printed and read aloud in groups
of (usually) four digits, and when verifying a number after entry
(which involves looking back and forth between the card and the
web form) one uses the spacing to resynchronize.

If there were some security or integrity reason for disallowing these
characters, I guess I'd buy it, but I've not found a single good reason
for it. The consensus among those that I've spoken to is that it's
nothing but lazy, sloppy programming. I completely agree.

It turns out that sometimes one can clean up the spaces and dashes in
the same amount of code as the instruction not to (this example in perl):

$ccnum =~ s/[-\s]//g;  # (No dashes or spaces)

Credit card validation should never be done exclusively on the client
side, and since the server does it anyway, I just can't find any good
reason for this sloppy practice. Those who believe otherwise are very
much encouraged to contact me with the reasoning.

Some sites cleverly avoid the "no spaces or dashes" shame by limiting
the credit card entry to 16 characters: this has the same effect. It's
just lame.