I’ll assume that if you’re reading this article that you’ve written PHP code before, and that you’re fairly familiar with the constructs of the language. But, for the sake of being thorough, I’m going to mention a few things.

1. Comment!

Make sure you’re commenting. I recommend a header comment to describe the file: The Author’s name, a description of the script, and a listing of your founding assumptions are all good things to include in the file description. Also if you write some code that is particularly complex or important I recommend commenting it aswell. Some sticklers will even recommend commenting every function (including function parameter descriptions). I don’t feel that this is necessary but if you’re writing a massive application or an application created by multiple developers than this will be very helpful.

2. Use Functional Programming

I can’t believe I have to say this, but, use functions. If you write a string of code more than once it should be turned into a function. But, be careful to avoid writing several functions that do similar things, if two functions could be consolidated into one in an elegant way I would recommend that. remember the less code you have to look at in the future the easier it will be to understand what the application is doing.

3. Split up your files.

If you find that your script is very long try splitting it into multiple parts. Also, if you have certain portions of your code that are used on multiple pages make sure that this part is included in an external file for easy maintenance. If one page has several modular parts make sure that they are all contained in external files.

4. Make sure you’re using directories.

If you’re working on a large project, it’s very important that you organize your files into logical directories. There’s nothing worse than a completely flat file system. I’ve seen projects where there were hundreds of scripts (with nondescript names) in the same directory. Do yourself a favor and organize these files. It’ll make finding things later much easier. I usually find that it’s best to organize my files into Models, Views, and Controllers. Model are scripts that describe data objects (classes). Controllers manage interactions between user actions and models and views give information to the user (pages, ajax responses, RSS feeds, RESTful API responses, SOAP pages etc.).

5.Don’t create variables where you don’t have to.

If a function returns an iterable object and all you need to do is perform an action on that object using a loop, don’t create a dedicated variable for it. For example say that I want to iterate over an array that is returned by a function. Instead of:

$arr = functionReturningArray();

for($arr as $element)

do some action($element);

try:

for(functionReturningArray() as $element)

do some action($element)

this is a much more concise way of performing an action.

6. Object Oriented Programming

If you’re not familiar with it already read up on Object Oriented Programming. OOP allows you to create objects that contain all the data and functions to represent a physical object or idea. This is very helpful for large project where you want to compartmentalized your code into distinct pieces (easier for debugging easier for understanding). This approach almost always yields less code, and if done correctly can yield reusable code for other projects.

7. (Bonus) Don’t Be Lazy

One of the main sources of sloppy code is laziness, remember that just because you know what you’re trying to accomplish with your code doesn’t mean that others will. Take the time to do it right, because sooner or later almost all code needs to be revised, write it correctly the first time and you’ll thank yourself later.

Regards,

Adam Haney

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For those of you who don’t know. I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I got into web design before I was in college and I’ve found throughout my academic journey that being a good C/C+/Python programmer has led me to be a good PHP/javascript programmer. I love web design because it’ s not entirely scientific, it’s much more people based, but often times when we as web design professionals must design highly scalable websites, or websites that need to be easily maintained it is neccassary that we be familiar with Computer Science principles and be accustomed to the general thought process of a Computer Scientist. I whole heartedly believe that as you grow to be a better academic programmer you will grow to be a better web professional. For those of you who have already left your college days behind you I’ve compiled a few wonderful resources for begining your journey into the realm of academic computing.

Located at: http://code.google.com/edu

Google code is a wonderful resource for web designers because Google’s business is web, but it’s methodology is very academic. Google’s code university is a great way to keep up to date with the new and innovative things happening at google.

Located at: http://ocw.mit.edu

MIT, one of the world’s premere universities for Computer Science has graciously opened up their lecture halls to the masses. They’ve included everything from introduction to computer science to some of their much more advanced courses.

http://academicearth.com

Academic Earth is a wonderful resource for all subjects. It’s computer science courses include lectures from top schools such as Berkley, Stanford, and MIT.

What to Take Away

Some of the lectures included material that is at a graduate level, unless you’re particularly interested or talented don’t expect to understand everything that’s talked about in these courses. Remember YOU aren’t being graded over this information and even if you only understand 40% of the material that’s it’s still going to help you as you approach your day to day problems and stretch your thinking into new directions. I hope you find these resources helpful, happy coding.

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UPDATE:

And we’re back.

Thanks,

Adam Haney

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So how did we accomplish this feat? Simple, we used an application called tweet spinner http://tweetspinner.com/70914771. With tweet spinner you can set up keyword following and user mimicking to target twitter users who would be interested in your blog or your organization. We don’t think that tweet spinner should be used as a way aid spammers, but rather as a tool to effectively tell people about what you do and how you could help them.

Now, like we said tweet spinner offers several helpful tools such as keyword following (which allows you to automatically follow users who tweet about a specific keyword) and user mimicking (which allows you to follow all the friends or followers of another twitter user). But, like we said you don’t want to spam people so what is the best way to use this tool?

1. Find twitter accounts that are already established that relate to your organization.

users we mimicked

Finding people to model yourself after should be part of your day to day life anyway. Who better to mimic than someone who is already where you want to be. We selected 4 twitter users who were in the same field that we were, who were already established, after a week almost 40% of users we followed followed us back, talk about reciprocity!

2. Keyword following

With keyword following you follow users who have tweeted about topics that relate to your organization (up to 40 at a time). As you can see some users were more interested in our blog than others, and you’ll have to play around with this. This information serves two purposes. First, and most obviously, it helps you target specific keywords, but it also tells you who your target market should be in other ventures, it helps to know what sort of people are interested in you.

Don’t Over-Do it!

Don’t go too crazy, twitter does have a follow limit of 2000 follows (unless you yourself have more than ~1800 followers in which case your follow limit is about 10% more than the number of followers you have). Also, you can’t follow more than 1000 people per day, so don’t try it. One final note, spammers are bad people don’t be one, twitter and karma will punish you.

We’re really liking twitter, especially now that we have so many people to talk to. Twitter isn’t completely about numbers, it is about the relationships that you can create with other people in your industry, but tweet spinner is an excellent tool to help you find people who are interested in the same things you are. Be kind to to twitter community and they’ll be kind to you.

Regards,

Adam Haney

Chief Developer

Casa Nova Designs

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Here’s our list of (web design related) news feeds:

Did we miss anything? Do you read a blog that’s not included in this list, do you think we should start reading your blog? Leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Thanks everybody,

Adam

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The tool is still a little off (it scrapes google pages using PHP’s curl library and sometimes it counts google’s internal links as search results). But, it is a good way to see about where your site is in the google keyword war.

You can find Google Rank Search at googleranksearch.casanovawebdesign.com

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer
Casa Nova Designs

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What is cloud computing?
Before we begin this discussion it is important to define, for this conversation, what cloud computing is. Cloud computing is an ambiguous term that can refer to everything from hosting to interface, from our standpoint we take cloud computing to mean this. Cloud computing is a software design paradigm that removes the majority of storage/computation from an individual user’s computer and instead uses a remote location to process information and store data. While some would argue that cloud computing must have a layer of hardware abstraction (such as Amazon’s S3 platform that totally abstracts the hardware that applications are running on), we believe that any software that runs primarily on a remote machine maintained by either the product vendor or a contractor of the product vendor is cloud computing (irregardless of the architecture of the remote machine). Popular examples of this design paradigm are Google Documents, Gmail, Blackboard, etc.

The bad news first
Because Doctrow’s article is primarily concerned with the risks associated with cloud computing let’s start there. Cloud computing gives all of the power of information to the software vendor. User’s do not maintain a private copy of their data and thus, if a software product which utilizes cloud computing becomes inaccessible all of the user’s data is lost. This does not necessarily mean that this is likely. Google has one of if not the best up time records on the Internet, I would argue that an individual is much more likely to lose data either to malware, hardware failure, or accidental deletion. The flaw with this argument is that, if a software vendor chooses they may forbid users to export their data. I’ll use Google documents as an example for this argument. Google docs, like many cloud applications allows users to download files from their servers to their personal machines, and in google doc’s case this information is provided in several open source formats. To contrast that Microsoft Word, which was the dominant play in this market, allowed users to store all of their documents on their personal machine, but did not allow them to access these documents in a none Microsoft product. So while users were able to store the information on their machine they weren’t free to use it as they pleased, and the potential of losing their data was much more likely than if they stored it on servers maintained by professionals.

The good outweighs the bad
In spite of these issues I believe that cloud computing is helpful to the user community and the software development community. For the user, cloud computing is often client agnostic. I, as a Linux user can access Google docs in Firefox, and if I’m at a friend’s house I can access the same information from a Windows machine. This cross platform compatibility was achieved without any extra thought from google. This is incredibly beneficial to the Linux community, as software platforms move away from Window’s dependence Linux adoption becomes a much smaller hurdle. Also cloud computing is, in many ways, architecture agnostic. I as a developer can create a cloud application in Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python C, C++ on either Linux, Mac, Windows or any other OS I choose. The only requirement is that my server can manipulate data and server is up to the web via http. This is immensely helpful for developers, as they aren’t locked into using any one language or operating system regardless of what their end client is using.

On Cloud 9
In my opinion, cloud computing’s benefits far outweigh it’s risks. Like any paradigm, software developed for the cloud is only as negative as a developer makes it. If Google wanted to control user’s data they could, much like Microsoft controlled users data with their proprietary obfuscated file types. In the hands of benevolent hosts cloud computing offers an exciting new age of computation for the average user. It abstracts their operation system, takes care of backups and requires no updates. True software vendors could create software as a service models that would continually charge users for use, but are these monthly fees going to be worse than the one time expense of purchasing traditional software? These are important issues to consider, but I believe that those decisions lie in the realm of business men. I as a developer embrace cloud computing as a paradigm.

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer
Casa Nova Designs

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We here at Casa Nova Designs have been very busy designing a web based health care system (soon to be launched UsHospitalCareers.com) In our time developing this website we have learned much about ourselves and had the opportunity to improve our communication with clients greatly.

As developers we do the best that we can to communicate our technical ideas to our clients in easy to understand language. It is important that the client is also able to communicate to a developer what they need for their project so that the project can be completed in the fastest most cost effective manner possible. Here are 5 points that we feel with make your project go smoothly.

1.Know what you’re trying to accomplish.

What do you want your customers/users to accomplish by visiting your website? Do you want to provide information about the company? sell products? provide a place for employees to collaborate? We can provide all of this functionality and suggest features when necessary, but thinking about things like this in advance will make sure that your website provides a platform that can truly transform your business.

2. Know what you like.

If you are interested in being involved in the graphical design of your website (some clients prefer that all creative control be given to us, we find that very flattering) it is important that you know what you like. It saves several hours of development and collaboration if you are able to provide examples of websites that you like, and when possible, explanations of why you like them. “I like this web site’s colors”, or “I like the navigation of this website” are simple ways that you can let us know what you like, so we can produce a website that you love.

3. Get your camera ready.

If you have any logo files, pictures of your products, employess, workspace etc. That you’d like to include on your website having those items ready will greatly reduce the time it takes for us to create your website. If you need us to take any pictures for you or to scan any images that you have a hard copy of we can also provide that service.
4. Know what you want to say.

If you already know what information you would like to have on your website including that information will help us greatly. We as developers can write content for your pages (This content is known as web copy), but often times a client is able to describe their company’s history, mission, etc. best in their own words. This may seem like a daunting task but, adding web copy is often one of the last steps in the design process and a client can write their content in tandem as the developer creates the website.

5. Stick with it.

Once we’ve begun a project it is difficult to change the direction. We can when necessary make changes but, these changes will result in additional time and expense. So make sure you think about your project carefully before giving us the green light. Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your web site try to step back, design time various based upon the size of the project from a couple of days to several weeks. If you do have an idea for a developer try to contact them as quickly as possible so that they can implement your new idea with as little duplication of effort as possible.

For more information about communicating with developer check your Smashing Magazine’s article on the subject (this article is intended for audience with moderate technical knowledge)

Hopefully this information will help you as you work towards completion of your next web project.

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer
Casa Nova Designs

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The code to create a slide show is rather simple. Simple create an element and everything that you place inside of that element will be presented in the slide show.

the XHTML:
(it is very important that the style of the parent element is set to “display:none” inline and not in the stylesheet or elsewhere in the document. The prototype library is unable to change the opacity/display of an element whose style is define in an external stylesheet).

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<div id="slides" style="display:none" >
	<img src="http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/l/lu/lusi/1189704_ripe_strawberries_3.jpg" />
	<img src="http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/s/sj/sjur/1186634_kiwi.jpg" />
	<img src="http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/l/lu/lusi/1186300_banana_diet_4.jpg" />
</div>

The Javascript:
To create a slideshow simple include prototype (either on your site or using google’s service) and call the StartSlideShow function. The first argument of the function is the id of parent element in this case slides. The second argument is the length of time (in milliseconds) that a particular slide stays visible.

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<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload=function(){
	StartSlideShow('slides', 2000);
}
</script>

If you don’t already have Prototype.js included as a javascript library on the site you are working on it can quickly and easily be added via google’s javascript api service:

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<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  google.load("prototype", "1.6");
  google.load("scriptaculous", "1.8.2");	
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="slideshow.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload=function(){
	StartSlideShow('slides', 2000);
}
</script>

The entire slideshow.js file is less than 30 lines of code (not counting the comments). The script should be easy to understand and modify.

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function DoSlide(slide, index, slideLength){
	setTimeout(function(index){
		$(slide).appear();
	}, index * slideLength, index);
 
	setTimeout(function(index){
		$(slide).fade();
	}, (index * slideLength) + (slideLength / 2), index);
}
 
function DoSlideShow(slideshowDiv, slideLength){
	var slides = $(slideshowDiv).childElements();
 
	//fades each slide in and out
	slides.each(function(s, index){
		DoSlide(s, index, slideLength);
	});
 
	var intervalLength = slideLength * slides.size();
	var slideShow = setInterval(
	function(slideshowDiv, slideLength){
		DoSlideShow(slideshowDiv, slideLength)
		}, intervalLength, slideshowDiv, slideLength);
}
 
function StartSlideShow(slideshowDiv, slideLength)
{
	var slides = $(slideshowDiv).childElements();
	//hides all slides inside div
	slides.each(function(s, index){
		s.toggle();
	});
	//makes parent slide div visible
	$(slideshowDiv).toggle();
	DoSlideShow(slideshowDiv, slideLength);
}

If you are interested in a working copy of the slideshow I have a demo set up: http://scratch.casanovawebdesign.com/slideshow. If anyone has any questions or suggestions for this script feel free to discuss in the comment section.

Regards,
Adam Haney
Chief Developer Casa Nova Designs

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These new features are very exciting and some of them are already implemented as non-standard CSS two open source browser rendering engines. Gecko the rendering engine employed by the mozilla browsers (firefox, mozilla, thunderbird) is able to render rounded corners using CSS3 properties as well as handle object opacity. Webkit, the rendering engine that supports Safari and Konqueror (a linux browser) is also able to implement many CSS3 features. CSS3.info has detailed information about CSS3 support in popular browsers (no small surprise Internet Explorer has little to no support).

Finally for more information about the path of CSS3 and how far away the W3 is from releasing their specification check out the W3 roadmap at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work.

I hope you find this information helpful. I for one am very excited about the release of CSS3.

Regards,

Adam Haney

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