Weekly Roundup - June 30th 2008Weekly Roundup - June 30th 2008

Posted June 30th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of June 23rd to June 29th 2008, where I look back at the posts I made over the past week as well as useful and interesting articles on other websites and blogs that I might have read.

Articles posted on my blog

Monday: Weekly Roundup - June 23rd 2008
Tuesday: Backup/export bookmarks with Mozilla Firefox 3
Wednesday: FCKEditor 2.6.2 is released - fixes page scroll on ENTER
Thursday: Windows Vista Black Screen After Login - Resolved
Friday: JpGraph Error Can't access PHP_SELF, PHP global variable
Saturday: Reset the auto increment value for a MySQL table
Sunday: List compiled modules with the PHP CLI

Interesting articles found offsite

I changed reading RSS feeds from Akregator to Google Reader about a week ago and it has meant I'm tending to read more articles and blog posts as I can read them from anywhere (mostly while I'm eating breakfast in the kitchen in the mornings...) This has meant a lot more interesting articles listed below than usual. I will be shortly breaking this section off into a separate website which will contain daily updates instead of weekly like it is here.

Adobe Photoshop

tutzor.com looked at how to create a Star Wars text effect with Adobe Photoshop. I found the post interesting not necessarily so much because it's doing something with Star Wars, but there are a lot of really useful effects used in the post for modifying type and layers etc.

Blogging

Blogging Tips n Tricks posted a list of 112 high PageRank RSS and Blog submission directories.

Codeigniter

CodeIgniter 1.6.3 was released, being primarily a maintenance release, with a variety of bug fixes and some refinement to existing features. View the changelog for more details. CodeIgniter is a PHP framework and this blog currently uses CodeIgniter.

CSS

Sitepoint looked at how to do nifty navigation with CSS, allowing navigation items in a menu to appear with CSS only and no Javascript.

Domain Names

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has decided to allow anyone to apply to a generic top level domain (like .com, .net, .nz etc). New generic TLDs will likely appear in the 4th quarter of 2009, so presumably we'll see stuff registered like .microsoft, .google, .yahoo etc. Read more at The Register, Computer World and Ars Technica.

Hardware

PC World looked at inkjet printer ink - the manufacturers' ink vs the cheap stuff that other companies produce. After analysing image quality, yields and how they age, PC World came to the conclusion that, while the cheaper stuff costs less and gets a greater yield, the manufacturers' claims that their ink is better is actually true. Read the multi page article starting here, and supplementary articles looking at where to buy cheap ink and images comparing the manufacturers' ink vs 3rd parties.

Javascript

InfoQ looked at how to move Javascript event handlers like onclick() out of the HTML and into a separate Javascript file. The event handlers are then hooked into the HTML once the page has loaded. This makes for cleaner and smaller HTML. Read more here.

jQuery

himerus inc posted a jQuery 101, an introduction to jQuery explaining what it is and a basic overview of some of the useful ways it can be used.

DZone's Web Developer Zone posted 5 jQuery Questions and Answers: HAnow can I increase and decrease text size? How can I zoom an image when it is clicked? How Can I create A "Read More" Link That Will Instantly Expand To Show The User Additional Text When Clicked? How Can I Shift An Image A Specific Number Of Pixels Every Time It Is Clicked? And the last question was just asking the reader what else they'd like to see.

KDE

KDE 4.1 beta 2 was released. Read the release announcement on the KDE website (screenshots there also) and how to install it on Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04 on the Ubuntu Geek blog. The final release of KDE 4.1 is due for July 29th 2008.

Linux

CentOS 5.2, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, was released. Read the release announcement and the manual / release notes on the CentOS mailing list and wiki.

Arch Linux 2008.06, codenamed "Overlord" was released. Arch Linux is aimed at advanced users of Linux with previous knowledge of how to set up and run a Linux system, without the use of user-friendly GUIs or other tools.

Mambo

Team Mambo released Mambo 4.6.5. This is a maintenance and security release which fixes some potentially serious security vulnerabilities affecting all earlier versions of 4.6. It is recommended that all 4.6+ users update to 4.6.5 as soon as possible. Mambo is a Content Management System (CMS) built with PHP.

MySQL

I've been looking at some of the useful things you can do in the MySQL CLI interface recently, and the MySQL Performance Blog posted some neat tricks for the MySQL command line pager, something which I've been meaning to look into myself.

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin 2.11.7 was released. This is a bugfix release containing a security fix.

Programming

devjargon posted 5 ways to make sure your project fails. I think I've been guilty of all of these at some time or another.

Search Engines

Jefferson Graham at USA Today spoke with Google's Matt Cutts about search engine optimisation. There's nothing new in the article but it breaks them down in easy to understand points, making it a good starting point for most website owners.

SQL Server

"Angry Hacker" posted 10 reasons why SQL Server 2008 is going to rock, including C like math syntax, processing of delimited strings (I would have liked to have been able to use this 4 years ago) and intellisense. SQL Server 2008 is due for release later this year.

Symfony

Symfony is a PHP framework and the 1.1 version is about to be released. Fabien Pontencier posted about the symfony 1.1 architecture to give an overview about how it all works.

Web Design

Vandelay Design posted links to 25 beautiful minimalistic website designs.

Other Stuff

OpenDisc 08.07 was released, including Firefox 3 and the latest milestone versions of OpenOffice.org, FileZilla, Seamonkey and much more.