NetBulge.com Design and Development Website

Output for Debugging in PHP

While working on a script I often find myself writing, deleting and rewriting quick lines to output the content of variables to the screen so I can keep track of the program execution. There are many ways to print output and here are a few ideas that save time and make life easier.

HTML Music Code

Inserting an audio file into a web document should be a somewhat uneventful task. Actually, if you do not care about standards it is rather simple since the non-standard <embed> tag works very well in 95% of browsers. It only gets complicated when trying to follow the W3C specification. In this article I provide both methods and you can decide for yourself.

DOCTYPE?

DOCTYPE stands for Document Type Declaration and is a requirement for several web documents including HTML and xHTML pages. It must be placed at the beginning of a document and lets the browser (or any other engine interested in making sense of your markup) know what type of technology you are using and which version.

Semi-automatic form validation

If you’ve got a website, you’ve probably got one or more forms on it. Since visitors usually don’t want to take the time to fill out the full form - and we do want all the obligatory information - we all have to use form validation. Me personally, I like to do my validation server-side, because if a visitor really wants to annoy you he (or she for PC’s sake) will disable client-side scripts. Yes, that is right, they do it; I’ve seen them do it. All your hard work and all your scripting goes down the drain and you are left empty-handed if you used them. I’ve worked a lot with forms, and I’ve come up with my own little standard way of doing this. The example I’ll give is in PHP since there’s an area for it on this website.

SVG and PHP: because we can

With SVG, we can create graphics from plain text. And although it’s not widely supported yet, let’s have some fun with it? It’s XML-based, it’s easy, and it’s fun. And what better way to do it, than combining it with PHP and making it dynamic. Why, you ask? Because we can!

SVG and PHP: because we can - Part 2

Now that we have a rectangle that takes our given variables, what we need is...

Sales Without Search Engines

How would you get people to your site if the search engines didn\'t exist?
Imagine one day you flip on your PC, log on to the Internet and go to google.com. The browser alerts you and says that there is no website found at that address. No problem you think, as you head on over to Yahoo.com - same thing, no website found at that url. Now something seems fishy, go to MSN.com because you know Microsoft will never run out of money and their search engine will be up. Nope, instead you get another alert box telling you that there is no website found at that url.

Imagine that!

XHTML - Kicking And Screaming Into The Future

XHTML, the standard, was first released back in 2000. Roughly five years later we begin to see major websites revised to use this standard. Even the favorite whipping boy of standards-compliance punditry, Microsoft, presents their primary homepage msn.com in XHTML.
Standards compliant XHTML sites are still the minority. The reason is simple. When the W3C released the new standard, the rest of the web running on HTML did not cease to function. Without any pressing need to conform to the new standard, designers continue to use old, familiar methods. These methods will perform in any modern browser, so why bother switching?

Page scanning behaviors

Ever thought about the way a web page is browsed? Have you taken time to study common scan patterns? It makes a big difference to know how your visitors interact with your pages and this article is a good starting point.

Of Web Backgrounds

The background of a page is an important element. Since it occupies the entire screen, a good choice will probably go unnoticed while a bad choice can easily drive your users insane. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when designing backgrounds for the web.

How To Pick Your Website Colors

Before you can consider the finer points of your design, you need to make the big decisions. Few decisions are more important than the color scheme your website is going to use.

Google PageRank Algorithm Explained

PageRank is Google\'s measure of importance assigned to a web page on a scale of 1 to 10. You can check the PageRank value of any page by downloading the Google Toolbar. This article is intended at understanding PageRank and providing an insight into its different aspects.

Web design: audience is everything

British researchers found in a study released Aug 11, 2005 that men and women have distinctly different tastes when it comes to �good web design.� The study found that men assigned higher ratings to websites with dark colors and straight, horizontal lines as major design elements. Women, on the other hand, preferred a more liberal use of colors and typefaces.

Is any of this information useful to web designers? Maybe. But the study does serve as a good reminder of what constitutes effective web design. Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing your next site.

Fix server time and date in script

Very often, the servers hosting our scripts are not in the same time zone as our target visitors. In order to use the current time and date, the server info must first be recalculated adding (or subtracting) the time difference.

Replacing letters and words

The strtr PHP function can be easily used to replace all the occurrences of letters in a string for other letters, and it can also receive a list (array) of replacement words; doing all the necessary changes in one clean sweep.

CSS Tooltip

A tooltip is a small popup triggered by a MouseOver that displays quick info about anything. This article uses a mix of CSS and Javascript to produce very simple yet functional code for multiple tooltips.

IFRAME behavior using DIV

IFRAMEs are very useful for embedding content into a web page, particularly another URL. They are often misused for their box functionality and scrollbars. CSS has a property that allows for better control and a more reliable use: Overflow.

Online game design: an insider�s view � Part 2

Once the game was coded and people were playing it, I ran into a whole different series of problems. All the previous issues were things that I had thought about carefully while I was creating my game. The following are issues that I hadn�t foreseen but required plenty of work on my part.

Online game design: an insider�s view

Ever entertained the idea of making a game? As a programmer and a graphic designer, I�m yet to meet a fellow coder or computer graphic�s artist that has not thought about it seriously at least once.
This article was written by a successful entrepreneur in the complex area of online game design, creation and administration. If you are interested in game making, or just a fan of successful online stories, you should give this one a look. <Esopo>

Indenting text: Blockquote and Span

Before the existence of CSS designers had to be creative to make text or graphic indentions. I personally used tables and transparent images, and thought it was good. These days we can leave behind all that and actually use the tag designed for such need: the blockquote - or, go for a simple SPAN.