We've moved

We will be posting all information on our facebook page from now on....

https://www.facebook.com/media903

Getting the ie 7 feed autodiscovery to work.

You know the little feed icon at the top of ie7 + that glows when an rss feed has been detected on a webpage? I was wondering for the longest time why it wasnt glowing on my webpages where i clearly had a feed.

Here's why:
Basically the feed autodiscovery works based on a link tag in the head of the webpage.
For RSS it would look like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="your feed title here" href="http://www.company.com/feedurl.rss">

For Atom it would look like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="your feed title here" href= "http://www.company.com/feedurl.xml">

I found this info in this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rssteam/archive/2005/08/02/publishersguide.aspx

PHP OOP - a real world example

Although not the best practice in real world programming, this tutorial offers a slightly more valuable way to use object oriented programming with php.
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/real-world-oop-with-php-and-mysql/

PHP OOP

I found a great site for learning object oriented php development.

php oop

A faster website

How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

Check out this article and give it a try for yourself.
I stumbled on this when I was reviewing my google developer dashboard for some of my sites. Google told me they were slow and i should consider this option to speed them up.

I did some looking and voila...google was right again!

With php, just add 2 lines of code to your webpages.
At the very top add this:
// start output buffering at the top of our script with this simple command
// we've added "ob_gzhandler" as a parameter of ob_start
<?php
if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start();
?>

At the very bottom add this:
// end output buffering and send our HTML to the browser as a whole
ob_end_flush();

Just by doing this our webpages appear less choppy as they render.

Here is a complete article and direction on how to use this:
How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression

Another article:
http://dev-tips.com/featured/output-buffering-for-web-developers-a-beginners-guide

Website Image Gallery

I found a great image gallery add-on for website image galleries. It builds on the zoom-image idea which i was using a lot lately but provides a little more flexability and some themes to style the image boxes however you like.

The documentation provided on the site was quick and easy to use and I had a gallery set p in a few minutes.

Hope this helps: Rokbox
http://www.rocketwerx.com/products/rokbox/documentation

Multiple browser versions

If you need to check how your site looks in multiple versions of a browser, in case you are using png images for example, here is where i got my info:
There are a few ways to do this,
1. partition your drive to run vista or windows 7 on one and xp on another.
2. use a virtual desktop: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/support/virtual-pc-2007.aspx

Once you determine how your going to run xp and vista or 7 on the same machine, you should get this to run multiple versions of ie easily.