1. Founders Talk

Founders talk is a really good because it interviews really interesting and influential people from the world of the web. Some of the notable people interveiwed include Drew Wilson (the guy who made Pictos & Screeny) & Vitalty Friedman (The editor-in-cheif of smashing magazine).

Average Duration: ~ 60 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

2. The Javascript Show

The Javascript show is a great round up of all the newest Javascript goings on in the Javascript world. It’s a great source to find out about new libraries & Javascript news. The key reason I love this show is because they cover a wide variety of useful tools & I always start using the libraries and tools they mention.

Average Duration: ~45 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

3. The ExpressionEngine Podcast

I’m not a massive fan of ExpressionEngine (I am a much bigger fan of CMS’s such as Perch or WordPress), however their podcast is really well put together & really high quality. While it does have a big focus on creating websites in EE, most the stuff they talk about can be applied to working with any website.

Average Duration: ~35 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

4. The Changelog

The Changelog podcast is great , it covers web and desktop development & the hosts appears to be quite well connected (So they interview some pretty interesting folk).

Average Duration: ~30 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

5. SitePoint

SitePoint is a really great resource of materials to get stared in the world of web development. Their podcast is really well put together & really informative.

Average Duration: ~40 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

6. Think Vitamin

Think Vitamin is well known as a sound information on web development. Their podcast does not disappoint.

Average Duration: ~40 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

7. Wired.co.uk

Wired is fairly well known technology & geek culture magazine, their podcast is a 40 or so minute summary of the weeks technology going ons with an in-depth interview. It’s really well edited, they stick to their release schedule & the quality is fantastic.

Average Duration: ~30 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

8. The ATX Web Show!

While this podcast is mostly based around the going ons in Austin, Texas, it’s a really good for finding out some of the cool things happening in web development.

Average Duration: ~45 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

9. Click

BBC Click is a really good TV show which has a excellent sister podcast which is really informative of the changes in the technology industry.

Average Duration: ~30 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

10. Forrst Podcast

Forrst is pretty well known among most web designers, their podcast covers the going on in the forrest community & also discusses whats happening in the rest of the web.

Average Duration: ~45 minutes
Release Schedule: Weekly

In a nutshell, on pages you have set as being “live” the extension will load up a version of Live.JS which will keep your webpage on the most recent version without you having to refresh the page. Here is a short video overview, with me explaining the basics of how it works.

It’s also available on GitHub.

REPLACE(Original String, Find This, Replace with this)

So it can be used like:

SELECT REPLACE('My Original String', 'Original', 'Modified');
# This will output: My Modified String

So if you wanted to go through a full  table and replace a bunch of strings, you could use it like this:

UPDATE `table_name` SET `field_name` = REPLACE(`field_name`, 'Find Me', 'Replace with Me');

Useful no?

At first I thought it was fake, but if you visit the offending website, it’s unfortunately real. So yeah, after a short time of giggling and raging I worked on a way to bypass this.

How to bypass it

The easiest way, is to vote with your feet and not use the website. But in some cases, that isn’t always an option.

A working method I found (if you are using Google Chrome or Safari) is to hide the element.  With your mouse right click on the element and click “Inspect Element”, this will open the developer tools. Then under the “style” side menu just add the rule “display:none;” and it should disappear. In most cases, it might look a bit like the screenshot below.

You can also right click on the element in the developer tools and click “delete node” on the html causing the ragebox.

Extra Notes

• This is the same method using on my post labelled: Bypass Facebook’s “Like this to see the picture” pages using Google Chrome.
• You can also add a rule to your AdBlocker to stop these working on most websites, but that might affect sites which use lightboxes to look pretty.
• We totally need to standardise the <lightbox> tag into HTML5, just to deal with crap like this

View / Download PHP HTML5 Form Class on GitHub

This little class, helps you build and validate form objects. You can read about how it works on the wiki on GitHub.

In a nutshell, it’s Morgan Freeman guiding you questions such as “Is There a Creator?”, “Is Time Travel Possible?” and “Are We Alone?” while giving you scientific theories to how/why certain phenomena is possible.

While you can only buy season 1 on DVD via amazon right now (UK), season 2 can be purchased online and is also awesome.

I highly recommend you give it a try

In a nutshell the WP HTML5 Category Selector adds a filter input field to the category box on the add/edit post page. It’s primarily aimed at bloggers who have lots (for example more then 10) of categories.

If you have a chance to give it a try, I would love to hear you feedback (On twitter I’m @Rogem002).

Key changes include:

• Removed PHP4 support
• Added Google +1 support
• Improved analytic data
• Removed “Attempt to extend PHP max_execution_time and memory_limit” options.
• Made default widget set a sprite image.
• Made a few UI changes for a better UX

I’m also planning to create a GitHub repository to make it easier for everyone to contribute to future versions.

Enjoy

Cookieless domains are (as the name suggests) are domains, in which the user will not send cookies (Which can add quite a few kilobytes to a request). For example, say I want a user to load a static image it would be silly of them to also send me the cookie data. Luckily they are super easy to set up.

Set up a sub-domain

Firstly, set up a subdomain on your website. For example static.yourdomain.com would be suitable, but it’s really up to you. Now point the domain to a path where you will keep your static files (Such as images and CSS files). For Full On Design, I set up http://files.fullondesign.co.uk/.

Stop cookies being set site wide

Next, make sure your website does not set website wide cookies. The fastest way to do this is by amending the .htaccess file and adding a CookieDomain Directive. For example:

CookieDomain www.fullondesign.co.uk

Alternatively in PHP’s setcookie() function, I could just use something like:

<?php
setcookie("TestCookie", 'Some Value', time()+3600, "/", "www.fullondesign.co.uk", 1);
?>

The key point to note is that the domain parameter is set to www.fullondesign.co.uk, not .fullondesign.co.uk. Thus the cookies will only be sent when the subdomain is www.fullondesign.co.uk.

Now start linking up to files in that directory and your pretty much done.

Setting up cookieless domains in WordPress

WordPress has a few neat built in functions to make this process easier. If you use wordpress pop the following code (just before the “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging.” comment) into your config.php file (amend as required):

define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', 'www.fullondesign.co.uk');

You can also change the uploads URL of your WordPress install to point to your cookieless domain. In the config.php file add the following(amend as required).:

define('WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://files.fullondesign.co.uk');

Useful Resources

I’ve barely touched on the topic of cookieless domains aside from just saying “They making your website load faster”, here a two website which go a little more in depth.

• Google: Minimize request overhead
• Ravelrumba: Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain

Reasons to use PDO

• It’s Fast - it talks to the database via a database specific PDO-driver.
• It’s Object Oriented – The methods within the class are the same for each database driver, so you can easily change your database driver without lots of extra coding.
• It’s Flexible-  You can easily change between such database drivers as PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite by pretty much just changing your construct statement.
• It’s Safer – PDO encourages you to bind parameters to your SQL query’s, meaning that it’s significantly less likely your website will suffer from a SQL injection based attack.

Connecting to a Database

Connecting to a database is pretty simple. Here is how to connect to a MySQL Database.

<?php
// Define the parameters
$host = 'localhost';
$dbname = 'my_database';
$user = 'mysql_username';
$pass = 'mysql_password';

try {
	// Call the PDO class.
	$db= new PDO('mysql:host='.$host.';dbname='.$dbname, $user, $pass);
} catch(PDOException $e) {
	// If something goes wrong, PDO throws an exception with a nice error message.
	echo $e->getMessage();
}

?>

Doing A Query

Again, doing a query is just as simple as:

<?php
$query = $db->query('SELECT * FROM `users` ORDER BY ID DESC;');
$result = $query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

// $result will now contain an object of all the rows in the table 'Users'
?>

However, if you are using user variables which may cause a SQL Injection you should bind the parameter to the query (see next example).

Binding a parameter to a query

<?php
$query = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM `users` WHERE `ID` = :ID: AND `email` = :email: ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT 0,1;');
$query->execute(array(':ID:' => '3', ':email:' => 'me@email.com'));
$result = $query->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
?>

If you bind a parameter to a request, it will sterilize the input so that it will not cause a SQL Injection.

Useful Resources

PHP Manual: PHP Data Objects

Nettuts+: Why you Should be using PHP’s PDO for Database Access

PHP: The Good Parts

Update:

As of PHP 5.4 the MySQL extension will be softly deprecated. This means you really should start using PDO ASAP!