Zenphoto - Lightweight Web Gallery Script

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Tired of the bloated Coppermine Photo Gallery? The much lighter Zenphoto gallery script may be a good alternative.

The compressed download is under one megabyte, and the installation looks fairly simple. Just upload via FTP, and run the installation script.

The installed gallery is responsive and clean. Don’t take my word for it, though. Look at the demo gallery.

The script is fairly new, and is still evolving. Some features, like RSS support, have just been added.

If you need a gallery (for a design portfolio, to show off your photos, etc), then be sure to check-out Zenphoto.

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Start Using Polls on Your Blog

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Polls are a great way to solicit opinions, and add some community to your site.

With a poll, a user can just click a button to give you their two cents. Meanwhile, it takes a lot more effort to leave a comment. Which do you think your readers prefer? While comments allow them to say anything they want, polls enable a quick multiple-choice response (which can be very useful). Also, I’ve found that blog posts with attached polls tend to generate more comments.

Once you decide you need a poll, you need to actually add one. You have plenty of choices for implementing your poll. Here are a few of the better services/scripts: (more…)

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roScripts - Helping Programmers Program

Friday, December 28th, 2007

roScripts is a blog/forum/Digg-for-scripts. Their “articles” section has several categories worth of coding tutorials (PHP, Flash, AJAX, HTML, etc). Then they have the “scripts” section, where you can easily find pre-made scripts to suit your purposes. The interesting part, though, is that they’re sorted in a Digg-like manner. You can vote-up scripts you like, and “bury” the ones you don’t.

roScripts has changed a lot since their launch, and they keep getting better.

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Which Lightbox is Right For You?

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

I was going to write a post comparing different lightbox scripts, but it looks like “etc” beat me to it. Which Lightbox is right for you? covers 18+ different scripts for your lightboxing needs.

For those of you who have never heard of the term “lightbox,” it’s a photographic term that has been recycled for web use. A lightbox, in the photographic sense, is a device used for viewing negatives. In the web design area, “lightbox” refers to a script that displays images or other content in an overlay DIV.

Which Lightbox is right for you? This post will help you figure that out.

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Websites as Graphs

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

This is either a useful tool or a fun toy. Websites as Graphs is a Java applet that renders your website’s (X)HTML structure as a graph of colored dots.

You enter a sites’ URL into the form, and the applet puts a black dot on the screen (representing the root <html> element). Quickly, more connected dots expand outward. Each dot is color-coded to match a group of elements. The blue dots are links, the red ones are tables, etc. The graph shown to the right shows this site (note the lack of red dots :D ).

It’s fun to enter a bunch of your favorite websites and compare them (maybe it is a toy rather than a useful tool…), and compare them to your own as well. Try it out, it’s fun to watch if anything.

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SimplePie: Parse RSS With PHP

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

LastRSS. MagpieRSS. Neither have been updated in over a year. What’s the best way to parse RSS feeds and output them with PHP? Simple, use SimplePie.

What is SimplePie? It’s a file you include in your PHP scripts, allowing you instant access to RSS-parsing capabilities. You can display RSS headlines/items on your website, combine several feeds into one, and anything else that you can think of. If you know a little PHP, the possibilities are endless.

You see this PHP code:

require('simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie("http://feeds.feedburner.com/Webmaster-source");
$feed->handle_content_type();
echo "<h1>".$feed->get_title()."</h1>";
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
echo '<h2><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'">';
echo $item->get_title().'</a></h2>';
echo '<p>'.$item->get_description().'</p>';
}

That’s all you need to display a feed’s headlines and descriptions. Of course, that was only a simple example. It’s unbelievable what you can do with SimplePie.

Over at NTugo, SimplePie is used extensively. The MyNT RSS reader is powered by SimplePie. The “Recent blog posts” and “Recent posts from the NTugo Network” boxes on the home page are built with SimplePie. The RSS feed aggregated from all of the NTugo blogs? SimplePie again! It’s amazing what you can do with SimplePie.

If you know PHP, you’ll definitely want to take a look at SimplePie.

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MyNT (My NTugo)

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

RSS is one of the greatest web technologies invented in the last ten years. It enables us to keep up with our favorite sites, listen to podcasts, and get niche news easily. Forget annoying old newsletters! Who needs them when you can just open your RSS reader and skim through headlines, looking for things of interest?

Ah, the RSS reader. Like with web browsers and email clients, everyone has a different preference. Some like desktop programs, while others like web-based apps. There’s no shortage of choices. You have Feedreader, Netvibes, Bloglines, etc. I don’t like any of the choices. I’m a big fan of RSS, but I’ve never really liked any RSS reader other than Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature. Recently I’ve had two problems. Number one, my feed collection outgrew Live Bookmarks. Number two, I’ve often wanted to read my RSS feeds on other computers.

What did I do? I threw together my own web-based RSS reader. I call it MyNT (say “Mint”), which is short for My NTugo. It’s a little innovative, as I added a few…different features to it.

My favorite feature: You can read your RSS feeds without logging in at all (just go to http://my.ntugo.com/yourusername.html). Just bookmark that URL and you can check your feeds with a single click (let’s see Bloglines do that).

Take a look at MyNT, you may like it. I can’t guarantee everyone will like MyNT. After all, I made it mainly for myself (and anyone who thinks that most feed readers are too bloated). I wanted to capture the simplicity of Live Bookmarks in a different form, and I think I did a pretty good job at it.

Well, MyNT’s URL is http://my.ntugo.com, and you can read the official press-release-sort-of-thing here.

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AjaxLoad: Free “Throbber” Image Generator

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Attention AJAX programmers! Do you need a good “loading image” (or “throbber”)? Take a look at AjaxLoad.info, the only throbber-image generator I know of (as of this writing). You pick an image style, then enter some hex odes for the foreground and background colors. Hit the generate button, and if you like what you see, download the animated GIF. Simple, or what? Here are some examples:

Those are just a few examples of what AjaxLoad can do.

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Google Apps

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

So, you’ve got yourself a domain. Sure, it helps people get to your website, but what else can you use it for? Google’s got the answer. Do you hate your webhost’s webmail program? Do you like GMail? Well, now you can have your own copy of GMail (with 100 free email accounts)….but at your own domain. That’s right, you can have your own mini-GMail with email addresses resembling you@yourdomain.com. You get more than just email, but the email’s the best part. Forget your host’s SquirrelMail system, switch to Google Apps.

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Script.aculo.us

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily manipulate HTML elements onscreen? Wouldn’t it be nice if AJAX requests could be sent with only one line of code? Take a look at Script.aculo.us.

What is Script.aculo.us? It’s a set of JavaScript files (based off the Prototype JavaScript library) that lets you do numerous cool and/or useful things with ease. Fading, sizing, and movement actions are only a couple lines of JavaScript away. Not to mention easier AJAX techniques.

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