Mobile Safari Advanced Features

If you’re already building web apps, you might wonder why you should bother to build an iPhone native app. The short answer is that you might not need to, but you should still optimize the app for iPhones.
Native-looking chrome
Set these in the head:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/icon.png" /> // set a custom icon for when a user [...]

New Plugin: wpSMS Supports Sending SMS Messages


Scaling PHP

This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow?
And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. We [...]

Web Form Validation With jQuery

Josh Bush’s Masked Input Plugin and Paulo P. Marinas’ AlphaNumeric are both jQuery plugins to prevent input of invalid data in web forms.

Browser-Based JSON Editors

JSONLint, a JSON validator, was the tool I needed a while ago to be able to play with JSON as format for exchanging data in some APIs I was working on a while ago. And now I like JSON well enough that I’m thinking of using it as an internal data format in one of [...]

More Web Performance Tips From Steve Souders

Hearing Steve Souders at WordCamp last week got me thinking about website performance, so I went looking for more. The slides from his WordCamp talk are online, but he gave a similar talk at Google I/O which got videotaped and posted richer detail than his slides alone will ever reveal.
Also on his blog: Use the [...]

Parse HTML And Traverse DOM In PHP?

I love how easily I can traverse an HTML document with jQuery, and I’d love to be able to do it in PHP. There are a few classes, but the PHP binding for Tidy seems to be where it’s at. The Zend dev pages make it look that way, anyway.

Apache, MySQL, and PHP on MacOS X

p0ps Harlow tweeted something about trying to get an AMP environment running on his Mac. Conversation followed, and eventually I sent along an email that look sorta like this:
If you’re running 10.4 (I doubt it, but it’s worth mentioning because I’m most familiar with it), here’s how I’ve setup dozens of machines for web development [...]

Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus

This an old one, but it just caught my atention. In A List Apart tells us Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. Is this still true? Haven’t the last several years been about the triumph of good design in both the usability and graphic senses? Or are rounded corners not actually [...]

Fancy Up Your Website With Web Clip Icons

Aaron Schmidt alerted me to this how to sweetening up your site with fancy iPhone web clip icons.