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Full On Design

A Web Development & Technology Blog

 

Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman is awesome

I recently was introduced to Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman which I found profoundly interesting.

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 :)

WP HTML5 Category Selector 1.0.0 Released!

Good News Everyone! I have finally got around to delivering a new wordpress plugin, creatively named “WP HTML5 Category Selector“.

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).

Socialize This 2.2.0 Update Details

Socialize This 2.2.0 has just been pushed to the WordPress Plugins Repo, and is now available for download.

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 :)

Using cookieless domains to improve a website performance

Fast loading times are a really important factor when it comes to website ranking, so it’s important to remove as much unnecessary data as possible. A good method to do this is via cookieless domains.

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.

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PDO (PHP Data Objects) – Starter Guide

It may surprise you to hear, that using the mysql_connect() function in PHP has recently be marked as “old hat” coding because it’s slow in comparison with newer methods. A better alternative is PDO (PHP Data Objects), a lightweight method for accessing databases. Here is a quick overview to help you get started with PDO.

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.

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