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No-database Flash-PHP chat. Part V: Emoticons

This is the final article of the No-database Flash-PHP chat series (see Part I, Creating Basic Chat Functionality, Part II Security and Usability features, Part III Security and Usability features (continued) and Part IV, Usability and nice-to-have features)

In this last iteration we will concentrate on a topic that is definitely more fun than security or user tracking. Today we will talk about “Emoticons” or how they also call them “Smileys”. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary an emoticon is “a group of keyboard characters (as :-)) typically representing a facial expression or an emotion or otherwise conveying tone or attitude that is used especially in computerized communications (as e-mail)”.  We could add to that instead of “a group of keyboard characters” it could be an image, or in case with Flash … animation (yummy!).

There is a good and bad news. The good news is you CAN make really cool looking Flash emoticons with sound, video and all the effects Flash has in its arsenal. The bad news is Flash seems to be having troubles with positioning movie clip within a TextField or TextArea component inline with the text.  The only workaround I found was to display emoticons on the next line. If this doesn’t bother you – proceed to the next paragraph, otherwise I would suggest waiting for the next version of Flash player. Hopefully this bug will be fixed.

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Alex July
17787
FREE

Free! - PHP and CSS: random images and CSS positioning

Until recently I was unaware of the power of CSS and Its ability to integrate with other languages. I always thought that styles were static and had to be coded into the style sheet.

It was with a visit to A List Apart when I stumbled across a PHP article about Random Images by Dan Benjamin. As I’m only a newcomer to PHP, I was interested enough to read on and found it to be a great article & script. Another blog style site Relatively Absolute  is a perfect working example of the Image rotation script as it uses one for generating random header images much like the ones I’m going to be demonstrating here. In fact Absolutely Relative inspired me to write this article because I liked the transparency illusion so much. 

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Dave Thomas
19199
FREE

Free! - 9 Things that could improve your webpage today

Here are a few snappy suggestions for things you could do to improve your sites, enjoy!

 

 

1. More Speed!

Even in the world of Broadband connections, one of the top complaints by users is that a site is unresponsive and slow. Sometimes this is because of actual slow loading due to download time. In which case some careful image optimisation is and reducing the size of the page getting rid of extraneous tags is a good start. CSS for layout can aid you here as it'll remove lots of those repetitive font tags that are clogging your markup.

Sometimes page speed is due to the time taken for the browser to “draw” the page, rendering time. In this case you can improve it by getting rid of tables from the layout (due to how browsers render tables, lots nested of tables="slow" drawing of the page)

Another part of perceived speed relates to how quickly the user can actually find what they're looking for. So making sure your navigation is clear and unambiguous is a big plus here too. Otherwise the user ends up wasting their time and leaving in disgust.

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Matt Machell
3505
FREE

Free! - The secret benefit of accessibility part 2: A higher search engine ranking

An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site's about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings.

Not all of the accessibility guidelines will help with your search engine rankings, but there are certainly numerous areas of overlap:

1. ALT descriptions assigned to images

Screen readers, used by many visually impaired web users to surf the web, can't understand images. As such, to ensure accessibility an alternative description needs to be assigned to every image and the screen reader will read out this alternative, or ALT, description.

<img src="filename.gif" alt="image description goes here" />

Like screen readers, search engines can't understand images either and won't take any meaning from them. Many search engines can now index ALT text though, so by assigning ALT text search engines will be able to understand all your images.

 

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Trenton Moss
1577

Blog Development Possibilities for the Web Designer

We can’t avoid it. We can’t get around it, either, because it hits us in the face whenever we surf the Web. It’s fairly recognizable because its design may lack “umph,” spirit, and spunk (Did someone say it looks “mass-produced”?).  On the other hand, it may appear so sharp that it seems to defy the pundits who declare that the Web is no place for the likes of magazine design. IT is the Weblog, or BLOG. In some cases, it’s a personal soblog, a collaborative moblog, a Billy Joe Boblog, and even a joblog. Where does the Web designer fit into this self-designed madhouse? This week I’ll take you on a tour to discover how this Web tool works for and against professional Web designers.

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Linda Goin
2595
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Free! - Web Ready Digital Video

Web Ready Digital Video

With the recent increases in Broadband speeds, delivering high quality streaming video on the web is now possible. Whilst the final result will depend to a great extent on the quality of the original video, when it is resized for inclusion in a web page, say 320 x 240, any shooting errors or compression artefacts become much less noticeable. Any consumer DV camcorder should be capable of producing video of sufficient quality for web use.

This has been made possible largely due to the new Windows Media Codecs, which produce excellent results with virtually no loss of quality from the original 720x576 (PAL) or 720x480(NTSC) input.

So what do you need to get started?

A DV camcorder

Editing software – Adobe Premiere, Canopus Edius, Vegas etc.

Encoding software (usually included on your editing package) or you can use the Windows Media version, downloadable from Microsoft.  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

Some basic lighting – you can usually hire this for the duration of the shoot.

A clear idea of what you want to shoot. This is the most important aspect. You should spend more time in pre-production than you do on shooting and editing.

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Bill Graham
6414
FREE

Free! - Ten usability blunders of the big players

Web usability is about making your website in such a way that your site users can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.

With web usability practices becoming more commonplace, and knowledge of the many web usability benefits becoming more widespread, the big players on the web must surely have usable websites, right? Let's find out...

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Trenton Moss
4099

Content Development for the Web Designer

A web designer often spends months on site development. Say that after all these months the colours for your new design shimmer, the layout reeks with perfection, and the navigation moves your test viewers to grateful tears. However, the content falls short. Do you hire a pro writer and editor to help, or can you modify the content yourself? Can a person design AND write? Of course! With the grammatical rules contained in this article, your content could shine as brightly as your design. Read More
Linda Goin
2677

Creating circular movement with Flash

Welcome to the second article in our series on Flash motion using ActionScript. In the first article, I looked at how you could move an object in a straight line using ActionScript. In this article, I'll look at creating circular motion - moving an object in a circle around another object. By the end of this article, you'll be able to create a function that you can reuse throughout your movies. Read More
Sas Jacobs
7379

ColdFusion MX: Securing Your Application

In the last article we built out the back-end administration of the website in CFForms & Administration (Part 2 of 2).  We had already built the tools to allow people to put stuff into the database, so we built a way to get things out of the database.  Our goal was to build the framework for our back-end, and build one tool that allowed us to report off the sales leads.  The last article was full of great tips, additional use of Dreamweaver code wizards and we also spent a great deal of time explaining the code that we used as well.  One such example is that we introduced recordset paging and recordset navigation.  These two useful tools allow you to be informed on what records you’re viewing, and a means to navigate through all the records being returned.

In this article we want to secure what we’ve created so that only people with the right login, password and security role can log in and interact with the back-end admin section.  We will focus our attention on the Application framework, the Application.cfm file, Application variables and how to secure your website with a login and password using <cflogin>, <cfloginuser>, <cflogout> as well as some related functions: GetAuthUser() and IsUserInRole(). 

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Rob Sherman
2979
FREE

Free! - The secret benefit of accessibility part 1: Increased usability

Web accessibility has so many benefits that I really do wonder why such a large number of websites have such diabolically bad accessibility. One of the main benefits is increased usability, which according to usability guru, Jakob Nielson, can increase the sales/conversion rate of a website by 100% and traffic by 150%.

At which point you must surely be asking, “So if I make my website accessible its usability will increase and I'll make more money out of it?”. Well, not quite. An accessible website is not automatically more usable but there are many areas of overlap:

1. Descriptive link text

Visually impaired web users can scan web pages by tabbing from link to link and listening to the content of the link text. As such, the link text in an accessible website must always be descriptive of its destination.

Equally, regularly sighted web users don't read web pages word-for-word, but scan them looking for the information they're after.

Link text such as 'Click here' has poor accessibility and usability as both regularly sighted and visually impaired web users scanning the paragraph will take no meaning from this link text by itself. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and the destination of the link can be understood without having to read its surrounding words.

 

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Trenton Moss
1543

No-database Flash-PHP chat. Part IV: Usability and nice-to-have features

In this article we will continue working on our Flash-PHP chat application (see Part I, Creating Basic Chat Functionality, Part II Security and Usability features and Part III Security and Usability features (continued))

Today we will cover the following topics:

  • Using unique colours for each user’s messages
  • Displaying timestamp with each message
  • Automatically placing keyboard focus in the nickname field on the log-in form
  • Log-in by pressing “Enter” key
  • Send and format messages by pressing “Enter” Key
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Alex July
11308
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