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Weekly Roundup - November 17th 2008

Posted November 17th, 2008 in Weekly Roundup

This is my weekly roundup for the week of November 10th to 16th 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 - November 10th 2008

Tuesday:
- Always make FCKEditor paste as plain text

Wednesday:
- How to use PHP's __autoload function

Thursday:
- How to get and set form element values with jQuery

Friday:
- How to check and uncheck a checkbox with jQuery

Saturday:
- No post

Sunday:
- GoDaddy Coupon Codes 16 November 2008

Interesting articles found offsite

Code Igniter

Ask About PHP looked at how to extend Code Igniter's native model and make it a bit more useful and prevent a lot of repetition whenever setting up new models.

Ecommerce

CanvasBurn posted a list of 13 open source e-commerce applications. Although osCommerce is in the list please don't use it :)  The comments are useful to read as well because people rate some of them and list some additional ones. The concensus is to not use osCommerce...

Fonts

Jacob Cass at Just Creative Design posted a list of 20 typefaces to start a designer's career. He first suggests that 20 typefaces is a good number to work with and not to use free fonts, finally listing the 20 that he thinks are the best.

Google Toolbar

Peter Jalbert at Google Tutor posted about the Google Toolbar version 5 which has an improved Gmail button to alert you when you have new mail and the subject lines of messages in your inbox. There's also the ability to send any page by email to a friend and other new features.

HTML

Chris Coyier at Smashing Magazine posted 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean which include: using a strict doctype; keeping Javascript and CSS external; nesting tags properly; eliminating unecessary divs; and using better naming conventions.

Internet Explorer

David Chartier at Ars Technica reported about the new version of mobile Internet Explorer: IE Mobile 6. The version of Internet Explorer used for mobile devices is currently based on the IE 4 and it seems odd that Microsoft would continue to use an old version of IE and not start using either IE7 or IE8's rendering engines. The post uses Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.1.4 Emulator Image and has some screenshots of a couple of sites using both the old and new browsers.

Joomla

Joomla 1.5.8 was released, containing bug fixes and two moderate-level security fixes.

jQuery

jQuery Lightbox plug-in is yet another lightbox plug-in for jQuery.

CSS Tricks posted a colour fading menu with jQuery where the background of the menu item fades in and then fades out on mouseover/out. View the example here.

The preloadCssImages jQuery Plugin by Filament Group automatically preloads all images referenced in CSS files. This makes the images always ready when needed instead of the possibility of an image loading only when the user mouses over something, for example.

Linux

The Ubuntu Geek posted how to execute commands simultaneously on multiple servers using PSSH, Cluster SSH or Multixterm. If you have many identically configured servers and need to make the same changes to all of them, this makes the job a lot easier.

MooTools

David Walsh posted how to track file downloads with Google Analytics and MooTools. Using the suggested code you could track all sorts of different clicks and modify it slightly to track offsite links as well.

Jx is a javascript library for creating graphical user interaces based on the MooTools library.

Photography

Smashing Magazine posted 60 Beautiful Examples Of Night Photography with links for each through to the original source.

PHP

John Mertic at IBM Developer Works posted about the upcoming PHP 5.3 which is is set to be released by the end of 2008, looking at changes to the object interface.

Safari

Safari 3.2 was quietly released by Apple and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Download Safari here.

Windows

The How To Geek posted how to prevent Windows XP from creating the thumbs.db thumbnail cache files. A folder will revert from whatever view setting you have set for all folders to thumbnail view if it finds the thumbs.db file there, so it may be useful for you to disable this altogether.

Randall C. Kennedy posted about Windows 7 at PC World, noting that "Windows 7 looks, behaves, and performs almost exactly like Windows Vista. And it breaks all sorts of things that used to work just fine under Vista."

WordPress

Six Revisions had a list of 50 Beautiful WordPress themes with a screenshot of each and a link through to the appropriate offsite page. As with anything free, be sure to check the license terms before using it to ensure you are not breaking any of the restrictions.

More links...

Normally I create this post at the start of each week and add these useful offsite links as the week passes. I just kept bookmarking links this past week and have run out of time to add all the offsite posts I found interesting. I'll follow up with a second post tomorrow containing the rest of the useful links.