Nice motor! Yelp for iPhone Adds Foursquare-Like Badges and Royalty Status The new iteration of Yelp's iPhone app isn't live just yet, but a company blog post gives a window into what's coming very soon: badges, and a hierarchy of "royalty" that lets you "rule" venues, neighborhoods, and even cities. The royalty feature is much akin to Foursquare's mayorship feature, and lets Yelp users with the most checkins become the "Duke" or "Duchess" of a particular venue. Yelp goes a step further with the hierarchy, however, offering users with most Dukedoms in a particular neighborhood to be named the "Baron" and even a "King" to be crowned for most Dukedoms in an entire city. The company itself acknowledges in the blog post that "we're not the first ones to offer checkins," but that adding these features "furthers Yelp's mission of connecting people with and supporting great local businesses." Yelp also provides some statistics behind why they're investing in new mobile features: a full 27% of all searches on the review site come from their iPhone app.
Reducing HTTP requests with generated data URIs I’m not really a server-side guy, but I do dabble here and there, and the other day I had this really neat idea I’d like to share. Of course it might be old-hat to you experienced PHP programmers! But then I hope you’ll be interested in my implementation, and who knows — maybe I’m about to make somebody’s day! The idea is this: you can reduce the number of HTTP requests that a page has to make for its images, by pre-processing the source-code and converting them to data URIs. The data URI scheme is a means of including data in web-pages as though it were an external resource. As Google soon atested though, I’m not the first to have had the idea of using them for page-optimization. <img src="<? What I’m proposing is a retrospective process that converts all the image paths for you, so you don’t have to do anything special when you’re authoring the page in the first place. Code is where the heart is The following example is a complete demo page, with original HTML and CSS, surrounded by PHP.
Cross-Browser Testing: A Detailed Review Of Tools And Services - Smashing Magazine Advertisement As you probably know, cross-browser testing is an important part of any developer’s routine. As the number of browsers increase, and they certainly have in recent years, the need for automatic tools that can assist us in the process becomes ever greater. In this article, we present an overview of different cross-browser testing applications and services. Surely, you are already familiar with some of them, and you may have even stumbled across another overview article, but this one takes a different approach. This is not just a list of available tools, but rather a comprehensive analysis based on my experience with each of them. Probably the most important metric of these services is the capture delay, which I measured for the URL stackoverflow1, with the following browsers enabled: Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari. BrowserShots BrowserShots2 is the oldest and best known free online multi-browser screenshot service. The interface is not very user-friendly. Conclusion BrowserCam
Behold the seven-story tweet | Crave Uh-oh. Tweets have just grown from 140 characters to seven stories. Digital-media students at Philadelphia's Drexel University have found a way to turn the microblogging messages into 36x62-foot animations projected onto the surface of a campus building. That's a whole lot of tweet. Using the "Social Graffiti" system, anyone can digitally tag Twitter messages with @digmGraffiti to be projected onto Nesbitt Hall. Morton and Porche developed the system (essentially a custom-made Twitter application built using the open-source Twitter API) for their senior project as a way to combine architecture, design, and technology--and explore the reach of social networking. Anyone with a Twitter account can send a message to the building, but if their tweet contains profanity or other words or phrases that trigger a third-party filtering system, the entire message gets deleted and never sees the light of night.
PHP mysqli Prepared Statements « Full Life = Work + Life; Recently I had a close look at the mysqli prepared statements. Why use prepared statements in php if you can easily concatenate a statement string and then execute it? There are several reasons: Performance is an interesting issue, for example an article states that prepared statements make a difference.From the programming point of view though one gets character escaping written by someone who went through the trouble to do it properly and it is guaranteed to hapen each time.From the style perspective – most your SQL statements are created once and are generally in one place, therefore it is easy to make changes if your schema has been changed. Let’s start from the beggining. mysqli is an extended version of the well known mysql library. mysqli supports procedural style interface as well and object-oriented. Few library methods of my own, just for reference: Now we get to actually using it: And of course I found a problem. Like this:
Cool hidden cities and underground explorations From Indiana Jones’ search under a Venice library for the Holy Grail to Batman’s secret cave under Wayne Manor—underground (and off-limit) spaces are extremely cool. Learn how to capture that same excitement and adventure in your own real-life travels with Nile Guide’s awesome collection of hidden cities and abandoned underground constructions. See a few below: Catacombs and mines of Paris Chernobyl/Pripyat Berlin bunkers See them all at Nile Guide. Tons of travel ideas. How to Make Twitter More Useful for Your Business If you’ve been using Twitter, you’ve likely checked out an app or two to make your Twitter experience more robust, or even just a bit easier. TweetDeck, Twitpic and Tweetie are all examples of Twitter apps. What if I told you there was a magical place that could easily be your one-stop shop for all your Twitter needs? Yes, this place really does exist. It’s called OneForty.com, the Twitter equivalent of the Apple App Store. Twitter Still Rocks for Businesses Before I jump in to tell you about all the benefits of OneForty, I want to point out that in recent months two reports have surfaced that show Twitter being the #1 choice of all social sites for professionals. In a recent Burson-Marsteller study, 65 of the largest 100 international companies have active accounts on Twitter (the second being 54 on Facebook). The Ultimate Resource If you find yourself gravitating toward Twitter as a business tool, OneForty is a site you don’t want to miss. The “Tweet This!” What’s Hot Essentials Toolkits