Today, Amazon hosted a jQuery Hack Attack in Seattle. John Resig, jQuery creator, provided the keynote presentation and contributed one of the open talks. Below, I include notes on the keynote regarding jQuery mobile browser suppoort and the three sessions I attended.
John Resig ~ “I want to give developers the smallest toolset they need to build the best sites possible.”
jQuery Mobile: Notes from John Resig’s Talk
Mobile JavaScript gains increasing importance as more and more smartphones with JavaScript support are shipped to consumers. jQuery intends to support the most popular mobile web browsers and devices.
One difficulty when defining what browsers and devices to support is gathering data regarding mobile browser marketshare and version information. Large sites such as Yahoo! have this information, but have not released it to the public. Typically, these sites see the statistics as a competitive advantage and as a result have not released the data to the public.
Resig currently gathers data regarding mobile browsers from StatCounter (web statics gathered from over 1 billion pageviews) and Gartner (device sales statistics). Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook announced the release of XHP yesterday. It is an extension for PHP which provides enhancements to the PHP language syntax and gives the language some convenient capabilities.
In this post I will provide you links to the essential sources of information about XHP, show some XHP sample code, and discuss the installation process for XHP on Ubuntu with Apache and PHP5.
<?php
require_once('/home/cal/facebook-xhp-290b185/php-lib/init.php');
$name = 'Calvin Freitas';
$title = "{$name} loves XHP!";
$url = 'http://calvinf.com/';
$permalink = 'http://wp.me/pcoLC-4e';
#create a <head> element
$head =
<head>
<title>{$title}</title>
</head>;
#create a div
$div =
<div id="header">
<h1>{$title}</h1>
</div>;
$body =
<body>
{$div}
<div>
<p>My name is {$name} and you should go visit <a href={$url}>my website</a> now.</p>
<p>Read my <a href={$permalink}>guide to installing XHP on Ubuntu</a>. It includes the source code for this page. Comments and corrections are welcome.</p>
</div>
</body>;
echo
<html>
{$head}
{$body}
</html>;
?>
A few syntax notes
XHP forces you to properly nest tags — make sure you close them properly or it won’t compile and it will throw errors. Because XHP auto-escapes, when you’re creating a link (such as in an a element), you don’t need to put quotes around it.
<a href={$permalink}>guide to installing XHP on Ubuntu</a>
Installing XHP on Ubuntu
Server: Ubuntu 9.10 running on a slice at the Rackspace Cloud.
Web server: Apache 2 Apache installation guide (Slicehost article, but generally applicable)
Sam Javanrouh is my favorite photographer at present. He takes incredible photographs and also does the occasional video. The video below, Toronto on Ice, is one such example.
WordPress 2.9 has been released and is available for download. The most important new features are a new “trash” system for deleting posts or comments, a built-in image editor, batch plugin updating, and easier video embedding.
On a related note, Elitwee MyTwitter 3.0.3 is compatible with WordPress 2.9 and is a great way to include your tweets as a widget on your WordPress blog.
I have written a PHP 5 library for the Posterous API. It uses the curl extension to query the Posterous API, retrieves the XML, and returns the XML as a SimpleXMLElement.
The Elitwee MyTwitter 3 Plugin for WordPress has been released and is available for download now from the WordPress Plugins Directory.
Description: Elitwee MyTwitter is a simple tweet widget and status updater for WordPress.
What’s New?: This new version allows you to easily add one-or-more Twitter widgets to any widget-enabled WordPress theme. You can also post updates to Twitter directly from the plugin’s Settings page. It is compatible with WordPress 2.8 and higher.
I’ve updated the custom theme for my website! Look at it now.
I spent today finishing the code for the custom WordPress theme I use to power the layout and design of the site. Many thanks to Jason Oxrieder for doing the graphic design work behind the new look!
The new design is just one example of the custom WordPress development I am able to do. I provide WordPress consulting and can answer questions about topics related to customization, themes, plugins, settings, system administration, and more.
