Weekly Roundup - September 8th 2008Weekly Roundup - September 8th 2008

Posted September 8th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of September 1st to 7th 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

I started Monday off with 2 posts because I always do my Monthly Roundup on the first day of the month but also needed to do the Weekly Roundup because it was Monday :)  So I then challenged myself to post twice each day this week and succeeded.

I'll see how well I can go for the rest of the month posting twice a day instead of once (although in August it was more like only 5 or 6 times a week) and see how that affects traffic to this website over the next two to three months.

Monday:
- Weekly Roundup - September 1st 2008
- Monthly Roundup - August 2008

Tuesday:
- Using nohup to prevent processes stopping on disconnect
- Google to launch Chrome web browser tomorrow

Wednesday:
- Google's Chrome web browser is released
- How to flush the DNS cache on Windows

Thursday:
- IMDB website design changed
- Optimize a table in MySQL from the command line interface

Friday:
- Display DNS cache on Windows
- Google Chrome "not supported" by Google apps

Saturday:
- Flush the exim mail queue
- Optimize a table in MySQL from phpMyAdmin

Sunday:
- Create application shortcuts with Google Chrome
- Optimize tables in MySQL automatically with PHP

Interesting articles found offsite

Adobe Photoshop

1st Web Designer posted 48 Photoshop Shortcuts.

AWK

Eric Wendelin posted an introduction to AWK. AWK is a command line tool for text processing, processing data in either text files or streams.

Blogger

Antonio Lupetti posted "7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger" in his Woork blog, divided into sections such as start creating a custom template; create single custom pages on Blogger; display some HTML only on the home page; and page title and meta description.

CodeIgniter

Thomas Myer at IBM's Developer Works posted "Getting Started With CodeIgniter", looking at how an MVC framework can help, how to install and configure CodeIgniter, and starting your first project. Code Igniter is a PHP framework.

CSS

NETTUTS posted "10 Challenging But Awesome CSS Techniques" with screenshots and then links through to the tutorials. Techniques include focusing and blurring menu items; illustrative menu rollovers; and dynamically highlighted columns in tables.

Google Chrome

Does the world really need another web browser? Google seems to think so with the launch of its new Chrome web browser. Also check out the Google Analytics blog post about Chrome and some FAQs relating to it and Matt Cutt's post on anwers to common Google Chrome objections and what information Chrome sends to Google.

PC World posted 7 reasons to like Chrome and 7 reasons against it. Their first reason it's cool is that "It won't crash" but I had Chrome crash on me within the first few minutes of using it.

Cnet posted "10 things we'd like to see in Chrome" which included profile roaming, better bookmark management, plug-ins and Mac/Linux versions.

The Sodeso Blog posted impressions of Google Chrome in two parts with a lot of high res screenshots. The second post covered the Javascript debugger with a lot of detail.

David Walsh posted how to detect Google Chrome with Javascript.

Internet Explorer

Thebeebs at The Way I Think posted about the new developer tools coming in Internet Explorer 8 along with some screenshots of each of the 10 favourite things, including a colour picker, Javascript debgging, simple prototyping, and source searching.

Javascript

Six Revisions posted a list of 10 Promising Javascript Frameworks with a brief description of each and links through to the respective websites. The ones in this list are alternatives to the big ones such as jQuery, Mootools, Prototype and YUI.

jQuery

Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS. One clever thing the example shows is how the back and forward buttons still work as you look through the slideshow (it adds #img/filename.jpg to the end of the URL making this possible) and this makes it possible to bookmark a particular page in the slideshow.

The jQuery date picker plug-in is a flexible unobtrusive calendar component for jQuery. The linked to page has example usage and a large number of demos, as well as links to all the requirements and the plugin .js and .css files themselves.

Steve Smith ported FancyZoom to jQuery. View the demo here.

Linux

PC Mech posted how to install Ubuntu Linux from a USB stick instead of an optical drive so you don't need to waste time and CDs/DVDs installing new releases.

Hacks Zine posted how to reset a lost root password in Linux. The article talks about Ubuntu specifically but the advice should work for most Linux distros.

Mootools

David Walsh posted how to do mouseover accordions with the Mootools Javascript library. You can go straight to the demo here.

MySQL

The MySQL Performance Blog posted a warning to Beware of running ANALYZE in Production because there is an issue which causes ANALYZE TABLE to block all accesses to the table while it could be flushed from the table cache.

PHP

ProDevTips posted the latest in their series on PHP Doctrine, dealing with file uploads with PHP Doctrine.

LornaJane posted how to create a PHP REST server in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

phpMyAdmin

The first release candidate of phpMyAdmin 3.0 was released. The 3.0 branch of phpMyAdmin requires PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5.0+

Web Design

Smashing Magazine posted 40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box, looking at designs which break the boring structure of typical 2- and 3-columned, boxed layouts. As usual, screenshots of the design and then a link through to the actual website.

WordPress

Six Revisions posted 45 Beautiful and Creative WordPress designs with a screenshot of each and links through to the actual website.

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