XML

ActionScript is a very pow­er­ful pro­gram­ming lan­guage used in nu­mer­ous Adobe Flash and Flex ap­pli­ca­tions. It pro­vides an ob­ject-ori­ent­ed class level en­vi­ron­ment with many ad­van­tages to the av­er­age de­vel­op­er. In this ex­am­ple we’ll be con­struct­ing a video wall pulling the top videos from YouTube’s Tech feed. We will most­ly be cov­er­ing ba­sic ActionScript tech­niques, thus it is not re­quired to be an ex­cep­tion­al whiz at pro­gram­ming. For this tu­to­ri­al I’ll be us­ing Adobe Flash CS3 with ActionScript (...)

Web ac­cess is im­por­tant the­se days, no mat­ter where you are. Your cus­tomers’ abil­i­ty to ac­cess your web­site at their con­ve­nience is vi­tal. Making your web­site user-friend­ly on a com­put­er is one thing; mak­ing it avail­able on a mo­bile plat­form is an­oth­er. The mo­bile Internet is the next bat­tle­ground for de­vel­op­ers and de­sign­ers and should be se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­ered by ad­ver­tis­ers. Your reg­u­lar web­site won’t cut it on mo­bile phones. Making your web­site ac­ces­si­ble on a mo­bile net­work does re­quire a (...)

Episode 91 of The SitePoint Podcast is now avail­able! This week your hosts are Patrick O’Keefe (@iFrog­gy), Stephan Segraves (@sseg­raves), Brad Williams (@williams­ba), and Kevin Yank (@sen­tience). Listen in your Browser Play this episode di­rect­ly in your browser — just click the or­ange “play” but­ton be­low: Download this Episode You can al­so down­load this episode as a stan­dalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #91: The Best Site of All Time (MP3, 59.2MB, 1:04:39) Subscribe to the (...)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote a blog post to­day about why the net­work com­put­er failed and how cloud com­put­ing has made it pos­si­ble to sup­port a Web-based op­er­at­ing sys­tem. Schmidt calls the an­nounce­ment of the Chrome OS note­book ear­lier this week one of the most im­por­tant de­vel­op­ments of his work­ing life. He says the news is tes­ta­ment to the ad­vance­ment of com­put­er science that al­lows de­vel­op­ers to use lightweight tools sup­port­ed by com­plex back-end sys­tems to cre­ate prod­ucts and ser­vices (...)

Twice a mon­th, we re­vis­it some of our read­ers’ fa­vorite posts from through­out the his­to­ry of Nettuts+. Implementing AJAX tech­nol­o­gy can be a hit or miss thing. Do it well and you’ll have users rav­ing over the slick­ness it pro­vides to the gen­er­al user ex­pe­ri­ence, while, if you mess it up, you’ll be at the re­ceiv­ing end of their wrath. Here are 24 tips to guide through the pro­cess of im­ple­ment­ing AJAX tech­nol­o­gy with­in your web ap­pli­ca­tion. 1. Understand What it All Means First up, you (...)

This blog post is a ver­sion of Eric’s talk at our Chrome event on Tuesday, December 7, 2010. You can watch his talk on YouTube. - Ed. On Tuesday, we an­nounced a num­ber of up­dates to Chrome and Chrome OS. For me, the­se an­nounce­ments were among the most im­por­tant of my work­ing life—demon­strat­ing the re­al pow­er of com­put­er science to trans­form peo­ple’s lives. It’s ex­traor­di­nary how very com­plex plat­forms can pro­duce beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple so­lu­tions like Chrome and Chrome OS, which any­one can use from (...)

It’s of­fi­cial! Developers now have ac­cess to Foursquare APIv2, the com­pa­nies news de­vel­op­er tool which has been in the works for more than 12 months. Under the new API Foursquare has re­moved XML calls, which in turn will speed up re­spon­se times, while they have made OAuth2 avail­able to al­low for bet­ter se­cu­ri­ty when users con­nect their Foursquare ac­counts to third-par­ty ser­vices. Also in­clud­ed in the API are new end­points that al­low for badge fetch­ing, venue his­to­ry and venue pop­u­lar­i­ty. (...)

We're pub­lish­ing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Explore and vi­su­al­ize graphs with Gephi. Where bet­ter to start an­a­lyz­ing so­cial net­works than with your own? Using the graph­ing tool Gephi and a lit­tle bit of Python script, you can an­a­lyze your own Twitter net­work, re­veal­ing the in­her­ent struc­ture among those you fol­low. It's al­so a fun way to learn more about net­work anal­y­sis. Inspired by the LinkedIn Gephi graphs, I an­a­lyzed my (...)

It seems that some­one is al­ways go­ing around the Internet and mak­ing triv­ial things a com­pe­ti­tion. Thus, when Twitter and Foursquare both made moves to re­move XML sup­port from their APIs, mil­lions of web de­vel­op­ers re­joiced. Why such ju­bi­la­tion? Is there re­al­ly a need to cel­e­brate such a triv­ial, and log­i­cal, move? Norman Walsh and James Clark re­al­ly cov­ered the bas­es on this one, so I’ll spare the more in­trin­sic de­tails that you can find at their blogs here, and here, re­spec­tive­ly. (...)

It seems that some­one is al­ways go­ing around the Internet and mak­ing triv­ial things a com­pe­ti­tion. Thus, when Twitter and Foursquare both made moves to re­move XML sup­port from their APIs, mil­lions of web de­vel­op­ers re­joiced. Why such ju­bi­la­tion? Is there re­al­ly a need to cel­e­brate such a triv­ial, and log­i­cal, move? Norman Walsh and James Clark re­al­ly cov­ered the bas­es on this one, so I’ll spare the more in­trin­sic de­tails that you can find at their blogs here, and here, re­spec­tive­ly. (...)

In 2008, a small com­pa­ny named Varien, based in Los Angeles, qui­et­ly re­leased an open source ecom­merce plat­form to the world. Ma­gen­to, as it came to be known as, quick­ly gained trac­tion with web de­vel­op­ers wish­ing to move on from the days of osCom­merce and Zen Cart to a more pro­fes­sion­al and ro­bust sys­tem. Magento has earned a rep­u­ta­tion of be­ing flex­i­ble and pow­er­ful, while re­main­ing some­what of a mys­tery to de­vel­op­ers. Documentation for the plat­form was, and still is, scarce. In this (...)

At least in terms of cool Web stuff, JSON re­placed XML long ago. But the sto­ry keeps trick­ling down. Semi-piv­otal events ap­pear to be re­cent moves by Twitter and Foursquare to re­move XML sup­port from their Web APIs, set­tling sole­ly on JSON. In the wake, no less than XML crew mem­ber James Clark has tak­en a slight­ly more ap­pre­cia­tive stance on JSON. XML grew too com­plex, he ad­mits. It doesn’t work well with pro­gram­ming lan­guage data struc­tures, he con­cedes. Still, the oc­ca­sion is al­so an (...)

I'm usu­al­ly the last guy to know, and the first to ad­mit it, but is RSS re­al­ly dead? I keep see­ing posts claim­ing Twitter and Facebook have essen­tial­ly re­placed RSS as the way folks fil­ter their news the­se days, but I for one am still ad­dict­ed to my RSS client (it's Shrook, for any­one who still cares). Perhaps RSS isn't dead, but in­stead it's pro­fes­sion­al­iz­ing. It's the Beta to the VHS of Twitter. Higher qual­i­ty, bet­ter sig­nal, but more ex­pen­sive in terms of time, and used on­ly by folks (...)

&c=<?php echo(rand()); ?" tar­get="_blank"&c=<?php echo(rand()); ?" bor­der="0" alt="" / Advertise here via BSA Manoj Sachwani — a con­trib­u­tor here at Fuel Your Coding — is launch­ing a free week­ly newslet­ter just for web de­vel­op­ers! Manoj says there will be just one email each Saturday and ab­so­lute­ly no spam. Right now the newslet­ter will most­ly be shar­ing valu­able links for de­vel­op­ers, but he is open to feed­back and would love us to help him im­prove it. Potential topics in­clude: (...)

[If you’d like to down­load the file used in this tu­to­ri­al to prac­tice the­se tech­niques, vis­it www.lay­ers­magazine.com and nav­i­gate to the Magazine sec­tion. All files are for per­son­al use on­ly.] Let’s face it, in the past new Flash users had to deal with a daunt­ing­ly emp­ty Actions pan­el and ad­vanced users had to pil­lage pre­vi­ous pro­jects to speed up de­vel­op­ment. Flash CS5 has changed all this with the in­tro­duc­tion of the sur­pris­ing­ly easy Code Snippets pan­el, ad­vanced code hint­ing, and cus­tom (...)

Earlier this year we an­nounced the dep­re­ca­tion of Google Mapplets. As part of the dep­re­ca­tion plan for Mapplets we will short­ly be switch­ing from ren­der­ing Mapplets with­in Google Maps, to ren­der­ing them on a ded­i­cat­ed Mapplets page: http://maps.google.com/maps/map­plets?mod­uleurl=http://www.google.com/ig/mod­ules/geo­scratch­pad.xml In con­junc­tion with this tran­si­tion the Google Maps Directory will be closed, and links to Mapplets will be re­moved from the My Maps tab in Google Maps. (...)

With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of smart phones of vary­ing screen sizes, flash com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, and most re­cent­ly ap­ple tv and google tv, many web­site own­ers are choos­ing to solve this prob­lem with mul­ti­ple sites and do­mains. While this so­lu­tion can work, there are plen­ty of ways it can go wrong. In this post I’ll try to help you un­der­stand why this is usu­al­ly not the best choice. First, let’s make sure we are talk­ing about the same is­sue. When I talk about cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple web­sites I mean hav­ing (...)

If you use the KeywordDiscovery API, and Python, my pain is your gain. It took me a few hours to get this to work. You can grab it and go. Here's the func­tion, writ­ten in my usu­al Python Pigdin. I don't rec­om­mend us­ing it with­out a pass­ing knowl­edge of Python, but that's up to you: def kwdis­cov­ery(user­name,pass­word,phraselist): base64string = base64.en­code­string('%s:%s' % (user­name, pass­word))[:-1] au­th­head­er = "Basic %s" % base64string api­url = (...)

Businesses have an ex­traor­di­nary amount of on­line data to look after. Between Web an­a­lyt­ics, so­cial me­dia met­rics, email sub­scribers, CRM, cus­tomer sup­port stats and pro­ject man­age­ment, com­pa­nies have at least half a dozen dash­boards to log in­to and pull data from. Geckoboard is one Web ap­pli­ca­tion that at­tempts to sim­pli­fy this bur­geon­ing over­abun­dance of busi­ness in­for­ma­tion. It's a drag-and-drop dash­board that al­lows you to plug in var­i­ous sources of data and dis­play them on a (...)

If you're run­ning a web­site for a school, or a busi­ness, or a band, or a club, there's prob­a­bly a tab on your site's home page la­beled Events. The cal­en­dar that shows up on that page is most like­ly driven by some kind of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that col­lects your events us­ing a form, stores them in a database, and ren­ders them through an HTML tem­plate to pro­duce your events page. One of the premis­es of this series is that pub­lish­ing cal­en­dars as HTML, for peo­ple to read on your events (...)