Demos & Downloads
I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. This process made me wonder what it would take to upload photos to Flickr using PHP. This post details how you can authenticate and upload photos to Flickr using PHP with phpFlickr.
Image Data URIs with PHP
If you troll page markup like me, you've no doubt seen the use of data URI's within image src attributes. Instead of providing a traditional address to the image, the image file data is base64-encoded and stuffed within the src attribute. Doing so saves a network request for each image, and if you're the paranoid type, can prevent exposure of directory paths. Since creating data URIs is incredibly easy, let me show you how to do it with PHP.
JavaScript Battery API
Mozilla Aurora 11 was recently released with a bevy of new features. One of those great new features is their initial implementation of the Battery Status API. This simple API provides you information about the battery's current charge level, its charging status, and allows you to be notified of changes via a few events. Let's check it out!
CSS Circles
A while back I shared a clever technique for creating triangles with only CSS. Over the past year, I've found CSS triangles incredibly effective, especially when looking to create tooltips or design elements with a likewise pointer pattern. There's another common shape that's easy to create, and that is the circle. Using border-radius, you can create wonderful CSS circles.
CSS Filters
CSS filter support recently landed within WebKit nightlies. CSS filters provide a method for modifying the rendering of a basic DOM element, image, or video. CSS filters allow for blurring, warping, and modifying the color intensity of elements. Let's have a look at how CSS filters work and how you can quickly create elements that are beautifully filtered!
XBox Live Gamer API
I've thought long and hard about this, and I still can't decide whether or not I should consider myself a "gamer." During my lifetime, I've owned an original Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo64 (best controller of any console ever), wii, and XBox 360. I used to have a horrible habit of downloading pirating games, but that's long and over with. Anyways, the only game I've played consistently over the past three years is Call of Duty. Which one? Whichever the latest Call of Duty has been most recently released. I don't even care to attempt the story mode; I simply want to log on and shoot each and every one of you I encounter.
Page Visibility API
One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back? The Page Visibility API allows developers to react to changes in page visibility via the visibilitychange document event. New document.hidden and document.visibilityChange properties are also available.
Create Spinning Rays with CSS3: Revisited
Last December I wrote a blog post titled Create Spinning Rays with CSS3 Animations & JavaScript where I explained how easy it was to create a spinning rays animation with a bit of CSS and JavaScript. The post became quite popular so I thought I'd take some time to look at it and improve it. It occurred to me that one solution I didn't present was a much lighter solution; a solution that required only CSS!