APIs Tutorials
Create a Dynamic Flickr Image Search with the Dojo Toolkit
The Dojo Toolkit is a treasure chest of great JavaScript classes. You can find basic JavaScript functionality classes for AJAX, node manipulation, animations, and the like within Dojo. You can find elegant, functional UI widgets like DropDown Menus, tabbed interfaces, and form element replacements within Dijit. In DojoX you can find charting libraries, special data stores, vector graphic helpers, and much more.
Change Category Slug within WordPress
When I first started this blog, I set the category "slug" to "sugar." Why sugar? Because a lot of a good thing is candy; thus, a bunch of MooTools tutorials is as sweet as sugar. While I get a giggle out of calling my categories sugar, Google doesn't find it nearly as funny, nor does Yahoo or Bing. In an effort to increase my SEO, I wanted to change my category slug to "tutorials." That's where the awesome Redirection plugin and a simple regular expression comes into place.
Async Google Analytics
It seems like every website these days uses Google Analytics. And why not? It's an outstanding tool that gives you any and every statistic you could ever want. The problem with Google Analytics is that it's been, well, slow loading at times. That's why I was so pumped when I saw Google was releasing an async version of their script.
Using the GitHub API and PHP to Get Repository Information
GitHub is an awesome place to host your open source project code. MooTools, Prototype, and jQuery all use GitHub. As you probably know, the MooTools Forge requires your plugins be hosted on GitHub. The only problem with hosting all my MooTools plugins is that I lose traffic when I want people to see my code. Problem solved: use PHP, the GitHub API, and PHP Markdown to display files of my choice on my website.
Simple PHP Caching and Content Retrieval Function
One way to make your website exponentially faster is by caching both remote and internal requests. Why request your RSS subscriber count from FeedBurner more than once a day if that count is calculated once per day? Why hit your database on each page load if that content rarely changes? I've created a primitive request-and-cache function for PHP that checks for fresh content in the cache and retrieves content from a source if fresh content isn't available.
Get a URL’s Reddit Score Using PHP and JSON
Since we can see Digg turning more into a funny-pic-and-vid site each day, I've turned my attention to Reddit. Reddit just seems more controlled and programmer-friendly. Since I have respect for Reddit I thought I'd put together a quick tutorial on how you can retrieve a URL's Reddit score using PHP.
Dynamically Create Charts Using jQuery Flot and Google Analytics
Earlier in the week I published a popular article titled Dynamically Create Charts Using MooTools MilkChart and Google Analytics. My post showed you how to use MooTools MilkChart and a splash of PHP to create beautiful charts of Google Analytics data. I was interested in seeing what jQuery had to offer in the charting department. jQuery Flot is what I found.
Dynamically Create Charts Using MooTools MilkChart and Google Analytics
The prospect of creating graphics charts with JavaScript is exciting. It's also the perfect use of JavaScript — creating non-essential features with unobtrusive scripting. I've created a mix of PHP (the Analytics class), HTML, and MooTools JavaScript that will connect to Google Analytics, create an HTML table with the statistics for a given month, and use MooTools MilkChart to colorfully chart them out.
Retrieve, Cache, and Display Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count
One way of significantly speeding up your website is by caching information you retrieve remotely from other websites or databases. Caching information is extremely simple and can save your users seconds of unnecessary waiting. Here's how I cache my FeedBurner follower count on my site.
Create WordPress Page Templates with Custom Queries
One of my main goals with the redesign was to make it easier for visitors to find the information that was most popular on my site. Not to my surprise, posts about MooTools, jQuery, and CSS were at the top of the list. What do those three topics have in common? The fact that I provide a sweet demo for each of them. Thus I set out to create an easy way to check out all of my demos — the Demos & Downloads page.