One service that I had used a while back was AddThis social bookmarks. I really liked its ease of use, support for a huge range of social networks and bookmarking sites, and most importantly it had great tools for analytics.
The social bar itself however left more to be desired. It was an eyesore, appearing after every post on my site, and made me cringe at the fact that it relied on JavaScript to function. Luckily, I found an alternative in the form of their API docs. Read more »
Back in September of last year, Jim Greer of Kongregate.com posted an article in the forums about a new badge data service served in JSON. This was great news for developers, we could finally grab data from our user accounts without having to do a web scrape on our user page.
However, this forum post seems to be the only official documentation on what is a very interesting data feed, so it is with this reason that I decided to create this beginner’s tutorial on how to use it. Read more »
The web has so many useful services now, many offering their own API that you can draw data from and create your own mashups with. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Kongregate are just a few.
Their data output is most commonly formatted in RSS (for feed readers), and JSON (a lighter form than XML used a lot for AJAX). In this post I’ll show you how to use the cURL library to collect data from any public web page. Read more »
For those that don’t know, the Google AJAX Feed API is a JavaScript tool that you can use to handle your AJAX requests, and is particularly useful for reading in feed data from external websites. After searching for all kinds of plug-ins and tools, I landed on Google’s answer, and found exactly what I needed – a JavaScript-only feed parsing script.
This tutorial will provide you with a very basic script to start using this great tool and covers what you need to get started.
Just a quick demonstration today on using JavaScript and CSS techniques to create scrolling backgrounds. Here we layer backgrounds on top of each other and change their horizontal position to move them past the viewing area. It also uses different multipliers to move the closer objects quicker, and create a parallax effect.
When opening new windows from your web page that link to external files, a common practice is to open them in a new window as not to deter the user from your site.
One method to do this in the past was to use target="_blank" that tells the browser to open the link’s href attribute in a new window. This, however, is deprecated in the Strict Doctype of W3C web standards so we should be trying to avoid using it whenever we can, and in this post I’ll show you exactly how it’s done.
In the below examples I’ll use data from a fictional database table named “users”. We’re looking to return the 10 most recently added users with a date of birth later than January 1st 1970.
Read more »
Okay, so you’ve gone through those guides on setting up your new weblog, and followed all the advice on using social media to leverage your site into becoming über-successful overnight. The problem now is that those two elements are still detached. You’re posting all that relevant content on your website but nobody is around to click those links that direct to all that beautiful material.
This is not an article on improving your follower count or the “top 10 ways to drive traffic with SEO“, but it will definitely help in a different way. Today, I’ll show you how to automatically post your blog articles straight to your Twitter and Facebook accounts using your RSS feed as a stream.
For those of you writing #daily365 articles, or have signed up for Project52, this will be ideal. Let the computers do the work for you.
The service I use for this is called TwitterFeed, which you’ll need an account for. It’s all super easy and I’ll explain it after the jump. So anyway, here we go. Read more »
Actually, this one’s long overdue. My Tweet Cloud plugin for WordPress has recently passed over the 500 download mark and, as of last week, is now on its fifth release (v 1.4).
It’s had some significant improvements over its lifetime, and has quite frankly surprised me at how popular it has become. Especially from a script written in a night with nothing more than a simple idea behind it. Read more »
At the point that your site becomes more complex, you look to ways of simplifying your page code to give yourself less headaches. Ultimately you’re looking for a way to separate that header that you’ve copy-pasted so many times to different static web pages, into a page that all your other pages can call, and will stay the same.
If like me you hadn’t heard about PHP until this point where you are looking to add in other scripts to your web pages, then now is a very good time to learn about PHP includes.
1 | < ?php include( 'header.html' ); ?> |
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DogDay
Stephen McIntyre