Weekly Roundup - August 18th 2008

Posted August 18th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of August 11th to 17th 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 - August 11th 2008
Tuesday: Unable to modify table, timeout expired errors with Microsoft SQL Server
Wednesday: Javascript getYear fix
Thursday: No post
Friday: Changing the Postfix maximum email size
Saturday: PHP Date Constants
Sunday: No post

Interesting articles found offsite

CSS

PeakFlow design posted 10 useful CSS tricks, including CSS resets, horizontal centering (although their method won't work in certain versions of Internet Explorer) and dealing with the double margin issue with CSS floats in Internet Explorer 6.

PHP

ProDevTips posted an introduction to PHP Doctrine, a PHP ORM for PHP 5.2.3+ (official website here), and followed it up with using PHP Doctrine with Smarty.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney previewed the Zend Framework 1.6.0 looking at some of the new features and improvements coming in the next version.

Seach Engines

seomoz.org posted a fairly comprehensive overview of Yahoo's site explorer and link searches, covering the modifiers that can be used in site explorer and some of its weaknesses, and then how you can do more or less the same (and better) searches using their regular search functions. A list of useful search modifiers for regular search is then listed.

SEO

Ashish at Mind Tree posted "32 SEO Tips to Boost your Website Traffic" with some sensible suggestions and includes character counts for some of the important page attributes such as meta title and description.

SQL Server

TechSvr Blog posted about Temporary Tables in SQL Server, giving a good overview of the different types, how they are named, deleted, used and so on.

Web Design/Development

Smashing Magazine posted "5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers and Developers" looking at sliding vertical navigation and overlay; neighbours navigation; panel block; tags chart list; and clever archive navigation.

Antonio Lupetti posted "25 Awesome tutorials for web designers" with offsite links to posts with topics like CSS tricks, creating beautiful tooltips, creating nice calendars with date-pickers and autosuggest with PHP.

Windows

The How To Geek posted how to create a shortcut and hotkey to toggle the volume on Windows, allowing you to mute and unmute the sound at the click of a shortcut icon or press of a key. This is useful if your keyboard doesn't already have special media control buttons.

Watching the Net posted 10 useful Windows built in command line tools, including systeminfo which shows the host name, os name, install date, boot time etc; netstat which shows what is connected to your computer (this one is similar to the *nix command of the same name); and tasklist which shows a list of the running tasks.

Other Stuff

John Dvorak posted an interesting article titled "How Adobe can stop Microsoft" which suggested Adobe port its major products to Linux and eventually release its own Linux distro packed with its own products.