Quick Tip: An Introduction to Sammy.js

“You’ve been seeing it for a while now with Google’s Reader, Gmail, and most recently, on Facebook. Probably, you, too, would like to write RESTful evented JavaScript applications. Well, fellow developers, meet Sammy.js, a tiny JavaScript framework built on top of jQuery. Sammy utilizes the URL hash (#) to allow you to create single page AJAX applications that respond to your browser’s back button. Interested?

“In this article, I’ll be providing a short overview of the framework, and then a brief demonstration of what it’s like working with Sammy.js, with the hope of enticing you enough to consider it for your projects.”

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Quick Tip: Working with MySQL and INNER JOIN

“In today’s video quick tip, we’ll go over when and why to use JOINs when working with your databases.”

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Quick Tip: New HTML5 Form Features

“In this screencast, we’ll take a quick look at a few new HTML5 features: the placeholder and autofocus tools, as well as the email and URL input types.”

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Quick Tip: A Fast Overview of Querious (MySQL Manager)

“In today’s video quick tip, we’ll have a quick (not sponsored) overview of a Mac database manager for MySQL that I came across yesterday, called Querious. As I mention in the screencast, I particularly like this one, because it just works — without being too complicated or overwhelming in the way that PHPMyAdmin might be for some.”

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Quick Tip: Google Fonts API: You’re Going to Love This

“Google have made two huge announcements today. One of these concerns the Google Fonts API. Simply by linking to a particular font, stored on Google’s servers (save on bandwidth + caching benefits), we now have access to a wide array of custom fonts. Quite literally, you can integrate these fonts into your project in about 20 seconds. It’s as simple as that. Further, due to the operations being performed behind the scenes, these custom fonts will even be recognized back to Internet Explorer 6. I, for one, and am extremely excited about the possibilities, and the font catalog is surely to continue expanding over the coming years.”

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Quick Tip: Practical CSS Shapes

“A common design technique lately is to create a fold effect, where it appears as if a heading is wrapping behind its container. This is generally achieved through the use of tiny images; however, with CSS, we can mimic this effect quite easily. I’ll show you how in four minutes.”

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Quick Tip: Top 5 Awesome Features in Transmit 4

“The ever-amazing Mac software company, Panic, has released the fourth version of their incredible FTP client Transmit last week. What’s packed into this version? Well, according to the release notes, ‘Everything is new!’”

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Quick Tip: A 4 Minute Crash-Course in WordPress Custom Fields

“Today’s Basix video quick tip topic comes from a question on Twitter, concerning the use of custom fields in WordPress. Luckily, as you’ll find, attaching unique data to postings is as simple as assigning a value in the “Edit Post” page, and then referencing that information with the get_post_meta() method.”

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Quick Tip: Loop Through Folders with PHP’s Glob()

“Are you still using opendir() to loop through folders in PHP? Doesn’t that require a lot of repetitive code everytime you want to search a folder? Luckily, PHP’s glob() is a much smarter solution.”

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The Intricacy of Simplicity: CSS3

“Ever wondered how a particular effect was achieved in a web design, and, after zooming in several clicks, you found that the author added several subtle shadows, borders, gradients, etc? In the past, this was achieved simply by slicing out an image, and setting it as a background of some element. Luckily, with CSS3, we can be afforded much more flexibility. Now, while the code for such a simple effect might be a bit tedious, it’s well worth it, and that’s what we’ll review in today’s written and video quick tip!”

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