Photo Credit: “iLove” by julian-

As a programmer/web-designer I dip into a diverse range of programming languages and frameworks. I often find that I get locked into a specific coding grammar/syntax and that it is then difficult to switch to a new one. This is when I find the following cheat sheets invaluable (and indeed comforting).

• Subversion (SVN) - 293 KB PDF
• Regular Expressions (RegEx) - 648 KB PDF
• mod_rewrite - 563 KB PDF
• PHP - 556 KB PDF
• CSS - 316 KB PDF
• HTML - 563 KB PDF
• Ruby On Rails - 753 KB PDF
• HTML Character Entities - 959 KB PDF
• JavaScript - 453 KB PDF
• MySQL - 348 KB PDF
• RGB Hexadecimal Colour Chart - 199 KB PDF
• OS X / Linux / Unix
• Photoshop CS3

Photo Credit: “404 sign, Love Hotel, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan” by gruntzooki

After reading Ian Lloyd’s The Perfect 404, I’ve revamped my “Not Found” error page to be a little bit more useful because, as Lloyd writes, “a user-friendly website will give you a helping hand.” Previously my 404 page simply stated that an error had occured and offered links to the home-page and archives. I knew I could do better than that! Continue Reading…

One of the great things about WordPress is that it doesn’t limit how content is displayed, but provides a ‘framework’ of ways to do so. Even better, it’s possible to change the display according to the content. This tutorial describes how to make posts be displayed within ‘the loop’ according to their content - or contextual differences.

Hosted Ruby on Rails platform with high availability “elastic” scaling.

PHP masters show us the best principles to follow for high-grade PHP programming.

I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.

A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.

But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.

It’s all very impressive.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

I know I’m terribly late to the party with this but Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser, looks pretty fscking awesome. I’m going to have to play with this.

“The Web has a particular architecture and it makes sense that if you are deploying a service or API on the Web then it should take advantage of this architecture instead of fighting against it. There are millions of deployed clients, servers and intermediaries that support REST and it makes sense to be compatible with their expectations.” [via]

Creating tabbed interfaces suddenly becomes a piece-of-cake when using the Tabs function in the jQuery UI library. It can be utilized to create completely unique interfaces without having to be a coding God - using only one line of code!

A standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant full-text search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes). [via]