One of my favorite services for developers and entrepreneurs is Pingdom. They offer a tool which notifies you if your website is down or non-responsive. I also like Pingdom because their staff is very responsive. The company is based in Sweden.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on testing and optimizing the speed of my websites. Google has stated that the faster a website is, that there might be a chance for better rankings. Better speed also makes for a better experience and more importantly for a smaller load in weight and time.

Pingdom has a speed testing tool which I’ve been using and it’s really sweet. It’s free to use and you can test to your heart’s delight. By using the Pingdom speed test tool, I found that my style sheet was pulling in old images. By removing those images, I increased the speed by nearly 50% overall.

The tool tracks: total loading time, total objects, external domains, html, xhtml, css, images, scripts and plugins. The graph loads in real-time so you can watch how a browser loads your objects one by one. There are tools including Yahoo’s YSlow and Google Chrome offers some of this functionality but the Pingdom tool just seems easier to use and you can save the tests as well.

Leave a comment if you know of other good, reliable speed testing tools.

Every once in a while, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to rename a whole batch of files on your Web server. In my case, I find this especially useful when someone provides me with a folder full of friendly-named files (files that contain spaces, special characters, etc.) and I want to make them a little more Web-friendly. On Linux and Unix-based computers, it’s really simple to do this from the command line. To do so, simply use a command similar to the following: Continue Reading »

On occasion, I’m sure you’ve found yourself in a position where you need to find an item inside of an array. PHP offers a very simple method to do just that. The array_search function lets you search for the item and then tells you what the index for that item is. This function works with numerically indexed arrays and with associative arrays. Continue Reading »

In one of my recent posts, I explained how to use array_push, array_pop, array_shift and array_unshift to add and remove elements from the beginning and end of PHP arrays. Today, I’m going to introduce you to the array_splice function, which allows you to insert elements into the middle of the array. Actually, it lets you insert elements at the beginning, end or anywhere in between and even allows you to replace elements that are already in your array. Continue Reading »

The Zune team has announced that this evening, beginning at 10 p.m. PST, the Zune network will be unavailable for a period of up to 24 hours so they can implement some major backend updates and changes to the service. Apparently the changes are being made to help improve the performance of the network and to make it possible to implement some planned feature additions in the future. Very few of the changes made this evening will be immediately visible to the end user, but it sounds like they’re preparing for some good updates further on down the road.

One thing Zune users will notice after the service resumes, though, will be an update for the Zune software. Again, there are not supposed to be any major feature additions with this release, but the release is apparently necessary to keep the Zune software working properly with the updated network.

If you are a Zune software user, especially if you are a Zune pass user, the Zune team is warning customers to make sure that all pending transactions are completed before 10 p.m. PST this evening. If you are planning to download or rent a movie, make sure that download is finished before they shut off the service.

Update: As of 8:40 p.m. on Tuesday, the service still does not appear to be fully operational. However, a new version of the Zune software (Zune 4.2) is now available, and apparently allows users to view AVI videos natively within the software.

Anyone who’s spent time looking for solutions to allow their Web site visitors to convert pages to PDF has most likely discovered that the majority of the tools available for doing so are lacking in one way or another. Trying to build one in PHP from scratch is an extremely daunting and unsatisfying task. Using a pre-built library in PHP always seems to carry with it some disappointment (most of the time related to either the CSS implementation or the usage of images on your pages) and using a hosted solution usually means long processing and waiting times or does not allow for any decent customization.

However, a new hosted resource has come onto the scene that seems to do an extremely effective job, allows for a great deal of customization and is fast and efficient. A team known as OpenTracker has put together a resource called PDFmyURL. On the surface, PDFmyURL looks like just another site that allows visitors to enter a URL and get a PDF of that page in return. Even in that task, PDFmyURL does a much better job than most of its competitors (there are a few other sites that claim to allow users to do that, but many of them require you to save the page in Microsoft’s packaged HTML format before you can convert the page). However, by clicking a small link on the PDFmyURL home page, you can expand a list of advanced options that show you some code you can place on your own Web site to seamlessly allow your visitors to convert your pages to PDF. Continue Reading »

Firefox 3.6 was released today – the company notes a 20% speed improvement over version 3.5.  Apparently over 350 million users use Firefox as their browser of choice.

Here’s a list from Firefox of the new features in 3.6:

• Personas: Personalize the look of your Firefox by selecting new themes called Personas in a single click and without a restart
• Plugin Updater: To keep you safe from potential security vulnerabilities, Firefox will now detect out of date plugins
• Stability improvements: Firefox 3.6 significantly decreased crashes caused by third party software – all without sacrificing our extensibility in any way
• Form Complete: When filling out an online form, Firefox suggests information for fields based on your common answers in similar field
• Performance: Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time
• Open Video and Audio: With the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 audio and video support, now video can be displayed full screen and supports poster frames

And here’s an updates list from the developer side: 

• Support for the latest HTML5 specification, including the File API for local file handling
• Font Support: In addition to OpenType and TrueType fonts, 3.6 now supports the new Web Open Font Format WOFF)
• CSS gradients: Supports linear and radial CSS gradients which allow for a smoother transition between colors
• Device orientation: Firefox 3.6 exposes the orientation of the laptop or device to Web pages

A few days ago, I opened Chrome on my Vista 64-bit computer and noticed something different when I went to fill in a form. The auto-complete feature was different than it had been in the past; different than any other browser I’ve used. Now, the auto-complete (or auto-suggest, I guess, is more appropriate) feature on Web forms is now more inline with the way the browser address/search bar works in Chrome.

When you begin typing, instead of simply loading a list of suggestions, it automatically selects the most appropriate item from the list of suggestions. Therefore, if the selected suggestion is correct, you can simply hit the tab key to move onto the next form field. No longer do you have to choose an option using the mouse pointer or the cursor keys, it automatically chooses one for you.

Today, I updated Chrome on my Linux Mint installation, as well, and noticed that the feature has been implemented there, too. Therefore, this feature is definitely available in the latest “unstable” (or “developer’s”) versions of Chrome for Ubuntu and Windows, at least. Is anyone else seeing this in their versions of Chrome? Any idea when this feature was added? I don’t see it in any of the official release notes from Google.

If you’re anything like me, you generally set up an auto-incrementing integer field in most of your MySQL tables that can be used as the primary key for your records. A lot of times, after inserting new information into the database, you need a way to find out what ID was assigned to your data when you created the new row. With MySQL, it’s really simple to get that information. MySQL offers a function called “LAST_INSERT_ID” that does just that.

As soon as you finish inserting the new row, if you run another SQL query that looks like “SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()” on your database, the result you get back will be the most recently added auto-increment number in your MySQL installation.

PHP also has a built-in function to perform this operation. Instead of setting up a separate MySQL query, executing it and retrieving the results from it, you can simply use the mysql_insert_id() function, which will automatically perform those steps and simply return the ID number.

When working with arrays, you may often find yourself in a position where you need to add a few extra items to the array or remove some of the items you already added. PHP has a few functions that are designed to help you with this process, allowing you to add new elements to the beginning or end of the array or to remove elements from the beginning or end of the array. Continue Reading »