Posts from — March 2009

The following is a list of twitter directory sites that can give you more followers:

1) wefollow.com

This is a new project from Kevin Rose. It’s user-created directory for anyone with a twitter account. Each person with a twitter account can have up to 3 tags associated with it. Adding yourself to the directory is also easy. You just need to click the following link.

2) twitterpacks.pbwiki.com

Twitterpacks is a wiki-style twitter directory. Each category and sub-category has a page that you can edit and add your twitter account page.

3) justtweetit.com

A large directory of twitter users categorized by topics.

4) www.tweetfind.com

In addition to a directory of twitter users, it also shows the top 10 trends in the last 5 minutes, few hours, and 24 hours.

5) www.twibs.com

A directory of businesses on twitter.

The final version of Internet explorer 8 has finally been released.

The following are 5 new features that Microsoft finally got right:

1) Page debugging

One of my biggest Internet explorer complaints is the fact that they have no good javascript and page debugging tools (such as firebug). This time around, Microsoft finally got a clue and added an extensive debugging tool that actually competes with firefox. To access it, go to: tools->developer tools (or use F12). A separate window will popup, which will give you many different options for debugging.

2) Accelerators

If you highlight text on the screen and right-click it, you are now presented with some extra options called accelerators.

The built-in ones include:

• Search with live search
• Map with live search
• Email with windows live
• Blog with windows live

There is also a link to some other accelerators that you can install.

3) Grouped tabs

When one tab is opened from another, the new tab is placed next to the originating tab and color coded, so that you can quickly see which tabs have related content. If you close a tab that’s part of a group, another tab from the same group is displayed, enabling you to remain within the context of the current task rather than suddenly looking at an unrelated site.

4) Private browsing

History and cookies are not stored. To enable this, go to: tools->in private browsing (or Ctrl-Shift-P).

5) Re-open closed tabs and re-open your last browsing session

You can now re-open all of the tabs that were open the last time you closed your browser and re-open an individual tab if you accidentally close it.

1) use a compressor

JSMin is a filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files. It typically reduces filesize by half, resulting in faster downloads. It also encourages a more expressive programming style because it eliminates the download cost of clean, literate self-documentation.

PHP version here

2) Minimize the number of .js files

Each .js file reference on a web page means another http request from a client’s browser. Although it may decrease the readability/maintainability of your code, it is faster to have one larger .js file than multiple smaller ones.

3) use profiler and timer tools

Firebug offers a suite of profiler and timing tools that allows you to see exactly how long your scripts take to execute and gives you the ability to tweak and optimize them.

4) use settimeout

Browsers run Javascript code synchronously. This means that when a

tag has been found, everything on the page stops until the end script tag has been found. If a script doesn’t finish executing within a certain amount of time, then the user gets a warning that says, “A script on this page is taking a long time to complete.”

The setTimeout function takes 2 parameters. The first is the name of the function that will be executed and the second is the number of milliseconds to wait until it is called.

This is useful for functions that take a long time to load.

5) cache DOM variables

Every binding in Javascript is late. This means each time you access a property, variable, or method a look-up is performed. Within the IE DOM, this could mean an extensive search of the element to find the same property over and over again, only to be returned to the JScript engine unchanged from the previous request.

Here is an example of a function that can be optimized:

5) Yahoo! User Interface Library

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Features

Two different types of components are available: Utilities and controls. The YUI utilities simplify in-browser devolvement that relies on cross-browser DOM scripting, as do all web applications with DHTML and AJAX characteristics. The YUI Library Controls provide highly interactive visual design elements for your web pages. These elements are created and managed entirely on the client side and never require a page refresh.

utilities available:

• Animation: Create “cinematic effects” on your pages by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements. These effects can be used to reinforce the user’s understanding of changes happening on the page.
• Browser History Manager: Developers of rich internet applications want bookmarks to target not just pages but page states and they want the browser’s back button to operate meaningfully within their application’s screens. Browser History Manager provides bookmarking and back button control in rich internet applications.
• Connection Manager: This utility library helps manage XMLHttpRequest (commonly referred to as AJAX) transactions in a cross-browser fashion, including integrated support for form posts, error handling and callbacks. Connection Manager also supports file uploading.
• DataSource Utility: DataSource provides an interface for retrieving data from arrays, XHR services, and custom functions with integrated caching and Connection Manager support.
• Dom Collection:The DOM Utility is an umbrella object comprising a variety of convenience methods for common DOM-scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.
• Drag & Drop: Create draggable objects that can be picked up and dropped elsewhere on the page. You write code for the “interesting moments” that are triggered at each stage of the interaction (such as when a dragged object crosses over a target); the utility handles all the housekeeping and keeps things working smoothly in all supported browsers.

Controls available:

• AutoComplete: The AutoComplete Control allows you to streamline user interactions involving text-entry; the control provides suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality based on a variety of data-source formats and supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.
• Button Control: The Button Control provides checkbox, radio button, submit and menu-button UI elements that are more impactful visually and more powerful programmatically than the browser’s built-in form widgets.
• Calendar: The Calendar Control is a graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.
• Container: The Container family of controls supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog and SimpleDialog. The Module and Overlay controls provide a platform for implementing additional, customized DHTML windowing patterns.
• DataTable Control: DataTable leverages the semantic markup of the HTML table and enhances it with sorting, column-resizing, inline editing of data fields, and more.
• Logger: The YUI Logger provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the FireBug extension for Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console. Debug builds of YUI Library components are integrated with Logger to output messages for debugging implementations.
• Menu: Application-style fly-out menus require just a few lines of code with the Menu Control. Menus can be generated entirely in JavaScript or can be layered on top of semantic unordered lists.

Download and more information: here

4) Prototype

Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.

Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

Features

• Easily deploy ajax applications: Besides simple requests, this module also deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling.
• DOM extending: adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $(’comments’).addClassName(’active’).show() to get the element with the ID ‘comments’, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).
• Utilizes JSON (JavaScript Object Notation): JSON is a light-weight and fast alternative to XML in Ajax requests

Download and more information here

3) Rico

Designed for building rich Internet applications.

Features

• Animation Effects: provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on
• Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.
• Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.
• AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.

Download and more information here

2) Qooxdoo

qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source multipurpose AJAX frameworks, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL. It includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.

Features

• Client detection: qooxdoo knows what browser is being used and makes this information available to you.
• Browser abstraction: qooxdoo includes a browser abstraction layer which tries to abstract all browser specifics to one common “standard”. This simplifies the real coding of countless objects by allowing you to focus on what you want and not “how to want it”. The browser abstraction layer comes with some basic functions often needed when creating real GUIs. For example, runtime styles or positions (in multiple relations: page, client and screen) of each element in your document.
• Advanced property implementation: qooxdoo supports “real” properties for objects. This means any class can define properties which the created instances should have. The addProperty handler also adds getter and setter functions. The only thing one needs to add – should you need it – is a modifier function.
• Event Management: qooxdoo comes with its own event interface. This includes event registration and deregistration functions.

  Furthermore there is the possibility to call the target function in any object context. (The default is the object which defines the event listener.) The event system normalizes differences between the browsers, includes support for mousewheel, doubleclick and other fancy stuff. qooxdoo also comes with an advanced capture feature which allows you to capture all events when a user drags something around for example.

Download and more information here

1) Dojo

Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”.

Features

• Multiple Points Of Entry: A fundamental concept in the design of Dojo is “multiple points of entry”. This term means that Dojo should work very hard to make sure that users should be able to start using Dojo at the level they are most comfortable with.
• Interpreter Independence: Dojo tries very hard to ensure that it’s possible to support at least the very core of the system on as many JavaScript enabled platforms as possible. This will allow Dojo to serve as a “standard library” for JavaScript programmers as they move between client-side, server-side, and desktop programming environments.
• Unifies several codebases: builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, and f(m)).

Download and more information here

This article will show you how to password protect a directory using the apache web server and a .htaccess file.

.htaccess file

The .htacess file should be in the directory that you would like to protect (everything below this directory will also be password protected).

AuthName “Password Protected Area”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /full/path/to/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Replace “Password protected Area” with the name of the area that you would like to protect. Also, the path needs to be changed to the path of the .htpasswd file (which will be explained further).

Generating a .htpasswd file

A program comes with apache for generating a .htpasswd file. Here is how it works:

htpasswd [ -c ] [ -m | -d | -s | -p ] passwdfile username
htpasswd -b [ -c ] [ -m | -d | -s | -p ] passwdfile username password
htpasswd -n [ -m | -d | -s | -p ] username
htpasswd -nb [ -m | -d | -s | -p ] username password

A full explanation of htpasswd can be found here

If everything is setup correctly you should see the following prompt when you try to access your newly protected directory (and the username/password combo created with htpasswd should allow access):