So I took an extended Holiday Vacation from my blog and have been… missing. I know I commented on upcoming things which fell through. I may post those, I may just move onto bigger and better things. I will continue with the programming tips, tricks & bugs, and I will be adding more about marketing in this internet of ours.
This is a small post, but I have other data in mind, which I could post right now, but I’m going to hold off for the moment – when I get a better understanding of what I’m talking about, I will give some posts so you don’t have to be as enthusiastically confused as I sometimes get.
I’ve just made a new site for a dear friend of mine, Codi-Rose Collins. She is a real estate agent down here in Burbank, CA, and so I thought I would go about and set her up with a site that listed local listings.
What did I get myself into?! Real estate websites are by far one of the most complicated I’ve come across. In fact, there’s a website dedicated to helping Real Estate Webmasters. Real Estate listings are in a database that is controlled by certain companies, which there are many per state. The site listed above lists them, how you get in contact with them, prove you’re actually doing something with Real Estate, and then you get access, which I still have not done.
So, what’s the alternative? Well, APIs sound fun… I took a look at many of the sites out there; Zillow and Trulia were the most interesting. Zillow will provide you with a lot of information, the closest to what I want, but still not listings of homes to buy. It will get you a home evaluation and comparables, and Trulia can get you a lot of market information.
I did look at many more sites but my search ended with those listed above. There are some bad side-affects of using APIs, and if you do look at the site Codi-Rose Collins you will see that I have to have links to Zillow all over the place. I will quite possibly remove Zillow, or may just thoroughly increase its use to make the links worth it.
Anyway, thats a quick update on Real Estate Sites.
I recently had several uses for this function, and there are probably many out. I am not proclaiming this unique nor the best available, but it works which is what counts. I actually took the majority of it from someone else, I think from php.net, but I tweaked it a little bit.
Pass in the string, and optionally, the length you want to curb it to. You can set a default in the highlighted section of the code (currently set at 100). Right now it returns it with a “…” at the end, which is what I wanted. Go ahead and remove the second highlighted section of the code if you don’t want this. (The highlights are very small – look hard! Squint if you must.)-Kerry
Ok, I know I have a bunch of bugs to report as well but this what I’ve been working on, so I thought I would share it with you.
Many sites use flash tor fading images into each other, or to present a slide show. Sure, you can do this if you have the flash experience, or have one of the many programs that create them for you (most are paid programs, unless you want a watermark.) It’s not a bad solution, but there is another solution, Javascript.
A friend of mine found this cross-fade script, Image Cross Fade Redux. That shows it in action (I suggest taking a look so you can see what the cross fader does), he unfortunately doesn’t offer you the code. It’s not hidden, but he doesn’t display it for you to download or copy and paste. Well, here’s the code:
There are two parts that you may have/want to change.The first is the two parts where it says “5000″. That’s how many milliseconds in between each fade, and I wanted 5 seconds.
The second is the line ‘css.setAttribute(“href”,”/css/xfade.css”);’. Simply change the “/css/xfade.css” to the location of the CSS file I’m about to show you:
Feel free to change anything in the #imageContainer section of the CSS file. The only parts that need to stay is the “position: relative;” and “margin: auto;”. I suggest setting the width and height to the width of the widest image and the height of tallest image.
Make sure you include the Javascript on the page, a line like:<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=”/js/xfade.js”></script>
The last part is the actual pictures you want to cross fade into.
There is one thing you should pay attention to.
The <div id=”imageContainer”> contains all the images you want to fade into each other. This must remain the same.
Ok, so its been over a month since my last blog. I promise more are coming, I have a few topics I’d like to go over, such as cron jobs and yet another IE bug. Possibly some complaints about more horrible hosting… you know, the good stuff.
I would just like to announce that my site, http://www.phoenixdev.net, has gotten a new design. I’d love some feedback. I haven’t fixed up all the CSS on certain headings – but I’m talking about the overall look.
As my projects and sites have been growing in number I have found it increasingly difficult to keep track of all the projects and tasks associated with each one.
This started my search for a project manager, a free one, of course.
I found various project managers, but most of them you had to pay for or were on your computer. I wanted one on the internet so other people could look at them as well, and possibly update them. I came upon activeCollab.
It was perfect. It has a 10 minute video telling you how to work the whole thing, explaining all the features. It’s very simple (relatively speaking) for a project manager. It has a very easy automated install followed by simple steps to setting up your first project.
It keeps a profile of your company and employees as well as your client companies and their employees, whom you can specify access to specified projects. Easy setup for tasks and milestones(a task with a time target) as well as a message board for each individual project.
I’ve installed this manager on three sites and it has become so very useful. If you’re looking for project management, I suggest you give it a try.
A little over a week ago I decided to immerse myself with RSS information, and this script is the result.
First let me explain the concept of what an RSS feed is for. People these days generally go to many news sites to get information about different topics. They have to go to many different websites, go to that section of the website and see if there is a headline that they’re interested in.
An RSS Feed is a file from that website that can be read from something called an aggregator. An aggregator collects RSS Feeds and displays the newest headlines from each one on a single site or page. It doesn’t generally show you the entire article, but usually just a headline and a short summary. This allows you to look at all your favorite headlines from your favorite news sites, and only go to the ones that you really have an interest in. They automatically updates to the new headlines and marks the ones you read as “read” so that you can easily distinguish the new items.
Onto what I learned.
The first thing I decided to do was find out what RSS is. I went to RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters, and found that it wasn’t really a tutorial but more of an informative guide. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I found out one important piece of information. RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom are completely different:
RSS 1.0 stands for “RDF Site Summary 1.0″. It is more complex than the others but gives you more options and customizable features.
RSS 2.0 stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It’s focus is on simplicity and is one of the most common feed types, and probably most widely known.
Atom came as the result of wanting a standardized format. Both of the other formats are considered “informal”, and people wanted a change. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) took this project on and made Atom the “standard”.
Well, I’m building a database-driven news site. RSS is a mandatory feature, but I also don’t want to have to manually update my RSS feeds. Well, there are sites that will generate it for free for you, like Feed43. I tried this, and its a good service though a little complex to setup. The only problem with it is that the feed has a big advertisement for Feed43 on it. Even though most people would never really see the advertisement (doesn’t show up when the aggregator collects the feed), I thought it wasn’t very professional for a company to be doing something like that.
I decided to make my own generator, and I wanted it to generate it dynamically. I decided to make it create either an RSS 2.0 feed or an Atom feed. This was my logical conclusion as it seems RSS 2.0 is the most common feed on the internet while Atom is considered the “standard”, and I like to uphold standards.
I first just basically copied and replaced values of an Atom feed. I thought it was a smart idea, until I tried to validate it. The validator I’ve seen recommended and the one I ended up using is called Feed Validator (how creative). Even though I haven’t tried any other validators to compare it with, I think its one of the best validators.
Back to my point, my feed failed validation pretty badly. I then found the Atom standard specifications. It had an example as well as a lot of know-how behind everything. After an hour or two, it validated. Great! My script now dynamically created a valid Atom feed.
I then went on to RSS 2.0, and I found the specification off the bat and got it to validate pretty fast.
The second to last thing I’m going to go over is the RSS button. You may not know it, but there is a trademarked image that is freely available under the Feed Icon Guidelines. If you want to get a basic image and manipulate it a bit, a great site is called Feed Icons. These are the “standard” images. If you want some nonstandard ones, this site has a few.
One more note on aggregators. While they are generally on web pages, there is a site, Rmail, that sends you your feed data. I haven’t tried it but it looks like a good idea.
The shopping cart I have been developed hit a major slow a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t find a solution, which is very rare. Well, a couple days ago I looked for a PHP forum. This was after I had given up on 1&1 support after many calls and many emails, Paypal thought it was on my hosting end and wasn’t getting many responses and other companies told me to switch hosting providers.
Well, I explained my situation and in about a 24 hour period they figured it was my cURL version was old because it was an old PHP version (4.4.7) on the dedicated SSL. I had tried to get 1&1 to upgrade this before using .htaccess, but your .htaccess files don’t affect your SSL server. I now knew that I had to get it upgraded for it to work.
I was thinking about this for a while. In the mean time I sent a support request to Paypal seeing if there was any alternate solution to using the old cURL version (they didn’t really know what I was talking about) and sent a request to 1&1, thinking I would just badger them a bit more, hoping someone could change it.
Before I go on, I thought I should comment quickly on 1&1. After asking them how to upgrade to the higher PHP version, I explained the reason being I needed to upgrade the cURL version.
They responded and told me I needed to upgrade my PHP version. I responded saying that I had asked that question, and I needed to know how.
Next response tells me that sorry, but you can’t upgrade your PHP version. Great, well I already had another solution worked out, I just didn’t like it.
PHP 5 has its own extension “.php5″. I tried this on the server and it did support it, meaning 1&1 had lied again. This handled my problem and I was able to connect successfully to Paypal! Yes! Now I just have to finish implementing WPP (Website Payments Pro).
-Kerry
P.S. I also have another script that I will be blogging about soon. It generates Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds, but its not in a finalized form though it does work correctly.
Photoshop, atleast 7.0, doesn’t natively support cursor files (.cur) or icon files (.ico).
To solve this little problem I downloaded a little freeware utility that can handle .ico’s. Well, I was simply looking to find out what size the favicon.ico was supposed to be when I came across a tutorial gave a much better solution.
It’s a Photoshop tutorial for favicons. It shows you where you can get a free plugin for Photoshop that lets it handle icons and cursors (really easy to install). It also tells you all the information you need to know about favicons and gives you links and resources to see some of the great ones out there. I really suggest doing the tutorial: How To Create A Favicon.ico.
The design has arrived! Thanks to Rafferty Pendery and Studio 98 Designs, I have a beautiful website design! You can see it at Phoenix Development home page. I will be putting up content soon, as well as a list of all my services and all the scripts I’ve been working on.
It’s a little bit ironic how so many web developers and web designers have errors on their website or simply incomplete cycles. Most of the time they are busy with so much other work that they don’t have enough time for their own site, but I think its important to set a good example. Phoenix Development will live up to that standard.
