Links roundup August 19th 2008

Posted August 19th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

I had forgotten to update this week's weekly roundup post before it auto published at midday yesterday so missed adding a bunch of additional offsite links. This follow up post contains the ones I missed plus some additional ones from Monday.

AJAX

Mind Tree posted 6 Deadly AJAX Drawbacks: development time; browsing history and experience; search engine interaction; accessibility; server load; and security.

CSS

Nettuts posted about saving time with CSS using multiple classes, e.g. <p class="primaryColor important"> which makes the <p> tag use both the "primaryColor" and "important" classes.

Noupe posted 40+ CSS/JS Styling and Functionality Techniques for form elements, with screenshots and offsite links to each technique.

Drupal

Drupal 6.4 and 5.10 were released. Note that these fix critical security vulnerabilities and upgrading existing websites is strongly recommended.

Joomla

Joomla 1.5.6 was released. This is a quick turnaround security release to address a high level security issue and it is recommended all users upgrade immediately.

jQuery

Nettuts posted how to use jQuery to retrieve data from an XML file. This is an interesting concept because it allows you to retrive XML data with jQuery and then display it in browser in whatever layout/format you choose.

And Nettuts also posted how to create a tabbed interface with jQuery.

ProDevTips posted how to share data between jQuery and PHP with JSON, using the jQuery functions .toJSON and .evalJSON, and the PHP functions json_decode and json_encode.

Shafqat Ahmed posted an introduction to jQuery.

Hardware

ASUS is now offering 12 models, according to the Register. It will be interesting to see how they fare with this - when they had a single cheap offering it was simple and now it suddenly becomes more complex for people trying to decide what to buy.

Linux

The Ubuntu Geek posted Howto Disable CTRL-ALT-DEL in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Server.

MySQL

Baron Schwartz at the MySQL Performance Blog posted "The ultimate tool for generating optimal my.cnf files for MySQL" which is of course a human with years of experience rather some some scripting tool.

A while back I posted how to to backup MySQL with a PHP command line script. David Walsh has taken a slightly different approach with his "Backup Your MySQL Database Using PHP" post, using PHP's mysql functions and some SQL queries to work out which tables etc to backup, and therefore not requiring the high level user that my command line script does.

I found SQL Buddy, an AJAX powered MySQL database browser/editor etc which supports PHP 4.3+ and MySQL 4+.

PHP

ProDevTips posted about PHP doctrine last week, a new ORM for PHP, and now looks at how to extend PHP Doctrine, in this example with checkbox groups.

Word Press

Word Press 2.6.1 was released. This release has over 60 fixes but as the post points out, you need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.