Redmond Among Contributors to Open Source PHP Framework

Zend Technologies releases updated open source framework with support from Microsoft, IBM, Google and others.by Kathleen Richards
April 2008 Zend Technologies Inc. is forming alliances with key Internet players to broaden the Version 1.5 of the open source Zend Framework (ZF), released last month, adds support for key Google APIs, LDAP authentication, OpenID and Windows CardSpace. Developers using the new version can now work with YouTube upload and write APIs. Other enhancements include better support for forms, AJAX and advanced search capabilities from within the framework with the Apache Lucene search engine, according to Zend.
"Not only are we seeing a very, very broad reach of the framework -- 1.5 is going to be distributed with Ubuntu Linux -- we're actually seeing some significant enterprise uptake," says Andi Gutmans, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zend. He reports more than 4 million downloads, 500,000 of which are unique, since Zend Framework version 1.0's general availability in June 2007. (For more on Zend and the PHP community, see the Q&A with Gutmans, "Glue and Mortar.")
Part of that success may be due to the growing community behind ZF, described as a use-at-will architecture for rapid Web app and services development. According to Zend, more than 400 contributors worked on the upgraded framework, including Microsoft, Nirvanix Inc. and Fox Interactive Media. IBM Corp., Google Inc. and StrikeIron Inc. have been contributors since version 1.0. The Zend Framework is licensed under the new BSD free software license, and code contributors must agree to the Apache Software Foundation's Contributor License Agreement.
Microsoft's Open Identity"PHP works on the LAMP stack, which is essentially implemented on the Zend Framework, and that's why we made the agreement with Zend," says Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect of platform and interoperability strategy at Microsoft. "They have a huge developer base for the PHP customers. We felt that it would be very strategic and we could reach out to the grassroots developers if we were to enable InfoCard support with the Zend Framework as well as a standalone module."
Zend and Microsoft started to work together last summer, with the Zend engineers doing the development. "Our contribution is to provide architectural items, and to make sure that the identity metasystem works on a consistent basis," explains Rajagopalan.
In September 2006, Microsoft announced that some InfoCard specifications (WS-*) were going to be made available under its new Open Specification Promise. Soon after the company took steps to ensure cross-platform implementation. "In May 2007," recalls Rajagopalan, "Microsoft sponsored open source projects to enable InfoCard support on PHP for the LAMP stack, Java for Java servers and the Ruby on Rails framework, and a cross-platform C language implementation that will enable information-card support for many Web servers, including IIS and Apache."
Microsoft has also partnered with Zend to ensure that PHP runs smoothly on Windows servers.
Varied SupportZF supports PHP 5.0. The release of PHP 5.3, which will include some features originally pegged for PHP 6.0, is expected this quarter, according to Gutmans.As of January, PHP 4.0 is no longer supported. "As far as security fixes are concerned, we're going to continue doing those until August of this year," he says.
source = http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=1029

Thoughts on SharePoint and FAST Search

SharePoint Report 2008 we discuss SharePoint's shortcomings and strengths in the search space. While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of different reasons.

Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor FAST Search and Transfer (more information on FAST can be found in our Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog post about the SharePoint conference, I highlighted the presentation that FAST employees gave. This presentation showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts. These Web Parts demonstrated several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, like: content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

The last capability is one that I believe would be particularly interesting for SharePoint users, since taxonomy management represents a challenging area for most SharePoint implementations -- SharePoint taxonomies are very rigidly based on physical structure of the SharePoint sites and leave little flexibility for a more logical taxonomic structure (Redmond folks would argue that the content query Web Part might help, but it's not a solution). That said, what Microsoft hasn't really provided is good guidance on what users can expect to see and any migration path between SharePoint search and FAST. Unfortunately, that really hasn't changed: Microsoft hasn't released any roadmap for FAST's integration, though you could argue it's still early.

That aside, what could the FAST acquisition mean to SharePoint customers? Here are a few of my thoughts:

• The FAST acquisition was officially completed today. This is a good thing, since Microsoft can now get down to the business of integrating the company's technology with the rest of Microsoft's products. However, it's not clear what, if any, impact this acquisition will have in the very short term. Judging by the Groove acquisition, which preceded the SharePoint 2007 release by some months, an acquisition after the release will not yield any updates in the core product until SharePoint vNext (probably around 2010 or so) and beyond. However, I'd be willing to bet that some elements of the demo given at the SharePoint conference make their way to sites like Codeplex or as free downloads on Microsoft's site.
• The former CEO of FAST will assume the role of VP of Enterprise Search. His responsibility will include all search products: SharePoint search, Search Server Express and FAST ESP. So I guess the "Enterprise Search" moniker might need to be removed or rewritten on the SharePoint search page; FAST is, by far, the new "enterprise" search product at Microsoft. What's interesting here is that Microsoft has historically brought Office-related technologies under one roof; just look at what happened to SharePoint specifically -- that product was once its own product group. As they integrate FAST, it would appear that this announcement suggests Microsoft might break out search into its own dedicated team and make SharePoint a "customer." This opens up the possibility of decoupling SharePoint from any particular search technology -- perhaps a pipe dream, but we can always hope.
• In a blog entry on the Enterprise Search blog, Microsoft stated that the FAST offering will continue its Linux and Unix support. The blog entry was quick to reinforce the message that Microsoft does not want to support or wish to invest in Linux or Unix solutions. While they would like to "delight a core part of FAST's customer base," they are openly hoping those customers will convert to Windows and .NET. This does call into question whether this Linux/Unix support will be long for the world. In the short term, however, Microsoft can boast a better product from which to launch a play to be a real contender in the enterprise search space; see our related blog entries and article on FAST here. In the long term, Microsoft will have to come to grips with the fact that enterprises will continue to leverage non-Windows technology and if Microsoft wants to benefit from that revenue, they should consider continuing FAST's support for those technologies (their recent earnings announcement, and the subdued guidance for the year, may reinforce that message).
• Microsoft won't support SharePoint on Linux . This is probably not a surprise to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Microsoft. However, the fact that FAST (currently) is supported on Linux may introduce greater content aggregation and, certainly, search capabilities within SharePoint. Let's hope that Microsoft sees it that way.

In general, the FAST acquisition, for SharePoint, will likely have little impact short term. Over the longer term, it's clear that the Office 14 version of SharePoint will be substantially improved in the search area (depending on the SharePoint product team's willingness to implement the new technology). I would personally like to see some add-ons in the near term, since that would improve search within organizations that may have both tools.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as the integration progresses.

Source:

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1219-Thoughts-on-SharePoint-and-Fast-Search

Open Source CMS’s Make the List

With the competition so high for this award, it came as a big surprise to see that the only two self-hosted open source CMS applications to make the list were WordPress and Drupal.

Drupal, is an open source CMS that has become widely used by the music industry. It is similar in operation to others such as Joomla and Mambo. It is designed for more in depth and larger sites with potentially large amounts of users accessing and updating it.

WordPress is of course the premier open source blogging CMS. It is by far the most used blogging platform out there with more plugins developed daily than any other CMS out there.

Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. These finalists were selected (by Webware editors) from a pool of over 5000 qualifying nominees. But the 100 winners were selected by popular vote. These winning 100 products represent the best of the Web, according the people who use it.

Based on these numbers, we here at CMSWire are proud to congratulate both these two on overcoming massive competition in one of the most highly competitive web app fields out there. When competing against other well established platforms such as Joomla, phpNuke, Pligg and Moveable Type, it is a high honor to be the only two to make the list.

Source: cmswire.com

Learn To Joomla at JoomlaForBeginners.com!

This is the home of free Joomla! Video Tutorials.

That's Right! As in "Completely Free", "Gratis", "No Obligation", "No Registration", FREE Joomla! Video Tutorials.

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Our Joomla! Video Tutorials are High Quality, Crsytal Clear and recorded in Real font sizes that are easy to read... They are narrated by a Joomla! professional so you can also Hear the instructor. We offer more COMPLETELY FREE Joomla! Video Training Tutorials than anyone.

WATCH our free Joomla! Video Tutorials as often as you like. It's like having Joomla! Training Videos On-Demand; there's no waiting.

SHARE our free Joomla! Video Tutorials with your friends. Add our free videos to your Blog or Website. We provide the script; it's as easy as copy and paste.

DOWNLOAD our free Joomla! Video Tutorials to your hard drive or portable media device and watch them any time you wish, even without an internet connection.

Enjoy our new "Joomla! Recipes" feature, where we take an exsisting Website and reveal it's recipe and how to build it.

Just for fun we also offer other items like the free and exclusive JoomlaForBeginners.com Windows screensaver with Joomla! RSS News updated around the clock, and the free and exclusive JoomlaForBeginners.com Sony-Ericcson w580i mobile telephone/walkman theme.

What can we say? We love Joomla!

Google Internet Share March 2008

Google Inc. (GOOG) received 67% of all U.S. Internet searches during the four weeks ended March 29, according to information service Hitwise.

Google received 64% of all U.S. Internet searches in the same period a year earlier.

Yahoo Inc.'s (YHOO) search engine received 20% of U.S. Web searches in the more recent period, while Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN Search drew 7% and Ask.com 4%.

The remaining 46 search engines in Hitwise's search engine analysis tool accounted for about 2% of searches in the U.S.

Source : CNN Money

Web design India: IT on a new high

In business world, growing competition and brisk changes have made the outsourcing one of the most popular and growing area. Offshore outsourcing in web development, web designing and SEO services is now multi billion industry. Most of the European companies are outsourcing functions from logistics to Human resources to Information technology to Payroll processingto India.


This outsourcing boom has transformed India from a developing country to an emerging economy and a superpower in the making. Dipstick survey shows that India is the first choice as a destination for outsourcing services based on techno-environment, hard working and skilled manpower, effectively managing and mitigating risks involved and helping maintain profound relationships with the customers.

India enjoys a boon in offshore outsourcing services. Indias government manifested its support to IT education by heavily positioning its investments on infrastructure improvements related to telecommunications. Also, generous tax incentive - schemes never fail to attract more companies to outsource its services to India.


Demand of web designing service in India is continuously picking up. The reason for that is, India is a rich source of programmers coupled with academic excellence. India has an extensive pool of programming talent, at high levels of expertise, who are English proficient, and work virtually around the clock. At a fraction of the cost paid to programmers in the US, UK and Japan, India can provide a host of programming experts. Furthermore, web designing companies in India not only consider graphic design and logo design but also give great importance to the content and SEO services. Because a relevant quality content with continuous latest useful information with its visual effect at first look is always important for any business. So that potential customers who once visit your site love to visit it next time for more information, this flow will serve your business purpose - changing visitors to customers, who take interest in your services and products.


The other thing is that web designing company India also boast of their dedicated, genuine, experienced professionals who are adept in adopting latest technologies. And they organize quality and productivity solutions from the initial step of web development which makes them to deliver results faster at reduced time.


Thus, by seeing the present edge dynamic softwares and cutting edge technologies, obviously India is the best site for Offshore Outsourcing Company Website Development because of its easily available rich resources from every perspective. To end with it can be said that India is the most preferred destination for web design and other IT work because of its ability to offer quality services at competitive cost.

Source: Fibre2fashion

Different Between HTML 4 and HTML 5?

It's not as a big of change as it may seem. Keep in mind that "backwards compatibility" is of the utmost concern when releasing a new level of HTML/XHTML. For those of you who may be interested in the forthcoming changes, the W3 have a working draft of a document that details the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.

• HTML 5 differences from HTML 4
  http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/

We will be paying very close attention to the progress of HTML 5. We'll be running a series of articles in layman's terms to help you understand the benefits of semantic document structure and using proper markup. We suggest that you take an hour or two each week and review the HTML 5 Working Draft and prepare yourselves for the future.

SEO Benefits

Online ad agencies struggle with this issue everyday. How do you generate the same profit from organic search engine optimization when it requires a lot more effort, expertise, and expense to produce high rankings and organic traffic? How do you sell the possible disruption on a web site to clients, in order to make it rank well? It's a lot easier to throw up a brochure site with a few catch phrases and graphics and bid on some AdWords advertising.

Part of the problem can be solved by valuating search engine optimization services more highly. SEO is grossly underpriced. In my situation, clients are paying 4 times as much for PPC clickthroughs as for organic clickthroughs. Studies show that people click on organic listings in the results pages, even though the space given to text ads is almost pushing them off the screen. Text ads still aren't precisely targeted either. Why should they be? If they're poorly targeted, it creates more clicks and more revenue for the search engines.

Organic rankings don't suffer that problem. If the person isn't interested, you're not out much.

Another solution is to create new web sites to cover specific facets of a product or service. This ensures funds will be invested in SEO, thus creating an opportunity for SEO to generate sales leads and revenue. Many companies stick to one web site when they should have 4 or 5. A single site is under tremendous pressure to perform. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not good risk management strategy since competitors will find it easier to beat your one site, and Google could alter its algorithm overnight resulting in a loss of half of your traffic. Not a likely scenario, but it does happen.

Source: seoconsultants.com/articles

Five Simple Ways To Keep Your Reader’s Attention

In today’s world of evolving blogs and on-line newsletters, readers are swamped with so much information that they become more sensitive to the quality of articles that they are reading. I highly recommend that you follow these five steps to keeping your reader’s attention while at your site, blog, or article:

1. Be Clear. It is always refreshing to use clear language and understandable terms that keep the reader “in the know”.

2. Be Brief. I know it is great to write articles like “100 Ways To” but these articles can tire the reader. Brevity is a real blessing sometimes.

3. Humor is always nice. As much as you might be saying something serious, still, an appropriate use of humor is always refreshing.

4. Be Honest. When the reader can see into your sincerity and candor, that is a real great trick to keeping the reader at your article.

5. Be Unique. This is why websites and articles really make it - uniqueness. This one I will let you interpret for yourself. This is a surefire method to get readers to return to your articles, website, and/or blog with frequency.

Add social bookmarking to wordpress

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a quick and simple social bookmarking option to your blog similar to what you see on this site. This is for wordpress themes only although with a bit of tweaking it may be able to work on other blogs.

This will be the final outcome:

1. First, download these images, these are the icons for the image you see above and put them in the images folder of the theme file: socialbookmarkingicons.zip
2. Now open up style.css in your theme and add this code:
   

   .socialbookmarking {
   margin-right:5px;
   text-align:center;
   clear:left;
   float:right;
   font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size:8pt;
   color:#333333;
   border-left:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   border-right:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a {
   width:27px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a {
   width:30px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a {
   width:28px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo1.png);
   }

3. Now add the following to the single.php page underneath the content of the post (normally something like
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   ”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

And that’s it, you should now have an area of social bookmarking icons that is similar to the ones you see here on Help Developer.

source: http://softwaredevelopmentindia.wordpress.com

Meta Keywords Advice

Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many people still think of this as a quick fix for SEO. It's not. Google no longer uses it. Yahoo is perhaps the only search engine that still uses the meta keywords tag but places very little weight on it. By placing this tag on a web page, the primary beneficiary is your competition. How so? The meta keywords tag gives your competitors a nicely formatted list of your important keywords. Don't believe me? Try the free keyword research tool at the end of this article.

Most people agree that this tag is useless (read Danny Sullivan's 2002 Death of a Meta Tag article). I'll take it a step further and argue that it's hazardous. I know many people won't agree with me, but here's my argument:

Search engines used to rely heavily on the meta keywords tag to guess which keywords were relevant on a web page. Now search engines are sophisticated enough to examine the actual keywords in the body of a web page. Major search engines place little, if any, value in the meta keywords tag. There is more risk than reward in using the meta keywords tag because your competitors can view the meta keywords tag and can steal your keywords.

What do I mean by "steal" your keywords? By placing the meta keywords tag on a page, you are, in effect, giving your competitors a list of your important keywords. They can then use these keywords and buy PPC ads or optimize their own site for your important keywords. Why give them this sort of business intelligence? Having invested time and money on exhaustive keyword research to identify the important keyword phrases to use for your own SEO and PPC efforts, why on earth would you make a list of your high value keywords public?

Perhaps a concrete example will help illustrate the point. I was playing with the keyword tool, entering domains of other search engine marketing firms to see if they were using the meta keywords tag, and, if so, what keywords they included. Plugging one site into the tool, I noticed the keyword phrase "targeted traffic" in the meta keywords tag. Looking at the site's home page and even viewing the source, that phrase is only in the meta keywords. Nowhere else. This is what people do - they just stick their important keywords into the tags. You don't have to study the title tag, study the meta description tag, see what alt text is "behind" the images, examine the content of the page, look at the links, etc. In other words, you don't have to take the time to think like a search engine or reverse engineer a competing site. Your competitors give you all of their important keywords in their meta keywords tag. I've never thought of "targeted traffic" as a keyword to optimize for or to buy with PPC ads. Perhaps I'll run some PPC ads and see if it's a valuable phrase for SEO. Point is, I'd never have thought of it if it wasn't in a competitor's meta keywords tag.

Here is our meta keywords advice: do not use the meta keywords tag. Instead, make sure the title of your web page has your important keywords and that those keywords are repeated in the body of your web page. If you want to, create a meta description tag. The search engines do use that meta tag, but it's not essential for SEO.

Creating good content is essential. Each page should have useful content and include your important keywords. Don't try to stuff all of your important keywords onto a single page. Create pages around a theme, a small collection of keyword phrases. For instance, target 1-3 keyword phrases per page. Write a title that incorporates those keyword phrases. If the title seems awkward from the point of view of your audience (site visitors not the search engines), scale back the number of phrases and try again. If you choose to write a meta description tag, it should reinforce the keywords already in the title tag. The body of the page should then include those important keyword phrases. Again, though, the content of the page should be written for your site visitors and not seem awkward.

Since many web sites do still use the meta keywords tag, we have developed a free keyword research tool that will analyze the meta keywords of your competition. Use the tool to see what keywords your competitors are embedding in their meta keywords tags and then research these keywords using other freely available tools. When I begin work for a new client, I ask them for a list of their competitors' web sites. I plug those into the tool and it gives me an instant list of keywords. That's only the beginning, a starting point for further keyword research. These companies have spent hours upon hours performing keyword research. I can take 30 seconds, scrape their meta keywords tags and have solid keyword ideas for PPC ads to create or SEO work to perform for a client. That, coupled with the fact that Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag, convinces me that it's downright silly to use them.

As time goes on, I expect online businesses to become a bit more savvy regarding meta tags and this tool will no longer provide a quick start. In the meantime, use the free keyword tool and crush your competition!

Source: searchengineguide

9 things a web designer can’t do without

As a web designer there are certain things that any web designer would need to succeed in developing his or her skills. Below is a list of 10 key things I personally feel a web designer needs. If you know any more then please leave them as comments.

So here goes:

1. Well obviously a graphics design application. Personally I favour Gimp because its fast, reliable, updated regularly, free and easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features when it comes to web design. The worthy alternative to this is the slow, expensive Photoshop (oh did I say worthy, I meant unworthy, yeah I don’t like it, although a lot of other designers do.)
2. Inspiration, no web designer can produce good sites without getting ideas from other peoples sites (that doesn’t mean copy people sites, just get some ideas). There are plenty of sites that you can get inspiration from, personally I use templatemonster.com, csspick.com, cssdrive.com, cssmania.com, wpthemesfree.com and other general browsing, if I see a site design that I like, I bookmark it and come back to it later. Inspiration from other peoples work is how you can improve your skills over time as you start to wonder how they did something on there site and eventually find the answer.
3. Coding knowledge is something that quite a few designers dont take up, however learning how to code can seriously increase the amount of money you can make, people who want sites designed are more likely to go for someone who can do everything for them, not get a design and then have to find someone else to code it.
4. Templates. As you produce sites you will start to become more efficient, you will realise that the site you are creating has a similar structure to a site you have designed before, therefore it is good practise to get that template you did previously and edit it rather than start the new site from scratch. Personally I have created over 100 templates over the past year (website and wordpress), and I am in a position to code websites a lot faster because the template is already made.
5. The Web Developer Toolbar. (download here) A must have tool is the web developer toolbar, it works with Firefox and gives you all the information you could ever need when coding websites and is also handy for seeing how other people have coded their websites. This makes it a lot easier to code and is definitely an important tool to have. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for IE which is what you would use it for, all of those IE problems.
6. Validate as you go along, the worst part for most web coders is that they will create a great looking site that works perfect in Firefox, heck it may even look nice in IE (very unlikely, but one can only hope). Then comes the dreaded part, validating it to W3c standards. This can take up a lot of your time, so make sure you are validating as you go along, this will cut off that annoying period at the end of development when you can’t see what is wrong with a line of code that seems to be correct but W3c says otherwise.
7. XAMMP, If you are creating PHP/MySQL driven sites or designing skins for online tools like Wordpress then installing xammp is a must. It will enable you to create your site or template offline which speeds up development by a massive amount because you don’t need to keep uploading each revision of each file to the internet, it also keeps that project your working on secure during development.
8. Tutorials. Everybody learns how to design or code through tutorials, its just the way that it is done, when you ask a question on a forum and you get an answer, in essence you are reading and using a tutorial. There are thousands of tutorials out there, take a look around this blog and you will find some.
9. And finally enjoy what you do, if you don’t enjoy what you are doing then you are wasting your time. Don’t become a web designer because you heard it pays well because it doesn’t, it is overcrowded with kids trying to make a quick buck by undercutting the proper designers, it gets very frustrating. Life is about enjoyment, if you don’t enjoy something then it will show in the quality of the outcome.

PHP Cookies

A cookie is used to store data on a users computer. Creating and retrieving cookies and their values is an easy process in PHP and in this short guide I am going to show you how to use cookies.



Creating a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “cookieValue”, cookieExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “seenPage”, time()+3600);

this creates a cookie called visitor with the value seenPage and it will expire in 3600 seconds (or an hour)



Finding a cookies value

The Code

echo $_COOKIE[”cookieName”];

an example:

echo $_COOKIE[”visitor”];

this will show to screen the value that is stored in the cookie with the name visitor, so the result would be “seenPage” if we use the previous example



Deleting a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “”, timeExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “”, time()-3600);

you can see that the time()-3600 is similar to when you create a cookie, this is because if you replace the + with a - then it cancels out the cookie.

So there you have it a very simple quick guide to PHP cookies, I hope this helped

Microsoft releases 14,000 pages of Office suite protocols

Microsoft has taken a serious step towards fulfilling its interoperability and openness promises for developers, partners, customers and competitors, by releasing significant protocol data. .

The organisation posted more than 14,000 pages on MSDN covering preliminary versions of technical documentation for its protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, points out that this brings the total to more than 44,000 pages of protocol documentation now released and freely available – even to ISVs (independent software vendors), open source developers and developers in user IT departments.

Says Robertson: “We believe that providing open, consistent access to these protocols will further unleash the creativity of all developers to work on real-world interoperability solutions. The implementation of Microsoft’s interoperability principles is an important component of our overall efforts to promote interoperability in the marketplace.”

He gives the example of developers working with SharePoint protocols, who now have resources to develop products that work with Office client applications and SharePoint Server products.

source: mcsolutions.co.uk

Secret images of Google Earth

Microsoft upgrades robotics development tools

Microsoft’s efforts in developing tools for robotics took another step forward recently when the company released a preview of the next version of its programming platform.

Robotics Developer Studio 2008 builds on the original release, Robotics Studio 2006, according to Microsoft robotics group general manager Tandy Trower, and is due for release later this year. The company made a community technology preview of Robotics Developer Studio available for download on April 9. The name change lines up with existing product lines and better reflects its role as a development tool, the announcement noted.

The updated developer tools now allow the use of distributed LINQ queries to reduce network utilization and simplify service authoring. Runtime performance has also seen a boost, according to Trower, with the company estimating interservice throughput gains of 150% to 300%, between nodes as well as within a node. According to the company, services now load twice as fast as they had before.

The tools themselves have seen other work as well. The Visual Programming Language tool now allows users to visually define computational domains for managing distributed program execution. Meanwhile, the simulation environment tool now can record and play back simulations, and its floorplan editor simplifies the definition of complex interiors and building structures.

Since the launch of Robotics Studio 2006, more than 200,000 copies of the software have been downloaded, according to Microsoft. The software is free for noncommercial applications and must be licensed for commercial use.

The company also announced a virtual robotics competition, called RoboChamps, which was expected to launch April 21; details are available at www.robochamps.com.

Check Out the Latest Version of Google Earth

Today we're introducing a new version of the Google Earth desktop client. The new release, Google Earth version 4.3, greatly advances our vision of offering a realistic, 3D model of the world in Google Earth by giving users a higher quality, more immersive experience. Google Earth 4.3 also adds more realistic, real-world data so users have more ways to discover and explore all the interesting features the world has to offer.

Here are the highlights:

• New navigation -- We've created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.

• More, faster 3D buildings -- Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. We've significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.

• Street View -- The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.

• Sunlight feature -- This new addition is a playful way to control the sun's location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth. While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.

• Image acquisition date -- One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.

• New languages -- Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Keep an eye on the Google LatLong (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/) blog for more details on Google Earth version 4.3 over the course of the week.

A whole new world to explore

On the Google Earth team, we're big fans of Earth Day, so much so that we couldn't hold out until it arrives next week to release our latest labor of love: Google Earth 4.3. With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail.



Here's a sample of what you'll find in this release:

• New navigation - We've improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the "look" joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.

• More, faster 3D buildings - It's more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we've added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.

• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.

• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Check out the Lat Long blog for all the details, or head over to our website at earth.google.com. And stay tuned for more details about Earth Day coming soon.

Design Your Site with WordPress Magazine Themes

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

That’s right. WordPress magazine themes are outstanding design frameworks that include a wonderful, easy to manage homepage instead of the traditional blog homepage. Now, you can set any html page as your homepage when using WordPress, but this method requires little know how and even less technical ability. And at least one of them is free.

WordPress is the most used open source CMS out there right now and it takes little work to build and SEO powerhouse. Google loves it and indexes all pages easily if you have everything working properly.

But when visitors come to your blog, they frequently see a standard blog home page, with snippets of posts in a list and some sidebars containing various items of interest.

Magazine themes eliminate that aspect of this. They give a well structured, easy to follow foundation for the rest of your site and aid in directing traffic from your home page to various key areas of your site.

Three Great WordPress Magazine Themes

Mimbo 2.2
The first magazine theme called Mimbo 2.2. Mimbo creates a wonderful area for featured articles, sub-categories and less important categories individually. This is done with ease and a little code manipulation. You can get assistance with the code from the creator Darren Hoyt. It uses category key numbers to determine what content to place where and then uses WordPress’s custom fields to place the pictures.

The best thing about Mimbo is it’s free! Below is a screenshot of a Mimbo 2.2 theme in use right now.

Mimbo is the only free magazine theme found that merits any recognition; but there are also two for purchase that are just as outstanding, if not more so.

Revolution
Revolution is a top notch, for purchase magazine theme. It is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system. It offers a little more flexibility and a different homepage layout than Mimbo.

Revolution also has other magazine style themes specific to news, business and more. A set can be purchased for around $80.00 for single use.

WP-Magazine
Also of note is WP-Magazine Theme. It has a great scrolling image on the home page with a larger area to work with and less white space. The basic option here sells for around $80.00.

Now you have the resources to build a powerhouse publication website with a great design, ease of use and fun right at your fingertips. Why are you still reading? Read more about WordPress and the great things you can do with it now… More Info: cmswire.com

Drupal 5, clean URLs, and Fedora

Monkeying around with Drupal 5 on Fedora 8, trying to get up to speed in this strange new world of structureless node soup. I thought an easy warmup task would be to get clean URLs working, but that turned out to be quite a tussle.
I had Drupal installed in a "/drupal" subdirectory of an existing site, which worked fine as long as the Apache config had Alias /drupal /usr/share/drupal, which was installed by default. That made everything work, but putting in the default "clean URLs" rewrite rules and trying to access the "admin/settings/clean-urls" URL (instead of "?q=admin/settings/clean-urls") gave this error in the Apache config:
The requested URL /usr/share/drupal/index.php was not found on this server.
Assuming that's the googleable phrase that will land folks here, here was my solution: first, realize that the Alias of /usr/share/drupal was preventing the rewrite rules from ever being accessed - remove the rewrite rules and you'll see you get the same error. I ended up removing the Alias altogether, and instead making a symlink inside my web root to /usr/share/drupal. Then just add your rewrite rules and an option to follow symlinks in a Directory config for your web root, like so:
Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /drupal
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]


And don't forget to remove the Alias /drupal /usr/share/drupal line from your config. Do that, and it should work. Works for me, at least.

Source: frobnosticate.com